What is MCe

MCe: Maintenance Connection Everywhere. The name/edition used by most resellers.

MCxLE: Maintenance Connection Express Limited internet Edition. The name/whiteboxed edition of MCe sold by Maintenance Connection Inc. primarily in the U.S.A.

The two products are virtually identical except for naming

Purpose: We work when the internet doesn't!

The purpose of MCe is to enhance your Maintenance experience. It is often paired with Accruent's MC, but it is paired with other CMMS software to bring state of the art offline and flakey internet especially with the Technician product, and advanced capabilities with the Admin and other products.

The Technician modules bring a set of 'offline first' products to allow you to access your maintenance data even when you don't have the internet. While some functions require an internet connection, most daily, regular work for technicians and many managers can be done while you don't have a solid internet connection.

To let you be productive in places like:

• On the subway, train, bus, public transport of all sorts.
• When 'downtown' and your cell phone data doesn't get good reception
• In the elevator
• In an airport (airports often restrict and/or make it difficult, even when you pay the performance is often terrible)
• In an airplane (where data costs are extremely high, slow and unreliable, but OK, 2025, this is becoming less of a problem - some airlines like WestJet give good access for free.)
• In the furnace room
• On the roof with your iPad
• In the warehouse
• In the yard
• In the boardroom (although this specific one is becoming less and less of a problem)
• In conference centers
• In hotels (especially those that block your network connections.
• In any place that blocks your network connections.
• Where water blocks your signal (aquariums, water 'features', boiler room
• In many hospitals
• In a Faraday cage (such as those built in Nuclear plants to prevent the external hacking so popular in movies …)
• In the arctic (for example managing radio towers via dogsled: yes, in this day and age, that is still the best way our customer told us, dogs don't require gasoline like a snow mobile does.)
• In valleys (hills block your signal)
• On the back side of the mountain (our ski hills customers)
• Anywhere you have to say 'what? I don't hear you' in your phone.
• In Submarines (yes seriously)
• Behind a concrete wall with lots of metal rebar
• Beside a corrugated metal wall (distorts the signal)
• Behind a metal wall of any sort that blocks or scatters your cell or WiFi signal. garbled voice may come through enough, but data doesn't work when it is garbled.
• Anywhere else YOU have run into situations where your device just doesn't work well.¹

It is designed to give 3 different optimum experiences

• On a cell phone
  • Optimization for touch
  • Optimization for small screens
• On a tablet
  • Optimization for pen
  • Optimization for touch
  • Optimization for mid sized screens
• On a Laptop or Desktop even with multiple screens attached
  • Optimization for keyboard
  • Optimization for mouse
  • Optimization for large - any size - screens

What if you have a touch screen on your desktop or a pen on your cell phone, or if you are using a small window (cell phone sized) on your desktop? That's OK - it's one software with all the optimizations. So while our primary reason for touch and small screen optimizations is for a cell phone, they apply equally to a laptop or a tablet that has multiple applications up at the same time. The pen optimization similarly is there if your cell phone has a pen, and so on.

What platforms does MCe run best on?

MCe was designed in the first 6 major editions to only run on handheld devices. A quick history in the order they were invented – and we shipped software for almost all of them within a couple months of them being available to purchase – several we ran immediately on with no changes:

• Palm Pilots and compatible (Our last customer finally upgraded about a year before MCe8.0 came out, they had a couple ruggedized devices that lasted until then and they were happy with the software – it did everything they wanted even though it was very old by then.)
• Windows Pocket PC devices
• Windows Mobile devices
• Early Windows tablets (One column display, basically a really wide phone)
• iPhones
• iPad (One column display, basically a really wide phone)
• Android phones
• Win 7, 8 phones
• The 2nd round of Windows tablets (both the Restricted RT versions and the real Windows versions) (One column display, basically a really wide phone)
• The 3rd round of Windows tablets (all 'real' Windows) (One column display, basically a really wide phone)
• Android tablets (One column display, basically a really wide phone)

You may note that Win 10 phones are not in the list above. The author of this document jokes he is one of the 17 people that had a Win 10 phone. It was (and is) his favorite smart phone from a general design perspective including the GPS, unfortunately the browser in the Win 10 phone was severely crippled and buggy and we were never able to get MCe to run on it. Most software producers gave up trying to run on 'yet another different & incompatible with previous versions' Microsoft phone. And then of course, Microsoft also gave up on it.

So then the question is: Does MCerun well on tablets, laptops and desktops. The honest answer we gave for years was "Technically it runs excellent on Windows devices, and runs well on iPads and Android tablets. But the UI is optimized solely for smart phones and narrow windows."

While we always 'worked' on those platforms, with MCe version 8 we have started to optimize the UI to work in 3 configurations:

• Phone (narrow width, limited height)
• Medium (tablets, 2 to 3x's the width, and typically at least 50% more height)
• Large (laptops and desktops)

We don't yet have a solution we are happy about for very large systems multiple monitors attached to one computer. We have a few very limited features that make use of a second screen, and what we have does run nice on these huge systems, but we admit and acknowledge that we have not provided an optimized UI experience for 3+ screens. We have ideas though – and when they are fully ready, we will provide this 4th optimized experience.

But for the 3 configurations we have optimized for, the UI changes to be optimized at these 3 distinct levels to give you an optimum experience whichever of the three you have. No longer does MCe look like 'a big smartphone' when running on a laptop or desktop or tablet.

What type of customers does MCe work for?

Like the Maintenance Connection product we work hard to enhance, our solutions are designed for and used in a wide variety of industries. I'm not going to try to be exhaustive, but more representative. If you think I should have specifically mentioned your industry, let us know1 and we'll add your industry to the list.

• Countries, Federal Government
• Education
• First Nations/Aboriginal/Indigenous Peoples, Government
• Hospitals
• Manufacturing
• Military, Government and Private, yes we have support people with proper clearance levels.
• Mines
• Municipalities/Counties, Local Government
• NGO's (Non-Governmental Organizations) and Charitable organizations
• Nuclear plants
• Property management
• Retail
• School boards, Government and Private
• Schools (primary, College, University)
• States/Provinces/Cantons/Departments, Regional Government

Is MCe your only product?

No, we have several others. The major ones are:

LoginHub – used by many industries. Universities for example like it for managing the influx of 1000's of students each year and giving them access to reporting problems. LoginHub helps managing this large number of students coming and going. Works with LDAP and related 'directories'.

DataHub – used for importing data and exporting data from other systems. Both one time imports and ongoing system updates.

GISHub – a custom connector package for high end mapping such as municipalities

See also 4b95fdcc-a403-4d09-bd26-e686f61d1ea8 MCe Modules

Why does my software not look exactly like the screen shots in this manual and whitepapers?

A large portion of our products, just like the Maintenance Connection MRO product family, can be customized for the needs of your organization.

• Some of these depend on which products and packages you have purchased.
• Some of these depend on license 'exceptions' you have paid for.
• Some are based on configuration choices you have made and done or have had done for you.
• Some are based on restrictions you have specified for certain/certain groups of people in your organization. For example: We provide signatures in WO's where we allow photos to be entered, but you might decide 'no signatures, just photos'.
• We have hand crafted both dark and light modes
• We often don't update older screen shots to show every new feature in newer versions if the point is focusing on a feature that was there in the older version, especially given all the other reasons they might not be identical.

Examples

The examples are taken 'from' real customers. We try to give a broad set of examples that would be meaningful to all users.

In some specific cases, there are industry specific 'issues' that we will give specific examples for. These will be obvious so you can skip them once you realize that they have no applicability to your situation.