Client's Cc Needs A Fail-safe "new Order" Alert

[jerseyjoe]

I have a restaurant web site. Their customers place delivery and take out orders online, paid by PayPal. The orders arrive om a laptop at the cashier's station via email that sets off a small ding-dong, audible only right there.

It's a busy place with staff and managers back and forth all the time. At times the cashier has to leave the station to greet arrivals, etc.

So it's possible to miss an incoming order. Now that the site has been active and advertised in local venues for the past few months, volume is picking up.

Therefore, last week, two incoming pickup orders were un-noticed until the hungry customer showed up.

Yes, I know CC4 has a FireFox alert that may mitigate the problem. But even then, I need something more positive.

The ideal situation would be if the order would be fed to the Point Of Sale system that automatically prints out the order on the printer in the kitchen. But no one has offered to write such a mod, even though evryone I spoken to (including Brooky) agree that this would open a huge market for CC.

So, until that happens, I need an alternative. Maybe a way to turn on a small light at the cashier station. Or a more audible alarm. Something that will not be overlooked.

Ideas, please?

[jerseyjoe]

You know we cant provide links to mods here Joe but there is one that appears to be good but i haven't used it. Search google for Limetrade Cubecheck, could be just what you are looking for and is a freebie

I have found an even better solution!

First of all, I installed CubeCheck. Nice looking program, but with two fatal problemos.

1) I could not get it to work. I installed it, followed the minimal configuration advice and I started CC using the CubeCheck tool. But new test orders never triggered the popup.

2) the developer never responded to (or even acknowledged) two emails, maybe a week ago, regarding the first item.

But, while hanging around waiting for the response that never came, a much simpler and even more useful solution presented itself.

The explanation below may be wordy but implementation it is so simple it's amazing that no one has mentioned it here in these forums until now. (I am not amazed that *I* did not mention it before now because it is simple and elegant, characteristics of a level of intelligence I lack.)

I installed the open source version of Eudora7 (www.eudora.com), an excellent email program.

One of Eudora's most appealing features is that when a new email arrives it filters the mail into mailbox and pops up a full screen display of Eudora even if it has been minimized. It also pops open a full sized window for the previously closed mail box that has just received an email, displaying a list of that mailbox's unread messages in chronological order in the upper half of the screen And (important step) the full text of the most recent unread message in the lower part of the screen. Also, unread messages are flagged with a bright dot until the operator clicks on the flag to mark them as read.

in simple terms, a new order replaces whatever is on the computer screen with an unmistakeable, un-avoidable copy of the new order and keeps in in your face until it is acknowledged.

Eudora also can be configured to force a separate popup notice on the screen and the option to a make a sound that you can define from a wave file of other.

In this case, I configured Eudora to check for new email at a frequency appropriate to the need. Given that these are lunch and dinner delivery orders, we are checking every 2 minutes. (Some servers will balk at 1 minute mail checks).

When a new order comes in, the screen pops up showing it. The operator punches the information into the Point of Sale touch screen and the order is automatically entered and sent to the printer in the kitchen.

Then the operator marks the email as "read", closes the message window and minimizes Eudora to the system tray. It is now ready to report the next incoming order.

Of course you will need to configure CubeCart to send email notices of new orders to a dedicated email address such as "[email protected]."

I am now trying to figure out how to make Eudora send any incoming order to a printer in the kitchen. Doing that would solve the problem I have raised elsewhere in these forums of the need to bridge the gap between CC and the great variety of POS systems out there.

This is a solution not to be underestimated in its potential. There are MILLIONS of restaurants that could use this.