AGDATA HISTORY

The AgData traces its origin back to 1963. It began as a university project designed to test whether computers could aid in making management decisions in agriculture.

In 1968, AgData became a commercial service bureau utilizing mainframe computers. Believing that personal computers would be the platform of the future, Dan Boeger, AgData's president and founder, ported the mainframe software over to CP/M (an early operating system) in 1976. The MS-DOS version followed in 1982. Dan's insight proved prophetic. Seeing that Microsoft and Intel were leading the way for increasing power while decreasing prices, Dan saw that he could assist in bringing this power to agricultural users by using Microsoft development tools. The MS-DOS version of AgData is written with MS-Professional Basic and AgData's Blue Skies is written with MS-Visual Basic for Windows.

Today there are over 1,200 AgData users internationally and AgData has been rated 100% in user satisfaction by a California Farmer survey. In order to bring as much power as possible to AgData's end users, Dan leveraged the power of Microsoft's Dynamic Data Exchange (DDE) and Object Linking and Embedding (OLE) in the Blue Skies Accounting Series. The use of these tools allows the full power of MS-Excel to be used in projecting and calculating enterprise budget amounts and comparing them with actual expenditures. Likewise, Blue Skies setup files can be opened, viewed, and edited in MS-Excel. Blue Skies uses standard file structures that can be shared with other applications.

What this means to you is that custom programs can be added to your system that will share your information with Blue Skies. An example of how this might be useful is: suppose you wanted a custom program designed to schedule plantings or calculate off-grade percentage from processing facilities. The custom programs could read and write to your Blue Skies data files. The reports you could generate might include information from both the custom program and from Blue Skies.