Questions?

Hi, I was wondering if there is a solution for adding more info to the vendor portal.

I want to upload or share information such as how to use certain tools, style guides etc.

We could build a custom website for this, but it would be easier if this info could be included in the vendor portal where vendors can easily access it whenever they need to.

I'm just trying to find a place to share virtual column code...

We would like to be able to track the number of job offers a vendor has rejected. Is that possible? If so, where is the data stored and how can we access it?

Occasionally our vendors invoice us for $0.00 when a PM has forgotten to enter a payable for a project.  Is there any way for XTRF to prevent this?  (Seems like a great candidate for a checkbox somewhere in settings!)  The problem is that before the PM can move forward with making the correction, someone (me) has to locate *which* of the vendor invoices that charge is on, rewind the vendor invoice, and then delete that $0.00 receivable, then fast forward the vendor invoice.  It would be really great if there could be an option in settings to prevent vendors from invoicing a job for $0.  At least that way they could check in with the PM to see what's going on before creating a whole lot of work for someone else.

We have many clients that are using Machine Translation and we have to assign a rate for that Match Type both for clients and vendors. We use memoQ as our CAT Tool. XTRF is telling me that it is impossible to add a line to the Grid. How do you handle this?

Any way to force vendors to use the INVOICES tab? 

and NOT the "Add invoice" in the "Jobs Completed" view from the Vendor Portal. 

(When clicking on Add invoice, the system does not seem to allow to combine those invoices and creates a single invoice for each job. We want to avoid that and force vendors to use the INVOICES part of the vendor portal)

For some reason, I thought or assumed, it was an available option under the Smart Project views. But it seems to not be available. Would people be interested in having this added to our list of things we'd want to see happen?

Hello, and happy new year everyone!

For the past few months, I’ve been realizing that at my company, our use of XTRF has been limited - limited because we’ve created our processes and workflows based on our own experience & creativity (or lack thereof) and because there are few best practices for us to follow as a guide. There are a lot of people on this forum doing very creative work, and I frequently come across nuggets of information that help us improve our processes. But I’d like to do more of that, and I was hoping that I wasn’t alone. :)

Here is my thought, I’d like to create a user-directed web-based series of meetings that would allow us to share how we all use XTRF. It could be a monthly 1-hour web call with rotating presenters. My thought is we’d collectively come up with a list of topics to discuss. Then an individual who has good experience on the selected topic would prepare their best practice to share. The presentation should be around 20 minutes and then allow the remaining time for discussion. And because I’m a Smart Project user, I’d want to focus on Smart Projects.

Of course, we’d have to pay attention to privacy issues, not sharing client/vendor data, pricing information, and no live data, etc.

And just so everyone is clear, I’m not interested in a bitching session, but time spent to really try to learn from each other.

Thoughts?

If there is interest in this, I’d be happy to try to kick off a Smart Project Best Practices Web Group. Please post your thoughts here, and if it makes sense, I’ll give it a go.

Mark

Certain vendors, especially agencies and DTP providers, tend to select "All Languages" as their language pairs, and this appears as Any >> Any in their XTRF profile. 

We've found that this seriously messes up our data because these vendors appear in searches when they really shouldn't: If we have a translation agency that specializes in Indian languages but has Any >> Any in their profile, they'll appear in a search for vendors providing ES > EN translation. 

Outside of getting the vendor to select specific languages, is there any way to work around this? (It would be very time-consuming for us to go in and modify all these vendors' language pairs.) Can we make sure vendors with Any >> Any don't appear in our searches? 

I've been thinking about virtual columns and how many I need to create, and how many others seem to need it also. There seems to be a lot of redundant work going on in this situation. So a few questions about this...

1) Are virtual column consistent among implementations? I mean, if I give someone my virtual column code, will it work on their system?

2) If so, would XTRF consider creating a library of virtual columns that we could access and use?

3) And would other users be interested in sharing and creating a code repository of some sort, that we could use and share among each other?