For Quick View, sections I. Highlights to V. Quick View (10 to 20 minutes) - click here.

Note about pop ups

Various modules employ popups (Visualizer, Calendar, Query Builder, Widgets). You need to allow popups in your browser's settings to view those modules.

VI. Extended View 

Before going through the following, please go through V. Quick View so that you understand the fundamentals of logging in and the menu selections and selecting and working with the main modules. 

On each module, click [Help] in the lower left corner to view the module-sensitive help (On the Home page, [Help] is in the upper left corner). Please have a quick look through the help page for each module you work with.

From the Home page we suggest you select [My modules], then [Select all] and [Save module settings] so that all modules are available.

A bit more detail

Log in

If you haven’t logged in, from the Log in page, select Dan from the dropdown list then click [Log in].

Floating menu (requires popups to be allowed)

The [Quick menu] floats a menu bar. This is not necessary, but it simplifies access to menu items. You can make it pop up whenever you go to your Home page through the Home page > [Preferences] tab, ‘Display popup menu?’ checkbox. (Click [Save preferences] after making changes). The next time you come to your Home page, the menu will display.

Home page

The Home page provides access to the visualizer (identified by the small, square buttons with 4 color circles in it – representing the nodes in the visualizer), and the To do button shows several outstanding to dos. 

You should try the visualizer. Click the To Do visualizer button. Later, in Contacts, you will have a chance to visualize a contact’s network of connections.

• Mouse around in the visualizer window. 

• Mouse exactly over a node to see its relationship to the prime node (the blue one). 

• Mouse over a node or its description to highlight that node in the display area on the right, then click [Get the highlighted item] to display that record in the main display window.

You’ll see a lot more of this functionality when you get to contacts and start viewing connections in the Visualizer window.

Visualizer

Everybody loves the visualizer. It’s a very right-brain way of looking at data, and a really handy way of having a central window from which you can execute many actions. The visualizer is available in Home page, Contacts, Actions, Help Desk and Projects.

In Contacts, it’s very much akin to the “6 degrees of separation” everyone is familiar with. We show a prime and 2 outer layers (degrees). Clicking on any node in either of the outer layers makes that node the prime and displays 2 outer layers linked to that prime.

You can literally walk through your entire contact database if you’ve done a lot of linking.

This is the way to build contact networks – everyone in the workgroup or company links contacts wherever possible. The results are very cool.

Favorite reports

Note on the Home page [Information] section ‘My Favorite Reports’ near the bottom. This is the way to provide you with any number of reports you can run as frequently as you want, all designed by you or anyone else, using Query Builder.

You can readily select new Queries into the list or remove the ones that are there. You can also open the queries and run them, or change them, any time.

Calendar (requires popups to be allowed)

Click the [Calendar] icon in the left-side menu to bring up the calendar. Add an appointment or two in a time that hasn’t yet expired (otherwise the appointment will show up as “past”).

• The calendar is a pop-out (our term for a pop-up) so you can continue to work and leave the calendar open (it can be minimized). It needs to be open for the Reminders to pop up at the appropriate times.

• From an appointment detail, you can send Meeting Emails to any number of attendees, either through the [Ad hoc] addressing function or by selecting from the contact list.

• View the Week view and the Group view.

• Review the calendar’s interface generally, noting the various buttons at the top.

• Click [Help] in the top left side area and review the module-sensitive help.

• Go back to the Home page, under the [Information] tab, click [Refresh all items] if you’ve added an appointment.

Resources

From the Home page, click the [Resources] icon on the left-side menu to display the module selections for the resources group.

As you move through this extended section, if you try to access a module that isn’t selected in the Home page’s [My modules] section, you can go back and select that module and save your selection, then go back to the desired module.

Resources are the group of information-gathering modules. 

Contacts

Spend the most time in Contacts and the various direct links.

• The default module is Contacts and the contacts list view will be presented. Note the Quick Search panel if it’s displayed. If it’s not displayed, click [Search] to display it.

• The search panel is a key element throughout various modules and enables not only quick searches by clicking and typing a bit of information, but goes further by providing [Advanced search] that brings up our full-blown Ad hoc Query Builder.

• Click [Help] to bring up the Contacts help page. Scroll down to the Contact list heading – List action area. Below the list image, you’ll see a link “Click here for information on searching.”. Click that link and review the search help page.

• Back at the contact list, click the folder icon next to Reference ID: _Compexamp01066. That’s Mr. _Complete Individual.

