Where There’s a Will, There’s a Way

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.

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.