Maximizer CRM Central

Life in Technicolor: Row Coloring for Non-Table User-Defined Fields.

wleung — Thu, 29 Jul 2010 23:43:00 GMT

Row Coloring for non-table fields.

Row coloring is one is my second most favorite feature in Maximizer CRM 11. One thing that you cannot do, however, is set a row coloring based on ranges. If I wanted to color all the opportunities that have a projected revenue of something greater than $100,000 dollars for example, there currently is no way to configure this.

This leads me to my second most favorite feature in Maximizer CRM 11, the formula user-defined field. Formula user-defined fields allow you to take the value of one or more field, manipulate them, and display them in another user defined field. For example, if you wanted to create a "Revenue after tax" field that will subtract sales tax from the revenue, you can now do this by programming the formula field to calculate the tax and subtract this from the revenue.

So for coloring rules, the trick would be to configure an alphanumeric formula user-defined field that will take ranges of revenue and output a label for that range. In my next example, I'm going to create a formula field called "Opportunity Size" and have 3 opportunity sizes: small, big, and huge.

So here is how we would configure the formula field:

In the user-defined field setup screen, click Add to create a new user-defined field.
Name the field "Opportunity Size".
In the Type drop down, select Formula, then select Alphanumeric.
In the Return type drop down, select Alphanumeric.
In the Formula field, click the ellipses.

Here is where the fun begins... But to make life easier, copy and paste the following couple of lines into the formula field.
if ([Revenue] < 50000, "Small",
if ([Revenue] < 100000, "Big","Huge"))

The manual has lots of examples and the below snippet of code doesn't have anything that is not in the manual.
Click OK to complete the formula.
You may want to set the user-defined field to hidden, if you don't want to see it all the time in the list of user-defined fields. Otherwise, click Ok to complete creating the User-defined field.

Once you've created the user-defined field, look at the user-defined field for all your opportunities. The opportunities all are classified as Small, Big, or Huge. You can put this formula user-defined field in your column setup just like any other user-defined field.

To create a coloring rule:

Name the coloring rule "Color by Size".
In the Match entries using this field area, select the Opportunity Size field we created.
Add criteria for the Small, Big, and Huge. Now be aware that these are free-form text typing, but the beautiful thing about the formula fields is that since there is no user who is entering the data, and the field will always be Small, Big, or Huge. So make sure you type in Small, Big, or Huge correctly!
Once you've entered a value, change the text color and/or background color.

Once you're done, click OK and apply the Coloring rule to view your opportunities in Technicolor.

Holiday Work Delegation

wleung — Fri, 18 Dec 2009 21:48:00 GMT

It's the holiday season again. A time of wonder. A time of joy. A time where you can offload your workload to the poor interns/articling students/contract workers/anybody else not fortunate enough to have the holidays off. A good way of assigning work to these poor souls is by creating hotlist tasks and assigning the tasks to them.

In order to assign other users tasks, you must first be able to access their hotlists. Here is how you would do this:

In Administrator, go to File > Users. (You can also do this in Maximizer by going to File > Users, just make sure you have the right to modify User/Group setup).
Select the user you want to assign the tasks to, and select preferences.
Under the Access to Hotlist section, make sure that you, or a group you belong to, has full access to the user's Hotlist.

The Calendar/Hotlist tab is also the place where you would set access rights to their calendar too, so you can see whether or not they actually do have time to do your work before whatever plans they have at night. Nobody likes to stay in the office really late around Christmas. You don't want to be Major Buzzkill, because nobody likes Major Buzzkill.

So after you've enabled yourself to assign hotlist tasks to the user(s), when creating a hotlist task, their names will appear in the "Assigned To" drop down list. Names appearing in this list are users who have set full access to their hotlist to you or a group that you belong to. After completing entering their task, click OK and the Hotlist task will appear in their hotlist.

So after you've assigned all your work to other people, go home and enjoy the holidays. Here are some simple steps to have a good holiday:

Chill out, be happy. Forgive and forget!
Give generously, there are many people in need, especially this year.
Give your Mom a big hug the next time you see her.

Happy Holidays!

Note Filters: Make Notes Linger in the Darkness...

wleung — Fri, 30 Oct 2009 22:19:00 GMT

Welcome to this Halloween edition of "Where There's a Will, There's a Way" (queue the cheesy Halloween music).

Having a ton of notes on clients can be a good thing. But sometimes, finding specific notes can be a nightmare. There is a way, however, where you can make some notes vanish when hunting for a specific note and re-appear when you want to view all notes. Filters can be used to specify the type of note that gets displayed in the notes following. You can switch between filters, just like how you can switch between column setups.

Effectively using filters is frighteningly easy. It all starts by classifying your notes. When creating your notes, you can set the category of the note. There are some system defaults, like email, phone calls, mail-outs, and these automatically get assigned to the notes when you perform these actions. When you create manual notes, however, you can assign it a custom category.

You can configure manual note types in Administrator by going to File > Preferences and selecting the System Fields tab. Select the Address Book Notes category and click the Add button to add values to the list. As you can see, there are many other categories you can select and add values to, but we'll keep this discussion focused on note types.

So after you create the note, set the category to whatever you want. Notice that the values that appear in the notes drop down are the ones that we configured in the System field tab? Scary!

