A View from the TopLine

If you’re new to using Microsoft Dynamics CRM, here are a couple of my favorite time-saving short cuts which will help increase your productivity.  When using CRM from your web browser, you can access a shortcut menu from each heading in the navigation section — hover and then click on the arrow to open the view.

Most of you may have heard by now that Sage has reached an agreement to sell the ACT! and SalesLogix software lines to another organization, Swiftpage.  While this was a somewhat surprising development, we here at TopLine Results welcome this change and are excited about the future of these products.

You may have heard the term cloud storage, but do you know what it means? Cloud storage is a service which allows you to store your documents and files on a network of servers maintained by a trusted third party.

If you are not currently using a cloud storage service, you should consider adding one.

It’s a new year and for many of us that means resolutions.  I'm sure if you are anything like me there are some resolutions left over from last year . . . marathon anyone?  Many businesses have goals or resolutions which they map out at the beginning of the year, but never complete due to daily road blocks and distractions.

The acronym for customer relationship management, CRM, was first introduced in early 2000 as a replacement for the now-outdated term sales force automation (SFA).  CRM was immortalized in the popular lexicon when Microsoft CRM came to market in 2003.  For those of us in attendance at the 2003 industry tradeshow where Microsoft CRM 1.0 was launched, one thing became clear:  Microsoft’s entry to the CRM field was going to make this young industry better understood in the marketplace.

TopLine Alerts runs as a Windows Service which means that it runs whenever Windows is running, even if you are not logged onto your computer.  In order to do this, you must specify which user on your computer (or domain) this service should run as.

Due to some structural changes in ACT! 2013, there will be some tweaks that need to be made in order to get TopLine Alerts and TopLine Dash/Alerts to work properly.

If you are not using TopLine Alerts, you do not need to worry about any of this.

The TopLine Dash preferences store the last dashboard that you opened so that it will automatically open the same one when you start ACT! the next time.  Sometimes you will want to reset these.  In order to do this perform the following steps.

For one reason or another, you may want to reset your TopLine Designer preferences.  This primarily means that any custom columns that you may have set will be set back to their defaults.

To do this:

1.  Click on the Tools menu in ACT!.

2.  Click on the TopLine Designer - Manager menu item.

If you are mixing versions of TopLine Designer and make schema modifications using an old version, it's possible to corrupt your metadata.  Newer versions of TopLine Designer prevent this from occuring but if you find yourself in this situation, follow these steps.