Friday, October 31, 2008

InBizness 2.7 Role Based Dashboards

Database dashboards are not a particularly new thing and independent developers have been adding them to their solutions for years. This may be the first appearance of a FileMaker framework application that has this sort of implementation. In this implementation, you can assign a role to your staff members via the staff module and you can select if they open automatically to their dashboard or the traditional InBizness main screen.

In the InBizness 2.7, we have added dashboards for Customer Service, Sales Staff, Accounting, Information Technology and Workgroup managers. Traditionally, when we introduce a new module within InBizness, we try to not overload it with features you may not want. As we release each following update, these modules get more and more customer requested features. This is also the case with the InBizness role based dashboards. For the most part, each dashboard has its own layout and that layout is designed to have multiple tables for role based views. In these tabs, you can add buttons and portals that are specific to that business role. On exception in this update was for the Information Technology Dashboard. Here we included a Tab and Portal to show staff user log in activities and filtered by date range.

CUSTOMER SERVICE DASHBOARD
Designed for growth and to eventually show customer service members alerts that pertain to support calls, products that need to be returned and credits that might need to be issued to customers. We foresee this screen to interface mostly with the clients, contacts, invoices, payments, events, credit memo, return merchandise and customer support modules.

SALES STAFF DASHBOARD
Designed for growth and to eventually aid sales professionals to see the leads and quotes they need to follow up upon. Can be used to show saved searches to target what they need to do in their business day. We foresee this screen to interface mostly with the clients, contacts, leads, quotes, sales orders invoices, inventory, campaign, events and support modules.

ACCOUNTING DASHBOARD
Designed for growth and to eventually to aid the accounting related actions such as deposits that need to be done, breakdown of income by type, QuickBooks integration status and more. We foresee this screen to interface mostly with the clients, contacts, vendors, invoices, payments, inventory, purchase orders, finance, bank deposit, events and credit memo modules.

INFORMATION TECHNOLOGY DASHBOARD
Designed for growth and to eventually aid the in house technology support professional including some of the technical management needs of InBizness itself. We foresee this screen to interface mostly with the staff, media and support modules.

WORKGROUP MANAGER DASHBOARD
Designed for growth and to eventually to aid managers in the support of the members of the workgroups they manage. This can include views of timecard records, tasks, correspondence and much more. We foresee this screen to interface mostly with the staff, clients, contacts, leads, quotes, sales orders invoices, inventory, campaign, events and support modules.

Sunday, October 26, 2008

User Sessions Table

From Dwayne Wright - Certified FileMaker 9 Developer
WEB: www.dwaynewright.com
EMAIL: info@dwaynewright.com
TWITTER: dwaynewright

A User Sessions Table is used to log when a user opens a database file or closes a database file. This is usually accomplished with the help of scripts that activate on open or close of a database. When the scripts activate, they navigate to a layout that allows for a creation of a new record and attach the necessary information.

This is what I wrote when I added the term User Sessions Table into the FileMaker Term Of The Day blog. I then realized that I really wanted to go the extra mile, add this to my InBizness 2.7 release and write a more robust article for the FileMaker Security Explored Blog. So here goes ...

When I decided to implement a User Sessions Table, I already had some of the necessary code in place. I had a staff table that is tied to my user accounts and privilege set information. The staff file is used to add user accounts to the system and I setup the roles field in staff to correspond to the privilege set information that FileMaker uses. Also, I had setup a global variable to capture a variety of information on startup. The name of the global variable is $$session and the included calculation is ....

"LANGUAGE:" & cfTab & Get ( ApplicationLanguage ) &
"¶APP VERSION:" & cfTab & Get ( ApplicationVersion ) &
"¶LAST LOG IN:" & cfTab & Get ( CurrentTimeStamp ) &
"¶DESKTOP PATH:" & cfTab & Get ( DesktopPath ) &
"¶DOCUMENTS PATH:" & cfTab & Get ( DocumentsPath ) &
"¶EXTENDED PRIV:" & cfTab & Get ( ExtendedPrivileges ) &
"¶PRINTER:" & cfTab & Get ( PrinterName ) &
"¶PRIV SET:" & cfTab & Get ( PrivilegeSetName ) &
"¶SCREEN DEPTH:" & cfTab & Get ( ScreenDepth ) &
"¶SCREEN WIDTH:" & cfTab & Get ( ScreenWidth ) &
"¶SCREEN HEIGHT:" & cfTab & Get ( ScreenHeight ) &
"¶SYSTEM DRIVE:" & cfTab & Get ( SystemDrive ) &
"¶SYSTEM IP:" & cfTab & Get ( SystemIPAddress ) &
"¶SYSTEM LANGUAGE:" & cfTab & Get ( SystemLanguage ) &
"¶SYSTEM NIC:" & cfTab & Get ( SystemNICAddress ) &
"¶SYSTEM PLATFROM:" & cfTab & Get ( SystemPlatform ) &
"¶SYSTEM VERSION:" & cfTab & Get ( SystemVersion ) &
"¶USER NAME:" & cfTab & Get ( UserName ) &
"¶DATABASE NAMES:" & cfTab & DatabaseNames

FYI ... cfTab is a custom function to put the appropriate number of tab characters between the label for the captured data and the data itself. So the next step was to create the Users Session Table itself and my version has the following fields ...


