Actinic Business 5

Revamped navigation

To help beginners and other users, Actinic has revamped its Navigator, the utility option that takes you through the different stages in setting up and running an Actinic Catalog Web site. Navigator displays the stages in setting up and running an online store in the form of clickable flow diagrams. Each clickable object opens up the relevant page in the application, so you can work your way through easily. This is in contrast to the Help button, which appears on most dialog boxes and application forms. This button opens a Help window, but unfortunately it has no concept of the calling form and so you aren't positioned in the section of help that may be of interest to you, but rather at the first page of the help file. It would be little work to fix this and I'm sure interim builds will do so.

When setting up to sell over the Internet you can offer various payment methods, and Actinic makes this easy with predefined types that also include several of the popular Internet Payment Providers such as SecPay, NetBanx and WorldPay. These companies will interface your Web site with the credit card houses and enable your site to authorise credit card transactions. You can even instruct it not to accept certain types of payment for orders from certain countries. Actinic has carried this even further by having service providers for shipping as well. So the system not only knows about the shipping rates, but the buyer is emailed a reference number so that they can track the shipping of their goods via the carrier's Web site. The first carrier company that Actinic has integrated in this way is UPS, but unfortunately for us in Europe it's only available for customers in the US and Canada to date. Come on, Actinic, let's have some of this cool functionality for UK carrier firms.

Actinic's product has always excelled above most of the competition because it makes it easy to build an online shop and provides the mechanism for handling the orders when they come. The order handling has been significantly improved in version 5. There's now stock monitoring with stock and reorder levels. There's also a wider range of reports that can be generated from the order-processing system as well as the ability for the system to generate an email to the buyer as soon as their goods have been marked as 'shipped'. Through Actinic Link (see enterprise, p235), accounting systems can now interface to the order-processing system of Actinic Business. Currently Sage Line 50 and Exchequer Enterprise are supported, with QuickBooks Pro being available soon.

While in the past Actinic's products built the shopping side of your Web site, if you wished to have other pages about your company, special offers, contact pages and the like you'd have to create these with one of the HTML design tools and maintain it this way. This meant there were two separate ways to maintain your site - hardly perfect. In version 5, all this can be done within Actinic Business. So a user familiar with the application can update the Web site, add special offers and so on, safe in the knowledge that they won't break the site. This is because all the changes are made to entries in the database, which then generates the HTML pages based on the predefined templates, rather that to raw HTML pages. Actinic calls this area of the Web site the 'brochure'.

Going back to the stock control side of things, you can now make the price of an item dependent on the price of its components, so if, say, the cost of the batteries changes, the cost of another product shipped with batteries is also adjusted. All stock information and data can be held on an external database, with Actinic linking to it. A previous complaint of Catalog was that once all this critical business information was entered into Actinic there was no easy way to extract it into another program. With linked data sources and excellent export data options, this criticism can at last be laid to rest.