If there ever was such an unwarranted, ridiculous, and devious list, I believe this would be
The Top 5 Sage SalesLogix Reports for the Holiday Season:

5. (History) History by Contact: Have you ever wondered if you can find not only who made the last change to a record, but what it was that they changed? Or maybe you changed a value, and now you want to change it back, but you can’t remember what it was. Use this report to see a list of all history—including database changes— for any account to which you have access. Now you no longer have to bribe your SalesLogix Administrator to look up something for you, and instead you can keep those reindeer-shaped cookies and almond bark pretzels all to yourself!

4. (Labels) A4 Avery L7159 – Address: Getting ready to send out office holiday cards of you and your staff dressed as adorable penguins wearing Santa hats? Make distribution easy by printing address labels for all of the contacts who made it on your “Nice” list this year.

3. (Sales Order) Sales Order Detail: Don’t have ERP Link configured yet? Surprise your back office staff with printed sales orders rolled up as stocking stuffers!

2. (Ticket) Support Ticket Knowledge Base Summary – Sample: What better activity to plan at the holiday office party than ticket knowledge base trivia?! The winner gets to pick a prize from the Ugly Christmas Sweater trunk.

1. (Opportunity) Competitor By Opportunity Status: Nothing says holiday spirit like finding out who your top competitors are and leaving a flaming fruitcake at their doors.*

*Do not actually do this. In fact, Sage is not responsible for cavities, embarrassment, paper cuts, regret, injuries, or any other consequence from reading this list. We hope you learned something about the power of reports! Happy Holidays!

What do paper airplanes have to do with Sage SalesLogix?

Check out some of the results of the survey in the graphic to the right.

Note: Full survey responses are reserved for Sage SalesLogix Partners and are posted on PartnersOnline with other 2011 Boot Camp materials.

Here’s a snippet of the SData discussion at Sage SalesLogix Boot Camp 2011 discussing the groups system endpoint, which implements the request to execute groups a little differently than we’ve seen with SData before. (Because the group itself is only going to get the metadata.) We do this through $queries/execute?[resource]. Here are two examples:

*************************************************************************************************************
Execute a group based on its plugin ID:
/slx/system/-/groups/$queries/execute?_groupId=p6UJ9A0004TS

Execute a group based on its family and name:
/slx/system/-/groups/$queries/execute?_family=Account&_name=All Accounts

*************************************************************************************************************

Why are “_groupId” and “_family” underscored? Nathan (SData expert) joins the SData discussion from Melbourne via Skype and tells us why:

In an Implementing for Sage SalesLogix virtual training course, we are limited to using one machine. This video helps you visualize a real-world, multi-client-server environment as you work through the training course.

If your company uses tickets, check out the new “Explore User Options for Customer Service” video in the Administrator’s Subscription. Sage SalesLogix includes several configuration options so that you can adjust the out-of-the-box workflow to fit individual user preferences. In the video, learn how to:

• Set user defaults for ticket entry and ticket.
• Automatically assign users to tickets based on the selected Area.
• Set up an approval process for SpeedSearch submissions.
• Identify which Customer Service options apply to a LAN only environment and which options can apply to both LAN and web.

Here are some of the dialogs we cover:

Customer Service User Defaults

Service/Support Tab for Office Profile

Service/Support Tab for User Profile

Students who are new to Sage SalesLogix Administration or Implementation courses may need extra time and practice to fully understand how security works—there are just so many options to make SalesLogix fit almost any business model. The trick is to discover not only which options apply to your company, but also which options apply to a LAN or web environment.

To help make this process easier, I created this Sage SalesLogix security comparison chart. SalesLogix experts and n00bs alike, tell me what you think. Did I miss anything?

The problem

If you install SalesLogix on a 64 bit machine (Windows server of course), you are told that you need to change your application pool mode to “classic.” This instruction is on page 93 of the current implementation guide. It seems that this would be a huge hindrance to performance for your website. That isn’t the case with this particular setting. The Managed Pipeline mode tells IIS how to handles requests. By default IIS 7 will use a single pipeline for all code and this pipeline is tightly integrated with ASP.NET, which I assume means better/faster. This mode does not have anything to do with memory instead it adds the ability for IIS to run some legacy modules.

What about the Allow 32 bit applications setting? Same deal here, we have some modules that will not run in 64 bit mode like the provider and groupviewer. So does this mean in 32 bit mode my website is only getting 2 gigs of Ram? yes it does but not really.

Good practice?

Each application pool is assigned that 2 gigs of memory. You can place SData, SlxClient, and processhost in their own app pools. The same goes for any other virtual directory. In their own app pool each virtual directory will get its own 2 gigs of memory. Not too bad, but you can always up that to 4 gigs with a registry setting.

An easy solution? Well it isn’t necessarily a solution, but an easy way to get your website some more memory. You need to match these application pool settings in Application Architect since AA will by default use the same app pool for all portals.

I bet the fix is to get those modules rewritten or modified so they are not 32 bit or classic mode dependent.

But wait there is more

According to Stuart Carnie who ran a dumpbin on w3wp.exe on a 64 bit machine w3wp is large address aware and does get 4 gigs be default.

I think we have a good solution worked out. Is this how you do it? Is my explanation off somewhere? I am not an expert in IIS by any means, so please add your comments!

