Wizard Systems

Sage CRM - Important Information for users of Exchange Online

Sage CRM Sage recently shared the news Microsoft is phasing out the Application Impersonation role for Exchange Online. This process began in May 2024 and will conclude with its full removal by February 2025. Application Impersonation allows applications to access user mailboxes on their behalf. With its removal, new methods will be required for applications to connect to MS Exchange Online, aimed at enhancing security and standardising mailbox access across Microsoft services.

Sage CRM Impacts This change only affects Exchange Online users. The Application Impersonation role is essential for Sage CRM’s integration with Exchange Online, enabling the system to access and manage mailbox data. For organisations using Exchange On-Premise servers: There is no indication from Microsoft of plans to remove Application Impersonation. It remains assignable and manageable via PowerShell in these environments. Organisations using Exchange On-Premise can continue to utilise Application Impersonation without disruption. The current EWS-based integration will remain unaffected. For organisations using Exchange Online: Once the Application Impersonation role is withdrawn, customers using Exchange Online may experience interruptions in connectivity.

What steps are Sage taking? To address this change, the Sage CRM team are currently developing version specific patches to ensure the Sage CRM and Exchange Online integration. This patch will ensure compatibility after the removal of Application Impersonation. For customers implementing Sage CRM with a new instance of Microsoft Exchange Online, Sage recommend holding off on attempting the integration until the upcoming patches are released. The removal of the Application Impersonation role in Exchange Online has already started affecting new integrations, and these patches will resolve the issue. From Sage CRM 2025 R1, Sage will transition the integration from Exchange Web Services (EWS) to Microsoft Graph, providing a future-proof solution for Exchange Online customers. Please note: in both cases, some manual configuration may be required for your Microsoft Exchange Online environment.

Patch Availability Patches will be released for the following versions of Sage CRM: Sage CRM 2022 R2 - this will be patch 2022 R2.6 Sage CRM 2023 R2 - this will be patch 2023 R2.4 Sage CRM 2024 R2 - this will be patch 2024 R2.1 Additionally, the following direct upgrades will be supported: 2022 R1 - 2022 R2.6 2022 R2 - 2022 R2.6 2023 R1 - 2023 R2.4 2023 R2 - 2023 R2.4 2024 R1 - 2024 R2.1 2024 R2 - 2024 R2.1

Integration with Sage Products These patches, when released, will apply to both standalone Sage CRM installations and those integrated with Sage accounting products, including: Sage 50 Sage 100 (not for sale in the UK) Sage 200 Sage 300 (no longer for sale in the UK) Sage X3 Sage Intacct

Streamline Customer Support with Freshdesk's Omnichannel Solution

In today's digital age, customers expect seamless support experiences across various platforms and channels. Freshdesk's customer support solution recognizes this need and offers a powerful omnichannel approach, enabling businesses to provide exceptional customer service no matter where their customers reach out.

Unifying Customer Interactions
Freshdesk's omnichannel capabilities consolidate customer interactions from multiple touchpoints into a single, unified interface. This centralized approach ensures that no inquiry goes unnoticed, and agents have a comprehensive view of each customer's journey, providing context for more personalized and efficient support.

Seamless Communication Across Channels
With Freshdesk, businesses can effortlessly integrate and manage customer communications across a wide range of channels, including:

1. Email: Customers can reach out via email, and Freshdesk's intelligent routing system ensures that their inquiries are promptly assigned to the appropriate agent or team.

2. Web Chat: Freshdesk's web chat feature allows businesses to offer real-time assistance directly on their website, providing customers with an immediate and convenient support experience.

3. Social Media: Freshdesk enables businesses to monitor and respond to customer inquiries on popular social media platforms like Facebook, Twitter, and Instagram, ensuring that no conversation falls through the cracks.

4. Messaging Apps: With support for messaging apps like WhatsApp and Facebook Messenger, Freshdesk empowers businesses to meet customers where they are, offering convenient and familiar communication channels.

5. Phone: Freshdesk's telephony integration ensures that phone interactions are seamlessly integrated into the omnichannel support workflow, providing agents with a complete customer history and context.

