Just a quick post to share with you a service I found over the weekend.  The site is called LiveDocx, and with a free membership you get all the tools you need to be able to generate DOCX, DOC, RTF and PDF documents on the fly from templates!

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Working with a Windows based web server recently, I ran into a bit of a puzzle when a software package I was using required a regular PHP script to be run.  On POSIX based operating systems like Linux or BSD, this is something you could easily accomplish by running what is known as a ‘cronjob’.

As Windows has no cron daemon, I had to come up with another solution.

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For months now I’ve been struggling with an issue, where at seemingly random intervals, my keymap would get all scrambled up. Instead of a question mark, an E with an accent would be typed. Normal single quotes turned into backticks, etc.  Very frustrating.  The problem would persist in an application until I closed and reopened it.  With no idea what was causing it, and such a painful fix, I spent some time Googling and have discovered the cause and solution.

My Windows Vista system had a French Canadian keymap installed.  A keyboard shortcut to toggle keymaps must be getting accidentally pressed.

The Fix

1. Open up the Control Panel
2. Select ‘Regional and Language Options’
3. Select the ‘Keyboards and Languages’ tab
4. Press the ‘Change Keyboards’ button
5. Select any keymaps you don’t want.  
6. Click Apply, problem solved!

Unless you regularly switch languages your system should only have one keymap installed.

In the same area of the Control Panel on the Advanced Key Settings tab I discovered a keyboard shortcut for ‘Left-Alt + Shift’ that was part of my problem.  Altering the keyboard shortcut would fix the issue here as well, although deleting the extra keymaps was my preferred solution.

Sometimes I run a program by accident and want to close it quickly.  In Vista if you try to close a program while it is working, Windows considers this a problem!   So naturally, it fires up a process to check online for a solution.

99% of the time there is no real problem, I’ve just attempted to exit an application while it was busy.  The solution checking is annoying…   here’s how to turn it off!

Turning off  Solution Checking

From the Control Panel (in Classic View), select “Problem Reports and Solutions“.

Under the tasks menu to the left, select ‘Change Settings‘.

Click ‘Advanced Settings‘

Set the ‘For my programs, problem reporting is: ‘  setting to ‘Off’.

Viola!  No more annoying checking for solutions to non existant problems.

As a new SugarCRM user, I have been having a few issues getting the email campaign functionality up and running. This built in module has some great features like per user view and click tracking, and opt out/list management. It’s powerful, but as I’ve discovered, can be an incredibly frustrating experience to get it going.

To help others out, I’ve created this step by step walkthrough.

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