• Read through that contact’s information, particularly the Comments section, and follow the things to try. If you have Skype installed, change the Work phone to some other number (like our number: 1 250 769 3951) and call.

• Also, click the Google [Map] button next to the address to display the map.

• In Contacts, note the way an individual can be linked directly to a company: Above the Company field at the top middle are buttons: [Lookup] [Clear] [Go to], etc. Try them.

Connections from Contacts

• Click the [Visualize] button to see the connections visually. Leave the visual display open on your desktop so that you can quickly access the main contact or any connection, should you need to.

• Also click the [Connections] button to see how to view the connections list and move to the connections module where you can select a connection and skip to that connection’s contact record.

Memorizing Contacts

Contacts employs the concept of a memorized contact. 

That means that if you’ve memorized a specific contact or looked up and fetched a contact from the list view, that contact will be hidden away in memory that can be used to populate various links in Contacts, Projects, Document Management, Catalog Management, Help desk and so on. 

• To memorize a contact, you can select Edit > Memorize/Insert or click the Memorize button (the two documents button). Also, the last contact you have looked up and retrieved will be memorized.

To demonstrate, from _Compexamp01066, click Memorize. Then click the Project icon on the top toolbar or select Links > Projects/Opps from the menu to display the Projects module.

Project, opportunity and client file management (Projects)

Since, in this case, Projects was called from a “parent” module, the menu bar will show a quick return to that parent (in this case a Contact).

We are looking for File # 1084. You may have to select ‘Show Open(0) and Closed(1) and possibly ‘That belong to: Anyone’ to see it. Click that folder icon on the row to open the project.

• Have a look at the Project page content. Click [Help] and read through the help file.

• Note on the Project page “Owner”. This is automatically assigned because there is a “parent”/ owner record. 

• Note in the bottom area “Clone this record…”. This is a cool feature that lets you create a new record type from an existing record. So if you wanted to remind yourself to do something with this project, you’d select To do and click [Go] to create a record. The new record is automatically linked to the Parent of the project but you can change that to anything you like.

• Note the lists on the right side of the Project page: Activities, Steps/tactics and Sub projects.

• Activities tracks all the non-tactical actions linked to this project. You can view and add as needed.

• Tactics sequences special “program” action records according to the ranking you provide. This enables you to set up a series of steps to take on the project.

• Sub projects are projects linked to this project. You can have unlimited sub projects and, of course, those sub projects can have sub-projects, and they can have them, and so on.

• Check the menu bar in the top right area, noting that documents can be attached to a project.

• Also, click [Note] on that menu bar. This pops up Quick Note, a very handy feature for creating either General or To do records, linked to the record that it’s created from. You can add time information here, so this is a cool feature for professionals needing to do time tracking.

• Click [Contact] under “Return to” on the left-side menu to go back to the contact record.

As an aside: some information on Campaigns

Complete email and phone campaigns are supported, including bulk email, from one phase to multiple phases, including print, email and phone campaign elements within any single campaign. Multi-phase campaigns are also known as ‘Drip Marketing’ campaigns because they enable a business to send out a series of planned information types over an extended time period.

Campaign steps can contain attachments, content with field placeholders, replaceable at runtime with current customer and other information, templates created in Quill.

There is a lot more on campaigns in our online Help at http://dalcotech.com/qhelp/qhelpmain.aspx (or via our main web site - look for the Support > Help option. Check out Help > Modules > Campaigns.

Help Desk

Back in Contacts (specifically _CompExamp01066) click the Help desk icon on the top toolbar or select Links > Help desk/tickets from the menu to display the Help desk module.

There should be an existing ticket. 

• Another cool feature is the ability to create a help desk ticket, then suspend the ticket while you move through other modules to view or do things.

• Select ticket 1425 and read the Notes. It explains how [Pop Quick] was used.

• Review Help Desk and its [Help] pages.

• Return to our contact either by clicking [Contacts] if the “Return to” wording is displayed in the left-side menu or by clicking [Go] in the body area of the ticket.

Documents

Back in Contacts, click the Docs icon on the top toolbar or select Links > documents from the menu to display the Documents module. This will take you to a documents list for the contact. 

Document management is the Achilles heel of many workgroups and businesses; not so here. 

Not only are documents stored and managed centrally with full search capabilities, but further there are optional links to contacts and projects so that the association is always intact.

For example, leases can be linked to a contact record for the leasing agent, blueprints and plans to a building project and so on. In turn, the building project could be linked up line to a customer contact record.

