Below is a list of tips and tricks for the Sales & Marketing Client course. Click one of the items below to see information that may be helpful to you as you go through the course.
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.
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 Oracle database, and copy that database onto the desktop of all student computers. To learn how to synchronize the RACE database and create a local Oracle database, refer to Synchronization—Exercises and perform the exercise to create a new local database. The Oracle database will contain all data needed to execute the exercises for each lesson. You can name the synchronized local database as SMKTrainingDB.ora.
Note: Remove the read-only attribute on each database by right-clicking on the SMKTrainingDB.ora 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.
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.
Creating, updating, and executing selections and views also tend to be difficult for students. Again, make sure that you are well prepared and that you fully understand the Selection and Views functionality.
Creating, updating, and processing campaigns often prove to be difficult tasks for students. Make sure that you are well prepared and that you understand the campaign process in IFS Sales & Marketing.
The Mail Merge functionality exports information from IFS Sales & Marketing to Microsoft Word. It is important to emphasize to the students that the functionality resides in Microsoft Word, not in IFS Sales & Marketing, and that the students might need additional training in Word to be able to completely master mail merge and all its functions.
Training in this area includes presentations and an exercise. It is actually this exercise which should initially be performed by the trainer, to create a local training Oracle database for the students. In this exercise, synchronization is performed from the server RACE database to a local Oracle database.
Note: If you synchronize from a local database to a server, information from the local database will override that in the server database.