QuoteWerks Support Portal

ACT! is the most common locally installed product (over here in the UK, at least).

#1 & #2 - you'll want to take a look at the QuoteWerks SDK (details here). Get in touch if you don't have access to a programmer - we've done dozens of integrations with QuoteWerks and could make very light work of this for you.

#3 - yep Act! is very popular desktop-based CRM. There's also potentially QuoteWerks' "ContactWerks" on the horizon (details here).

Hello Matt,

Are the DDE commands something you can type?

It appears as if so, otherwise there would not be a text field available. And can you give me an example of such a command?

I used Act! Before switching to Max. I’ll check it out. I don’t need fancy features, just plain vanilla customer database that works with QW.

Thanks.

Paul

The quickest and slickest solution is this (assuming you use the corporate edition of QW). If you have both systems installed on the same SQL Express instance it takes about 20 minutes to set up.

1. Use SQL Studio Manager to create a view within the QW database of the Infoflow contacts table, but design the view so that the columns within that view have the same names as the QwContacts table.Call this view ContactsTemp.

2. Use SQL Studio manager to rename the native QwContacts table to QwContactsBackup

3. Rename your view to QwContacts.

You will now be able to search and select InfoFlow contacts directly from within QW, with QW set to use its own contact manager. The Add/Edit Contact functionality won't work, but you wn't need that..

Basically what's happening is that QW sees the new view as if it was the contact table it's expecting to see, but behind the scenes SQL server is presenting the Infoflow data.

I've used this in a few situations. The only drawback is that if Aspire add/change columns on the QwContacts table (or even change its name, as they did a couple of years ago), you have to change the view accordingly - again this is only a few minutes work.

Solution presented with our compliments if you know how to implement it, otherwise get in touch and we'll help.

cheers

Paul

Hello Paul

Thank you for the response. I'm not using QW corporate. I'm a 1 man shop.

You'd think that since most of this sort of software (QW, Infoflo, other CRM) all run on similar databases (SQL Express probably the most common), there'd be some easy way to exchange information.

I thought DDE was meant for that in the 1st place between windows programs.

I'm thinking of going with another CRM - Act!- as suggestd previously by HilltopIT.

Since it integrates already with QW.

I'm evaluating different CRM but it seems as if the choice is pretty narrow if I want to keep using QW.

Thanks.

Paul

Hi Paul,

The trick I outlined does actually work with the standard edition of QW - you can do it within the Contacts.mdb database as Access has a built in driver to connect to SQL Express databases. But if you're going with ACT the question doesn't arise!

regards

Paul