COMPULIFE ® Software Inc. 
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Update News
for April 2019
These topics will be dealt with in more detail throughout this bulletin. Thank You To Those Who Tried It NOTE: The following about the new Table Rating option pertains to Compulife's U.S. customers. So far we have had NO reaction from Canadian customers or companies about adding table ratings to our Canadian edition - NO INTEREST at all. The programming work is done, all we need is data but so far: silence. Last month we introduced the new version of our Windows software that does table ratings and a number of subscribers gave it a try. Our thanks to each subscriber who tried it and special thanks to those who found and reported issues/bugs that have been repaired. At this point we think that all the bugs have been addressed and the new software is almost ready for general release. We have held back on including the Table Rating version in the April monthly update. Therefore, after the April monthly update you will need to again manually download the special midmonth update which will give you the Table Ratings option. That update file is found here: Just save the file to the COMPLIFE folder on your C: drive. After it is saved, start Compulife from scratch. The program will find the file and ask if you want to process it. There are two reason for delaying a general release. First, Our programmer will be on vacation during the second week of April and so if there are any issues that appear we won't be able to address them until his return. Second, after releasing the last update to the Table Rating option we then upgraded our Windows software language compiler to the newest version of that compiler. As always happens with a compiler upgrade, there are issues that turn up that must be addressed. In addition, our programmer has been going through the software source code making improvements and changes that could introduce new bugs into the system. Therefore, that programming work will continue until he leaves for vacation. Once he has returned from vacation we will then introduce the newest Table Rating software in one last special update. After we are certain that there are no resulting problems, we will then put the new program into a general release midmonth update that everyone gets. Should anything turn up we will be able to act quickly to resolve the issue. Expanding Products and Categories Now that I (Bob) have returned from my vacations (February and March) I will be focussing on adding more products and categories to the Table Rating database. If there is a product that you need added, let me know by emailing us at: We will be forwarding your request to our contact with the respective company and letting them know that you want (and that we want) their products in the table rating option that is now available in our software. As we have previously announced we have no intention in the short term of adding table ratings to our internet software. However, for those subscribers who purchase our internet engine, and who want to use the "data" that we have accumulated and will be maintaining for our table rating quotes, we can tell you how to create a table rating quote system that will use that data. Included in the April monthly update is an important file that you can use in order to do table rated quotes. The name of the file is TABLE.TXT. TABLE.TXT contains all the percentages for the available tables for any given product code in the table rating product database. Because it is a TXT file, you can easily view it with any TXT document program such as "notepad" on your computer. IMPORTANT: This does NOT apply to those using the Windows PC software. In order to proceed with table ratings internet engine users will need an update to the latest version of our internet engine. The current engine does not provide you with the "policy fee" used in the calculation of premiums. The new engine will give you the policy fee, the name of the variable being Policy_Fee_Copyright_Compulife. NOTE: Given the "scraping" that has been going on, where our internet engines have been attacked in order to scrape quotes for our software, any new "variables" will have the phrase "_Copyright_Compulife" added to the variable name. When the future version of our Internet Engine is introduced, the one that works with the new data structure that we will introduce sometime next year, ALL current variable names will have "_Copyright_Compulife" added to them. This will mean some work for our customers who implement that future engine but it will be a simple find and replace in the source code and should not take all that long to update. With the new engine that provides the policy fee, together will the table.txt file, we can then explain how to setup the software to do table ratings in web quotes. It will require some programming on your end but once it is done all the product data entry and changes will be done for you and maintained by Compulife. For those currently doing table ratings with our engine, where they have been doing some of this on their own, it should make your life much, much simpler. While we are doing surgery on the Internet Engine we will be also moving ahead with the new "counter" system that we are installing into the internet quoting software. This counter technology will keep track of the number of quotes the internet engine software is doing on a daily and monthly basis. When completed, we will first introduce this new internet engine to our own websites: "term4sale", "Compulife Basic" and "Compulife Web Quotes". It will give us the total number of quotes being done daily and monthly for the entire system, and for each "user" associated with that system. IMPORTANT: Information about individual quotes will NOT be recorded. We currently have NO mechanism in our software that reports individual quotes being produced and we have no intention of introducing any such mechanism. The new counter system will be a text file system where the text file containing the count information can only be manually retrieved by the customer. Periodically we will ask customers to do so and to send that file to Compulife. Each Internet Engine user has signed an agreement where they have a reporting duty if they provide access to our engine to sub-users. The new counter file(s) will make that reporting much, much easier. All cutomers will need to do is retrieve the counter file and email it to Compulife. Once it is working well, and the new API quoting option has been introduced, we expect to be changing our internet quoting pricing and the pricing will be based upon volume of quotes. Once again, those price changes will not occur until after the counters are working, and the new API option has been introduced. NOTE: To ensure that no one "fudges" the counter file content, there is a proprietary checksum value that is written to the file by the engine. If anyone edits the file after it has been modified by the engine we will know. If the file is modified during it's course of use, there will be mechanisms to deal with that. Once again, that new engine with the new counter file will not be introduced to our customers until it has been thoroughly tested on our own web sites to ensure that there are no issues with it. The following is the current order for new work that we will be doing in 2019/2020:
Upgrade Internet Engine to Introduce Internal Quote Volume Counters Compulife API Web Quote Option Overhaul Of Current Product Data Files Introduction of New PC Version: CQS.EXE Introduction of Compulife Basic Plus (with Pick 12) Anyone with questions about any of these upcoming projects can call Bob Barney to discuss: (888) 798-3488. Please don't email me essay questions, just call. If I'm not in, email me your phone number, I'll call you. These planned objectives will easily consume our programming time during 2019 and into 2020. The good news is that once the product data files have been converted, and we have introduced the new CQS.EXE, and upgraded our internet engine to use the new data files, Compulife will be turning it's full attention to our web based, Compulife Basic software. The long term goal is to have a web based product that does everything our PC based software does. |