Focus Office: Publishing a Collection – Alpha POS Services

Focus Office allows you to make real time or scheduled changes to local Focus databases anytime and anywhere from the cloud. When working in Focus Office, you will make collections of changes and then publish (download) those changes to selected sites. This article will walk you through the collection publishing process. To learn how to create a collection, see Focus Office: Creating a Collection for instructions.

Step 1: Log into Focus Office

See How to Log In to Focus Office for details.

The first screen you will see when you log in is the Collections dashboard.

Here you can see the status of all your collections. Collection statuses include:

Unpublished - The collection has not been scheduled for download to the store.
In Progress - download to store has been scheduled, but the collection has not been sent.
Sent - The collection was sent to the store(s) but isn't installed and active.
Complete - The collection is downloaded, installed, and active at the store.

Step 2: Search for the desired unpublished collection by name or scroll down to recent additions

Step 3: Publish the collection using 1 of 2 methods

Click on the blue dots to the right of the screen to edit, duplicate, delete, or publish a collection. Click on a collection to view the collection details. When viewing unpublished collections, the option to publish will be available.

Step 4: Determine when you want to Schedule & Publish the download

Select the stores to receive the download (not available for site specific collections).
Choose ASAP or Schedule the changes to download at a future date and time.
Publish to officially release the changes to be sent at the chosen time.

A published collection's status will change from Unpublished to In Progress until the scheduled download date and time.

After a successful download, the collection status will change from In Progress to Sent. You will know that the changes are installed and active once the status changes to Complete.

You can view the status of a published collection in more detail by clicking on the collection and looking at the status details, as demonstrated by the examples below:

For any questions/issues regarding publishing a collection through Focus Office, please contact our support staff at support@alphapos.net.