SageCRM - The Next Level

SageCRM - LinkedIn Example - Person

Lawson — Wed, 17 Jun 2009 12:17:00 GMT

Summary:

The purpose of this BLOG posting is to provide instruction on how to add in a link to LinkedIn for persons onto the Person Summary Screen. A zipped pdf file has been created for users to take these instructions with them, click here to download the pdf.

Assumptions:

During this discussion I will be presenting how to link the Person Entry Screen to LinkedIn.

Please note this code assumes that the user is always on-line, i.e. connected to the internet, errors will result if an attempt is made to use the following documented behavior without an internet connection.
Additionally, this code assumes that the user has a current LinkedIn account and has configured their LinkedIn login to be remembered so that the user merely has to navigate to the site to have access to their LinkedIn profile. If the user chooses to log-in to the LinkedIn site each time they visit LinkedIn then this sample code will require this login to occur every time.

Prerequisites:

SageCRM 6.2, this code has been written in a way that will allow it to function within SageCRM on-premise and/or SageCRM.com. There are other ways of achieving the same result which require the use of Server Side code, in an effort to make this code work for all of our existing clients I modified the code shared with me to work client side only.

Installation Instructions:

1. In order to use this customization you must navigate to Administration | Customization | Person Entity | Screens Tab | select the Person Summary Screen.
2. Once you are in the properties for the screen copy the below code and paste it into the Custom Content for Person Entry Screen:

Beginning of Code

End of Code

3. Once the code is copied into the screen, click the save button to save the screen modifications.

Testing Instructions:

1. To test this customization navigate to the Main Menu and find or select a Person record.
2. Once a person record is selected a LinkedIn icon should appear next to the label for the person first name.
3. Click on the LinkedIn icon, a separate screen should appear launching and navigating the user to the Person Search screen found within LinkedIn’s site.

A special thanks to the following two chaps for contributing to the final solution. Without their assistance this would not have been possible.

Alistair Hill
Consultant
Plus Computer Solutions Ltd.
Phone: 604.420.1099
e-mail: alistair@plus.ca
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
Ken Schmitt
Advanced CRM Certified Consultant
London ON, Canada
e-mail: ken@schmitts.ca
website: http://s5.schmitts.ca

When using a derived field in a SageCRM SQL View how do you get SageCRM to see this field as a numeric so you can sum it within reports?

Lawson — Thu, 16 Apr 2009 14:21:00 GMT

This was a recent question I got from a business partner. When you create a derived field in a SageCRM SQL View how do you get SageCRM to see this field as a numeric so you can sum the field within SageCRM reports? This is a great question. But there are some parts of this question that need explaining before we get to the answer of the question.

The first is what is a “derived field in a SageCRM SQL View”. Will when I teach SageCRM and creating of Views I always show how any SageCRM consultant can start writing views by using the Microsoft SQL Enterprise Manager and the Microsoft SQL Query tool to create the view and then copy the view into SageCRM. That is another conversation and another posting I wrote on the Accpac Community BLOG http://community.sageaccpac.com/blogs/crm_tips/archive/2009/03/09/how-to-write-a-sagecrm-sql-view-for-non-programmers.aspx.

During the process of creating a view most partners want to just add fields. But some times a situation comes up where you need to add two values together or do some sort of formula within the individual rows of a report. The concept of this calculated value is available through Microsoft SQL derived fields.

Ok, so we get the basic idea of a derived field. An example of a derived field can be as simple as when you want to know the unique id for the company or the opportunity within SageCRM. Out of the box these unique ids are hidden from view and ONLY SageCRM has access to them. Within a SQL statement you can simply create your own field or a derived field for these so that SageCRM will NOT hide them from view. To do this in a SQL statement you could do something as simple as:

Select *, comp_companyid as comp_uniqueid
From company

This example changes the field name of comp_companyid to comp_uniqueid. NOW this field will not be hidden by SageCRM and now can be placed on the screen. Of course you do not want users or anyone to be able to alter this field. In order to do this you will need to do the answer to the over riding question for this post.

Once the view is added to SageCRM and the check box to allow it for reporting has been checked you now want to set the properties of this derived field so that you can sum it within a report.

So the answer to the questions above is quite simple. Add to SageCRM the derived field “comp_uniqueid” as a company table field. Now you are thinking I don’t want to add this to a screen and you would be correct. You do not want to add this field to a screen. But think of all the benefits you get by adding this field to the database. You now can have access to field level security. If the field is a numeric it can NOW be summed within a SageCRM Report and you also have access to the other properties of a numeric field as well. Such as the field name. Instead of seeing in the report writer comp:comp_uniqueid you will now see what ever translation you provided for the field such as “Company Unique ID”.

Some notes about creating derived fields. You can do almost anything you want with a derived field. Such as creating a derived table that populates the derived field for the desired record. (Ok, this topic is another completely separate post I will have to write). But when you get to the naming of a derived field you should always follow the naming conventions set forth by SageCRM. Why do you want to do this? Will if you look at the SageCRM Report writer you will notice that the fields are listed first by table name such as company:, person:, opportunity: and then by the field name “comp_uniqueid”. How does SageCRM do this? Will this is achieved by the naming conventions that are required when a field is created on a table. Each table has a unique prefix. For example every field within the company table starts with comp_, the opportunity table is oppo_ the person table is pers_. So when you create this derived field if you stick with the SageCRM prefix logic you will see many benefits within SageCRM.