So to filter the notes in the notes following window, select the Filter drop-down list and select Custom. Then, in the Type of note area, leave manual selected, choose the type of note you want to display, and de-select any other note types you don't want visible.

Click OK and only notes of the types that you selected in the manual filter will appear in the Notes following window.

Have a happy Halloween!

Leads Vs. Non-Leads

wleung — Fri, 16 Oct 2009 19:18:00 GMT

I guess you can say that all your customers are important. But sometimes, you need to make a distinction between those customers who take priority over others. Certain circumstances necessitate that you choose specific customers, and treat them differently. In the business world, these customers could be your leads. The potential customers that you probably want to pay greater attention to because they become your customer base. The customers that you already have, however, are still important, so you can't forget about them either!

Maximizer allows you to classify your companies, contact, or individuals as leads or non-leads. There is a couple of fields that are important when thinking about leads. All of these fields can be found on the Company/Contact/Individual Details section of the Basic Information dialog.

Sales Lead - if this field is set to Yes, the entry will become a lead.
Account Manager - set the Account Manager to the user who the lead belongs to. So if you are doing a search and you narrow your query by searching "My Leads" only, then the search will only bring up Leads that have you assigned to as the Account Manager. More on searching for leads in a little bit later on.

There are advantages to organizing your companies as leads and non-leads.

You can search your leads only. Having a narrow search will allow you to streamline the results and avoid clutter. When you open up most search dialogs, you will see a "Leads options" area.
- The Entries that are not leads option will search all entries where Sales Lead = No.
- The All entries option will search all entries, regardless of the value of the Sales Lead field.
- The Leads option will search all entries where Sales Lead = Yes.
- The My leads only option will only search records where the Sales Lead = yes, and the Account Manager = you (or the person who is currently logged into Maximizer).
Leads have a different set of Key fields. Because you need to know different information about leads as opposed to regular entries, it is always good to have a different set of key fields for easy access to the important fields. You can create Lead specific key fields for Company leads, Contact leads, and Individual leads.
You can sort your address book by lead/non-lead. A clever way of doing this is by adding an extra column to your column view and adding the "Entry Type Icon" field to it. If you sort by this column, it will group together all your leads/non-leads.

Automatically Creating Hotlist Tasks When Entering User-defined field information.

wleung — Fri, 02 Oct 2009 19:39:00 GMT

I am terrible at remembering dates. Sometimes I get so busy that I almost don't remember my own birthday. I guess that's what my better half is for. But still, I'd like to remember her birthday from time to time.

So what if you had a really important piece of customer information that you had to remember every year, like a contract renewal date, CEO's birthday, or end of fiscal year? Now, it's easy to create a reoccurring appointment in your calendar, but that can get tedious when you are doing some data entry or are updating a few companies at the same time. There is, however, an easy way to create hotlist tasks based on dates entered in a user-defined field.

Go to File > Set Up User-Defined fields.
Click Add Field
Select Date from the type drop down list.
Select Include in Hotlist option. If you want the date repeated annually, then select the Annually recurring event option.
Set Full Access/Read Access to the users or security groups that you want the hotlist created for. In the below example/screen shot, hotlist tasks will be created for Billy Holly and MASTER.

So in the future, when any date is entered into the UDF, a hotlist task will be created for all users specified in Full/Read access.

Be careful with this tip. If you create a date UDF that everybody can see, then every time you fill in that UDF, everybody will get a hotlist task reminder. That may or may not be what you want.

Choosing when you work... in your Calendar.

wleung — Fri, 25 Sep 2009 18:26:00 GMT

In Maximizer, you can customize your calendar to fit your work schedule. If you are one of the lucky ones to only have to work a few times during the week, or a few hours during the day, this can make your calendar a little bit more aesthetically pleasing.

Two of the most useful functions are the working day and working hour options in the preferences menu.

Working day

Select which days you work. Any day left unselected will be red in the weekly and monthly views, so you can quickly identify which days you are in and which days you are not.

You can also choose to not show non-work days in the weekly view by selecting the "Show non-work days in the weekly view" option in the Options area. That way, you can look at a weekly view of your work related activities while not being distracted with your weekly golfing sessions on your midweek day off.

Working hours

Set your working hours here. The range specified in the from and to drop down lists will be a different colour than the hours that are outside the range. Also, any appointments created outside of the range will appear at the top or bottom of the daily view saying you have x number of appointments before/after your start/end time.

Great Save! Recalling and Saving Searches

wleung — Wed, 02 Sep 2009 19:03:00 GMT

Sometimes, it takes a stroke of genius to create the perfect all fields search. After many hours of carefully planning which fields to include and which values to select, you run the search and get the perfect result set.

And sometimes it’s just a big fluke. You are shooting from the hip and just happen to stumble upon the right combination of fields and values to get the results you are looking for. You probably want to save that search, so you don’t have to go shooting in the dark again the next time you want to run the same search.

So after you are satisfied with your all fields search, go back to Search > All Fields. Then, select Last Search. This will bring up the last search that you made. Then, click Catalog, then Add. Fill in the Name of the search and a description. You may also want to include, or not, in the description, the fact that no planning was involved and you pretty much just guessed your way to the end result. Click OK to save the search.

You just made a great save!