There are both document and catalog management modules (more on catalogs later). 

Documents has two list display methods: grid (spreadsheet-type) and tree view. The default is to the tree view.

Documents - Tree view

In the tree view, expand the folders. There should be a DOC and a TXT document. Click the TXT rows then click [Preview on] to display the text in the adjacent window. 

Later, from your Home page, go to the Documents module and do the same for either/both GIF and JPG (image files). With image files, you can choose to fit the image in the display window or display the whole image.

A couple of neat things to do with docs:

• Click a PDF row and [Preview] to preview any PDF files.

• Click on a DOC or other type row then [Retrieve] to open or save a file.

• Click a row then click [Email] to create an email populated with the document and its description. You can cancel or complete the email as you wish.

Documents – Grid view

Click [Grid view] to display the document records in a spreadsheet style. 

Click the icon in the first column on a row to open the document detail page or click the loopback icon to upload the document to your desktop.

• Back when you were drilling down from the Contact, note that you could have checked the box, “Include proj docs” beside the Documents button to gather a list of all documents directly and indirectly linked to this contact.

• The Document Manager enables the central storing, search and retrieval of any type of document. 

• View all documents by returning to the Home page, clicking [Resources] then clicking [Docs] or more quickly by clicking the [Docs] icon.

• This will display all the documents stored on the central server (note: document access is restricted to authority level).

• The document manager lets you manage not only documents but also web page URLs. To demonstrate, click [New] from the Document List View.

• The detail page will display. Click [Help] and read through, then open a web page and try dragging the web URL from the browser’s Address box into the blue-framed box on the document page. You can then assign an owner if you want, along with group, sub group, keywords and so on.

• After you save the URL and return to the list view, you can use the search panel to quickly access the web page by searching on keyword and setting the Optional dropdown appropriately.

Let’s return to that contact (_Compexamp01066). If you’ve broken the direct link to the contact, just go to Contacts List View and locate and select the contact again. The ReferenceID is _Compexamp01066. To get there, go Home then select [Contacts] from the left side menu.

Also, if the Data Visualizer is still open, you could highlight the contact by placing your cursor over it in the node display or in the list on the right then selecting [Get the highlighted item].

Contacts - Background button

There is extensive customization capability available, including unlimited additional fields for any module. The administrator is responsible for setting them up.

• For all modules, those custom fields show up to the right of the default field set. 

• A horizontal scroll bar allows scrolling to the custom fields. 

• Also, you can tab from the last default field to the first custom field then on to other custom fields.

Contacts has custom fields that show up to the right, but Contacts goes further and lets you define up to 10 custom panels, each panel having its own identifying button and an unlimited number of fields. Those fields can be any type and they can be rendered as text or number boxes or drop down lists.

The [Background] button leads to a standard panel, but it essentially is the same as a custom panel so it’s a good demo.

Have a look at the various fields in the Background panel. Note the various dropdowns. The content is fully customizable (by the administrator), so companies can set up exactly what they want to record.

Contacts - Addresses/phones

You can close the Background panel if you want. Now click the [Address/phones] button in the buttons panel (beneath the [Visualize] and [Background] buttons).

• Using the Addresses/phones panel, you can set up an unlimited number of additional addresses for this contact (shipping, divisions, branch offices, etc.) as well as unlimited phones. Thus, you are not limited to a few phone numbers or addresses.

• Note that you can Skype phone numbers and Google addresses in this panel. Further, you can copy the address information to clipboard and paste it into any documents, orders, notes or other.

Actions and activities

Let’s cover off a major module: Activities.

Go Home and click the [Activities] button displayed in the left-side menu. If the activity is an email, you can start it from the [New email] button on the right side of the Home page.

If the Quick menu is floating, click any action in the floating menu bar (Time/Charges, To Do, Email, Messages) to bring up the Activities module.

This module is the heart of the information tracking functionality. Click [Help] for a full explanation of the module.

• Click on the folder icon on any row to view existing activities. You can create and delete activities if you want to test the module. 

• The button you click on the left-side menu will determine the type of action record you are looking at. For example, click [To Do] and you will see the same To Do items as are selectable from your Home Page.

• Try out an email. Send a document to yourself. Oops… we disabled emailing from the demo. Sorry. 

• Work with the Quick search panel. You might even want to venture into the [Advanced search] if you want to do some sophisticated searching. The advanced search works through the ad hoc Query Builder and doesn’t just list or print the records, it also lets you select any record and open that record in its owner module. 

