Give everyone at your company access to Sage SalesLogix Anytime Learning for one year,* and they’ll have the training they need, when it’s convenient for them. 

A Sage SalesLogix Anytime Learning Subscription gives your company access to a large repository of training videos created for the role of end user, administrator, or developer (one subscription per role). And it’s available 24/7 anywhere with Internet access. 

It’s easy to find the training you need!

This “how-to” training is tailored to a range of skills and needs, promotes continued professional development, and is accessible anytime for your convenience. New topics are added regularly. 

• - Browse: Browse the entire catalog of videos by category. Casually view topics that interest you—maybe even discover a solution to a problem you didn’t know you had.
• - Search: Enter a keyword, and watch the search results filter as you type! Find the video you want to see within seconds.
• - Tree View: Looking for a video recorded on a specific version? Use the tree view to narrow the videos by product platform and version.
• - How Do I?: Can’t find a video you want? Within your subscription, submit your request to our training team to record and add to the repository. 

Pay $995 for a 12-month Administrator’s or Developer’s Subscription with unlimited users, and get the End User’s Subscription for free.*

You’ll also enjoy unlimited** access to Master’s Series sessions and learn a specialized topic in a one-day, hands on, virtual classroom setting. 

Sign up today!
Visit sageu.com to view a demo or get started. 

*Prices listed in U.S. Dollars. Classes available to all employees of U.S. and International Sage SalesLogix customers with a valid subscription. Offer expires on 9/30/2010.
**Master’s Series sessions held monthly and all sessions are available to subscribing company’s employees.

We have all been there either as a learner or as a trainer — a question is asked by the trainer and the response is nothing but dead air. No response at all. How the trainer interprets this is one of the most important things they can consider as it pertains to the absorption of the material.

What are some possible causes of complete silence?

• Learners are checking their email or are otherwise distracted
• Learners do not understand the material

In either case the trainer should recognize that an engaged student will respond. At least in a group of 6 or more learners you are likely to have at least one learner that will respond. So if you get no response it is the responsibility of the trainer to identify why there was no response and address it.

The first issue is easier to address. You can ask for a response via chat to a simple question. Most learners that are partially paying attention will perk up and join back in and answer your chat. Something like “hey guys let me know via chat what version you are on.” You should get a good number of responses and you can move on.

If the subject is new for the learners you should be more concerned with their grasp of the material. If there is no response and you are confident some of the learners are actively listening then you need to re-explain yourself. Ask the learners to explain what you just said in their own words. This can be very valuable. Other students will hear the explanation in the words of another and you will get a chance to asses the learners grasp of the material.

At Sage we are trying to educate the developers, administrators and users of our products. It makes good business sense to provide the best training we can since the people we train sell or use the product. Better educated users are happier with the product they have purchased. Partners who sell our products are served by training by quickly learning the newest customization techniques so that they can modify the application for their customer’s needs. Developers and administrators have a interest in learning the material as best they can so that they are productive at their jobs.

So why the silence? We are considering it here at Sage and coming up with ways to ensure we get the message out.

If you attend training we set you up to absorb the material in a few ways. First you get the book. It is a detailed, step-by-step guide showing you how to perform the tasks for each exercise. Second we give you a working SalesLogix environment that is prepped for the class you are attending. Usually this is simply a base machine with SalesLogix installed. You get to try it out with your own hands. Then we give you videos showing you someone else completing the tasks and walking you through each step. In the videos we might take a different route than the book to show you what is possible.

So you can be as silent as you like while taking advantage of the various learning tools. We are ok with that.

One note — what we show you in the class is the required learning to get you started in the material. There is always more to learn and someone else to learn from. We can learn from you just as you will learn from us. So stay in touch with training. Ideas, problems, and suggestions are welcome.

The Web Administration tool set is scheduled for v7.5.3 on-premise release this summer. Great! But…what exactly is it? When we refer to “administration tools” for Sage SalesLogix LAN, it usually means one of two things:

Features accessible from within the SalesLogix Client interface; a user must have appropriate permissions (function security) to see these features: (Click image to enlarge)
Features only accessible from within the LAN Administrator interface; a user must be logged on as “admin” to see these features: (Click image to enlarge)

Now, when we talk about “administration tools” for Sage SalesLogix Web, we actually combine both of these definitions! First, users with appropriate admin permissions can access the Web Administrator from the same point of entry that they use to access other end user features in the SalesLogix Web Client. Second, in addition to providing common list management functions (competitors, lead sources, products, pick lists, literature items, packages*), the Web Administration tool set also includes functions that were previously only available to the designated admin user (users, departments, teams, roles*).

