Technology Advisors, Inc.

Knowledgesync is an Alerts and Workflow solution for numerous business applications. A few of the more basic uses are:

• Business activity monitoring for events customers want to know about.
• Business Process automation. Automatically deliver confirmations, quotes, thank you emails, etc.
• Alerts for warnings regarding issues with clients.

How can these items be accomplished? Here is a short list of some basic capabilities:

• Triggered emails based on events in a database or email inbox.
• Web dashboards using html with graphs, etc.
• Deliver crystal reports via email as a pdf on a schedule.
• Trigger crystal reports sent as a pdf to a group of people.
• Inbound email marketing
• Triggered updates integrating several databases or applications.

Off the top of my head, I can see several very good uses for this application within Technology Advisors for the Customer Advocate position.
Such as:

• Automatically send pdf ticket reports to customers.
• Send alerts to the Customer Advocate and Support about issues that need to be followed up for a customer.
  • Tickets, Contract Status, etc.
• Alert emails to Customers and the Customer Advocate
  • Tickets opened & closed.
• Alerts to the Customer Advocate
  • Ticket without an updated for 7(3?) days.
  • Customers the Customer Advocate has not contacted in the last 30 days.

These basic functions would not take long to setup, but could save our users several hours a week in effort. Not to mention avoiding headaches from issues that might slip through the cracks otherwise.

Best of all, SalesLogix users can download a free 30 day trial at http://www.sageknowledgesync.com. For best results, I would advise our customers to work with Technology Advisors to make sure the trial is beneficial and used to its fullest potential.

Entrepreneur.com has an article up on 5 Simple Ways to Show Customers You Care:

1. Share Your Knowledge
2. Ask, Listen, Respond, Adapt
3. Reward Customers
4. Hold a Customer Appreciation Event
5. Do Good

It's a great article and I recommend you check out. Here is my take on how you can apply these points to your own business.

1. Sharing Your Knowledge.  Social CRM is here.  As has always been the case, with it you can manage your e-mail newsletters.  You can now also manage your incoming and outgoing Social CRM communications with applications such as Twitter or Facebook.

2. Ask, Listen, Respond, Adapt.  Without a CRM application, how will you be able to keep track of all of your correspondence with your customers.  Newer CRM packages have the ability to integrate with all forms of communications.  Fax, Email, Snail Mail, Twitter, Facebook, Linked In, etc.

3. Reward Customers.  With the proper CRM application you can track Campaigns where you use Coupons, Gifts, Events, Targeted Mailers, Phone Calls, Social Media, etc.

4. Hold a Customer Appreciation Event.  Customer Appreciate Events or User Groups are a great way to keep your name in a customers mind.  With CRM you are able to invite your customers or potential customers to the events, track registrations and report on attendance and survey results.

5. Do Good.  Doing good is a great thing, but how will your customers know about it if you aren't able to track and effectively communicate your "good."

Using newer CRM products goes far beyond just a giant electronic Rolodex of names and phone numbers.  With a properly setup CRM application and trained user base, you should be able to manage your complete customer experience from prospect to repeat business.  And then some.

You get a handful of Groups out-of-the-box when you purchase SalesLogix - some that may be useful, and some not. If you find that they are almost useful, you can take some initiative and make them useful for your organization by copying the group, and then changing the logic. For instance, let's say you want to change the Latest Accounts group to show Accounts that have been modified in the last 60 days (the default is 30), and that are labeled as Type = ‘Prospect', and you want everyone to see this in place of the original Latest Accounts group.

This is really quite easy... To do this, login to the SalesLogix Client as the Administrator. Right click on the tab for the group when you are in list view, and select ‘Copy'. From there, go to the conditions. You see the original condition of Modified in the last 30 days:

Double click on the condition, and change the ‘30' to ‘60'.

Click ‘Ok'.

Make sure the Account table is selected in the upper left hand side, and on the right, double click on ‘Type'. Change the Operator to ‘Equal to'. Hit the Browse button and choose ‘Prospect' (or any other type(s)).

You will see two groups - Latest Accounts and Copy of Latest Accounts. You will want to change the name of the Copy Group, so double click on that, and change the name under the Properties tab. In our example, I'll name it Latest Accounts - TAI.

In the SalesLogix Architect, go to Manage Plugins, and change the filter by option to Groups and Groups ACO. If you click on Accounts on the left hand side, you will see your new group, and the old Latest Accounts group. Release your new group to Everyone. Click on the old Latest Accounts group, select Release, and remove the Everyone from it (to unrelease it). It should look like this:

Log into the SalesLogix Client as any user who is not the Admin to test it out. You should see your new group, and no sign of the old Latest Accounts group.

 

When an Activity is scheduled in SalesLogix it is automatically assigned to the user creating the Activity.  This user is the Activity Leader.  The Activity Leader then has the option of adding other SalesLogix users to the Activity via the Members Tab:

 

Activities Members are users in the SalesLogix system.  The Activity Leader can only add users they have access to "Add Activities" for in the Calendar Tab of their User Profile in the Administrator:

 

Once the creating user adds the other users as members of the Activity:

1.            The Activity record is created in the ACTIVITY table.
2.            A record is created in the User_Activity table for the creating user and each member.
3.            A record is created in the UserNotification table for each member.   When each member user logs into SalesLogix they are prompted to confirm or reject the activity.
4.            Depending on if they Confirm or Reject the activity, the USER_ACTIVITY.CONFIRMED field is set to True or False.
5.            The creation user is then notified by a new record in the UserNotification table.

