Anyone using Sharp Tills alongside Caterlink

[robjduk]

I have an odd scenario where we have Sharp retail system tills alongside a company called Caterlink who run our student food area. Now for reasons I won't bore you with, we set up a server to act as a man in the middle between our MIS and Sharps systems to pull photos over and some other bits of data as well as act as a server for the tills. As a trusted third party, we granted them conditional access for maintenance.

 

All has been well for about 4 years...

 

Recently, Caterlink seem to have got their IT act together and our new catering manager was issued a Caterlink laptop with what looks like Intune management on it so, can not load the Sharp client.

 

This has now turned into a cluster**** where The school, Sharp and Caterlink all think its each other's fault. The school pay for systems which should talk (and have done for years), Caterlink IT will not entertain allowing the Sharp software, our poor catering manager is missing vital reports and Sharp..... well......

 

I had an email from our catering manager and essentially, Sharp has shared the server passwords with him to "hop onto the server and check the reports".

 

I hit the roof and put a stop to that however we can't be the only school using Sharp tills and Caterlink. They are both fairly large presences in their field. Has anyone else encountered problems with Caterlink and Sharp talking to each other? I don't really want to have to buy Caterlink a laptop and keep it managed just for 1 piece of software which by now, really should have a web interface at minimum.

 

Thank you all

[TechMonkey]

Being a bit dim here, surely you supply the Sharp client to Caterlink and they get it installed? Boils down to, the system was working, now it isn't, the change was (unless there is anything missing from the OP) the new laptop and it being locked down. So Caterlink need to sort it out. I'm not sure how this isn't an open and shut case. On what grounds are Caterlink blaming anyone else?

[Aprice]

We use Caterlink with an aging and not great Biostore system, that's likely to be kept as it's pretty cheap compared to replacing it.

They have a kitchen PC that's provided by the school.

[robjduk]

Being a bit dim here, surely you supply the Sharp client to Caterlink and they get it installed? Boils down to, the system was working, now it isn't, the change was (unless there is anything missing from the OP) the new laptop and it being locked down. So Caterlink need to sort it out. I'm not sure how this isn't an open and shut case. On what grounds are Caterlink blaming anyone else?

 

I agree however Caterlink in my brief experience appears to be a disinterested, foreign call center.

[dapaulio]

I have nothing positive to say about this company. We moved to them from having internal kitchen staff. We found out They provide a service (term put loosely) expect the school to provide the hardware to run the cashless system and train their staff to use the tills and they even expected us to buy a printer for them as well so they could print their menus and labels.

 

Meanwhile quality of food looked great during the start of the service (I called this the honeymoon period) but as time progressed the quality, the care and presentation deteriorated.

 

They were out come the end of contract.

[old_n07]

Not sure if this helps but we run sharp and anyone that needs access runs a server side copy of the software from a shortcut so no client actually installed, we have Sharp Accounts and Epos Manager shared out this way

 

\\\SharpSoft\SPosStockManager\SPosSmartPay2Manager.exe

 

We've restricted this via groups etc