*New functions available only for Sage SalesLogix Web. Packages allow you to group products. Roles allow/restrict user access to certain Web Client or Web Administration features—similar to “Feature Security” for LAN Client users.

Everyone here is looking forward to this release making for very cool summer in Scottsdale!

Sometimes when we learn of a new technology we tend to want to use that technology for everything. In many cases this is a good thing, in other cases you end up pounding a square peg into a round hole. Perhaps the round hole hole is large enough to accommodate the square peg, but it is still not the best fit.

SData is a very nice square peg

You probably have several projects that SData can fit into. Perhaps integrating with a third party application or data loads from remote employees. Stuff like that. It makes sense to use SData when the systems are different enough — Java interfacing with ASP.NET — or far enough apart — the application is not able to communicate with the database via other means. It is ok to be excited about the newest method to retrieve data from SalesLogix. Once you understand SData and have learned to use the client libraries then the world is yours.

In SalesLogix training we usually get questions when something goes wrong not when new code is being written and everything is going fine. Recently we had the chance to work on a new project that was going just fine, but we were asked to work as developers on the project. The project was a web based project written in ASP.NET (C#) and would in all likelihood sit on the same web server as the slxclient portal. A request would come into this website against one of about 7 pages. It would contain an xml feed. The page would take the xml feed and fill it in with data from SalesLogix and return the filled in xml as the response.

Using SData you would have had the initial request to my page, the http request from my page to SData, and then SData‘s request to the database using the entity model. Since the new website sat on the same web server as SData, you can be sure that there is a port open (probably 1706) to the SalesLogix server, and that we could use ADO.NET to eliminate that last request from my webpage to SData.

The final result

The final result was we ended up with a website returning xml data which it retrieved using ADO.NET directly from the database. Nothing fancy — the same thing we have been doing for years. We were not using SData at all though. No client libraries were used just plain old ADO.NET and ASP.NET.

Other considerations

By not using SData we were also not using the entity model. This means any onbeforeupdate type events we had written will not be used. The argument can be made that these are important and if that is the case SData or working directly with the entity model is a good option. The learning curve of working directly with the entity model outside of SalesLogix might outweigh the gains initially, but the performance and code reuse benefits will certainly be there.

Rarely as a software developer are you able to say “I am a %lt;Insert language here > developer.” Instead you are a “Desktop application developer” or “UI Specialist” or a “Web Developer.” These new roles mean you probably code in a variety of languages or technologies. Desktop Application Developers need to know at least SQL, a language and perhaps a framework such as MVC just to name a few items. In fact, the language could be Java, C# or VB.NET — again just to name a few.

Web Developers are in the same boat. Rarely can you say that you are a C# developer and that is the only code you will work with. Your company is sure to have some legacy or “classic” ASP applications that you may need to convert to ASP.NET or maybe some PHP applications. What about AJAX or any of the JavaScript libraries that are out there? Do you have experience with those? If you don’t you should.

Tennis player cross train in Soccer, Basketball or volleyball. This keeps them in shape and works some of the areas that they do not get experience using if they were just playing one sport. Do they become experts or compete professionally in another sport? Usually not, but there have been exceptions.

So as developers or admins or just about any profession we are in we need to dive into areas that are related to our field, but perhaps not directly related. A windows administrator could learn something from installing Linux. Are your users tired of being asked each time they want to install some piece of software? This has been a security feature of Linux for some time. Have you heard the term “I grep that?” yeah a linux term. What about developers? Perhaps you know ASP.NET like the back of your hand and you like C#. Why not try some VB.NET? You will probably learn to like C# more and also learn something along the way. What about client side coding? As a C# ASP.NET developer you certainly have experience with the Microsoft AJAX libraries, but what about jQuery or Dojo? They do similar things, but some are cleaner and some are lighter weight. This could mean that one is better for some jobs than others.

How about CSS? Have you designed a website from scratch lately. The experience may leave you with a different perspective on your current coding tasks. You might have some fun, you might learn something new, and hopefully you will broaden your view.