Drawing an Organizational Chart

wleung — Wed, 26 Aug 2009 23:00:00 GMT

Time is always at a premium, at and outside of work. Let's be honest here, nobody likes to waste time, unless it's "wasting time" relaxing. At work, the more time you waste, the more money you could be losing. Unless you are New York Yankee Alex Rodriguez, who makes roughly $100,000 for every 6 pitches he sees. [Wall Street Journal] Waste away, Alex, you are doing good for yourself.

A good way of not wasting your time is talking to the right people. Establishing a pecking order is always important. When making a sale, it's always good to figure out who's the boss or who's writing the cheques.

A quick way of figuring out who is the king of the hill is drawing an organizational chart. Here is how you do it:

Highlight the company in the Address Book window.
Go to View > Organizational chart

The Organizational chart is derived from the hierarchy that is created by populating the Reports To field in the basic information window of a contact. So let's ABC Wine Shop Inc. has 3 employees, James Dolton, Ed Johnson, and Martha Torres. If both Ed and Martha report to James, then the organizational chart looks like this:

If Martha reports to James and Ed reports to Martha, the organizational chart will look like this:

Excel to Maximizer: Two-tiered Importing

wleung — Fri, 14 Aug 2009 17:12:00 GMT

From: William Leung

Sent: Friday, August 14, 2009 4:31 PM
To: Microsoft
Subject: Excel Awesomeness

Dear Microsoft,

By now, you must think I hate Excel. I've already written a couple of blogs about Excel and/or people's strange fixation with using Excel for everything. I work for a CRM company. So you can imagine the frustration I used to feel when I see people storing all their contact information in an Excel sheet and trying to use it as a pseudo CRM.

But really, thank you for making such an awesome product. It is great for doing spreadsheet stuff.

Come to think about it, if all you are storing is like, phone numbers, and names, I guess Excel could be okay.

But what if you want to get your Excel contact lists into Maximizer?

For example, let's say you had a spreadsheet with the following fields:

Last Name

First Name

Company

Phone Number

Address

Birthday

Importing this sheet into Maximizer is easy. There are a few things you need to do first to your spreadsheet to get it ready for importing.

Make sure all rows have a last name or company filled in. You can do a search in Excel for all blank cells in a column and replace it with information of a period. That way, when importing, Maximizer will not ask you a hundred times for a hundred missing last names.
Save the Excel sheet in CSV format. Do this by going to file > save as. Then, in the "Save as type" drop down, select CSV. You may get a couple popups saying something about losing formatting. Just hit OK and make sure the CSV gets saved. After it's saved, open it up again just to make sure it's ok. After that, CLOSE excel.

Now, in Maximizer...

Go to file > import > Address Book Entries
Select the CSV file saved from step 2 above. In the "Type of import" section, select the Companies/Individuals option. This will import all the company names and no contacts. That's the "second tier". We'll talk about that soon.
When you get to the "Select Fields for Import" screen, match up the Order of import fields with the Fields from file fields for company fields only, and skip the rest. So in our example, we will match up the Company and Address field with the matching fields in Maximizer. See the picture below:
Click Import to import the first layer (or tier).
After the first tier has imported, go to file > import > Address Book Entries.
Select the same CSV file. In the "Type of import" section, select the Contacts option. This will import the contacts.
When you get to the "Select Fields for Import" screen, match up the Order of import fields with the Fields from file fields for contact fields only, and skip the rest. BUT make sure to also include the company field. It is critical that you do, or else the import will not work. So in our example, we will match up the Last Name, First Name, Company, Phone Number, and Birthday field with the matching fields in Maximizer. See the picture below:
Click Import to complete the second tier of the import.

The import is now done. It's now time to go through your Address Book to verify everything is ok. Any company where you put a period or some sort of filler information in the CSV file will need to be dealt with appropriately.

Thanks, Microsoft, for making such an excellent program. Keep up the good work.

Best Regards,

Will "Excel's BFF" Leung

Semimonthly appointments

wleung — Fri, 07 Aug 2009 19:55:00 GMT

There is a way to create a semimonthly appointment in your Maximizer Calendar. Just to be clear, an example of a semimonthly occurence is like my favourite times of the month: pay day. It is like being paid on the 15th and 30th of the month and not every other Friday, which is bi-weekly.

Because there is no semimonthly option when creating a reccuring appointment, you have to be a little bit clever about it. The process isn’t perfect, though. For example if you create semimonthly appointments to happen on the 15th and 30th of every month, the 15th and/or 30th may land on weekends. You will just have to play these instances by ear. If you do want to see these options included in the software, email suggestions@maximizer.com, or go to the suggestions section of the forums and post something there.

Here is a short video on how to create a semimonthly appointment:

(Please visit the site to view this media)

Rounding up Tasks and Appointments

wleung — Fri, 24 Jul 2009 19:37:00 GMT

Sometimes, it's important to know how much effort you're putting into a relationship. Any relationship. Whether it be with your friends or a lead, it's always good to know how much time and effort you put in. A good indication of how much time you are spending with a client is looking at the number of activities you have with a specific client. Obviously it could be a bad thing that you see a customer a lot. They could be having a lot of problems. But it could also be a good thing. Maybe the customer keeps asking questions about different products and you are happy to answer them in hopes of making a big sale.

The hotlist task window is a great place to see both appointments and tasks at the same time. Configure a column view for the hotlist like I mentioned in a previous blog and you can sort your appointments and tasks by company name.

