2011 SSAA Award Winners

Acronym of the Month

Greetings, %%Facility name%% and welcome to our September 2011 "post conference" edition. Aside from the usual swag of regulars, we have a number of exciting features this month - including lots of blog posts & photos from the 2011 Self Storage Association of Australasia's Convention & Tradeshow!

As usual, if you have any comments, ideas or suggestions, please get in touch with me via andy@storman.com. Until next time, happy surfing! :-)

Regards,
Andy & the StorMan Software Team

Last week, Ben & Andy (from StorMan's Brisbane office) attended the Self Storage Association of Australasia's (SSAA) annual convention & tradeshow, held at the Crown Convention Centre in Melbourne, Australia. Aaron, from our New Zealand office, was also due to join us, but had to remain home at the last minute due to a family emergency. Here's Andy's day-by-day blog from the event...

Tuesday 16th August

Ben & I jumped on the 9am flight from Brisbane, landing in a cool but bearable (we're from Queensland, remember) Melbourne at around 11:30am. Our favourite cabbie, known only as "Mr Sam", met us at the airport and took us down to the Crown Metropol (our home for the next few days). We dropped off our luggage and carted the rest of the gear to the Crown Convention Centre, in preparation for the tradeshow.

A few moments later, we were inside and decided it would be best to try and find the boxes of tradeshow gear we'd had delivered down a few weeks prior. Luckily, as we walked through the door, it was waiting there for us behind a fenced-off goods cage. Within moments a helpful lad from the Crown had it wheeled over to our booth and we began unpacking.

Half an hour later, the crew from Harry's arrived to begin setting up our tradeshow flooring, trussing, LCD screens and furniture (see photos below). We had originally planned to go with the main tradeshow company for our furniture & flooring requirements, but after a little investigation on my part, soon found a supplier that charged more than 50% less (for the same thing), so we went with them instead. I'm glad we did; because their service was exceptional! Within 3 hours we were setup and ready to go - the LCD screens were tested, the audio working and the marketing materials in place...

Continue reading Andy's blog + view more photos on our website.

As mentioned back in our June issue, David Hardie and a team from Fort Knox Storage embarked on a Ride to Conquer Cancer - a cycling journey through South East Queensland's scenic countryside to Somerset Dam, benefiting the Queensland Institute of Medical Research.

The Fort Knox team joined over 1,300 other cyclists on an epic fund-raising journey. We recently heard from David, who told us that the ride went really well, considering there was over 120km's of cycling to be done each day over the two-day event!

David's group raised $37,000 with a total fundraising of $4.7 million for the Queensland Institute of Medical Research. Well done!

In late October, the Self Storage Association of Australasia (SSAA) will release their new Standard Agreements. For those SSAA members that use these agreements within StorMan, please be aware that once we "StorManise" them, they will be available for you for download from the SSAA website.

We will provide further information on this once the process is complete; so keep an eye out for this in our upcoming Weekly TechTips and eNewsletters towards the end of the year.

In case you missed it at (or couldn't make it to) the SSAA's convention, you can now access StorMan via your iPad, iPhone or Android-powered device such as an ASUS Transformer (see Darran's Latest Gadget).

If you use StorMan MultiView (either your own copy or one hosted by us), the first StorMan Mobile login is provided at no additional cost with every MultiView RDC-login & additional logins are available for a small monthly fee.

For those who don't use StorMan MultiView, we're got some great, low-cost MultiView deals for small facilities, so please contact your local StorMan sales office if interested. Alternatively, contact your IT provider about remote access software.

StorMan wishes to congratulate all SSAA award winners for 2011...

• Facility of the Year – Fyshwick Self Storage (Fyshwick, ACT)
• Regional Facility of the Year – Store it Safe (Launceston, TAS)
• Expansion - Jim's Self Storage (Williamstown, VIC)
• Manager of the Year – Frances Lewis (Store it Wellington, New Zealand)
• Innovation of the Year – Paperless office / iPad signup (All Secure Self Storage, New Zealand)

Continue reading Andy's blog on our website.

StorMan v9 (known as v8.2 internally) was demonstrated both at the StorMan tradeshow booth & on stage during the hour-long StorMan training session at the recent SSAA Convention in Melbourne. It's still in testing at the moment but, once released, we'll be sure to publicise it in our newsletters & TechTips, so keep an eye out! As usual, those on a valid Technical Support & Updates plan get the update at no cost.

Congratulations to All Secure Self Storage in New Zealand, who won the 2011 SSAA "Innovation Award" for their Paperless Office / iPad Signup system.

Their "Paperless Office" system allows you to sign-up self storage customers on an iPad or Android tablet such as the ASUS Transformer (see Darran's Latest Gadget for more). In fact, you don't just have to use a tablet computer - any internet-enabled device will work, as the digitised integration process enters data directly into StorMan as well as recording the details in an automatically pre-filled storage contract (agreement) as a PDF file - saving time, paper and eliminating input errors and lost documents hence increasing management efficiency.