So what other languages do you program in? Let us know in the comments…

Inside our Developers, Administrator, and End User Subscriptions we give you the ability to request a topic or “How Do I.” We get a lot of good requests and have recorded many of these. We cannot get to them all, but we evaluate each one and categorize and prioritize them as a group.

Sometimes we get a request that just doesn’t fit. They could be a video, could be a blog entry or just an email will suffice. This next one fits into a mixture, so here we go. The question was that the video we have on merge and diff does not:

appear to elaborate on the parameters that we are supposed to pass to DiffMerge. We would like to use that bundled tool to help us work through the customizations our vendor partner implemented

This interested me a lot since I like KDiff3 and I know different developers have their preference or have already purchased a solution. So how can I show the options in one area? Of course I went to Google <-click the link and you can see me Google.

Anyway I was left here:

http://blogs.msdn.com/jmanning/articles/535573.aspx.

James does a great job of showing the most common tools and their parameters. Application Architect allows for a %File1% and a %File2% which can replace James’ %1 and %2. I wont steal the charts from his site, but this is what I enter for diffmerge:

I hope that helps to clear that up.

Do you know how you learn?

There is a very common idea that each person learns in a certain way. I usually would say students are visual learners, audible learners or tactile learners. So some learn by watching me write the items on the white board, some learn by hearing me say the items out loud many times and other learn by writing the items and or using the list in practice. This has been further described as a learning preference rather than a particular learning style for each person. If we realize and embrace this newer idea then perhaps we may enable ourselves to learn better and in other ways.

Remember that back in the 50′s when much of the research on learning was conducted we did not have computers or even TV in most homes. Books were expensive items and college was something a majority of people did not consider attending. There was no facebook or email. You had party lines in your neighborhood rather than a dedicated phone line to your home. Now we all have computers in our houses.

There are also a few styles of learning such as active learners, sensing learners and visual learners. In my opinion sensing learners have a greater grasp of the spacial word around them and they can learn by experiencing the ideas of another through story or TV. From reading a book or hearing a description of a process. Active learners have to give it a try. This can take time because you need to have the tool available that facilitate you working it out. And visual learners need to see it done. They can repeat the process if they can watch it being performed by someone else once. Perhaps they have a harder time when their situation does not match the control environment, but overall if you can demonstrate it they can learn to repeat the process.

How do we use this in training at Sage

Well for the visual learners we provide a nice video of each piece of the class in video format. This works well for a learner who needs to hear it too. They watch as a trainer walks them through the customization and explains the process. More advanced learners can skip through the video if they already know the work being performed. They can subscribe to the Developers Subscription or Admin Subscription and learn there too.

Visual learners also benefit from the books that are part of each class. They include any major parts of the interface that we are adjusting and code snippets being used. Many times a visual learner will be able to remember which page or pages a topic is on because they remember where it was in the book. You can see them flip back to it if you watch them closely.

Tactile learners or active learners are given the chance to try it out. In all of our classes the student is given an actual machine to try out the exercises. Visual learners will benefit from this step as well because it will reinforce the learning from the book and videos. Audible learners or those who learn by watching benefit less from this part of the class, but it cannot be dismissed. In some cases the trouble or frustration caused by performing the steps can be a deterrent to this type of student and that needs to be considered.

Is there more to learning?

Active learners of all sorts will be considering the topics in the class and considering those topics in other situations. If we show you how to create a lookup one way is there another way to create one? What about a better way or a time when our method will not work?

The MORE to learning is applying what we give you in class to your situations in the real world. We cannot give an education it must be obtained. It is not possible to obtain what we need as successful students (of SalesLogix) in only 3 days. It is just the start.

Why is my learning style important?

It is less important than you might think. Realizing that you may have a preference for one style over another is the key. If you prefer to watch a video and read the book then do that. If you can read the book and try it yourself on our machine do that. You need to evaluate your learning process against some concrete results. Try a lesson one way and then try to repeat the lessons that you learned (creating a lookup) on a clean environment. Were you successful? Perhaps you need to add some practice in or adjust your method.

It is important to know your learning style because the real cost of an education is time. It takes time to learn and doing it inefficiently costs a lot of time. Usually this is the difference between meeting a deadline and not.

