This morning shortly after midnight the switch was thrown activating the listing maintenance in flexmls® Web and sending Tempo into it’s last stage before death… ’not quite dead yet’ mode. One of John Hall’s own gets credit for entering the first listing into the new system minutes after the switch, Russell Shaw with listing number 4000000. (Yes, the listing number counter was reset with the switch.) Russell’s accomplishment will be recognized in an unofficial ceremony where he will be presented with FBS and ARMLS coffee mugs. Congratulations Russell.
As expected with any switch throwing of this caliber there are a few small glitches that flexmls is currently working on. The largest of which is a bottleneck on one of their servers. So while they isolate the problem and get everything corrected, you might find yourself getting logged off of the system for no reason at all. We recommend you view this as forced practice with the new system. The second largest glitch isn’t a system problem at all, it has to due with the fact that passwords are now CaSE SenSItiVe. Make sure that Caps Lock key is OFF!
All calls regarding how to use the new system are being referred to FBS at 877-364-3934.
The buyer’s and seller’s cost sheets in Flex do not auto calculate. Flexmls and ARMLS will be doing a major revision of these functions after Monday and first guess is it will be 30 days until functional. Please use Tempo if you need the calculated cost sheets.
SERVER SLOWNESS
Flex is experiencing slowness which is not only irritating, but is causing pages not to display as it is timed out. Flex says the problem is somewhere in the web farm or the foundry (the electronic receptionist that routes traffic to the appropriate server) and they are working to resolve the problem. Flex has improved the performance, but it’s still not up to par. Here is a quote from FBS: “Our hope is that with these changes, Tuesday will be smoother. Given the severity of the problems today, however, we do expect that getting the system completely smoothed out will take a few days.”
PASSWORDS
Flex can only accommodate an 8 character password. Tempo allowed up to 12. ARMLS is getting a ton of ‘passwords don’t work’ calls. Please remember flex is case sensitive whereas Tempo was not. If you still can’t get it to work, reset your password via the Flex front page. If you call ARMLS or Flex, they cannot look up your password. It must be reset.
ZIPFORM
All new ARMLS profile sheets were added to the ZipForm library early Monday.
REQUIRED FIELDS
There are several new required fields: Auction yes or no; Capital improvement/impact fee, and the % or $ for SA and BB compensation. When a listing is revised, it will require these fields answered. If ARMLS needs to revise the listing the procedure they are following is to first check the listing in tempo to verify the compensation is % or $ and scanning the remarks to see if any auction or capital improvement fees are noted. If so, they’ll add it to the listing, if not they will enter No. If the property does say Auction, they will call the listing agent to get the remaining data needed.
Phil, The problems with slowness do not seem to be universal. I’ve not had any problems. Guess I should count myself lucky.
Consider yourself very lucky. I’ve had problems all week with the extreme lag time and probably lost two clients due to not being able to respond. I’ve contacted three other JHA agents and all report the same frustration. Sure hope the problem is solved soon or I’ll start to get cranky about the extreme increase in fees.
Dru and Jet, Thank you for your comments. We got word from the President of FBS that they are making progress with the speed of the system. I’ll spare you the technical descriptions and get to the point. The system is running slower than they want it to, they are working on it, and they will not stop improvements until they reach an acceptable speed.