One of my clients had their SugarCRM notifications stop working.
After a lot of testing, it turns out that if I set the FROM name to be the same as the FROM address it started working again.
WordPress for iOS
I’ve just loaded WordPress for iOS onto my phone, and this is the obligatory test post.
Importing Data Into SugarCRM
Working with SugarCRM (Pro, OnDemand) last week and discovered a wonderful thing!
SugarCRM has been designed to import record ID numbers from other systems. So long as the id numbers you’re importing are less than 36 characters, and are globally unique (not just unique to the entity, i.e. contacts, notes, accounts) you’re in business, you can simply import the legacy record ID into the Sugar ID field (see below on how to make it globally unique).
This is a great thing. Before knowing this, and with other systems, you need to create a custom field in each entity to store the legacy ID number, import the data into that entity, then export it with the new system’s ID number. You can then match up this new ID number with other data so that the relationships get maintained. This is discovery is for me a wonderful thing, others already know this as it was designed this way, but this will save me a lot of work.
One of the tips given to me by one of the SugarCRM support people was that if the ID isn’t globally unique, then simply suffix it (or prefix it) with something unique for that entity. For example, if Accounts and Contacts both have an ID of “ABCD-1234″ you could suffix all the Accounts record ID’s with “_Acct” and the Contact record ID’s with “_Cont”. This effectively makes them globally unique. Do the same for any ID’s in other entities, for example, in the Notes table, any Contact ID’s would get suffixed the same way with “_Cont”.
Account Records Before:
- ID, AccountName:
- ABCD-1234, Doe Exports
- ABCD-4321, Joes Toes
Contact Records Before:
- ID, ContactName
- ABCD-1234, Jane Doe
- ABCD-4321, Joey Blowy
As you can see above, the ID’s are unique to the entity but not globally unique (and we do want them globally unique). By suffixing the ID’s we can make them globally unique as you see below:
Account Records After:
- ID, AccountName
- ABCD-1234_Acct, Doe Exports
- ABCD-4321_Acct, Joes Toes
Contact Records After:
- ID, ContactName
- ABCD-1234_Cont, Jane Doe
- ABCD-4321_Cont, Joey Blowy
This really does make it much easier import lots of data and keep the relationships between pieces of information. For example, Notes would then look like this:
Notes after:
- ID, RelatedContact, RelatedAccount, Note
- 123_Note, ABCD-1234_Cont, ABCD-1234_Acct, “Spoke with Jane re recent purchase.”
- 456_Note, ABCD-4321_Cont, ABCD-4321_Acct, “Joey rang, wants to double his order.”
If only it were this easy importing into other CRM’s. Let me know if you have any questions about importing data into SugarCRM.
My Choices Led Me Here
I am here because of my choices, my decisions.
Because of my actions and my inactions.
Like it, or like it not.
That is the why.
You could accurately say “I chose to be here”.
The choices ahead, they will determine where I go.
Where are you?
And where are you going?
Are you choices leading you where you want to go?
Excel formula to convert minutes into Hours and Minutes
On occasion I end up with an Excel spreadsheet that has a list of items, each of which has a duration. It’s easy to sum up the minutes and get a total number of minutes (see B7 in the picture below).
But it would be nice to see that in “x hours y minutes.” don’t you think? Yup, so do I. And that’s what I’ve done in the C9 cell in the picture below.
Human Readable Hours and Minutes
So without further ado, here is the Excel formula to do this
=ROUNDDOWN(B7/60,0)&" hours "&MOD(B7,60)&" minutes."
Let me know if you find this helpful.
Editing Microsoft Office Documents on the iPad
I got asked on the weekend about what do I use on the iPad to edit Microsoft documents.
I’ve been using an iPad (the ‘new iPad’ or the ‘iPad 3′ depending on who you talk to) and have been needing to both create and edit Microsoft Office Word and Excel documents.
I’ve tried using Google Apps but have found that it just wasn’t that easy, and I had to be online, which wasn’t a problem most of the time, but occasionally was quite frustrating if the connection was either slow or non-existent.
So I hunted around for a native app, and ended up with Quick Office HD, which is perhaps the most expensive app I’ve bought. However, it has proven to be very well spent money.
I’ve been able to open existing files, create new ones, save them to a Dropbox folder and either have them available on my workstation or laptop, or email a colleague a link to the file. This has proved to be a great combination (Quick Office HD and Dropbox).
As it so happens, Quick Office has been acquired by Google, so I’m hopeful that sometime in the near future a better option will exist for Google Doc’s.
Quickly Create Bulleted Lists On iPads
I’m a newcomer to the iPad, but I’ve found that creating a bulleted list in an email can be rather time consuming as to get an ‘asterik’ (star, SHIFT-8, one of these *) takes a few taps on the keyboard.
I’ve found a quicker way to make them happen, here it is:
- Go to Settings
- General
- Keyboard
- Add New Shortcut
- The ‘Phrase’ is ‘* ‘ (that’s a star followed by a space, without the quote marks)
- The ‘Shortcut’ is ‘,,’ (that’s two comma’s)
Now when I type two comma’s followed by a space, it’ll replace that with a star followed by a space. Great easy bulleted lists in emails.
Getting ifttt to add to RTM
If that headline made sense to you, then you’re in the right place :)
The ifttt recipe
The problem I had is that ifttt doesn’t by default integrate with RTM.
So I’ve come up with a way that creates a new RTM task for me whenever there is a new item in a particular RSS feed.
We create a ifttt recipe that:
- When there is a new item in the specified RSS feed.
- Will send me an email with a unique subject line.
- Our email program (GMail in my case) has a filter set to look for that unique subject line and then forward that email to our special RTM email address (see this page for help with the RTM email stuff).
I’ve used [RTMwithSOMEuniqueLETTERS] as my subject line so that nothing will accidentally happen.
RTM (Remember The Milk) and ifttt have a bunch of features that I wish the Sage ACT! or SugarCRM task lists would emulate (or buy), it’s this sort of automation that can become very handy.
Howto: Lock Windows Machines From Command Line
I’ve recorded a short video on how to lock windows machines from the windows command line. Let me know if you found it useful.
General Insights
I’ve got back from the the Sage Insights conference on the Sunshine Coast, Australia. There were a couple of things that I’ve found of key interest:
- We saw a demo of the Sage ACT! Premium for Web HTML5 interface. Really liked the look of this, quite excited about this as I’m sure a number of our clients are going to love this.
- Got to speak with some Sage NA staff re the 2012 ‘feature that isn’t a feature’ Sage Analytics. I see this as being of benefit to a number of our clients as it allows them to quickly rearrange a view of their data to show their key metrics.
- Hearing the continuing focus on allowing the clients to choose if they want on-premise deployment or cloud/private cloud deployments. Good to know the plan is not to force clients into a SaaS only model like Salesforce.
- Hearing Chris Gordon at SwiftPage (providers of Sage ACT! E-Marketing) talk about what they’ve seen work for e-marketing users and give examples of those. Great info.
Of course it was great to catch up in person with those that came from the Sage USA, Sydney and Melbourne and especially the other ACC’s that attended from around Australia and New Zealand. The next 12 months promise some change. I’m looking forward to it.