Tutorial?

[Gerald V. Livingston II]

I'm contracting for a small ISP. Currently using a Windows based billing system
based on FoxPro with documentation that sucks bad. I know enough about the
books here to know that we aren't going to be paying for a new billing
system anytime in the next year or so (or paying Ivan to install freeside
for us).

I've been "playing with" freeside on a spare box at home. I like it. The
install went just fine for me but I have a few setup/operation questions.

Has anyone created a basic tutorial for setting up freeside for an ISP with
the following account classes:

1) Dial up users -- all users connect to leased POPs (level3, O1, etc.) so
we will NOT have a POP assigned to each user nor do we want a list of POPs
incorporated in the billing system.

2) Email accounts -- 1 each with the same username as a dial up user plus
unlimited others "under" each dial up account at no charge.

3) "Persoal Web Space" as a free account under a dial up user.

4) Web hosting accounts with customer's registered domain assigned 

And, to throw a wrench into the works -- the company is actually TWO
comapnies partially merged. We would need billing invoices generated for
some customers as coming from domian1.net and for other customers as
domain2.net. ISP.domain1.net charges $x.00 per account and ISP.domain2.net
cahrges $y.00 per account so the customer's shouldn't know they are a singe
company. 

I'm not sure how to set up the "packages" and "services" to be able to do
all of these things.

Also, our billing is done through Authorize.net. Am I correct in reading
the documentation that at billing time the system can generate and submit
the charges and read the responses directly? Right now we have to export to
a csv file, prune "known bad" orders (like expired CC's) from the file,
upload to Auth.net, download the response file, import that to the billing
system to set account status. PHEW!

And, our online setup currently uses auth.net through a secure page that
saves successful sign ups (non-failed charges) to a csv that we import
weekly. Can the freeside signup module verify charge success and notify us
to add the account to email/radius when it adds the account to billing? We
probably won't script auto adds to radius and our mail server is a Windows
based product (yuck) that will also be a while getting replaced.

Can the freeside sign up module check to see if a username has been used by
someone else (by checking all of the "EMAIL" type accounts in the system)
and inform the new customer that they must choose another?

And finally, can Freeside import users from our old system if we export
them to a csv file and massage the fields to a specific order? We have
under 10,000 records total so having to move them by hand won't be a big
deal. We'll just leave the old billing system running and have support
techs add a few hundred a night to Freeside manually. Import would just
speed up the process a bit.

I should be putting together a low end box to "play with" all of this off
my main home machine soon. We're in no big rush to install implement this
since we have a system that works now.

Thanks,

-- 
Gerald V. Livingston II

Configure your Email to send TEXT ONLY -- See the following page:
http://expita.com/nomime.html