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Overview of 3.0

This release of the Gorilla® software focuses on the message- sending capabilities in Gorilla, bringing you greater stability and enhanced printing, emailing, and faxing capabilities.

Overview of 4.0

1) Remote Printing. We know that one of the things that can take you down is a Computer Operator who doesn't show up for work, or worse—gives you no notice before quitting. And if you are doing a lot of mailings, your whole staff goes down in a folding, licking, sticking frenzy.

So how about this? Instead of printing to a local printer, you just choose another printer driver, and your print job flies through the Internet to a secure printer elsewhere. Your 5,000 piece mailing gets printed today, batched with other thousands of letters for maximum postal discount, and no one on your staff has to touch a piece of paper.

2) Mass Personalization of Your Messages. To understand this, read this seminar confirmation letter.

Dear Hester and Thorny:

I am so delighted you will be joining us at Morton's for my very special client seminar, "The Tax Challenge for the Large IRA."


In case you have never been to Morton's, I am enclosing a map for your convenience.

We will be meeting on Tuesday, July 24th.

Cocktails will be served at 6:30 pm. Dinner begins at 7:00 pm. We'll be done at 8:30 pm.

I want to review your menu choices just to make sure we got them right.

Hester, you ordered the roast chicken breast. The menu describes this as "Oven roasted free-range double chicken breast stuffed with garlic herb cheese and served with lemon butter." Yum. I think I'll have one of those.

And Thorny, you ordered the veal chop with sweet and hot peppers. Here's how they describe this one: "Veal chop marinated overnight in a savory blend of pepper vinegar, garlic and onions. Broiled and served sizzling with hot and sweet peppers." This sounds pretty good too. Doggone it. Now I don't know what to order.

At any rate, I look forward to seeing you.

We will be notifying the chef of our order on Tuesday morning. So if something does come up that would require you to cancel, please call Jewell before then.

So how does all this happen? With 4.0, when you create a Worksheet, those fields you see in blue type will immediately be available as merge fields. As you process seminar reservations, your Computer Operator takes the information from the Seminar Update Form, enters it in the worksheet fields, and prints the confirmation letters.

Currently you can create all the Worksheets you want. But you can't use the data in messaging. With Gorilla 4.0, you can.

3) Enhanced Project Tracking.
Gorilla 4.0 will come with Electronic Checklists. This might be all the steps necessary to create a campaign, or to transfer someone's account. You will be able to quickly look at the entire checklist, see what is done, what is not, what is overdue, et cetera.

4) Gorilla 4.0 has a blazing fast SQL database engine.  The entire program will then have been ported to Microsoft'® new development environment, .Net. As we build the new database engine, we will be addressing many of the 454 enhancement requests we have received from our users. We do aim to please.

New Development Team

Earlier in 2007, I concluded that BGM did not have the expertise in house to develop the next generation of software. So we have gone to an outside developer for both Gorilla 3.0 and 4.0. 

We have gone with Fortis Software in Clearwater FL. 

Paul McDaniel, Cofounder and Chief Technology Officer at Fortis, spent 11 years at Microsoft's corporate R&D headquarters before starting Fortis in 2001. At Microsoft McDaniel managed every part of the software life cycle, from leading Program Managers, to Developers, to Quality Assurance. His senior roles at Microsoft were as Software Architect. While at Microsoft, he was instrumental in the shift to the Internet for MSN and pioneered Internet server technologies. He led the design team for the original ASP programming language and brought version one to market, was the architect and lead designer on the new web server technologies in Windows 2003 and is credited as the lead architect on the Windows XP® "System Restore" feature. His name appears on 11 of Microsoft's software patents.

A huge reason for selecting Fortis, a Microsoft Gold Partner, is their expertise with Outlook and Microsoft Exchange Server.

With Gorilla 3.0, you will see part of their expertise at work as you see how they have integrated Gorilla email and Outlook email. In Gorilla 4.0, you see the full benefits of that expertise.

The Fortis team is utilizing the full Microsoft software development lifecycle-programming model in creating applications that are integral to the enhancement path we have chosen.