Here are the things I know about the New Sage SalesLogix Mobile product: It’s new, it’s mobile, and it’s awesome!

Installation

Installing the out-of-the-box product is a breeze. Simply add the mobile bundle in the Application Architect, configure a new portal, and deploy to your production Web server. Your sales staff can access account information on their mobile devices faster than I can power on my laptop.

Customization

Customizing the mobile client is simple, but it does require you to do more configuration for setting up your development environment than what is required for out-of-the-box production. However, once you understand why you need to set up a series of folders—to take advantage of plugin architecture—the process becomes easily manageable. For example, imagine you want to add a new Edit, Detail, and List view for a custom entity (i.e. clientproject). After enabling the entity for SData, here’s what your development folder structure might look like (not all folders are listed):

So for any customization, we somewhat replicate the argos-saleslogix folder/file structure in order to merge our new changes into the base site. Then you might ask, “Why do we create a new folder inside products? Can we modify inside of argos-saleslogix instead?” Well, the answer is, you can modify the argos-saleslogix contents and ignore the plugin architecture. However, any time you deploy from Application Architect, you would overwrite your changes. Also, future upgrades to the product would break your customizations. Still unsure? Check out a video showing an easy example with an explanation of why NOT to do that easy example. :)

Another question you might ask is, “Why go to the trouble of setting up your development environment by copying these folders—if the production environment was so easy, can’t we just copy the production deployment and push those files out through the Application Architect?” Although that’s a nice idea, the beauty of using JavaScript is that it can be minified for faster load times for production. Our browsers read code like that very well, but it’s not readable for an average developer trying to romance the code.

For more information, register for the New Sage SalesLogix Mobile Master’s Series course. We’ll create a new entity (clientproject) and show you how to add a new List, Detail, and Edit view—as well as associate projects to accounts and associate tickets to projects.