Adding a LinkedIn profile URL to SugarCRM Contacts

Posted by Robert Merrill on August 27, 2011 under Tech Tips | Be the First to Comment

I’ve done a lot of networking in the last two days, and as I was adding new Accounts and Contacts to SugarCRM, I thought, “There’s a field for the Account (company) web site, but wouldn’’t it be nice to have one for the Contact’s LinkedIn profile?”

I use SugarCRM because it’s open source and I knew that if I needed to I could modify it, but I don’t have time for even a little PHP programming project right now. But, as it turns out, adding a field is ridiculously easy. (I’m running SugarCRM Community 6.2).

Log into Sugar as Administrator.

In the upper right, click Admin.

Scroll down to the (possibly intimidating) Developer Tools and select Studio, then Contacts.

Then select Fields. (You have to create the new field first).

Select Add Field. You should see a little form like this. Here’s mine, already filled out. I stuck a c_ on the beginning of my field name so that I could quickly spot it as custom.  Then save it. Notice on the Field selector page that you now have a new field above the horizontal line. I’m assuming that the horizontal line separates custom fields from built-in ones.

At this point, I thought I was done. So I logged out as admin and back in as just plain old robert and brought up a Contact. No LinkedIn Profile field. Huh.

So, back to Administrator mode, and this time to Admin, Studio, Contacts.

Then select Layouts (here’s where it really gets cool).

There are three Layouts–the List View (search results), the Detail View (of a single Contact), and the Edit View.

I figured, “I need to be able to add and edit, so I’ll start  with Edit View.” Clicking that brings up this editor. At first, I tried just dragging the LinkedIn Profile field over onto the form, between eMail and Description, but it didn’t “stick.” So then I tried dragging a “New Row” over to where I wanted it, and that worked. But it had two “filler” fields. I just want one field spanning the whole panel, but oh well.

I dragged LinkedIn Profile over to the left filler and it “took.”

By trial and error, I found that by clicking the little + (plus sign) to the left of LinkedIn profile, it expanded to replace both filler fields!

Save & Deploy, go to the Detail View and List View and repeat the process, and, as the Aussies say, Bob’s your uncle.

List View does require a bit of futzing around with percentage widths. I took user out (since I’m the only one running this instance of Sugar) and put LinkedIn Profile in.

Now, I can add a person’s LinkedIn profile as soon as I put them in Sugar, and when I search for that person later, their LI profile is clickable, right from the search results, and opens in a new tab.

Not bad for 15 minutes of “work.” I took far longer to write this post than it took to add the field.

I hope someone finds this and that it makes SugarCRM more useful for you.

It’s also a great example of how modern HCJ (HTML, CSS, and Javascript) are enabling web apps to take over the world!

Awesome tech support from Dell

Posted by Robert Merrill on March 5, 2011 under Tech Tips | Be the First to Comment

I bought a new XPS laptop back in January 2011. I started installing all my software and it was, well, flaky. Turns out it had a defective hard drive; a chkdsk /r/f detected and repaired a bunch of bad clusters.

So I kept on, and it started getting flaky again. Time to call Dell. Oh joy. So I started documenting everything I’d done and every test I’d done, expecting a fight.

I called and entered the IVR. Here we go, I thought. Read more of this article »

Moving a Scoutwest Standard Time database off MS Vista

Posted by Robert Merrill on February 11, 2011 under Tech Tips | Be the First to Comment

I couldn’t find a Scoutwest Standard Time forum, and there were no entries for it on Experts Exchange, so that’s why this solution is in this obscure place.

When moving a Standard Time database from Microsoft Vista, it may not be where you think it is. The Scoutwest documentation for, “How do I move an ODBC database to a new place?” says, “1. Copy Standard Time.mdb to the new directory or a new machine.” Simple enough. The File DSN definition says it’s in C:\Program Files\Standard Time, and sure enough, there’s a file there named Standard Time.mdb. But that might not be the one you want.

If you bring that file over to, say Standard Time 7 on Windows 7, you’ll put it in C:\Users\<username>\Documents\Standard Time\Standard Time.mdb. That’s where my fresh install of ST v7 created its empty database, behind a File DSN still called Standard Time mdb (no period) as in v4. But of my four years of client billable hours records—nothing.

At first I attributed it to the upgrade process, going from v4 on the Vista machine to v7 on the 64-bit Windows 7. The very helpful Scoutwest rep didn’t think so, but let me download v5 and v6 to run the upgrade one step at a time. I did that on the Vista machine and it worked flawlessly. Now that I had a v7 database, I thought, “Bob’s my uncle,” as they say.

But still no joy. I made a copy of the database in C:\Program Files\Standard Time on the Vista machine and inspected it with Access 2007 (.mdb is the old Access JET format, but 2007 can still work with them). No upgrade records in the Version table. Huh. Plus, it’s awfully small—827K. But yet I start Standard Time 7 on the old machine and there it all is.

Finally, a full-system search revealed the copy lurking in C:\Users\<username>\AppData\Virtual Store\Program Files\Standard Time—a v7 Standard Time.mdb of over 30 MB, complete with four records in Version. I copied that file to the Windows 7 machine and all was well.

Just to prove my hypothesis, I restored the v4 database to AppData\Virtual Store from backup and copied that to Windows 7. Standard Time v7 did the upgrade in place, and there were the last four years of my business data.

Standard Time’s a great product for anyone who has to keep accurate records of their time. But if you’re running into trouble getting those records off of a Windows Vista machine, maybe this will help you.