Next up was to add some logic to my startup and shutdown scripts to record those activities to my user sessions table.


Finally, in version 2.7 of InBizness, I’m incorporating role base dashboards as an alternative to the main screen. One of these dashboards is for the companies information technology staff members. Showing startup and shutdown sessions is a natural place to show this information. So here is a peek at what I have setup.

Here you can see one of the tabs in the information tech dashboard. This tab allows me to see the log in and log out information of users within the system. You can click this picture to expand your viewing of the image.
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More info about the author and FileMaker in general, contact me at info@dwaynewright.com.

© 2008 - Dwayne Wright - dwaynewright.com

The material on this document is offered AS IS. There is NO REPRESENTATION OR WARRANTY, expressed or implied, nor does any other contributor to this document. WARRANTIES OF MERCHANT ABILITY AND FITNESS FOR A PARTICULAR PURPOSE ARE EXPRESSLY DISCLAIMED. Consequential and incidental damages are expressly excluded. FileMaker Pro is the registered trademark of FileMaker Inc.

Wednesday, October 22, 2008

FAQ: How Difficult To Create Batch Events For Leads

QUESTION: Specifically: I have established an eight step "campaign" process, whereby each targeted business will be the subject of eight sales communications (phone/fax/email), each of which is pre-scheduled to follow the previous contact a pre-defined number of days later. Each "contact" (call/email/fax) of the campaign is date calculated back to the first contact date (or campaign start date).

Can you tell me whether my sales campaign scheduling ("templating"?) can be "easily" incorporated into InBizness, either by myself, or by you as customization I will gladly pay for.

ANSWER: Well, as odd as it may sound, I decided to go ahead and add this feature in my upcoming release of InBizness 2.7. As I was adding the script, I wrote an article about the process for the FileMaker Scripting Explored blog. Here is a link to the article ... http://tinyurl.com/6emdvn

You can click on either image to view it better.


Here you can see the Leads layout and highlighting some of the key data that is brought over to the newly created events.

Here you can see the newly created and linked events.

Monday, October 20, 2008

Virtual One On One Sessions Using Yugma

We use a variety of tools to share screens with users as we go over FileMaker solutions in our Virtual One On One sessions. If you are a Macintosh user with an iChat account, we can use iChat. For Windows users, the one we use most is called Yugma and it is free to our clients.

HOW TO GET STARTED WITH YUGMA?
You will want to visit Yugma.com and setup a free account. This is usually done by clicking the link for Get Yugma. Enter in the information and click the Sign Up Now button. After the sign up is done, it is pretty much smooth sailing from there. Yugma does have a conference call number but I rarely use that. I have had some lack luster results with it and most of my sessions are one to one anyway. So feel free to call me at 360-863-3021 when ready to start the session. This way we can work out any connection issues we are having at the moment.

If you have a session scheduled, let me know when this is complete and I will send you a link via email to start our session. Here you can see how Yugma tells us the we have a session going.

Here you can see a look at how the email invite looks like.

After we get connected, you will be seeing my screen. In most cases, we will want to switch the access so that you are the presenter. This is done by one of the blue buttons about the Yugma tool bar. After this is done, you will need to click the large blue button to change begin sharing. Then I can see your screen. If you want me to interact with your screen and your FileMaker database, you will want to click the blue button to give desktop control.

The Change Presenter button with the tooltip for it showing as well.

Here you can see the big blue Begin Sharing button.

Here you can see the desktop control button.

Wednesday, October 15, 2008

FAQ: Editing Global Field Data

QUESTION: When creating an invoice and then clicking the "print current record" button, your name and address appear on the from line. I can change the address manually for each instance, but I can't figure out how to change the global so that it defaults to our address.

ANSWER: Most of the preference data is stored in global fields. Global fields are session specific when FileMaker is being hosted. So to edit globals, take the database off of the server, make the edits and then put the changed database up for hosting.

Wednesday, October 8, 2008

Main Module Preferences Tab - General

The preferences tab in InBizness is an effort that continues to evolve over time. This update includes the updates up to version 2.6. The Preferences tab includes the three sub-tabs of General, Invoices and Purchase Orders.

The general preferences tab contains settings that can appear in many modules or control InBizness operations in diverse ways.

Here you can see the settings for the General preferences area.

The General sub-tab contains the ability to enter in company name and address information that will appear in many printouts that InBizness uses. It also contains the ability to enter in an email address for security updates. This is used when someone edits the sign in credentials via the staff module. Another setting is the ability to determine what month is used in Fiscal Year reporting.

Here you can see a snapshot from a printed invoice and the area in which the company and address information set in the preferences area appears.

Here you can see the security tab in the staff module. This allows you to navigate to a staff members record and update their sign in creditentials for InBizness. This means a user doesn’t not have to navigate to the Manage Accounts and Privileges menu because these security settings are scripted within InBizness.

Here you can see the Reports menu and the Fiscal Quarter Sales Report selected.