ATM Monitoring in Ambank
Recently, I had the opportunity with three other vendors/freelancers to come up with a solution for their M$ ACCESS based “application” which record downtime of their ATMs. Basically it’s a .mdb file which is shared on a ms win server folder.
Before everything else, I was surprised how they “monitor” their ATM machines! They literally watched the ATM reporting screen to see if the ATM was down. I mean, a person is allocated for this task - just sit and stare at the monitor, if the ATM status goes down he needs to open their “application” and enter the downtime.
Anyway, they did a small presentation of their usage of this “application” and their expectation. They wanted some applications which will replace theirs. “Replace” not as in enhance or add-on new functions. They just want to keep the way they “monitor”.
I must note that I was contacted long before this meeting with regard to this matter and I was planning to use Perl/Shell scripting in Linux to do all of this with a LAMP interface for reporting purposes. But, it turns out that all their infrastructure as well as IT team is pro-Microsoft. What to do? They just want it in some Microsoft .NET or Visual Basic (is it the same now?). So, unfortunately we fail.
We proposed to them a fully automated uptime/downtime tracking facility with auto generation of reports in Excel/PDF.
What I don’t understand is why they find it all right to have somebody just sit and watch the ATM monitor screen. It’s wasting resources for nothing, instead of hiring/training a person to use Open Source stuff and make everybody’s life easy?
And, of course, some extra cash for me?
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Welcome to Arstan's personal blog. This blog includes tips on Linux, Apache, MySQL, Shell Scripts. Hardware/software and internet technologies reviews and updates.