Another way of seeing both appointments and tasks for a specific company is by right clicking on the Address Book entry and selecting "Activities for [name of Address Book entry]"

This opens up the Activities for... dialog. It is like a mini Hotlist window. It shows all activities for the Address Book entry. From here, you can create Hotlist tasks or appointments. You can also filter the results to see only certain user's appointment/tasks for the entry.

Key Fields: Organizing the Mess of User-Defined Fields

wleung — Fri, 17 Jul 2009 17:25:00 GMT

Maintaining a tidy database is one of the keys to efficiency. It's just like keeping a tidy house. It's all about getting rid of what's no longer useful and organizing the stuff that you do have for easy access.

It's the same way with user-defined fields. Yes, they are very useful in helping to store useful data, but the more you have, the harder it is to find things. A lot of this comes from proper planning when initially creating the database. Mapping out your business processes first and planning your database around your business process is always a smart thing to do. But I'll let Byron tell you more about this in his blog.

One way to help alleviate the pain of wading through a sea of user-defined fields is to create a key fields list. Key fields are important user-defined fields. They are displayed on the basic information dialog box in the bottom left hand corner. Adding or modifying a value to a key field is the same as browsing to the user-defined field and adding or modifying a value. It just takes less searching and fewer clicks.

To create a key fields list:

Go to Administrator.
Go to file > preferences. Go to the key fields tab.
To edit one of the displayed key fields, select the key field and select Modify. To create a new key field list, click Add.

If you edit or add a new key field, you will get to the key fields dialog.

Pretty standard stuff. Insert a name and description. Requested by is optional. Set the owner to something other than public if you don't want everybody to be able to use the list.

Here comes the tricky part: entry types.

There are 9 different entry types:

Comany - Lead
Company - Non-Lead
Individual - Lead
Individual - Non-Lead
Contact - Lead
Contact - Non-Lead
Opportunity
Campaign
Customer Service

The list will only display the key fields corresponding to the type of entry that is currently open. For example, you can have a list called "Will's Key Fields" and have fields for customer service and non-lead contacts. So every time I open a customer service case, and select "Will's Key Fields" as the Key Fields list, only the customer service key fields will appear. Conversely, if I'm editing a non-lead contact, only the non-lead contact key fields will appear.

So select the entry type and add fields by selecting the field on the left and clicking add.

When you are finished, click OK.

The key field list should appear in the key field drop down in any entry type that you have specified fields for. So in my above example, "Will's Key Fields" will only appear in the customer service case and non-lead contact dialog boxes.

Microsoft WPC 2009 – Day 4 - The Future of the User Interface

wanderson — Fri, 17 Jul 2009 05:23:00 GMT

Microsoft's Worldwide Partner Conference (WPC09) wrapped up today. I have to say that two things came across loud and clear in the conference:

1. Microsoft is respectful of their Partners and is following through on their business plan to work with their channel to drive business (money) into both the Partner and their pockets, and

2. That Microsoft is in it to win. I have been to most of the WPC events over the past 10 years and I cannot remember a year where their competitive drive was stronger. More importantly, to win - they know they need to focus on Partners and they need to focus on strong product design.

The following slide I think does a great job of showing Microsoft's commitment to succeeding with Partners and also the size and momentum that they bring to bear on the market.

I want to comment more on product design, but first I have to tell you that today I did something I have not done in years. Today I wrote a program. It has been a few years since I actually sat down and coded and debugged a program. I went to the Hands-On Lab for Windows Mobile and wrote an actual application that runs on Windows Mobile. It was a shipping and tracking application complete with a map that lights up where the package is during transit. Now, I am not saying that FedEx needs to be watching out any time soon, but I have to say – it was pretty good! There was a script to follow in the lab, but as a long-time programmer at heart I did add my own little touches to the user interface to make it easier to use. The user experience has been something that has always been something I have taken a great deal of interest in…which brings me to my next and closing comments for the conference.

Bill Buxton, Principal Researcher Microsoft Research (who also gave a key note address yesterday) gave an hour long presentation on The Future of UX: Looking Back 10 Years into the Future. An hour was simply not enough for me. Bill is a professional User Experience (UX) design expert and what I Iike most of all is his passion for the user experience, that he wants to improve Microsoft’s products – and above all of that – that Microsoft see the value in his input. On that note, Bill outlined for us the research group in the last two years. It has gone from 1 research fellow to 10 and Microsoft has hired UX designers at a rate of 1.5 times the rate that they are hiring technologists. Bill outlined past UX successes from the Kodak camera to the mouse to multi-touch technology. He also stressed that success lies in the combination of technology, design and business. It is the combination of the three that produces the generally accepted successes that we know today.

I like that Microsoft understands that they need to design technologies and products that have the user experience as a basic design tenant. I further like that they (seem) to understand that it is then the Partners that apply those technologies and products to reach end users. We all need to pick up our game and think about the entire user experience and not build solutions that are just “good enough”.

Microsoft WPC 2009 – Day 3 - Allison Watson's A List

wanderson — Thu, 16 Jul 2009 05:37:00 GMT

The third day of the Microsoft Worldwide Partner Conference had one of my favourite sessions - one I look forward to every year. Allison Watson presents her "A" List. This is a list of the best and brightest as chosen by her (or I would presume her staff), predicting what technology will shape our future. In years gone by this has included noteworthy new technologies such as flexible screens used as household newspapers, the Microsoft Surface product, new compression and graphics display technologies and Microsoft Auto.

