27 Internet Services

New Restricted Data Uploads

If you have delved into the Configure Community Uploads screen recently, you may have noticed a new option called "Do Not Upload Misc. Information". This feature is the latest update to the TOPS Community Web Site Upload, which allows you to restrict certain data from being overwritten on your web site by TOPS 2000™.

While the TOPS Data upload program has long featured the ability to choose which data should be uploaded for each community, that feature is restricted to the modules as a whole, such as 12-month history, Work Order, and CC&R. The new "Do Not Upload Misc. Information" option narrows the information that is uploaded to the web site even further by restricting certain fields.

A number of communities utilize their community web site to maintain the latest information about owners, and owners are actively encouraged to update the community web site with their most current information. While TOPS will download email addresses from the web site back into the software, other information, such as phone numbers or flex data cannot be changed automatically without potential legal ramifications for the property management company. A few of our clients have taken to printing reports of changed data on the web site, and manually re-entering that data into TOPS so that the next upload of that owner's information would not overwrite what had been changed on the web site. Well, no more. With the new "Do Not Upload Misc. Information" an upload from TOPS 2000™ will be strictly restricted to the following owner information:

• Primary Owner Name
• Secondary Owner Name (Spouse)
• Street Address
• Alt Address

Every other field will be retained EXACTLY as they already are on the web site, including login name and password. This only affects records that have been altered in TOPS (with an update status of U). New records will continue to upload the full record information. Email addresses will continue to be passed to TOPS, but any updates made to that or other misc. data in TOPS (phone number, Flex Data, etc) will not write to the web site records at all.

If you have this option checked and you wish to reset data from TOPS for one owner, you will need to disable and re-enable the web site upload for that one owner.

We do not recommend using this option to all of our clients, but if you do not maintain all of the latest owner information in TOPS, and wish to maintain that information on your community web sites, this feature may be helpful to you. "Do Not Upload Misc. Information" applies to the entire upload, so this option may not be activated on a community by community basis. It is all or nothing. If you wish to activate it for only a select group of communities you will need to perform all of your uploads manually, activating and deactivating this option each time.

Please contact our web support department at 1-800-899-5689 xt 3 or websupport@topssoft.com if you have questions or need help setting up this feature.

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