• Note that the detail records support cloning, making it easy to create any type of record from an action record.

• Also, action records support the rich text format so you can pretty well create exactly the content you want.

Co-owner concept

In many cases, an action record has more than one owner. For example, the main record may be linked to a project or help desk ticket. However, you might also want to link the record to a specific contact, whether that contact owns the project or help desk, or not.

On other occasions, the action may be primarily linked to one contact, but of interest to another contact. Hence, the co-owner concept. It’s very handy for lots of things.

Online word processing

A complete online word processor is available - Quill. It's quite comprehensive and is used for everything from developing templates through preparing letters and reports.

Quill has -in versioning, complete collaboration functionality and a variety of functions and properties that provide virtually everything needed in the typical office environment.

Quill isn't designed to replace Word or similar word processing products, but it does a great job of working with those products, as well as providing some added benefits, like field placeholders, contact insert, collaboration and conversion (from/to Word). Plus, it's tied directly to the Document manager module.

We won’t go into them in detail here, since you are likely familiar with a word processing solution. But have a look at it; create some documents, save them then pull them in from the Document manager.

From the Home page, click [Office] in the left-side menu. The modules are displayed in their own window, making it easy to work with them any time.

Reporting

There’s no sense putting a lot of stuff into the database if you haven’t the means to get it out – in any way you want it.

The report designer, QReport, takes some lessons from Crystal Reports and other advanced report designers. The result is a sophisticated, standards-based Report Designer that runs on a user’s desktop independent of the online system itself. 

The report designer is used to design structured reports as templates. The templates are then uploaded where they become available to authorized users.

• Everyone's needs are different, so we leave it up to the customers to design their own should they need them. However, we will be designing and posting various templates as we move forward.

A couple of simple reports are included, so you can run them and select from the various output options.

A bit later, we talk about Queries, which is a great way to build virtually any type of ad-hoc report and store them for later retrieval and running.

In Orders following, you will see a great example of a report designed with the Report Designer.

Orders

The Order Entry system is fairly sophisticated, enabling 3 customizable levels of taxes, selection from the products list, unlimited line items, overrideable pricing, custom line descriptions and more.

• Look at the example through our demo contact, Mr. Example of _Complete Individual. But let’s get to that contact another way: 

• Go to Dan’s Home page (you should be logged in as Dan Bear) and click the [Hot] tab. Open the dropdown list – you’ll see our contact – Example of _Complete Individual{1066}. Select it from the list and click [Go].

• When the contact page displays, select Links > Orders or click the Orders button on the toolbar (the two document button on the far right) and from the list view, click Order 1391.

• Have a look through the various options, buttons, etc. and, of course, check [Help]. You can mess around with the order, but don’t save any changes, please.

• To see that report we talked about, click [Print] with either the PDF or HTML option selected. The displayed report was designed using the offline, desktop-based Report Designer, QReport.

Reminders

By the way, that’s another nice feature. In any module, if you make changes then click to move away from the module without saving, you will be reminded to save the changes. 

(By clicking, we mean clicking anything within the module's framework – the left-side menu, horizontal button bars, etc.). BUT - if you click something in the browser framework like their big [X] button, there’s nothing we can do).

Custom Queries – ad hoc Query Builder (requires popups to be allowed)

Move to the Custom Queries module. Go Home, check [My modules] and ensure that Reports, Queries and Rpt mgmt are selected and saved. Then click the [Reports] icon on the left-side menu.

You can also get to it from the Home page > [Information] tab > My Favorite Reports, select the [->] button.

From the Reports display, select [Custom queries] from the left-side menu.

• The Query builder is a pop out module that lets you design simple to sophisticated, linked ad hoc queries and save them. The results can be displayed on-screen (where you can select a record and have it displayed in its owner module) or printed in a variety of ways. Note the XML output that can be used to import the results using any XML-compliant data base manager.

• Try developing a query. As always, click [Help] (top right) for details.

Catalog

Almost every company has some type of catalog, whether it’s a formal catalog of products available for sale, or a special group of files used to help close sales or provide support and service.

Our catalog system not only provides inside access to catalog items for quick thumbnail and extended viewing and emailing, but also allows designated catalog items to be stored in a special accessible public folder linked to the product/inventory database. This enables web pages to be designed to allow anyone browse the catalog database and view related images.

• From the Home page ensure the Catalog module is one of your selected modules then click the [Products] button on the left side menu. Select Catalog.

• Catalog has a structure similar to Documents: a grid view and a tree view. You’ve been through Documents so you will be familiar with these views.