Part of the Microsoft Dynamics CRM base package comes with the Windows workflow engine that allows for codeless workflow deployment. What this basically means is that you are able to update your CRM database without ever leaving Outlook. For example, as a user, when I schedule an activity in Outlook, it schedules that activity in my CRM system without me having to actually  go into it. Workflow automatically brings all the information into the body of that particular appointment.

The same goes for phone call activities. Workflow pulls all the contact information into the bottom of the phone call activity. When the activity pops up on my mobile phone, I don't even have to dial the phone number because all of the information is already on my screen. Let's say I make my call and have to leave a message. Not only am I able to complete the activity on my phone, but I can then schedule a follow up activity even if my CRM system is unavailable to me. When I type "follow up" in the subject of a new task, a new activity automatically gets set in my CRM system.

Workflow in Microsoft Dynamics CRM gives me the ability to complete activities, update results from a call or meeting, and schedule new or follow up activities directly into my CRM system from my mobile phone.

WinMerge is an Open Source differencing and merging tool for Windows, similar to UltraCompare.  You can download it here:  http://winmerge.org/

To set it up in the Application Architect open the program and select the Tools -> Set Differencing Tool menu item and fill it out as follows:

Differencing Utility File Path:
C:\program files\winmerge\winmergeu.exe

Command Line Parameters:
/leftpath %File1% /rightpath %File2%

The command line parameters website is:
http://winmerge.org/docs/manual/CommandLine.html

Two other useful parameters might be:

• /e enables you to close WinMerge with a single Esc key press. This is useful when you use WinMerge as an external compare application: you can close WinMerge quickly, like a dialog. Without this parameter, you might have to press Esc multiple times to close all its windows.
• /wl opens the left side as read-only. Use this when you don't want to change left side items in the compare.

We recently had a request to capture the changes made to a grid on an Opportunity Tab in SalesLogix.  The three items requiring capture were:

1. Any time a record was deleted
2. Any time a record was added edited via an Add Edit Form
3. Any time a check box in the grid was checked or unchecked

To implement this we simply created a function that would insert a record into the History table and would accept the OpportunityID, Description, Notes, and LongNotes as parameters.

 The pseudocode:
Sub InsertHistoryRecord(strOpportunityID, strDescription,strNotes, strLongNotes)
       dim Variables
       Create RecordSet
       With Recordset
           .Open "SELECT * FROM HISTORY WHERE 1=2", objSLXDB.Connection
           .AddNew
           .Fields("HISTORYID") = strHistoryID
           .Fields("ACTIVITYID") = strHistoryID
           .Fields("TYPE") = "262156"
           ....
           .Fields("NOTES") = strNotes
           .Fields("LONGNOTES") = strLongNotes
           .Fields("ATTACHMENT") = "F"
           .Update
           .Close
       End With
End Sub

Then we inserted a call to this procedure on the grid's OnCheckColumnToggle, the function that deleted records, and the form that added or edited records.  We wrote this custom procedure so that the history record creation would be seemless to the user and so we could control the data as we wanted.

I have found that one of the easiest ways to import leads into SalesLogix is through the use of the Import Leads tool. Being more of an end user than an administrator, I find it to be extremely user friendly and I am able to access it directly through my SalesLogix Client.

In order to import leads within the SalesLogix Client you can go to: Insert Menu -> Import Leads. The easiest way to make sure all the information you want to come over into SalesLogix is to check the "Show All Fields" check box so you can see all of the out box fields that are in the Leads table. If you do not see specific fields that you would like to import, custom fields can be added but this goes beyond my basic end user knowledge and would require more complex customizations. I have been told that once you check the "Show All Fields" box, there are Userfields (1-10) that can be used as custom fields, but I have not yet had a need to use custom fields.

SalesLogix has a handy feature that has been around through many versions of the software.  Some organizations use the feature, some have never heard of it, some will never have a use for it.  If you read the title, you would know that I am talking, of course, about hiding tabs. 

If your SalesLogix users complain about having too much going on at the bottom of their screen, and you do not want to spend time training each one of them on how they can hide unuseful tabs, you can take care of it for everyone, yourself.  

If you are using SalesLogix LAN clients, you would take care of this in the Administrator, or Architect applications.  This has not changed over the course of new SalesLogix versions.  If you would like to remove tabs in the SalesLogix WEB client; however, things work a little differently...

Log into the Application Architect.   In the Project Explorer, expand the Portal Manager.  Next, expand SalesLogix, and finally, the Pages folder.  Double click on the Detail view you want to remove the tab(s) from (Account Detail, Contact Detail, etc...).  In the Smart Parts window on the main view, select the tab titles you want to remove and click the delete button.  In the screenshot below, I am removing the Contracts tab from Accounts.

 Don't worry, you are not permanently deleting the tab.  You can always add it back using the plus button right next to the remove button.

This is a quick fix to help overwhelmed users only see the options that will be useful to them.

Today I was working with several instances of the SalesLogix Administrator, Architect, and Client for an upgrade.  My computer seemed to be running slower than normal, so I did a quick search and found the following things to try.

1. I searched the internet and found out about the prefetch command.  Open Start Menu -> Run -> prefetch.  This opens C:\windows\prefetch\.  I'm not exactly sure what these files do, but it appears you can delete them and Windows will automatically re-create them, which can sometimes help with speed issues.
2. I deleted all of the temporary files in C:\Windows\Temp and  C:\Documents and Settings\username\Local Settings\Temp.
3. I defragmented my hard drive.  After a quick google search, I found that there are many disk defragmenting tools out there.  I used AusLogics Disk Defrag, http://www.auslogics.com/go/diskdefrag/en/software/disk-defrag.

After doing these things my computer appears to have sped up considerably.  Some of these steps may be outside the scope of a normal users day, so I advise consulting with your IT staff before trying any of these options.