It is now available from our downloads area for the general public.
With almost 3,500 changes since our previous Jiwa release, and a change in technology to the Microsoft .NET platform, this is a significant release.
An installation manual can be found here.
There is some information to note on upgrading customer sites to Jiwa 7 from Jiwa 6, as David Simmonds explains...
Now that we have announced the release of Jiwa7 you can get down to implementing Jiwa7 for Jiwa Financials customers. We anticipate that we will need to be assisting most dealers to implement Jiwa7 at customer’s sites. Where we are assisting dealers this support will be chargeable by Jiwa either directly to the customer or to the JSP for you to recover from the Jiwa customer.
When a customer is moving to Jiwa7 there a number of steps that will need to be worked through:
1. The Jiwa7 license has changed to an annual license agreement, where the software will run for the period of time that a Jiwa Financials customer pays the annual license fee. The license agreement agreed to at the installation of Jiwa7 states this, however in order to ensure that there are no surprises we require each Jiwa customer to sign our document acknowledging they understand this change. This needs to be completed as the first step.
2. We will need the customer’s database/s at our premises so that we are able to freely work on checking the upgrade routines, breakouts & reports.
3. We will need a list of breakouts that require upgrading, together with a brief description of what they do.
4. We will need a list of Crystal Reports and the reports themselves together with a description of the report functionality where the report detail isn’t readily discernable.
5. We will quote the upgrade
6. We will schedule the work once we have a signed acceptance of our quotation for the work.
This list of steps above is to help customers & JSP’s by keeping the upgrade to Jiwa7 cost effective, and limiting the unrecoverable costs that can be incurred where you have been working on the customer’s upgrade project and then find that you have unrecoverable time.
The database upgrade to Jiwa7 will encounter some difficulties – mostly where there are master table records that have been deleted. You will know which of your customer’s databases fall into that category. Jiwa7 is enforcing tight foreign keys. We are able to complete the upgrade by making decisions manually along the upgrade path. You also need to be aware that Jiwa7 requires MS Windows 7, MS Windows 8 or MS Windows 8.1 to run. Jiwa7 also requires MS SQL 2008 R2 or later to run.
I have asked that customers who wish to upgrade contact you their Jiwa Solution Provider to go through a plan to implement the software at their business. A really good thing about the upgrade to Jiwa7 is that Jiwa7 can run on the same machine concurrently with Jiwa 6. (As long as computer is running MS Win7, 8 or 8.1) You could get your customers looking at Jiwa7 running on demonstration data quite easily by doing a basic install. The customer can then get familiar with how it works, and then proceed to upgrade when they are ready.
Jiwa7 is functionally a complete overlay of previous versions of Jiwa. All customers of Jiwa who are on a Jiwa 6 series product will be able to move to Jiwa7, we have all the functionality of Jiwa 6 in Jiwa 7. And there is a lot of added functionality which we will describe in later press releases.
Go to our portal at: http://support.jiwa.com.au/Home/Downloads to download the software. Also look at the Jiwa forums at http://forums.jiwa.com.au
Regards,
David