The goal of learning

If you consider the goal of learning you may learn just enough to meet that goal. We each may have a different goal. If the goal is to learn enough to do our job as effectively and efficiently as possible then realizing our learning style is important.

ref: http://csta.villanova.edu/CITIDEL/bitstream/10117/196/6/ThomasLA.pdf

I regularly use FireBug in Firefox my for my JavaScript debugging. Back in the mozilla days I would just enter javascript: in the address bar and get the nice dialogue that shows to tell me the location of the error. We can all agree we have come a long way. Now that Firebug is also in Chrome we have another tool. I admit I do not bother with JS debugging in IE much, but I have pressed F12 a few times in the app to get up the dev tools.

So to put it short I could not do as good of a job as the guys over at alistapart.com. Check out what they have to say about debugging in JS “after the jump”:

“When used effectively, JavaScript debuggers help find and squash errors in your JavaScript code. To become an advanced JavaScript debugger, you’ll need to know about the debuggers available to you, the typical JavaScript debugging workflow, and code requirements for effective debugging. In this article, we’ll discuss advanced debugging techniques for diagnosing and treating bugs using a sample web application.”

http://www.alistapart.com/articles/advanced-debugging-with-javascript/

Redirect with Save and Save/New
Using a Redirect after doing a save or save/new is pretty straight foward. The main difference to remember is whether your doing a redirect to a quickform MainView or doing a redirect to a quickform tied to an Entity Page.

For this example, I have a quickform called InsertRealEstate.ascx with an associated EntityPage called InsertRealEstate.aspx. The user has 2 save options: 1) Save which takes the user back to a RealEstate MainView with the RealEstateDetails.ascx quickform in the MainContent or 2) Save/New which takes the user back to the same InsertRealEstate.ascx quickform in the InsertRealEstate.aspx EntityPage.

Option 1: Redirect to MainView
For the first example, the save button calls a business rule that does a save. Then there is an ‘OnCompleteActionItem’ that actually does the Redirect. Here is a picture of what that would look like:

Lets take a look at the properties that are filled in for the redirect. The MainViewEntityName is set to RealEstate and the MainViewEntityMode is set to Detail. This will actually take us to the MainView for the RealEstate entity. In this case we are redirected to the RealEstate.aspx that contains the RealEstateDetail.ascx quickform in the MainContent. We also chose ‘Use Current Link in ID’ set to True as we want the Current ID to be included in the redirect. If you looked at the code behind that button you would see the code generated is something like this:
Response.Redirect(string.Format("RealEstate.aspx?entityId={0}", (this.BindingSource.Current as Sage.Platform.ComponentModel.IComponentReference).Id));
This actually redirects us to the RealEstate MainView and displays the record we just saved.

Option 2: Redirect to EntityPage
For the second example, has to do with the save/new button. The save/new button calls a business rule that does a save. This time we want to stay on the same page to add another record. We will still use the ‘OnCompleteActionItem’ to do the Redirect. Here is a picture of what that would look like:

In this case the properties used are the URL and the ‘Use Current Link in ID’ set to false. The URL is pointing to the InsertRealEstate.aspx Entity Page with a parameter added of modeid=insert
InsertRealEstate.aspx?modeid=insert
The ‘Use Current Link in ID’ is set to false because we don’t really need to see an ID if we are going right back to add another RealEstate record. The MainViewEntityName and MainViewEntityMode is not used in this case because we are not wanting to go to the MainView for the RealEstate Entity, instead we want to go to the EntityPage that we are currently on: InsertRealEstate.aspx.

If we take a look at the code generated for this we would see another Redirect without an ID in the URL
Response.Redirect(string.Format("InsertRealEstate.aspx?modeid=Insert"));

Hope this explains the working of the Redirect when used with a MainView and with an Entity Page.

We’re two Master’s Series deep! This week we finished our second series topic, Client-Side Coding Techniques, which followed our inaugural offering, SData v1.0 in December.

Did you miss a session? Fear not! You can attend a make-up session for Client-Side Coding Techniques or the revised SData 1.1 course in March. Visit http://www.sageu.com/saleslogix/masters/ for details and registration.

Sorry, I’m new here. What’s a M-M-M-Master’s Series?

Check out the Master’s Series Mashup for the two-minute skinny: