Merlin develops new Offline Service

Don’t want to leave your business fate in the hands
of your ISP?

Merlin Business Software have developed a new solution to reduce this risk.  Merlin Offline enables you to trade even if your internet connection is down.

Ask The Expert

The Merlin Offline solution was produced by our own Engineering team of specialists who had recognised this could be a potential issue for our customers.  Martin Williams, Merlin’s Head of Engineering explains how this development came about.  “A particular customer’s branch had no access to Merlin at the head office as their Internet Service Provider (ISP) had decided to do maintenance work on the local exchange on a Saturday morning…”

Martin continues… “…the users asked if there was any way they could have a separate copy of recent trading data available so they could at least avoid turning customers away while their data service was being restored.”

Discussing this with Merlin’s Senior Technical Consultant, John Barber, John reacted quickly by putting together a specification and prototype application, which ultimately resulted in the Merlin Offline solution.

Martin explains “The beauty of the Offline solution is that a full back up is automatically copied to a master station on a daily basis, with the ability to have as many Offline slave clients as you require.  This could be a single client for customers with a single site and server, or in the case of companies with multiple branches, each branch can have its own “master” client which can feed other “slave” clients within the branch.  This is solution is ideal where a large branch has more than one trade counter or office.  The Offline solution also offers an additional safeguard for customers using our hosted “cloud” services who may lose connection to their hosting centre for whatever reason.”

Used simply as a reference, the Offline solution will give you visibility of your customers, their special pricing, stock information and availability up to the last update of data and you will then be able to perform standard Merlin operations to give business continuity whilst the offending issue is resolved.

We have made the solution as cost effective as possible to ensure customers of any size can afford it, with a single master station at just £30 per month and additional slave station’s at £15 per month.