How to Embed a url into a SageCRM On-Screen Notification

Lawson — Thu, 26 Feb 2009 19:19:00 GMT

Summary:

The purpose of this whitepaper is to provide instruction on how to embed a dynamic URL into a SageCRM On-Screen Notification. The dynamic URL is actually a merge field being pulled into the notification. In the following print screen you will notice there are a set of notifications related to a Web coming into SageCRM’s Web to Lead functionality. A notification has been created on the Lead table to notify the SageCRM user that a Lead has come in from the website AND that they can “Click HERE to GO to Clients WEBSITE”.

So, the notifications serve a dual role, if the non-hyperlink portion of the message is clicked the SageCRM User is taken to the actual Lead record within SageCRM. The following print screen shows that if the SageCRM user mouses over the “You have a lead from the website” portion of the Notification the information portion of the Internet Explorer browser shows a link taking the SageCRM user to the actual lead record related to this specific notification.

If the “Click HERE to GO to Clients WEBSITE” portion of the Notification is clicked the user will be taken to the Lead’s website. The following print screen shows that when you mouse over the “Click HERE to GO to Clients WEBSITE” the information portion of the Internet Explorer browser shows where the SageCRM user will be taken to.

When you click on the normal text of the notification you will be taken to the associated record. As shown in the following print screen I clicked on the highlighted portion of the following screen shot which took me from My CRM | Calendar tab to the Lead record associated to that specific notification.

A pdf file has been created for users to take these instructions with them, click here to download the pdf.

Assumptions:

This only requires the use of SageCRM and it’s out of the box notification functionality.

Prerequisites:

SageCRM 6.2 (This has worked on earlier versions of SageCRM all the way back to SageCRM 6.0)

Installation Instructions Overview:

There are a couple of parts to this process. Here is an overview of the parts required.

Part 1: Identify which URL field will be used (Either a New field or an Existing field)
Part 2: Build On Screen Notification

Part 1: Identify which URL field will be used (Either a New field or an Existing field)

The first part of this process requires identification of which URL field will be used and from which entity. This field can be any existing field that is defined as a URL field type within SageCRM. In addition, it can be a new custom field added to an Entity. An example of where this has been applied. We had a client who needed to keep track of a specific contract document that was stored off site at their outsourced Document Management site. When a document was added to the off site location a URL would be sent to the user that uploaded the document. It was the responsibility of the user to copy the provided URL and go to the associated opportunity and use the provided workflow button and provide the contract URL for the specific opportunity. This was achieved by adding a URL field to first the Opportunity and then the Opportunity Progress tables of SageCRM. And then add a step to the clients custom workflow process to provide the URL for the associated contract. Once the contract URL was provided additional workflow buttons appeared which allowed for the CRM user to progress the Opportunity to the stage of approval process. During the approval process this custom URL field was used for notifications and for tasks so that CRM.

For the following example I will use the Lead Entity and the associated Lead Company Website field (lead_companywebsite).

Part 2: Build On Screen Notification

1. Navigate to Administration | Customization | Lead entity | Notifications Tab.
2. Click the New On-Screen Notification button.
3. Enter the following information into the new on-screen notification:

Field name:	Field Value:	Explanation if needed
Notification Name	Lead from Web
Enabled	“Check the box”
And/Or All:	And
Line 1. Field	Lead – Source
Line 1. Condition	Equal to
Line 1. Value	Web	Want all Leads that come in from the Web via the Web to Lead feature to cause a notification to be sent to a specific SageCRM user.
Line 2. Field	Lead – Date Created
Line 2. Condition	Greater than
Line 2. Value	Select a date, I chose the end of the previous year when this example was built which is 12/31/2008.	Want only leads from a certain date going forward to notify the specific user. Think about this option in the following way, if a SageCRM customer has been using SageCRM and Web to Lead for more than a few months then all of the Leads created since the first time they started using SageCRM will cause this notification to alert the specific SageCRM user. Which more than likely will not be appreciated. So, in this example by choosing a certain date we are limiting the notifications to the current years web to leads.
Notify User	Select a specific user	For my example to always show under a specific SageCRM user I hard coded my Notify User to be my SageCRM User “AR Clerk”. A dynamic parameter such as “- - lead – assigned to user- -“ can be specified here instead of the hard coded value used in the example.
Notification Message	You have a lead from the website, <A HREF="http://#lead_companywebsite#?">Click HERE to GO to Clients WEBSITE</A>	The HTML tag will bet changed within the notification to a URL. The merge field will be pulled dynamically each time a notification is shown on the screen. Resulting in a notification with unique urls for each lead.

The following screen shot shows what the on-screen notification configuration looks like.

a. At this point once all the values are completed click the Save button.

b. In order to test this Lead records need to be added to SageCRM with a source of “Web” and a created date greater than the date specified in your notification. Once all the conditions are met the notification will run based on your pre-defined interval in Workflow and Escalation Configuration area, the SageCRM instance used here is using the system default of 5 minutes.

c. The following print screen shows Notifications has been created on the Lead table to notify the SageCRM user that a Lead has come in from the website AND that they can “Click HERE to GO to Clients WEBSITE”.

Recap:

So, the notifications serve a dual role, if the non-hyperlink portion of the message is clicked the SageCRM User is taken to the actual Lead record within SageCRM. If the SageCRM user mouses over the “You have a lead from the website,” portion of the Notification the information portion of the Internet Explorer browser shows a link taking the SageCRM user to the lead record’s website.