Chapter 1 - INTRODUCTION

This manual is designed to walk you through the installation or upgrade of software for the v3 BCFPI software. It is not intended to explain the purpose of the software. You can download documents explaining more about the purpose of the BCFPI from http://www.bcfpi.com.

Given the current architecture of the database, there are many things to consider before you install the BCFPI software. Separate databases cannot be combined into one at a later date. You can export data and look at aggregated data in reports, but once a database is created, it is cannot be combined with other databases for data entry. Keeping this information in mind, planning for your organization's installation is important. For instance; will many people your office need access to the program? If your organization has many offices, will you be networking the offices together? Every database you use will be assigned a unique name. You need to consider meaningful, but short names to give to your database(s). We can offer assistance if you have any questions in this regard.

While this is a long document, we don't want to scare you. Installing database software can be tricky. We've put a lot of work into ensure that install the BCFPI is as easy as possible. In conjunction with that, we've authored a manual that details everything you might need to know to install the BCFPI software. We've tried to include lots of pictures to illustrate every step of the install which adds to the length. The Installation/Upgrading chapter guides you through the basics need to install the BCFPI software. More detailed explanations are given in the appendices.

Please note that the screen shots provided in this manual are generated from a Windows NT operating environment. Other operating systems may look different, but the steps should be very similar.