Imagine Cup - this is an annual award in the form of a challenge to students from around the world to do something with technology (each year is different). This year there was more than 300,000 students registered and 59,000 students from 149 countries competed. The theme this year was: "Imagine a world where technology helps solve the world's toughest problems."
Windows Mobile - really this was just giving the mobile market and product line the nod it deserves. Mobile is here to stay and will play a key part in defining how we work and play in the future (starting now).
Microsoft Surface - this was an update from two years ago (Surface was curiously missing from the "A" List last year). This year, Allison showed off the HealthVault application on Surface. It was a really cool application because it was a great example of using technology to make people's lives easier. For example, part of the demo had the doctor discussing what medicine the patient was taking and they were able to look at pictures of the pills. If you have ever had to take a lot of medicine - the names don't make a lot of sense but you can recognize them.
Advanced Communications - okay - I am drawing a blank on this one. I think it had to do with Office Communications Server. I was taking notes during the presentation but because the ones before and after this one were so interesting to me I did not have a chance to jot down what this was and now I forget. If anyone knows - leave me a comment. J
The Future of Productivity - this was easily the highlight of the entire "A" list. Bob Muglia came out to talk about what productivity will look like in the future and how each of these concepts is already being worked on in some way. The video is 5:45 and is really worth watching.
Realizing the Future - this was a great way of ending the "A" List. It was presented by a Research Fellow for Microsoft (sorry - I missed his name). He walked us through how they plan for 20 years in the future. He gave examples of technical advances that are becoming productized like thin screens that are allowing smaller and smaller products (Zune and TV screens) and the technology behind Microsoft Surface.

Although the "A" List was great - I think it was missing some of the cutting edge ideas like robotics and immersive or full-sense interfaces like Microsoft Natal.

There was one other session I attended today that deserves a little recognition. Stuart Crawford gave a presentation on Social Media 101 - Defining and Understanding How to Connect with Your Clients and Colleagues Using the Latest Technologies. He covered all the usual suspects from Twitter to LinkedIn and explained what each is good for and why we need it. Most importantly of all, he showed how this change is happening how and will become the "norm" whether we are prepared for it or not. He had a couple of great video to show also that I was not able to find on YouTube - if anyone has their URLs, please leave them in a comment.

Microsoft WPC 2009 – Day 2 – Azure and Office 14

wanderson — Wed, 15 Jul 2009 05:50:00 GMT

The second day of the Microsoft Worldwide Partner Conference is over and it was another good day.

The day was kicked off by Bob Muglia, president of the Server and Tools Business, announcing the business and partner model for the company's Windows Azure platform - Microsoft's answer to how Windows will operate as a cloud computing operating system. He also discussed how Microsoft will enable partners to generate new revenue opportunities through the development of innovative cloud services. Basically, Microsoft has laid out a plan for how they and their partners will continue to succeed in this new world of SaaS computing. I attended several sessions on Windows Azure and SQL Azure and was impressed with Microsoft's vision and execution plan.

Steve Ballmer gave another great talk on where Microsoft is going - headlined by their new Bing announcement - which is their newly launched Search engine and advertising model. After the Yahoo! purchase of last year fell through - we are now seeing plan B. By all accounts, it is looking good.

Chris Caposella gave a great talk on where Office and Office Services are going. I really think that this is something that although a little advanced for the average worker today sets the stage for how we will do document authoring and team collaboration in the not too distant future. I think Office 14 - to be known as Office 2010 - will be a great release. They have taken feedback on the ribbon and improved it as well as rolled it out across more applications. They have also done a great job of integrating team based and social media.

Microsoft WPC 2009 Day 1 – Microsoft Announces the Importance of the Customer – and Means It!

wanderson — Tue, 14 Jul 2009 05:05:00 GMT

The first day of the Microsoft Worldwide Partner Conference is over and it was a frenzied day. Microsoft knows how to put on a good conference. There were great key note presentations, a LOT of breakout sessions to dive down into the details of too many topics to count and a lot of Creole hospitality and food. The people of New Orleans are very nice.

To give you an idea of how big this conference is, there are more than 9,000 attendees from more than 125 customers. In the lead off key note by Allison Watson, Microsoft outlined 3 key success points of companies during an economic situation like the one we are in now: Company Vision, a Belief in themselves and Marketing that Vision, and the ability to Sell. Okay - no real secrets there. To Microsoft's credit though, they followed that up with something I did think was worth noting. They clearly wanted to send a message that Microsoft is not going to stay the same company we have come to know. They showed lively "commercials", a fresh young approach to their marketing and most importantly of all they stressed that "people" come first in their product design and marketing. They used the phrase "Life Maximizers" to describe the kind of customer that is beginning to make up a large part of the buying market. They described this as someone that values their work life balance - but also mixes their lives. They do work during their personal lives and personal things during their work time. This is something I firmly believe. Not surprisingly - Mobile makes a big part of this message. In the following picture they are making the point that the market is at an inflection point.

The combination of price (getting lower), technology (the devices and infrastructure can now deliver what people demand), and the user experience (something people actually like using - not just the cutting edge or techno-geeks but the majority of people). On the last point they stressed the user experience that is required to reach these users and of course couldn't resist from dropping the IDC stats that there are more than 1.3 Billion cell phone users in the world today and a predicted 400-500 Million Smartphone users by 2012. Knowing that Microsoft values the Mobile market this much also validates Maximizer's emphasis in the Mobile CRM market.