• From the tree view, select one of the line items and click [Details] to display the item’s detail page. 

• Note the “Product link”. This is used to ties an inventory product to the catalog item.

• And look at the “Publish to web site” selection. In addition to storing the file in a controlled folder on the web site, clicking this option enables catalog items to be placed in a browseable folder so that customers, vendors and other types of “outsiders” can view the catalog. That folder also has an Access database containing all the product information for that catalog item.

• Through this database, any web designer can design a web page using any of several languages (javascript, PHP, .NET or just HTML) to access and display the catalog, its complete product information (price, stock levels, description) and so on. 

(We have available one free of charge.)

The result is an efficient and readily-accessible catalog system, with hooks ready to go to enable outsiders to go through your catalog.

VII. Some interesting features. 

Customization

• Every major module has unlimited, fully customizable fields. 
• Lists can be customized to the exact wording the business requires. 
• Reports and queries can be designed and customized to meet any needs. 
• Word processing templates can be designed and customized to include fields from the contacts database.
• Menus can be customized to show or remove various selection options.

Cloning 

If you haven’t seen it in action, check out the cloning feature. It’s in most of the modules, and it lets you create different types of records from a single base record.

For example, go to Activities and click the folder icon on any row to open the detail page. Down at the bottom you will see the “Clone this record…” area. You can see how easy it is to create a new record and how handy that can be. 

The switchboard may have created a “While You Were Out” Message activity record while you were away. When you review the message from your Home page, you might want to create an email and a help desk ticket from it. It’s just a couple of clicks to do that using the cloning feature.

Group lists

From Home, click [Groups] on the left-side menu (check that it’s enabled in [My modules]), click [Groups] to see how group assembly is handled, along with bulk emailing and group phoning. From action emails, you can quickly select a group of addressees.

Widgets (requires popups to be allowed)

From the Home page, click Widgets and have a look at how various web services are easily integrated. This includes our fully integrated Twitter interface.

Quick note – from various modules or from the floating menu. 

Try Quick Notes to quickly record thoughts, to do, meeting information, time and charges and so on. Automatically inserts the owner when triggered from Contacts, Projects and Help Desk. Very handy for lawyers, accountants, consultants and other who track time. Has voice dictation, too.

Quick links from Visualizer

If you haven’t tried it, mouse over (or touch) any item in the visualizer to display a small window containing a blue dot, a white page and (if applicable) an image. Click the blue dot to make that node the prime display node. Click the white page to open the record in the appropriate module. Click the image to see a larger version. This way, you can quickly review your To Do list, connections of a contact, projects underway and so on, by leaving the visualizer open and simply clicking to view the specific items.

History

Click [History] from the Admin menu (Home > [Admin] on the left-side menu). 

It not only displays the last records you have worked with but also displays a history of all changes to any record in the list, if you have elected to track changes. A complete history of all actions is provided through the History module (controllable by the Administrator). This traceability goes a long way to helping workgroups and companies maintain accountability, both for internal audit and reporting purposes.

Click on the folder icon to view the record in its module.

Query Fetch Records (requires popups to be allowed)

Check this out: Open Custom queries (our Query Builder) from the Reports module > Custom queries, select the [Query info] tab and get “Simple Actions List”. Click the [Run] tab and click [Fetch records].

From the list, click the folder icon on any row to open that record in its owner form. You can do this for any table you query.

With this feature, you are never limited to how you access data. 

If the search panels built into each main module don’t give you the results you need, you can invoke the custom query builder by clicking [Advanced search] on the Quick search panel. To have a look at this feature, go to the Contacts module list view and click [Views] to open the Quick search panel. The [Advanced search] button is at the bottom of that panel.

Printing

Check out the report output options in both Reports and Queries: HTML, PDF, Excel, Word and XML, to cover all the bases.

Unlimited nesting

With our Projects module (also known as the Opportunities or Files module), you can set up unlimited nests under a project. A project can have unlimited sub-projects and those sub-projects can have unlimited projects under them and so on.

Pop Quick

Try this out: 

• Open the Help Desk module and select an existing record by clicking the folder icon to display its details.

• Click [Pop Quick] to open the Quick return window.

• Now move away from the Help Desk record. Go to the contacts, activities or other module. 

• Whenever you want to return to the Help Desk record, click [Quick return] in the Quick return window.

This lets people create a trouble ticket then search for background information and materials while still on the phone to the customer, and immediately get back to the ticket.