Possibilities - Key Contacts Directories - Electronic Publishing With TBBS

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KEY CONTACTS DIRECTORIES - ELECTRONIC PUBLISHING WITH TBBS
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*** From October 1992 Possibilities Newsletter ***
*** Copyright 1992 by eSoft, Inc.  All Rights Reserved ***

Key Contacts Directories -- Electronic Publishing With TBBS
by Alan Bechtold

"Big as a phone book."  That term is often used describe anything overly 
large in the publishing world.  No doubt, a telephone book in any good-sized 
city will usually substitute nicely for weight-lifting equipment in a pinch.  
To make matters worse, most people never need or use all of the information 
in any telephone directory, and many of the numbers they WILL need are most
likely outdated by the time the book has gone through the typesetting, 
printing and delivery process.

Key Contacts Directories Ltd. is painfully aware of the inherent limitations 
of printed directories.  For more than 25 years, thousands of buyers have 
relied on Key Contacts' printed directories for access to vital information 
about businesses operating in the Calgary, Alberta, Canada area.

But the electronic age has changed everything, creating new demands from Key 
Contacts' customers while offering the company new ways to meet those 
demands affordably and profitably.

Customers who relied on Key Contacts' directories for sales calls, 
telemarketing and direct mail business of their own, demanded more up-to-
date information.  The company's initial response was to increase their 
publication frequency to twice yearly.  But it was soon apparent that an 
entirely new method of information publishing was required.

Jeff Allison, TBBS system designer at Key Contacts Directories, Ltd., said, 
"With the growth of the information age, everybody was complaining by the 
time we got a directory out that the information was already out of date, so 
we looked around for some way to bring things up to speed and match the 
electronic age."  An online information system was one obvious solution.

Jeff had little trouble convincing his superiors of the company's need to go 
online.  They had already realized that "the day of the printed directory 
was dead" when he approached them with his plan to put all the data 
contained in the company's directories online.  "It was obvious that it was 
just a matter of time before people weren't going to be buying printed 
directories any more, and that the growth in this type of business was going 
to be electronic", Allison said.

Fortunately, Jeff was already familiar with BBSs, so the task of locating 
the right software for his company's system was made a bit easier.  TBBS and 
TDBS was the natural choice for his company's needs.

"I looked around for quite a while," he said.  "I'd worked on computers for 
a number of years, mostly as a hobby, and I'd already looked at a number of 
BBSs because I'd been interested in them.  But most of them didn't have the 
ability to offer multiline access (which I knew we needed for our system) or 
the ability to interface with dBase."

Then Jeff read an article about TBBS someone had posted on CompuServe.  "The 
article described all the things TBBS could do -- the way it handled 
multiline access on a single PC and the way TDBS allowed you to bring dBase 
databases online, and I said 'This is what we need.'  It was perfect because 
we already had about 40,000 records in dBase.  We used that data to crank 
out our printed directories, running it off in text format then turning it 
in to the printer."

While he admits his dBase programming skills needed some polishing, Jeff 
said he was soon designing menus, building search capabilities and getting 
all the data normally published in the company's directories ready to go 
online.

"There were a few tricky things with TDBS," he said.  "But there are always 
ways [to do the job].  In fact, I quickly learned that virtually anything is 
possible with TDBS and your imagination is your only limitation."

Once their system was operational, Key Contacts Directories' could instantly 
make its information available to its customers at less cost.  But the 
benefits went much farther than Jeff or anyone at the publishing firm at 
first imagined.

"This can do a lot more than the printed directory could ever do," Jeff 
said.  "For example, you can go into the system and say, essentially, 'give 
me all the lawyers located on Main Street that have more than 10 employees' 
and -- pow -- almost instantly you get an onscreen report listing them for 
you."

Naturally, setting up a database this large with so many search options 
required a lot of indexes.  "That made it a bit more difficult to program," 
Jeff said.  "It took about a year to get it all perfected, but it's also a 
LOT faster in its searches."

And Jeff put TDBS to work offering his company's customers a LOT of search 
options.  Callers can locate Calgary businesses listed on the system by 
company name, principal employees, address, telephone, business type, postal 
code and more.

Once a search has been selected, Key Contacts customers can elect to receive 
data from the system in a number of report formats, including two on-screen 
displays and as comma-delimited ASCII text files.  Callers can also set up 
their own personal databases via Key Contacts system's Sales Management 
System option, and have data they've called up saved into them.  Jeff said 
this popular feature generates a lot of additional revenue for his company.

Even though Key Contacts' system makes quick work of search requests, TDBS' 
can still sometimes take a few seconds to perform a complex sequential 
search through 40,000 records.  Jeff wisely set up the system so that, after 
making a search request, it flashes the words "Searching..." on the screen.  
This might seem simple enough but, as Jeff explained, a bit of trickery was 
required to pull it off with TDBS.