Efficient Collaboration and Automation
Freshdesk's omnichannel solution is designed to foster efficient collaboration among support teams. Agents can easily transfer conversations across channels, assign tasks, and leverage automation rules to streamline workflows, ensuring that customer inquiries are handled promptly and consistently.

Comprehensive Reporting and Analytics
With Freshdesk's robust reporting and analytics capabilities, businesses can gain valuable insights into customer interactions across all channels. This data-driven approach enables businesses to identify areas for improvement, optimize support processes, and consistently deliver exceptional customer experiences.

By embracing Freshdesk's omnichannel customer support solution, businesses can elevate their customer service game, providing a seamless and consistent experience across all touchpoints. With streamlined communication, efficient collaboration, and actionable insights, companies can build stronger customer relationships and drive long-term success.

Keep Your Schedule Aligned: How Riva Syncs GoldMine CRM with Outlook Calendar

Staying organised in today's fast-paced business world requires seamless integration between your various tools. When it comes to managing your customer relationships and daily schedule, ensuring your GoldMine CRM and Outlook Calendar are in sync is crucial.

This is where Riva comes in. Riva acts as a bridge, enabling bi-directional synchronisation between your GoldMine CRM and Outlook Calendar, keeping your appointments and activities constantly updated across both platforms.

Here's how Riva streamlines your workflow:

1. Effortless Data Exchange:

• Riva automatically synchronises your appointments, meetings, recurring events, and phone calls created in either GoldMine or Outlook.
• This eliminates the need for manual data entry, saving you valuable time and minimising the risk of errors.

2. Two-Way Street:

• Changes made to calendar items in either GoldMine or Outlook are reflected in both platforms.
• This ensures everyone on your team has access to the most up-to-date information, fostering better collaboration and communication.

3. Customisation Options:

• Riva offers configurable sync settings, allowing you to tailor the sync process to your specific needs.
• You can choose to sync specific data fields, control the direction of data flow (one-way or two-way), and even filter which users' calendars are synchronised.

4. Improved Productivity:

• By eliminating data entry and ensuring everyone is on the same page, Riva boosts your team's productivity.
• Sales reps can focus on building relationships and closing deals, while support staff can efficiently manage customer interactions, all with the peace of mind that their schedules are accurately reflected.

5. Mobile Accessibility:

• With Riva, your synchronised calendar data is accessible from anywhere, anytime on your preferred mobile devices.
• This allows you to stay on top of your schedule and manage your time effectively, whether you're in the office, on the road, or meeting with clients.

Conclusion:

Riva's seamless integration between GoldMine CRM and Outlook Calendar empowers businesses to streamline their workflows, improve collaboration, and boost overall productivity. By eliminating data silos and ensuring everyone has access to the latest information, Riva empowers teams to work smarter, not harder.

Get your Workbooks CRM system connected with 'WESS'

The Workbooks Exchange Server Sync (WESS)


We know how important it is to keep all your business critical information in one place, and we know how time consuming it can be to have to enter information into 2 different systems.

For many of you, you will be using the WESS already, while for others it may be something you haven’t yet considered. In this edition of Workbooks Wisdom, we're taking a deep dive into: how we recommend using the WESS through the Outlook Add-In; what key configuration you need to think about; and some helpful tips and links for troubleshooting any problems.

Why would you use the WESS?
When your business relies on communications with customers and prospects, as well as with stakeholders both internal and external, it’s critical to be able to see what’s going on. This is where the WESS becomes the go-to mechanism for ensuring all stakeholders in your business have visibility of your activities in Outlook. When Workbooks is embedded in your day to day operations, it’s even more important to keep everything in one single source of truth. The WESS allows you to cut down on the number of times you need to switch between Outlook and Workbooks by letting you change and update your Workbooks records whilst in Outlook.

