SMS™ Pre-Planting Checklist (Part 1)

For those tired of snow and cold weather and avoiding some tasks outside until it warms up; now is a good time to get your desktop mapping software and displays ready for the upcoming planting season.  Below are 3 easy steps, with links to our new YouTube channel, to help get your ready for this spring.

1. Make a backup of SMS and save to a secondary location.

Creating regular backups of your data and saving them to a secondary location , such as a CD/DVD or even external hard drive, helps protect your data in the event that you have computer issues (ie computers crashing, computer virus, etc) down the road.  If you have a backup, you simply have to restore it to the SMS Software and you are ready to get back to work.  If you do not have a backup, you may be at risk of redoing a lot of work, or even worse, losing all of your data.  To create backups in SMS Basic/Advanced, go to Services – Backup.

2. Verify that you are on the latest version of SMS

Precision ag companies have to make changes to their file formats as they perform new tasks and record new items.  This means you will need to update your precision ag desktop software as well to be compatible.  With our release of v12.5 in October and v12.6 in February, we have made changes to work with the following file formats:  Ag Leader, CNH, Gradient, ISO, John Deere, Mid-Tech, Precision Planting, and Trimble. If you are current on our annual maintenance program and have unlocked your software online in the past, then you can update to v12.6 SMS Basic/Advanced and SMS Mobile PC v6.6 by going to Help – Check for Updates.

3. Finish reading in your files from last fall and clear off the card

Regardless who you are, you are probably laughing that this is the next step, either because you can’t believe that this is the next step since you did this several months ago…..or because you know you haven’t taken the time to do it yet.  To read in new files into SMS Basic/Advanced, go to File – Read Files.

Check back tomorrow for the final two steps for preparing for this spring.