"The blinking 'Searching...' prompt was hard to figure out," he said.  But 
it turned out to be deceptively simple.  "It's done using an 'AT...GET' 
command, then you use 'SET COLOR ON Blinking' which sets the color to white 
blinking letters on a black background.  Then, once the search is completed, 
the system reads the next part of the program, which changes it back to the 
regular background."

Another area involving some tricky setup was Key Contacts' unique billing 
system.  The company charges customers $1230.00 per year to open a user 
account, which is started with about $2500.00 credit toward data searches.  
Customer credit accounts are charged out at 35 cents per "label" record 
displayed or 50 cents per "complete" record displayed.  Once a client's 
account no longer shows a credit amount, he or she is automatically notified 
online that it's time to pay for continued access to the data.

"That problem probably took me the longest to figure out," Jeff said.  "I 
had to create an accounting system that loops every time a customer calls up 
a record, creates a counter and then, once the customer is done, goes to the 
userlog file to see how much credit remains in the client's account, 
subtracts the most recent charge from that amount and creates a new balance.  
Once a customer's account reaches zero, the system then generates a message 
that tells the user there is no more money available in the account."

This allows the Key Contacts TBBS online information system to perform 
nearly all of its own accounting and billing functions virtually 
automatically.

Jeff also discovered another benefit of TDBS: it allows the directory to 
become a two-way street.  He added an option that allows clients to revise 
the information Key Contacts currently has on their own businesses.  Data 
entered into this information revision screen is saved to a separate 
database.  Key Contacts personnel then telephone the company in question and 
check out the validity of the new information.  If it's correct, it gets 
updated on the system, keeping the data online as current as possible, with 
less expense and trouble to Key Contacts Directories, Ltd.

Jeff has also made the Key Contacts system more attractive by putting some 
of TBBS' other strengths to work.  "A lot of big companies -- we have a 
couple of banks online, for example -- send messages and files, etc. to each 
other via TBBS's e-mail function -- taking advantage of the system as an 
interface between branches," Jeff said.  "Clients also use the realtime 
conference area at times and the selection of online TDBS games we've made 
available are always popular."

He also created a program that takes all of the data in the Key Contacts 
database and compiles it into one statistical report.  "This report offers 
current statistics on the number of records currently residing in the Key 
Contacts system," Jeff Said.  "The information is split up by city quadrant, 
postal code, and number of employees and effectively provides an up-to-date 
'snapshot' of the business community that's really interesting."

All these additional features are offered to Key Contacts clients free of 
charge, and Jeff says they pay the company back many times over in good 
will.

Jeff also set up free limited access to the Key Contacts system for 
unregistered callers, so they can easily sample the system and find out if 
it would be of use to them.  "New unregistered users get access to the Test 
Section," Jeff said.  "This lets them go in and try out the system without 
being charged.  It offers access to a limited database of about 3,000 
businesses and allows users to bring up the Business Classification codes 
for listings by type of business."

Key Contacts has even found a great way to subsidize some of its online 
system costs.  Just as business real estate can be paid for by taking on the 
occasional renter, Jeff said his company has "sub-let" space on the system 
to a distributor of popular shareware software packages.

"We set up a menu option for US-CAN Database which accesses a completely 
different database from ours, listing available shareware," Jeff said.  
"It's searchable by name, category, etc., and allows you to order the 
shareware online, which is then sent to you on disk.  The company has a 
database of probably 15,000 people they mail their catalog to, but a lot of 
their customers are now just calling Key Contacts to browse and order.  It's 
doing very well for them."

All of this is running on a 16-line TBBS/TDBS system, on a single IBM 
compatible 80386 25 MHz PC with four megabytes of RAM and one 120 megabyte 
hard drive.  Jeff said that at first it was hard to believe you could do so 
much with so little hardware.

"Initially I was skeptical," he said.  "But, after making a number of calls 
to eSoft, I quickly became a believer that this software would be the 
answer.  I think the final system is exceptional in that it combines all 
aspects of our business, and can provide our customers with specific target 
market searches which were never possible before in the printed directory 
format."

And, although he said the Key Contacts TBBS system hasn't yet replaced his 
company's printed directory business, he knows that time is coming.  "I 
suspect it will in a few years," he said.  "There are fewer and fewer people 
who are interested in printed media.  More people are using word processors 
to do mailings and things and they really don't have the time to go through 
a printed directory, one record at a time, to find their customer contacts."

Thanks to TBBS and TDBS, Key Contacts Directories, Ltd., is already fully 
prepared for that time, and capitalizing on the growing interest in online 
directories now.  It's clear they'll be positioned to take full advantage of 
future trends as they happen and their TBBS/TDBS system will be ready to 
accept the challenges those future trends bring. 

- END -
PS1092-2
Rev. 10/92

Copyright (C) 1994 eSoft, Inc., All Rights Reserved.  Permission granted
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