Some of the main announcements Microsoft made include:

Windows 7 to be released to customer this September
Office 14 to be released as an early preview shortly, followed by a general Beta later this year
Windows Phone - the new name for the Windows Mobile 6.5 release - and the statement that they are taking a more active role in defining the brand that users will see
The newly revamped Partner Network - a version 2.0 of the Partner Program
They surpassed Michael Jackson as the most active Twitter conversation

Microsoft WPC 2009 in New Orleans

wanderson — Mon, 13 Jul 2009 03:52:00 GMT

I am here at Microsoft's Worldwide Partner Conference (WPC) in New Orleans. Microsoft holds the conference in a different city each year and announced last year that they would be bringing this huge event to New Orleans in 2009 to help support the city as it rebuilds from Katrina. I'm looking forward to seeing New Orleans and their lively city culture, and the conference planners are not missing any opportunities - starting off at the registration desk with this great live band.

This is an annual conference and is Microsoft's key event to showcase their new products, go-to-market strategy and generally outline their business strategy to their business partners. This year is likely to be an interesting conference as Microsoft is at a cross roads for both market and product events. Microsoft is feeling market pressure like maybe never before from Google and the move towards SaaS. Microsoft answered a couple of years ago with their Software + Services and has been selling it to their partners ever since. They have moved some of their products into the cloud, but their main money makers remain an on-premise solution - mainly Windows and Office. Which brings me to their second event - product. They are currently readying the next version of Windows and Office for general release. Add to this mobility - something they have been doing since the late 90s but have still failed capture the market dominance they have in Windows and Web. There is a lot of talk from Microsoft and the usual rumor mill about when or even if Microsoft can capture this market.

I will be watching Microsoft's key note addresses and breakout sessions to find out what their messages will be and will write about them in my blog - so check back and see what Microsoft is announcing.

How to Motivate Smartphone and Application Adoption from the IT Side

wanderson — Tue, 07 Jul 2009 00:15:00 GMT

eWeek today published an article I wrote on getting Smartphones adopted by getting the IT team onside. In it, I address the concerns an IT team faces in adopting Smartphones into their infrastructure - and how to plan a roadmap and avoid common pitfalls. I broke the article into 5 key steps:

1. Set device management policies to ensure security
2. Use browser-based applications for occasional users
3. Use device-side applications for power users
4. Monitor returns and then consolidate plans
5. Build the business case

If you are starting to see rogue devices such as iPhones and BlackBerries being brought into your organization that are not part of your officially supported IT infrastructure, you should know that this actually presents a great opportunity for you and your company. Take advantage of your employees' willingness to use their Smartphones to increase the adoption and usage of line of business (LOB) applications such as CRM and sales force automation (SFA)-which traditionally have not achieved 100 percent user adoption.

Check out the entire article at: http://www.eweek.com/c/a/Mobile-and-Wireless/How-to-Motivate-Smartphone-and-Application-Adoption-from-the-IT-Side/

Communicating with The Entire Company

wleung — Fri, 03 Jul 2009 22:27:00 GMT

Sometimes it is necessary to broadcast a message to the entire company. It is always good to report things like a profitable quarter, a new product launch, or the company dragonboat team doing very well at the local regatta.

Email is a good way of doing it, but if you are like me, you get a lot of emails that are not relevant to you. Also, once you read it, it usually gets filed away in the Deleted folder for "safe keeping".

The Company Announcements section of the My Work Day window is a good way to broadcast important messages. It is also a useful place to find past important messages.

So here's a short clip on how to create a Company Announcement from an HTML file.

(Please visit the site to view this media)

Hot Keys and Short Cuts

wleung — Fri, 26 Jun 2009 21:13:00 GMT

I have this fancy mouse at work and sometimes I feel as if it wasn't a good investment. It is a wireless mouse with a whole slew of different buttons, but after the first few weeks, I found out that I really don't use it that much. Why? It's because I'm a keyboard shortcut fanatic. I would say that 50%-75% of the time, I'm navigating around Windows with my keyboard. I use my mouse to select things I can't get to with my keyboard, or to select text that will take me more than around 20 keystrokes to get to.

Now I'm sure most of us procrastinators know the common windows shortcut keys. Windows Key+D will minimize all windows and show your desktop. Alt+f4 will close your current open window. Alt-Tab will switch to the next window.

Here are some of the shortcuts that I use the most in Maximizer. This list is by no means exhaustive, they are just the ones I use the most. If you have any other shortcuts, by all means, post it to the comments section. Some of the shortcuts are also dependant on which module you are in.

Alt+f, f - Preferences
Alt+f, d - Administrator
Alt+f, p, o - Note report

Alt+e, m - Make list current

Alt+v, f - favourites lists
Alt+v, u - column setups

Alt+s, f - All fields search
Alt+s, b - All phone number search
Alt+s, e - Retrieve contacts
Alt+s, t - Retrieve opportunities

Alt+a, m - Schedule a meeting
Alt+a, n - Write a note

Ctrl+0 - Opportunity window
Ctrl+1 - Address Book Window
Ctrl+h - Customer service window
Ctrl+6 - Hotlist task window
Ctrl+7 - Calendar window

You can also create your own buttons and macros. See the user's manual for more information. All of the menu options have pneumonics. Hit the alt key to see the pneumonic for the menu. When you drill down into the menu, the pneumonics will be displayed for the function.

