Configuring Elliott V8.5

After installing Elliott V8.5 for the first time, you will need to make some configuration changes. If this is the first time you have installed Elliott V8.5, the system will detect that the EL850.CFG file does not exist in your startup < ElliottRoot>\Bin85 directory (e.g., M:\Elliott7\Bin85). Therefore, the ElliottV8.5 System Configuration utility will start up automatically during the installation procedure. You can also use EL850CF.EXE in the Bin85 folder (<ElliottRoot>\Bin85) to make changes to the Elliott Configuration. To avoid potential NTFS security issue, you should right click EL850CF.EXE and choose "Run as administrator". See sample screen below:

The configuration utility can also be launched from the Elliott Control Center. Login to Elliott 8.5 as SUPERVISOR. Then you will see the "Config" button on the top left corner of your Control Center. See sample screen below:

Click on this button and you will see the configuration utility show up as if you are running the utility <ElliottRoot>\Bin85\EL850CF.EXE through Windows Explorer.

License Tab

The Elliott license key code is a 30-digit code that controls the licensing information of Elliott Business Software, such as the number of users, maintenance expiration date, add-on licenses...etc. When you renew your Elliott maintenance agreement, add additional users or add-on options, you will receive a new license key code.

Copy and paste your license key code into the License Key field and click "Validate" to make sure it is a valid license code.

We introduced this method of licensing control after Elliott 8.5. It is expected that all future Elliott Business Software releases will use this convention for licensing. The difference is that we will use different version numbers. For example, you can expect when Elliott 8.6 is released, that we will use the Bin86 folder. The configuration file will be EL860.CFG and the utility name will be EL860CF.EXE.

Email Tab

The information you set up here, by default, will be used by all Elliott users.  

SMTP/MAPI: If you wish to send email by directly communicating with your mail server using SMTP (Simple Mail Transfer Protocol), then use SMTP. On the other hand, if you wish to send out email through your email client, like Outlook, then choose MAPI. When you choose MAPI with Outlook, it is likely you will receive security warning that another application is trying to send email on your behalf.  

You can address MAPI's security issue by following the procedure in <ElliottRoot>\Doc\OLSecUpd.pdf. Many of our users do not have the technical expertise to implement the procedure in this document.  In that case, you should choose SMTP. In Elliott V8, we support both SMTP and MAPI, and the default is SMTP.  When you use MAPI, the sent emails will show up in your email client (Outlook) sent box.  On the other hand, if you choose SMTP, the sent emails will not show up in your sent box. Instead, Elliott V8 will save the email activity in log files like <ElliottRoot>\Log\EmailLog-YYMMDD*.CSV.

If you specify SMTP, you will have the following options in the Default SMTP Settings group:

Server:  Enter your email server name. If the port number is not 25, enter the server name, followed by a colon, followed by the port number.

Use Authentication: SMTP server by default will require authentication.  But if this is your internal SMTP server (i.e., Exchange), you could add relay rules for your internal IP address so authentication is not required.

User Name/Password: This is the User Name and Password provided by your SMTP server admin.

Ignore Certificate Error: If your internal SMTP server uses a self-signed certificate, you will get a certificate error.  In that case, you could choose to trust the self-signed certificate and ignore the certificate error.

Enable SSL/TLS: If you wish to protect your email from eavesdropping between your workstation and SMTP server, then you may enable SSL to protect the communication.  Generally speaking, it is not necessary to enable SSL if the SMTP server is hosted internally.

Admin Email Name/Address: This is the default sent from the email address. When you use SMTP in Elliott 8, the system retrieves each user's email address information from the Password Setup screen. See sample screen below.

Use TLS 1.2:  Currently, most email servers support SSL security layer TLS 1.1 and TLS 1.2.  By default, Elliott v8.5 uses TLS 1.1 (when you select Enable SSL/TLS).  If, however, your email server requires TLS 1.2, select this option to make v8.5 use TLS 1.2 instead of TLS 1.1.  Note that this selection applies to all of your email servers, so they will all use TLS 1.1 or all use TLS 1.2. Please see the following KB article for more details: https://support.elliott.com/knowledgebase/articles/1978593-feature-support-email-servers-require-tls-1-2-fo. 

Options Tab

Use Elliott Deferred Processing:  Check this box to indicate that you intend to run Elliott Deferred Processor on the server console, and preferably on a 24x7 basis to serve as a report engine. If this box is not checked, you will not be able to use Deferred Processing or the new Run Now reporting feature in the printing option window.

Share Configuration Info with NETcellent (recommended): Checking this box allows Elliott to occasionally send configuration (setup) information to NETcellent. Because NETcellent wants to focus on improving features that our users actually use, this will help us with development of future improvements.

Default Printer Port: This is to specify the default LPT port for the “Raw Data Pass Through” feature.  You should leave it at “LPT1” unless you have a special reason to change it.

Country: The Canadian version is different from the US version.  Make sure you are using the right version for your country.

Display Screen Updates:  This is for changing the screen update interval.  By default, the Elliott legacy screen updates for every 50 display actions or when there is an input field or condition that is waiting for a keystroke.  For example, in customer file maintenance, Elliott displays all literals at one time instead of individually.  This is for performance purposes.  Sometimes, from a developer’s standpoint, when you animate a program and do not see updates as the action is taking place, it can be confusing.  This is one reason you may wish to change the default setting from 50 to 1, for example.

DDF Option: Require DDFs to create non-work files:  Checking this box will cause a message box to be displayed whenever any non-work file is created without a matching DDF definition. This alerts the user that a file has been created that may not be SQL compliant and ODBC compatible and may prevent you from using tools like Crystal Reports to access the file.

When such a message box is displayed, make note of the file name.  If  SQL compliance is desired for that file, you need to obtain a DDF for it and run DDF2BTR.Exe against that file to bring its SQL definition up-to-date.

Other Tab

Legacy Reports:

Check any of these options to alter the appearance of printed reports in Elliott.

Amigo Launching (Default)

Amigos is a term in Elliott referring to Notes, eContacts, Attributes, Events and Links.

Here you specify how your users, by default, will interact with the Notes, eContacts and Attributes lists.  When you check an option here, whenever you click on the corresponding button in the legacy screen toolbar, the list of Notes, etc., will appear in a separate process, independent of the process you are on.  This allows you to view multiple notes at the same time.

However, it takes longer to launch a separate process than to simply display the screen in the same process, and it takes more memory.  If the majority of your users have workstations that are slow or have minimum memory, you should not check these options.  Each user can override these system-wide defaults in the User Preferences screen.

NOTE: If you run this utility from the Elliott Control Center, you must exit all Elliott processes before the changes will take place.

CLS/JEG