UPGRADE-SCHMUCKGRADE

Several MLSs around the country are powered by Rapattoni MLS.  I-Tech MLS in the Glendale, Pasadena, Foothills area of Southern California is one.

In November of 2005, I-Tech MLS upgraded to Rapattoni's MLS Version 10. To my knowledge the I-Tech management did not seek member input before making the upgrade. But, OK. Here's the little blurb from a broadcast message last year describing the new features available in the upgrade:

MLS v.10 will feature a robust customizeable MLS Home page, keyboard shortcuts, an Options pane, a new combined Radius/Map Search, and other new tools. The new MLS v.10 requires users to set their screen resolution to 1024x768 or higher (please check the i-Tech Home Page for a video on how to do this). Pop-up Windows will still be utilized, so please make sure that your pop-up blockers continue to be turned off when using i-Tech, and that i-Tech is listed as a Trusted Site.

Great. Until you come to this part, from a broadcast message a few days later:

- i-Tech MLS will only work on the latest version of Internet Explorer. i-Tech MLS will NOT work on AOL, Firefox, Safari, Netscape, or MSN browsers. Please go to www.microsoft.com/windows/ie/ to download the latest version of Internet Explorer.

- If you are using an Apple or Macintosh Computer, you need to download the Citrix browser from Rapattoni. Go to www.rapattoni.com/citrix to install Citrix in your Apple Computer

Huh? Didn't anyone at I-Tech ask about accessibility or cross-browser compatibility? Oh excuse me, we're real estate agents. We don't know anything about technical stuff.

In case you're wondering - if you try to run MLS version 10 in Firefox or Opera, you get the gullitione thing on the home page:

But hey, the new version 7 of Internet Explorer  has tabs and security updates, but get this latest broadcast message:

Microsoft is now testing Internet Explorer 7 Release Candidate 1. Since this release candidate is still a test version, we strongly recommend that you DO NOT install this version of Internet Explorer. We cannot guarantee that the release candidate will be compatible with your MLS.

No one at I-Tech or Rapatonni has asked me, of course, but I am, in fact, running IE beta 7.0.5450.4 (the May 2006 version) on one machine and it works fine with Rapatonni MLS 10. The newest IE version, Candidate 1, does not. You can run standard searches just fine. However, the radius map feature mostly won't run. And if you try to create reports from search results the browser freezes.

Why am I ranting on about all this?

Active Rain members might belong to MLSs that are considering upgrades. Tell your MLS management that they should open up to member input and member testing. Real Estate agents are not always the technical retards they think we are. Tell them accessibility and cross-browser compatibility are important. The members are going to have a wide variety of systems, and differences in their browser preferences.

For the record, San Francisco MLS is still using the previous Rapattoni version. That Northern California hotbed of technology is still using the previous version?? That tells me something.

The simple public access side of I-Tech seems to run fine in all browsers, thank goodness, but here are links to both so you can see what we gained in eye candy at the expense of accessibility and compatibility:

Here's the San Francisco public access side

Here's the I-Tech public access side