How would we recommend you use the WESS?
When you have a WESS licence, you will also be able to use the Outlook Add-In to synchronise your emails, meetings and tasks to specific records in Workbooks. Where possible we would always recommend using the Outlook Add-In as this can, not only sync Outlook objects to Person records, but it also allows you to create, edit and update other Workbooks records. Here are some tips when synchronising different areas of Outlook:

Emails:
Where you want to automatically upload emails from a specific person, we recommend creating a rule in Outlook to automatically categorise those emails instead of using the add-in. (Please note that by using this method you can only link emails with a Person record in Workbooks, if you are linking other WB records you will need to use the Add-In)

Contacts:
If using the WESS to create People records in Workbooks, always use the add-in as this will help to identify any existing records and avoids the creation of duplicate person records.
Your "My People" view in Workbooks will synchronise automatically to Outlook via the WESS into your contacts list, so if you have a high number of Person records in your My People view, we recommend adding a filter to this view to restrict the number of person records synced as contacts.

Meetings:
We recommend creating meetings in Outlook before syncing to Workbooks. This is because you may want to use adjust the attendee list, or add a meeting link through an Outlook plugin therefore saving time and effort before clicking Save on the Outlook Add-In to sync it to Workbooks.

For more information on Workbooks CRM and the WESS extension, please contact Wizard Systems!

Urgent: Action Required for users that have Workbooks Exchange Sync Service (WESS).

If you have the WESS implemented within Workbooks, there has been a development from Microsoft that may prevent you and your colleagues from syncing data between Outlook and Workbooks.

Your WESS implementation may be authorised using Basic Authentication, which has recently been deprecated as communicated here – https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/exchange/clients-and-mobile-in-exchange-online/deprecation-of-basic-authentication-exchange-online

What this means for you?

It may result in data not appearing in either Workbooks or Outlook. 

How to solve this?

If you have been identified as affected, you will shortly be receiving an email with the full steps of how you can switch your authorisation method to one that will fix authentication problems across your user base. Please forward this or work with your IT team to implement these changes as soon as possible to prevent further issues with your WESS synchronisation. 

To get started immediately, the steps are listed here – https://www.workbooks.com/help/how-change-authentication-setup-wess

Bison chooses Riva to sync GoldMine with Microsoft Exchange

Bison Machinery Ltd., a specialist supplier of high quality metalworking machinery, chose Riva to integrate GoldMine and Microsoft Exchange. Integral to the project’s success was Riva’s ability to seamlessly and transparently sync GoldMine appointments and emails to the native calendar apps on mobile devices such as iPhones, iPads, and other smartphones and tablet PCs. The company’s sales and customer service teams can now concentrate on their work rather than manually archive emails.

Overview

 Bison supplies high quality metalworking machinery for fabrication, sawing, engineering, and sheet metalwork. The company, headquartered in Stafford, UK, is a trusted partner of the sheet metal and fabrication industry. With a history dating back to the 1800s, the team of 25 employees benefits from the combined experience and product knowledge that has been passed down from generation to generation in this family-owned business.

The Challenge

Bison implemented their CRM of choice, GoldMine, in 2012. There is one administrator responsible for providing IT support for all sales and customer service employees in the company using GoldMine to record and archive client email correspondence and meetings.

To better integrate GoldMine into Bison’s daily workflow, the company tried using a plug-in for GoldMine with less than satisfying results. Rather than performing the sync tasks automatically as Bison needed, users had to archive emails manually. This created an additional workload for the users and resulted in less than optimal use of the company’s CRM.

Summary of challenges:

• Plug-in wasn’t synchronizing automatically
• Plug-in slowed down the systems
• Users needed to archive emails manually
• Email history in CRM was inconsistent
• No way to automatically sync calendars and emails on multiple devices

Bison was searching for a way to seamlessly sync emails and calendars between their CRM and email systems which they considered crucial in optimizing the workflows of their sales and customer service staff.

The company wanted to have the option to archive emails in CRM as well. GoldMine partner and CRM specialists, Wizard Systems, recommended Riva to solve their sync and archiving issues.

The Solution

“We’ve found Riva to be an excellent product that just simply works. It saves us significant time now that we no longer have to manually link emails into GoldMine,” said Guy Bushnell, director, Bison Machinery Ltd.

Riva is now used by Bison to sync GoldMine and Microsoft Exchange for 14 employees – adding customer value, relieving all of the company’s pain points, and providing reliable, customer data automation for the company’s CRM and email systems.

