Revision as of 11:31, 27 July 2011

Creating Your TrackAbout Site

Site Name

By default we will use your domain name as your TrackAbout site name. So if your companies website is YourDomain.com we will call your trackabout site YourDomain. This is important only because then your people or your customers (if you allow your customers to access your site) can then go to YourDomain.trackabout.com to get to your site. Please let us know if you want a different name than your website domain name.

TrackAbout Creates Your Site

TrackAbout will create your website for you. You cannot create the website yourself. We will just need your Site Name to create your site.

Customized Banner

Across the top of your TrackAbout site there is a spot for you to have a customized banner. Generally you would put your logo here or any other graphics, text or links needed to make your TrackAbout site look like your site. We generally recommend keeping the banner to about 50 pixels tall so that it does not take up too much of the screen. Also there will be 4 buttons shown off the the right side of the banner. Your graphic or background colors may go under these buttons, but the buttons must be shown. A customized banner is not required, but we do recommend one. Without a customized banner a generic 'TrackAbout' banner will be shown. The image below shows the area of the banner.

Logging in

Your TrackAbout representative will create your first system administrator user for the site. You will get an email from with a link for you to set a password and then log into the site. You can log into TrackAbout in a few ways:

Go to YourDomain.trackabout.com. So if your website was abc.com then you could go to abc.trackabout.com.
- The benefit of using this YourDomain.trackabout.com url is that you will always see your customized banner across the top of the page - even when logging in from a new computer or a customer computer. When you log in with the two methods below, you will first see a generic TrackAbout banner the first time that you log in from any give computer. After that first login the computer should remember your banner, but the banner may be cleared periodically if you flush the browsers cache of stored info.
- This url is also easy to remember and makes the site seem more like it is your site.
Go to https://www.trackabout.com/public/login.aspx
Go to trackabout.com and click the "Login" link in the upper right corner of this page.

Setting up Basic Information

The information below is use to help you get started with a tracking project.

Most importantly, please contact TrackAbout Support to guide you through this process.

Locations

Setup your locations from the List Locations page.

This page can be found in the TrackAbout Config section of the site.

"Locations" in TrackAbout are really any location where an asset can be located - except for customers. So every asset is either in a Location or at a Customer.
There are a few different kinds of Locations:
- Branches. These are your physical branch, warehouse or store locations
- Trucks. These are your trucks, vans or other vehicles. You only need to set these up if you will be scanning your assets into and out of your trucks. Talk to your TrackAbout support person about this.
  - Scanning assets on and off of truck is usually only done by our customers that are using our Truck Load module.
- Supplier. These are your suppliers, vendors, outsourced maintenance companies, etc. You only need to set these up if you will be scanning assets to and from your vendors.
- Reseller. These are other companies that take your cylinders and redistribute them to other companies. You might decide to setup these resellers as "Customers" in TrackAbout or as "Locations" you should talk to your TrackAbout representative about this. It is probably more common to set them up as "Customers" and not as "Locations".

Product Codes

In TrackAbout a Product Code is the code used to indicate a specific kind of asset. It is also normally called your part number, item number, stock number, product number or sku. It is the code used by your business system to track your inventory and sell things to customers.

These codes are stored in a 3 level hierarchy inside of TrackAbout. We will need to map your product codes into this hierarchy.

This spreadsheet is the template needed to mass map your product codes.
- Excel spreadsheet template: Map Product Codes
- Some sample data is in the spreadsheet so that you can see how it is formatted.
- Replace this sample data with your own real data.

People

Setup your people from this page: Internal Users
This page is in the TrackAbout Config section of the site.

Mobile Users

You will need to setup all of your mobile workers from this Internal Users page. This includes truck drivers, plant workers and anyone else who will use the handheld computers.
Important: You will need to decide if your mobile workers will be required to use a password to log into the mobile units. The password is used by most TrackAbout customers to ensure that the person logged into the handheld is authenticated. This is a configuration that TrackAbout support can turn on or off for your entire site. Either you will always require passwords for logging into your mobile units or never require these passwords.

Website users

You will also setup website users from the Internal Users page.
The website users must all use passwords to log into the website.
It is recommended that you send your website users a 'Welcome email' from the TrackAbout site that will let them setup their own password. In this way nobody knows the users password except for the user.
If any users do not have an email address, you can set them up with a username instead and manually set their initial password. Once logged in these users can change their password, but they are not forced to change their password.

Setting up Mobile Units (Handheld Computers)

Charge the Batteries

The first thing to do is charge up the batteries for your mobile units.
So if you have a stack of boxes with handhelds inside, open them up and get them charging while you move on to the next steps.
Do not plug anything into your computer yet, we're just charging up the batteries.

Download and Install Software

Download the software you need for your handheld computers from the Software Download page.
This is in the Mobile Units section of the site.
You should find instructions on how to setup your handhelds from this page.
You will need a desktop or laptop computer running Microsoft Windows to complete this setup.

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