Tips and Tricks for the IFS Sales and Marketing Administrator Course

Below is a list of tips and tricks for the IFS Sales and Marketing Administrator course. Click one of the items below to see information that may be helpful to you as you take the course.

Installing IFS Sales and Marketing

Before starting the course, make sure that IFS Sales & Marketing can be run from all student computers. To verify this, go to the Sales & Marketing Installation page. Make sure that all necessary prerequisites are installed and try starting each application that is part of the course.

Note: IFS Sales & Marketing Client (Oracle), Administrator and Workshop requires an Oracle Client installation. Refer to the IFS Sales & Marketing Installation Guide for further information.

Training Database

The exercises in the Sales & Marketing are not based on the RACE database. Instead, you will need to synchronize the RACE database to a local database, and copy that database onto the desktop of all student computers. To learn how to synchronize the RACE database and create a local database, refer to Synchronization—Exercises and perform the exercise to create a new local database. The local database will contain all data needed to execute the exercises for each lesson. You can name the synchronized local database as SMKTrainingDB.mdb.

Note: Remove the read-only attribute on each database by right-clicking on the SMKTrainingDB.mdb file and clearing the Read-only attribute check box of the Properties window.

When you and your students start up IFS Sales & Marketing, make sure to log on to the local database on each computer (see the Logon and Start-up of IFS Sales & Marketing exercise). Synchronization should initially be done with a user that can later be used by the students as the logon user on the distributed local database. For example, if you log on as ALAIN and create a new local database then ALAIN will be the user for logging on locally.

Following the Chapter Sequence

It is important that you follow the chapters in the sequence given in the course description. Each chapter introduces a number of concepts that build on concepts described in the previous chapter. Moreover, each chapter-based set of exercises requires that previous exercises have been completed, or the student will not be able to proceed as intended.

Definitions Training

The definition section allows you to alter the table or field properties and to sort the tables according to the way you want it to appear in IFS Sales and Marketing Client.

Options Training

Options enable you to create lists of values for single and multiple choice fields.

Roles Training

Roles provide an easy method of designing and implementing your own security model by using Table, Field and Activity restrictions.

This often proves to be a difficult task for students. Make sure that you are well prepared and that you fully understand the functionality.

Users Training

This enables to register all the users in the system by the administrator and also enable password management. Further it is possible to transfer a user’s companies, selections and views to another user. This also often proves to be a difficult task for students. Make sure that you are well prepared and that you fully understand the functionality.

Synchronization and Discrepancy Training

Training in this area includes two presentations and an exercise. It is actually this exercise which should initially be performed by the trainer, to create a local training database for the students. In this exercise, synchronization is performed from the server RACE database to a local database.

Note: If you synchronize from a local database to a server, information from the local database will override that in the server database.