Congratulations to Bilton Grange Preparatory School near Rugby on becoming our 20th active user. We had aimed to meet that target by Christmas but we got very close.
January 2012 sees the launch of version 3 of Crozier Chorale™. This lays the basis for all future development which will be exclusively in the .NET environment, gradually saying goodbye to Microsoft Access. This should ensure greatly increased flexibility and robustness and open the way to the development of on-line facilities so that, ideally, parents and pupils can view their commitments from home and visiting music teachers can schedule their appointments from anywhere they have access to the Internet. We will, however, continue to maintain close integration with MS Word, MS Excel and MS Outlook.
In the short term users will see little change. The first improvement is a wholly re-written installation process, a separate application which carries out the setting-up of the database connection and updates the database for the latest version without the need to open MS Access. It also means that the distributed Access file is the executable so there will only ever be one version in the system.
The second improvement is a switch to tabbed forms where this is appropriate. Each main form, including the main menu, has a separate tab. This way you can see which windows you have open at any time and switch quickly between them.
Also in the pipeline is an integrated billing system to allow for all the many different ways schools calculate charges to parents and payments to visiting staff. Close on its heels will come an ordering system so that any user can order items for pupils and leave the rest of the process to be handled by Chorale. We have also been asked to provide pupil profiles so that you can review the musical history of each pupil at a glance - instruments learned, concerts participated in and attended, trips undertaken and so on. If you have further ideas for this feature, do contact us.