And as an added bonus, here are some of my favourite windows shortcuts:

Windows Key + r - Run command. The run command is THE most common thing I use day to day. After pulling up the run command, you can launch some of the most common applications. Here are some examples:

maxwin - Maximizer
winword - Microsoft word
excel - Microsoft Excel
outlook - Microsoft Outlook
Notepad - notepad
pbrush - paint brush
iexplore - internet explorer

And some windows functions:

control - control panel
control admintools - Administrative tools
services.msc - Windows services
appwiz.cpl - Add/Remove programs

urfckbtds3

Finding Time in My Busy Schedule

wleung — Fri, 12 Jun 2009 22:21:00 GMT

I am a busy guy. Between work, sports, friends, and planning a wedding, I barely have enough time for myself. Don't get me wrong, I like doing all those things (well, some more than others), so I'm always trying to pencil things in or squeeze the most out of my days.

One thing I find that helps me personally is logging personal appointments and tasks into Maximizer. If you flag something as "personal appointment" when creating an appointment, it'll show up as "private appointment" if others are viewing your calendar. This helps me keep track of big things I have to do.

So the other day, a friend wanted to watch the second Transformers movie with him. It's out on the 24th. But I had a feeling that I might have something to do that day. So I go ahead and create an appointment in Maximizer.

When creating an appointment, rather than just typing a time into the Start time field, I click on the ellipes (...) and the "Find Free Time" dialog appears. So I scroll to the 24th to see if I can find 8 or 9 consecutive hours (because obviously we have to watch the first one again before we watch the second one). Turns out I'm busy that day, but the next day, I'm free.

So in summary, clicking on the ellipses when creating an appointment will bring up the "Find Free Time" dialog box. Any non-highlighted box means that that slot is free. Dragging your mouse over multiple consecutive fields will highlight them and clicking OK will book that time for your meeting or whatever you are planning to do. There is a Find Time button on the Add Hotlist Task dialog too. It works the same way.

This function is big for me because I do book everything in Maximizer. Obviously, if I didn't, then my entire calendar would appear to be free. So it's important for me to always keep things in my calendar, even though it is a bit of a pain sometimes.

It is too bad that we don't make a plug-in that will tap into your mind and figure out when you are free or not without entering it into Maximizer. That would be huge. Check Maximizer CRM version 60, tentatively due out in the year 2110.

The Outlook Toolbar: Making a (not so) spiritual connection with Outlook

wleung — Thu, 04 Jun 2009 23:24:00 GMT

You never really notice your dependence on things. For example, one day I left my iPhone at home. For the whole day, I had no access to e-mail, music, or a cell phone. It was actually very relaxing. All I was missing was a couple beers and a beach. But the entire day, I was constantly thinking of things to check or maps to draw and I couldn't do it. Maybe I do that kind of stuff so often now that I don't notice it, until, of course, it's gone.

At work, I have a fixation with my Outlook window. Have a look at my work setup below.

I would say my computer looks like this more often than not during the day. Notice how I have Outlook dedicated to one screen. For me, Outlook always needs to be on and visible. I NEED to see my emails coming in and I NEED to answer emails quickly. It's one of (the many) habits I picked up from working in the real world.

With my dependence on Outlook and my inherited dependence on Maximizer, I was really happy to learn that there is an Outlook Toolbar allows you to do a couple of important things in Maximizer, from Outlook.

There is a different toolbar for the mail, new email message, contacts, and contacts information windows. In this blog, I'm just going to talk about the one I use the most, the one in the mail window. The mail window is the one with the Inbox and other incoming email folders.

Let's take a look at some of the options that are available to you on the outlook toolbar.

Save Sender as contact in Maximizer
This option allows you to create a Maximizer Address book entry from an Outlook email message. The entry is created from the sender's information.
Create CS Case
This will bring up a dialog that will let you create a customer service case. The customer service case can be created for an entry that already exists in Maximizer, or you can also choose to create a new Address Book entry and a new customer service case.
Save email to contact in Maximizer
You can save an email message in Outlook to the documents window of one or more Address Book entries.
View Contact in Maximizer
If you have synchronized the contact from Outlook to Maximizer or the contact was created using the Save Sender as Contact in Maximizer button, then when you hit this button, it will retrieve the contact in Maximizer. Otherwise, if the contact was created outside of Outlook and not synchronized, then Maximizer will try to find the entry in the database using the email address.

Coming back from vacation: What did I miss?

wleung — Thu, 28 May 2009 21:51:00 GMT

As much as I love to work, there is nothing I love more than going on vacation. There is so many good places to explore, things to do, and most importantly, so much great food to eat.

But the worst thing about going on vacation, other than the jet lag, is coming back to work. Personally, it always takes me a few days to get back into a "work groove". I seem to do everything a little bit slower and things that were once familiar are not so familiar anymore. And if you use email as much as I do, there's usually about at least 200 emails per week that I'm gone that I need to go through and figure out if I need to reply. One time, I even forgot the passwords to my computer.

