TillGate™                                      

The base product of AMC’s communications set

   

Networked Software Interchange (TillGate™) is a product enabling connectivity of all of PosPortal™, StoreTrader™ point of sale terminals, Central Control System PORRMS™ & The Retailers Solution TRS™ (BERMS) integrated stock and financial systems or other non AMC applications for the local server or a remote help disk facility.

The operators of TillGate™ can easily connect to any PC based device in your network from your office and do backups or distribute software to a large range of devices, simultaneously.

TillGate™ automatically knows what kind of computer and modem combination you are using and can equally connect to the devices on your LAN.

Button bars let you customise the interface for your specific needs. Simply drag and drop to transfer files between your PC and the remote device you’re connected to.

1.  Components of the Network are:

Local Office:

·  POS systems (1 - 100 systems per Server)

·  TillGate™ - TRS™ Server (one per LAN station)

·    Optional Router (0 - 24 Local Services)

·\1 - 9999 WAN/LAN connections – Windows XP, Windows 2000, WinNT, 95, 98)

2. TillGate™ Functions

The main function of TillGate™ is to provide the remote access for PosPortal™, StoreTrader™ and/or any other process, to processes running on both the workstation, and remote stations/servers.

When in Server configuration, TillGate™ is able to connect to 9,999 other TillGate™ Servers to allow access to the WAN/LAN or other processes, by POS, or by other processes running on the workstations.

TillGate™ will also support file transfers between sites and or terminals, with the support of wild cards.  Deletion of files, append to file, appending of files, along with file execution is also supported. The data format is open and may be binary, text or any mixture.  The system provides both compression and encryption for data being transferred via TCP/IP and is able to schedule file transfers with full log and error reporting and retries. Manual file transfer is also available.

TillGate™ has the ability to ‘Mirror’ or ‘Redirect’ transactions.  Using the mirror facilities allows two or more processes on the same server to receive the same data, without the sending process knowing.  This means that the data is sent only once, reducing the LAN / WAN traffic.  It will also allow one of the processes to be ‘down’ and the other working without the loss of data to the ‘down’ process.  This data will be available as soon as the process comes on-line.

The redirection will allow TillGate™ to send the message to another server instead of it being processed locally.  Using this approach, the process always sends the transaction to Server 0, and has TillGate™ send it to the relevant server for processing.

AMC provides an object library to allow our POS (or any other application linked with these libraries) via the use of user exits, a path to the Client-Server or to the external WAN.  There is no requirement for a normal SERVER or REDIRECTOR to be present. At no time is the workstation required to ‘see’ the server’s disk, nor does the user have to ‘logon’ to the network to function. Virtual Circuits for the WAN are also not required.  Security of data flow is via program control.

3.  TRS™-Server (With PosPortal™)

POS Client-Server passes all sales information at the end of the sale to TillGate™ where TRS (BERMS) ™ Database handler processes it.  This allows real time reporting, real-time stock-on-hand figures, for operator balancing at the Back-end, and automatic End of Day processing.  The data is also available to a supervisor, allowing up to date reporting on each operator, both within the office or, if configured, within the central office. This can be done without interruption to the operation of POS. The nature of PosPortal™ will also allow POS to continue trading even if there is a LAN failure, the only function not available in this case is the on-line access.

4.  Store & Forward (With PosPortal™)

TillGate™ will also support Store and Forward.  This allows the POS to send and forget. Packets are passed up the line as soon as possible.  This Store and Forward database is available to all process. When receiving a Store and Forward packet destined for a process on the current platform, TillGate™ will insert a record into the database.  A background process will then attempt to deliver the data to the process in question.  It will remain in the database until it has been delivered successfully, at which time it will be removed and inserted into a processed database for audit control.  Each record has a time stamp added for both insertion and delivery. This has the added advantage of being able to replay the transactions, if required, at some point in the future.

5. System Requirements

5.1 Hardware

The hardware platform is industry-standard PC based. However, an Intel Pentium processor is considered to be the minimum recommended system required, with at least 16MB RAM and 350 Mbytes of hard disk space. This minimum requirement is determined by the Windows operating system not by the AMC solution.

5.2 Operating Systems

Windows 95, Windows NT Workstation 4.0, Windows NT Server 4.0, Windows 2000 and Windows XP.

6. Database Environment

The Retailers Solution programs are database independent and the following databases are supported:

Oracle and Paradox.

Through the ODBC interface the number of supported database types is constantly expanding. The program code itself is not dependent upon any particular database type.