There are obvious benefits when it comes to disaster recovery, too. In the event of a fire, flood earthquake or similar disaster, this innovation allows the company to re-commence as soon as possible with no damage to customer records or contracts as there is no loss of data.

The phrase ”Do It Once & Do It Right” is the core idea behind this new system - with a future benefit being the facilitation of archives retrieval. This means no more hunting around through old boxes trying to find the contract of someone who stored 7 years ago! This will have the added advantage of space saving and being able to convert this space saving to saleable storage space!

In fact, there are far too many benefits to list here - so we welcome you to read the blog about it on our website. To find out more regarding pricing or how it works, please contact the project developer, Steven Gardner from Deepweb via webmaster@deepweb.co.nz. Congratulations once again to All Secure Self Storage in New Zealand for winning the SSAA's 2011 Innovation Award!

Continue reading Andy's blog on our website.

Someone's hungry...

Have you got a joke or funny pic to send us?
Please let us know!

18th October 2011: SSAA (Self Storage Association of Australasia) Regional Meeting (Adelaide). A StorMan staff member will be attending this event. Register at the SSAA website.

25th October 2011: SSAA (Self Storage Association of Australasia) Regional Meeting (Auckland). A StorMan staff member will be attending this event. Register at the SSAA website.

8th November 2011: SSAA (Self Storage Association of Australasia) Regional Meeting (Brisbane). A StorMan staff member will be attending this event. Register at the SSAA website.

17th November 2011: SSAA (Self Storage Association of Australasia) Regional Meeting (Perth). A StorMan staff member will be attending this event. Register at the SSAA website.

29th November 2011: SSAA (Self Storage Association of Australasia) Regional Meeting (Melbourne). A StorMan staff member will be attending this event. Register at the SSAA website.

You may have heard your computer technician or internet company refer to DNS, or DNS Servers. The Domain Name System (DNS) is a hierarchical distributed naming system for computers, services, or any resource connected to the Internet or a private network. An often-used analogy to explain the Domain Name System is that it serves as the phone book for the Internet by translating human-friendly computer hostnames into IP addresses. For example, the domain name www.example.com translates to the addresses 192.0.32.10 (IPv4) and 2620:0:2d0:200::10 (IPv6).

Read more about DNS at Wikipedia.

Different header / footer on first page

Those of you using Microsoft Office Word will likely already know about the header & footer function built into the software - but did you know that you can opt to have a different header & footer on the first page of your document? In fact, you can also have a different header & footer for odd & even pages.

To do so, double-click in the header or footer area and select "Different First Page", and/or "Different Odd & Even pages" (depending on what you want) from the options provided on the ribbon at the top.

If you're ever purchased online, you've probably spotted those "Coupon code" fields on the checkout pages. Luckily, there are many coupon-code websites out there, including RetailMeNot. Search & rate coupons for hundreds of thousands of online stores. Happy shopping!

How many sausages did our very own Darran squeeze onto a single slice of bread at last month's staff BBQ? The answer (with photographic evidence), next issue!

Answer to last month's brainteaser: On a map.

Hi there - I'm Darran, one of StorMan's Technical Support Agents. Each issue, I'll trawl through the deep depths of the internet to find you a funky piece of software, hardware or other interesting technological trinkets.

ASUS Transformer: There have been many so-called "iPad killers", but this is the first to actually be a real contender. It's a 10.1" tablet computer (like an iPad) that docks with a special keyboard to provide an additional 6 hours of battery life (on top of the 9.5 hours already offered by the tablet itself).

On top of this, you get either a 16GB or 32GB SSD drive (depending on the model), mini HDMI output, an SD card reader, a MicroSD card reader, WiFi, Bluetooth, GPS and two full USB ports so that you can plug in your own external hard drive (for virtually limitless storage) or USB device, without requiring any 3rd-party adaptors or dongles.

Andy & Steven (from our Brisbane office) both have one & Andy's recently made the trip down to Melbourne for the SSAA Convention where it proved to be incredibly popular with visitors to the StorMan tradeshow stand! The tablet runs the open-source Google Android platform, so you can really "tinker" with it & get under the hood to write your own software or make all kinds of system changes, if you're into that kind of thing (unlike an iPad). Andy has managed to plug in a PS3 controller to play games on it (see photos below), and has also worked out how to control it with a Wiimote over Bluetooth, thanks to a free app from the Google Android Market (their equivalent of the Apple App Store).

For specifications & further details, visit the ASUS website or search for the "ASUS Transformer" on Google for pricing details (RRP is around AUD $750 for the top-of-the-line 32GB model with keyboard dock; although it is also sold without the keyboard dock if you just want the tablet part). Oh, and you can access StorMan on it, too (as shown below)...

Nb. All 'Latest Gadget' information & imagery is sourced from online entities & supplier websites. StorMan generally doesn't endorse, own or test any of these products; we merely link to them as you might find them interesting or fun for your own use...

This month, we flashback to 2009, to look at photos from the tradeshow & convention two years ago. Read Andy's blog here.

You burn more calories sleeping than you do watching TV.