Spring forward

The weather may be having trouble making up its mind, but spring will be here before you know it! The Spring 2018 version of Ascend was released to beta and early release retailers on February 28. It will be available to everyone else on March 20 – so get to know our new features this week and mark your calendar to schedule your update!

Spring 2018: You’ve shared your thoughts and we’ve been listening. That’s why we’ve made a lot of not-so-obvious, behind-the-scenes changes that will improve performance in your system.

However, there’s still plenty of tasty treats included! The highlights are below, and you can find the full list of changes in the release notes.

• We’ve renamed On Sales to Promotions. And we’ve moved the Sale Wizard (for easily downloading Ascend-created promotions) into Database Explorer with the rest of these functions.
• Use the Reprint Receipt tile on the Ascend Desktop to print a receipt for the last transaction accessed on the current workstation. Users can also reprint a standard or gift receipt for the last transaction from the File menu on the Ascend Desktop or from within a transaction.
• All remaining multi-store functions (customers, taxation, and transfers) are moved to our Stratus platform. Once all of your locations (including any events, warehouse, or online sales databases) are updated, we’ll automatically migrate your data – no need to make an appointment, but it may take a few days before you see the changes.
• In Winter 2017, we prevented users from opening the same transaction on multiple workstations in order to prevent unintended consequences like lost changes. In Spring 2018, we’ve implemented this change on vendor purchase orders, too.
• If the Microsoft SQL Server service doesn’t start correctly on your server computer (which will prevent you from using Ascend on any of your computers), we’ve added a button to allow you to easily start it. (If the SQL Server service is running on your server computer, but other computers are unable to connect to Ascend, see our I can’t log in to Ascend knowledge base article for troubleshooting tips.)

Missing messages: We recently discovered that messages left in our non-emergency voicemail box weren’t getting forwarded to us thanks to a system error. We’ve since resolved the issue, but not before missing some of your messages!

We sincerely apologize if you were expecting a reply from us and never got it. If you still have any outstanding issues we haven’t addressed, please give us a call ASAP!

Deep freeze: A few weeks back, we mentioned that our recent enhancement which prevents users from opening a transaction on multiple computers uncovered that quite a few retailers have been running into issues with Ascend “freezing” on them and requiring the use of the End Task. While we’re introducing a change in Spring 2018 to allow you to access transactions that get “locked” because of this state, this doesn’t mean you should ignore the circumstance.

If Ascend frequently crashes or becomes unresponsive – regardless if it’s on all of your computers or just one – please call us as it’s happening so that we can look into the root cause. It is not normal and generally indicates a larger problem in your system.

Dexter downtime: Dexter will be offline for scheduled maintenance for up to an hour on Sunday March 11 starting at 6:00 am Central time. This will also affect placing Trek orders through Ascend, checking product availability (via vendor order or from a transaction), and accessing Order Grids. For more details on this outage, see Dexter.

---

Tags: Dexter, locked transactions, Multi-store, Multistore, On Sale, Outage, Promotions, Spring 2018, Stratus, Trek, Trek Bicycle, Trek Bicycle Corporation, Trek Bikes