Wizard Systems worked closely with Riva during the implementation process and managed all support requests on behalf of Bison. This made for a smooth and easy setup that did not require much in the way of involvement on the part of Bison.

“Throughout the pre-sales process and our implementation of Riva at Bison, we received excellent support from Riva’s customer services team. Riva is a great fit for Bison. Many of our Goldmine users have multiple Exchange mailboxes. Riva easily and eloquently handles manages this and removes the need for unreliable client add-ons,” stated Luke Fletcher, Software Consultant at Wizard Systems.

Riva, and the product’s option for automated email features, enables Bison’s sales and customer service teams to save time and ensure consistent CRM entries.

The Results

Riva enables Bison’s sales and customer service teams to work more efficiently in GoldMine and Microsoft Exchange, and on their mobile devices – in connected and disconnected modes – which has improved the quality of information that is being automatically archived in GoldMine.

“The real value with Riva is that we now have the peace of mind that our data is automatically and seamlessly integrated between CRM and email, without our employees having to do any manual data entry. Previously we were often unsure if users had remembered to manually sync emails,” said Guy Bushnell, Director, Bison Machinery Ltd.

The company will continue to take advantage of the high flexibility and stability that Riva provides in the future.

 

For more information on Exchange Integration with GoldMine, please contact Wizard Systems.

 

New - Synchronise your Gmail and Google Apps with your CRM

Launching in July 2015, Riva now has the capability of integrating your Gmail and Google Apps to your favourite CRM like GoldMine and Sage.

Gmail Integration

Riva synchronizes appointments, contacts, email, opportunities, cases, quotes and other CRM objects directly between Gmail and your CRM. Here you see an email that has been processed and synchronized from Gmail to CRM because it has the “Processing Complete” label assigned to it.

Synchronise Contacts and Leads

Riva seamlessly syncs CRM contacts and leads automatically and identifies them with a CRM label to to keep CRM contacts separated from your personal contacts. Contacts and leads can be synchronized in both directions.

Synchronise your Google Calendar with CRM

You can choose to sync your calendars to/from your default Google calendar or to a separate CRM-labeled calendar.

Display data as email on mobile devices

Riva can be configured to display CRM opportunities, cases, quotes, projects, and custom objects so they appear in the related Folders in Gmail. Because they are created as emails that contain the CRM information, this information can be viewed on all Gmail clients including mobile devices. Using Riva’s single-click Connect Bar, users can open the specific records in CRM in View or Edit mode.

For more information on Riva and how it integrates to GoldMine, Sage and other leading CRMs, please contact Wizard Systems.

 

Sage CRM and Exchange Integration

New video from Sage on getting started with Sage CRM and Microsoft Exchange integration.  A great way of sharing the Calendars of Sage and Exchange.

 

Please contact Wizard Systems for any advice on Sage CRM or Sage CRM Support.

 

 

Get automatic Exchange/Outlook integration to GoldMine with Riva #crm #exchange #riva

Riva delivers advanced, server-side Exchange integration for GoldMine. With Riva, no Outlook plug-ins need to be installed, configured or managed on users’ desktops, laptops or mobile devices.

Riva is compatible with ALL Microsoft Exchange mail clients:

-Outlook 2010/2007/2003, Outlook Web Access, Outlook on Citrix and Terminal Services
- Office 2011 for Mac, Entourage, native Mac OS X apps
- BlackBerry, iPad, iPhone, Android, Windows Phone and other ActiveSync devices).

Currently, Riva delivers automatic, transparent, bi-directional synchronization of the following items:

- Contacts
- Appointments
- Phone calls
- Tasks

Riva delivers a transparent, bi-directional sync of contacts, appointments, phone calls and tasks between Exchange and GoldMine.  It also syncs GoldMine to the native address book, calendar and mail apps on the iPad, iPhone, BlackBerry and other ActiveSync mobile devices. 

Our Riva product also has versions for Exchange Integration with Sage CRM and NetSuite.

For more information on how Riva can integrate GoldMine with Exchange please contact Wizard Systems for a presentation on 01454 316800.

Please note that Riva GoldMine only works with the newer GoldMine Premium Edition and not the older GoldMine Corporate Edition.