Stephen Smith's Blog

SageCRM version 7.1 is now available!  The latest version of SageCRM is now ready for Sage ERP Accpac v6.0 customers.  Version 7.1 builds upon the system’s core functionality by delivering customers the ability to communicate more effectively, collaborate better internally, and compete in today’s marketplace. New features include:

• Sage e-Marketing—a powerful and fully integrated email marketing solution.
• Total Campaign Management—enables easy execution of multichannel marketing campaigns.
• Communications Management— Microsoft Exchange server integration.
• Interactive Dashboard—link multiple gadgets on a single screen.
• New Report Charts—better business management with enhanced at-a-glance reports

ERP Integration

Most importantly to Accpac users, now in addition to the standalone SageCRM 7.1, the integrated version for Sage ERP Accpac 6.0A has also been released. Below is SageCRM 7.1 showing its new default welcome dashboard.

The Sage ERP MAS 90/200 integrated version is still being QA’ed but should be released very shortly.

New Interactive Dashboard

Below is a sample dashboard with some sales analytics. Notice that the layout of the dashboard is much more freeform now, so you can arrange the various widgets anyway you like.

Additionally you can link together dashboard widgets, so you can have one widget showing a list of records linked to another widget that shows all the details for the selected record in the first widget.

Accpac Quote to Order

Of course the Sage ERP Accpac 6.0A Quotes to Orders functionality is all in the integration. The screenshot below is actually the work in progress Accpac 6.1 Quote to Orders where the screen has been “narrowed” to fit on lower resolution screens and work better in monitors portrait modes.

New URL Re-Writer

To make setup and configuration easier, SageCRM 7.1 now uses a URL re-writer to route web requests to its Tomcat server. SData requests are handled by the SageCRM Tomcat server and are an integral part of the new dashboards. In previous versions this was handled by the Jakarta redirector, but now and then there were installation problem with this caused by different versions of IIS, various group policy settings and other security settings. The goal of the new URL re-writer is to provide better flexibility in deployment and configuration as well as to provide a more reliable installation experience. Sage ERP Accpac is also considering adopting this to route Accpac SData requests for the same reasons.

Hint: for this to install properly you need to have the ASP.Net role installed into IIS.

Social Media

Social Media is a major focus of SageCRM. It is being integrated into the product more and more. Plus many Social Media add-ons are being developed such as the SageCRM for Twitter extra and the Social Media Manager from Ebnu Consulting. Generally Social Media is becoming a more integral part of customer relationship management, whether seeing what people are saying about you or connecting and interacting with customers. Many people get their primary information through Facebook, LinkedIn and other sites.

All aspects of CRM are becoming more entangled with various Social Media services whether for advertising, customer feedback, support or any other type of interaction. In many cases these are providing better results that direct mail, e-mail, or phone calls. I blogged a bit about Social Media and ERP last year here, but since then things have come quite a long way and adoption has become much more mainstream.

Going Forwards

Of course Accpac 6.1 will integrate to this version as well as future versions. As Accpac continues its journey to the web that it started with version 6.0A, it will continue to integrate more and more into SageCRM. With both being Web products this becomes much easier in the past. Our technology stacks are aligning and our ability to seamlessly integrate becomes easier and easier. This breaks down the walls between ERP and CRM, allowing users in both worlds to get all the information they need for better decision making, whether its CRM users knowing of collections problems for customers from the back end accounting package, or A/R clerks being aware of communications that are going on between sales and customers they are collecting for.

As we move forwards we will be releasing many new “extras” similar to the “SageCRM for Twitter” extra mentioned above. Look to see some of these improving the ERP to CRM integration. The goal here is to get these into user’s hands sooner rather than having to wait for major releases of either the ERP or CRM product. If you are attending Sage Summit in a few weeks, look to see some previews of these extras that will be available shortly.

Sage has standardized on a REST based Web Services protocol called SData. This protocol is documented at http://sdata.sage.com/. As a first step this will standardize the technology that you use to communicate with Sage applications. You will be able to issue SData requests to multiple Sage products such as Accpac, Abra and SageCRM. As opposed to using a different technology to talk to each, such as COM, .Net, Java, Soap, DLL, etc. All the products will still maintain their existing APIs, but they will all add SData to their repertoire. Even if you are a reporting type application, crossing multiple Sage products can be difficult as they tend to use different databases or have very different schemas. SData is a nice way to hide these differences and to provide a single consistent programming interface.

The next step is to standardize the actual data that is exchanged via SData. Towards this end, Sage is releasing a number of “contracts” that can be used to interface to a given application. For instance the Sage Global CRM (GCRM) Contract (http://sdata.sage.com/sdatacust_GCRM.html) is a standard contract supported by all Sage CRM products including Act!, SalesLogix and SageCRM. If someone integrates to one of these products using SData and the GCRM Contract, then it will be very easy to integrate to any of the other CRM products.