One thing I like to do when I get back is figure out what the progress is on some of my Customer Service Cases or Opportunities. For example, I want to see if a customer has called when I wasn't there, a user defined field got updated by a manager, or if a colleague of mine has helped me resolve a case.

So here's how to do it:

Go to Search > All fields.
Click Add and select "Last Modified Date" from the Basic Fields folder. Click OK.
Select a date range. Usually I set it to the day after I left for vacation to the day I came back.

This will pull up a list of entries that have been updated. Depending on what the controlling window is, these entries could be like Companies/Contacts/Individuals, Opportunities, or Customer Service cases. From here there is lots you can do like run a report or do a notes search for notes created within the date range for these companies.

And as a bonus, you can add the field "Modified By" to your column setup to see who was the last person to modify the entry.

This will give you a good idea of what you missed at the office over the last few days. Your facebook page will give your co-workers a good idea of what they missed over the last few days.

Getting rid of unwanted duplicates

wleung — Fri, 08 May 2009 18:46:00 GMT

Checking for duplicates

By default, Maximizer doesn't check for duplicate entries when creating new records. That's a good thing. Sometimes you have 2 companies called "ABC Wine Shop" or 2 people named Joe Smith. So rather than having people name their records strange things like ABC Wine Shop A or Debbie 2, you can just enter the name of the record without thinking about a clever name.

You can turn on duplicate checking when adding Address Book entries by going to the Address Book tab in the File > Preferences in the Administrator. Here, you can set up rules that Maximizer will use to check whether or not a record is the same as another record. There is more information about this in the User's Guide.

What I really wanted to talk about today was the ability to group duplicates together and what you can do with them afterwards.

So let's say you have a list of contacts, and you've accidentally created two of the same Company. Let's use ABC Wine Shop for example. You and your partner have been entering notes for ABC Wine Shop, but you in the original ABC Wine Shop entry and your partner in a new one that she created when she couldn't find the original ABC Wine Shop. So you have 2 entries for the same company.

So here is what I would do:

Create an Address Book list with the duplicate entries.

You want to make sure that all of the entries for the specific company are displayed in the Address Book window. If you were to do a general audit of your Address Book and pull up all duplicates, simply do an all companies search and pull up your entire address book.

Once you have a list, select the Name column and go to Search > Check 'Name' for duplicates. This will work for any field in your column view, like phone numbers.
Once you have a duplicate, figure out which one is the "correct one".

This could be the one with the most up-to-date data or the one with the correct address. You decide.
Drag the duplicate entry (source) into the correct entry (target). This will bring up the following window:

There are the 3 options and what they do, from the F1 help.

Relate the Source Entry to the Target Entry
Select this option to relate the selected entry to the currently active Address Book entry. The related entry will appear in the Related Entries window list of the target entry. (All notes, user-defined fields and documents associated with the related entry are associated with the Address Book entry, once the relationship has been established.)

Combine the Source Entry and the Target Entry into a Single Entry
Select this option to copy information such as Contacts, notes, documents, and opportunities associated with a selected Address Book entry to another. Note that both the Source and Target entries remain in the Address Book when you use this option.

Move the Source Entry to the Target Entry
Select this option to copy information such as Contacts, notes, documents, and opportunities associated with an Address Book entry to another. When you select this option you are given a choice to delete the source record.

What we want to select is the "Move the Source Entry to the Target Entry" option as this will delete the source record.

This handy tip will let you clean up your Address Book. As you can tell with my blog about completing hotlist tasks, I'm all about keeping my database nice and tidy. It's always easier to find things when your Address Book is in order. Now, if I could only figure out how to keep my car nice and tidy...

WES 2009 Update

wanderson — Tue, 05 May 2009 07:29:00 GMT

May 4, 2009

RIM's WES 2009 started today. For those of you that don't know - this is one of the largest North American conferences focusing on the wireless world of the year - albeit it is focused around RIM - but still has a lot of industry and market information. I attended last year, but was not able to make it this year. Maximizer has sent a contingent of 4 staff made up from our offices in NA and Europe. Check out our twitter updates here.

BlackBerry 8220

Rumor Summary:

Apex - a CDMA version of the Pearl Flip 8230 with EVDO
Niagra 9630 - blending the style and size of the Curve and Storm with the keypad from the Bold
1 Ghz CPUs - this is as good as it seems. For anyone that has used a smartphone and been frustrated by slow responses, this will be welcomed with open arms. The first device manufacturer - RIM or otherwise - that can bring this to market will have a winner on their hands.
An LTE BlackBerry - this new device is unlikely to be available for trial but just knowing that RIM is working on it is a good thing for the industry
Version 5 of the BlackBerry OS - this will bring some much anticipated features such as
- incoming call display integration (meaning application vendors can extend and their own add-on value when the call comes in)
- improved SD card support
- Push API for BIS - something that currently only works with the BES
- UI updates - when are they not improving the UI - but it will still be appreciated ;)
  - § New updates this time around include themes, transitions and toolbars
o Geocoding APIs - this is used for tagging "where you are" with the internal GPS to allowing application vendors to do their thing with this information. Ideas here are targeted marketing - score 1 for the marketers of the world (is that good or bad?)

I don't know which of these rumors are going to be proven true - but if nothing else it shows the world (again) that things are moving faster and faster. All we can do is try to stay on top of what we can and try to find ways of using this change to innovate, differentiate and win in a fast changing market.