…In this corner of the ring we have the newcomer: Web Admin. It’s light, it’s bright, and it’s quick on its feet. But is it a match for the ever-faithful, ever-powerful LAN Admin? Round 1: *DING!*

That concept is all wrong. The Web Administrator is not necessarily designed to replace the LAN Administrator; in fact, both toolsets are actually very complementary [and complimentary] to one another.

OH: “Web Admin, you look very nice today. LAN Admin, you are just too kind.”

But what if you have both a LAN and Web implementation of SalesLogix—when should you use either tool? Or what if you have a Web-only implementation—do you still need the LAN Administrator? Let’s explore.

Web Only Implementation

Even if your sales staff does not use the Network Client, you (as the administrator) still need to rely on the LAN Administrator for some tasks—like managing SpeedSearch indexes, cutting Remote databases for Offline Web Clients, or adding licenses, just to name a few. But the Web Administrator is still a great tool to rely on for light-weight tasks like adding a user or changing product pricing because you can use the Web Administrator from any computer (even from your mobile device), and it saves you from having to remote into your SalesLogix Administrative workstation or server. It is also great for delegating small, data-entry tasks—like managing pick list items or lead sources—to standard users so that they can complete them without any assistance from you.

LAN and Web Implementation

If your sales staff uses a mixture of LAN and Web Clients, the same scenario above applies. The difference is that in order to give LAN users administrative features, you can grant them access to the Tools > Manage and Tools > Maintenance menus through Function Security, whereas to give Web users administrative features, you can assign them to a role. Roles rely on secured actions and are specific to the Web Client only.

Here’s a short video to explore the toolset and compare it against the LAN counterparts so that you can identify how or when you might use each tool. (This video is best viewed in full screen, HD mode.)

For more information and other videos like these, visit the Sage SalesLogix Administrator’s Subscription page.

A recent request (thanks, Paul!) led me down a path I didn’t expect. How do you create a Delete Lead role in the Web Administrator? Because the existing Entities/Lead/Delete secured action is already created for us, I assumed that I would simply follow these steps:

1. Remove the Entities/Lead/Delete secured action from the Standard User role.
2. Create a Delete Lead role.
3. Assign the Entities/Lead/Delete secured action to the new role.
4. Assign a designated user to the new role.

While those steps are valid, it’s missing a very important piece! The out-of-the-box Entities/Lead/Delete secured action—and a few others—aren’t assigned to an interface item. To fix any of those out-of-the-box secured actions, you need to go into Application Architect, locate the interface item that you want to restrict, and then assign the appropriate secured action to it using the Applied Security property. After building and deploying your changes, then you can proceed with the steps above. This fix applies to Sage SalesLogix versions v7.5.3 (with the Admin Accelerator bundle) and v7.5.4.

For more information, check out this video I created to step you through the process.

For more video tips like this one—including a neat trick for creating a custom Librarian role in the Web Administrator—visit the Sage SalesLogix Administrator’s Subscription. Inside the subscription, you can also download an electronic workbook for using the Web Administrator tools.

We received a blog request to provide a detailed explanation of the metrics and dimensions that are available with each content type (i.e. widget or chart). Great question, Janetta! Unfortunately, my answer probably isn’t as great as the question because of the sheer number of combinations. Out-of-the box, Sage SalesLogix allows you to create a new widget using data from 1 of 12 different entities: Account, Campaign, Contact, Contract, Defect, History, Lead, Opportunity, Product, Return, Sales Order, or Ticket. Moreover, the available options for Metric and Dimension vary for each entity—there are 106 total metrics/dimensions—which means that we could create 226 unique charting widgets! (Here’s the complete list if you want to check my math.) I’m getting dizzy just thinking about that many widgets. Instead, let’s just start with the Account entity and develop a pattern that we can apply to other entities.

For starters, think of the Dimensions (D) as “buckets.” Inside those buckets is the Metric (M). For example, let’s pick Account Manager (D) and Total Revenue (M):

What does that mean? We’ve just created a bunch of Account Manager (D) buckets into which we’ll sort all of the 287 revenue values (M) that we find under the All Accounts group. When we’ve collected all the values, we’ll come up with a total for each bucket:

Now we need to choose a content type so we can compare the results. Here are the available options:

• Bar Chart (horizontal bars, Dimension on y axis)
• Column Chart (vertical bars, Dimension on x axis)
• Line Chart (data points connected by a line, Dimension on x axis)
• Pie Chart (portions of the whole in pie-shape)
• Funnel Chart (portions of the whole in funnel-shape)

How do we know what option to pick? Here is some criteria I use:

Spacing

Bar, Column, and Line charts always display up to the top 10 values in the Dimension (i.e. Top 10 Account Managers, Top 10 Cities, Top 10 Industries, and so on). Some Dimensions might not have 10 values (i.e. Account Subtype). For those kinds of Dimensions, a Bar chart works fine. But if you know you have at least 10 values in the dimension, Line and Column charts seem to provide better visual spacing than the Bar. In this example, between the Line and Column charts, I would choose Column because the Line seems to give the illusion of a trend, which isn’t appropriate for the Metric/Dimension that we chose.

Relationship

The Pie chart lists either 5 or 10 values in the Dimension and shows how the parts relate to the whole. A Funnel chart also shows relationship to the whole, but it is typically reserved only for charts that query on sales processes (i.e. Opportunity entity) because its parts represent a sequence of stages in your sales pipeline. In this example, the Pie chart would be appropriate, but I would not use the Funnel chart.

Do you have any other tricks for designing widgets? What other examples would you like to see?