The GCRM contract was created by Sage for mostly selfish reasons. Sage owns dozens of ERP packages in dozens of regions around the world. Having each of these create a point to point integration with one of our CRM packages was proving to be a huge amount of development effort. Plus the results weren’t consistent, some of the integrations were better than others. This started as an attempt to standardize what was being done repeatedly over Sage again and again. However as the work progressed we realized there are a lot of other benefits. Not only does this save Sage some development time and money but it will:

• Provide a standard interface for others to do similar integrations. For instance an ISV could integrate another CRM package to multiple Sage ERP’s by taking advantage of the GCRM contract.
• ISVs will be able to integrate to multiple Sage applications at once (usually part of a suite of products) using only 1 technology.
• The various application contracts are well documented at http://sdata.sage.com/sdatacust.html making life a bit easier.
• Using REST based web services is an efficient way to produce a nice lightly coupled integrations.

Each application will still have a native SData interface where you can get at the full functionality of that product. But these standard contract interfaces will make it far easier for ISV’s to integrate their vertical solutions to multiple Sage products.

Many applications have a component of their data that is shared and needs to be synchronized. For instance much of the data that CRM maintains for its companies is shared by the ERP package in its customer’s information. In most CRM to ERP integrations a large part of the integration is keeping this company/customer data synchronized in the two applications. Similarly for an HR application to ERP integration, typically the employee database tables need to be synchronized in the two applications. SData provides a standardized protocol to allow multiple applications to synchronize data in a uniform manner (http://sdata.sage.com/sdatasync.html).

At the core of the GCRM Contract is the specification of how to synchronize the tradingAccount (company/customer), contact, postalAddress, phoneNumber and email tables. The GCRM contract specifies the fields that make up these standard contract definitions (how CRM and ERP expose their native tables) and what the applications need to do to provide the synchronization. In this case the hard part is handled by the CRM application which hosts the synchronization engine. The ERP package just needs to provide an SData feed for each of these tables in the correct format. Then CRM will periodically ask ERP if anything has changed and if so to provide the updated records. The protocol then has the details of how to handle conflicts and how to catch up if one application was unavailable for a period of time.

The GCRM Contract really consists of three parts:

1. The base customer/company tables that need to be synchronized and the protocol to handle that.
2. A number of real time data SData feeds in a standard format to access much of the data in the CRM product.
3. A set of SData feed definitions that allow CRM to provide a basic Order Entry screen, to query pricing information from the ERP and feed orders into the ERP package.

These three parts can be used independently. For instance Accpac could use the GCRM contract synchronization contract to replace the current method and start incorporating CRM data into its own UIs that is retrieved by the real time SData feeds, but then rather than using the CRM Order Entry screen, surface the Accpac Order Entry screen inside of CRM (the quote-to-order feature: http://smist08.wordpress.com/2009/12/17/sage-erp-accpac-6-0-quote-to-orders/).

As Sage moves ahead with adopting our REST based Web Services, SData, you will be seeing more and more new technologies based on this. Generally Sage is looking to develop many SData based technologies that can be shared across all Sage products and can be utilized by all Sage development partners.

Sage ERP Accpac and SageCRM have a very tight integration. But the current generation of Accpac is a Windows desktop application and SageCRM is a Web Browser based application. SageCRM will display a fair amount of Accpac data in its web pages, but at some point you drill down into the Accpac application and an Accpac screen will be run. This causes a disconnect for the customer as they switch from the SageCRM Web application to the Accpac Desktop application. There are also performance problems with this context switch and some installation difficulties getting the “Web” based version of the current Accpac installed and configured properly since it uses ActiveX controls.

Now as Sage ERP Accpac transforms itself into a true zero-client Ajax HTML/Javascript Browser based application (with no ActiveX controls), we want that to leverage this new technology to improve our SageCRM integration. For Accpac 6.0 we will start that process by offering native Web based versions of our Quote and Orders screens that will run natively inside SageCRM. These screens will be styled like all the other CRM screens and customers shouldn’t be able to tell the difference whether they are working with one of these Accpac screens or any of the regular CRM screens.

The styling and screen aren’t fully developed yet, but below is an early prototype of the start of a Quote screen running as part of the CRM web page.

The key points are that the screen lives inside CRM, it does not pop out of the application and when it’s finished it will be styled to look like all the other screens.

This way a sales person running SageCRM, won’t know he’s running multiple Sage applications as he manages his contacts, leads and opportunities as well as entering quotes and orders. To him it is all one application.

There is a fair bit of extra work going on behind the scenes to ensure that the workflow is continuous, data is automatically transferred from one step to the next (like opportunity to quote to order), and data is automatically synchronized in both directions with Accpac. If some one edits an Order in Accpac, then the opportunity and other data is kept in sync in CRM. We are also smoothing out some of the supporting workflows, like how a lead is promoted to a customer.

There are a couple of other screens like an Order Summary screen that are being added to our SageCRM integration using the new Web Based UI framework. But many of the other screen like if you drill down into A/R or PJC will still result in the VB screen being run in 6.0. We will be looking to fix up these in Sage ERP Accpac 6.1.

Hopefully this is a step to making the End-to-End application experience much more seamless for customers. Combining this with the SData initiative, we should start seeing much closer integrations between Sage products as they incorporate all these new and exciting technologies.