SMP Version History

6.31

Outlook Synchronization

New simplified one-way contact synchronization methods have been introduced that are straightforward to understand and more reliable. The previous bidirectional method, while still available for existing databases, often changed contacts in ways that were unexpected by users. SMP Admins may now choose which synchronization methods users may select. The following options are available:
1. No Contact Synching – Users cannot synchronize contacts.
2. Bidirectional – This is the old method of contact synchronization. Not available in new databases.
3. SMP to Outlook Only – Users may update their Outlook contacts to match SMP.
4. Exchange Public Folder to SMP & SMP to Outlook – An SMP Admin may update SMP with contact information from a Microsoft Exchange public folder. Users may update their Outlook contacts to match SMP.
5. Add New Outlook Contacts to SMP & SMP to Outlook – In addition to updating their Outlook contacts to match SMP, users may also choose to add new Outlook contacts to SMP.
The new contact synchronizing methods also have improved duplicate detection and a simplified duplicate resolution screen.
The option to delete inactive tasks from Outlook has been changed to “Delete inactive or reassigned tasks from Outlook.” When checked, tasks that were reassigned in SMP to someone else will be deleted from Outlook.
When tasks are updated in SMP, the owner name is now set correctly.
Eliminated a “You do not have sufficient permissions to access this folder” error when synching completed tasks.

Returned Email Checking

When checking Outlook for returned emails, SMP will now correctly process delivery failure notifications that were generated by the user's own Exchange server (if the user’s Outlook is configured to use Exchange).

Customer & Contacts

After you make a change to the Contact profile fields, the screen no longer refreshes and jumps back to the top contact under that specific customer.

Activities

When you click the Contact drop down in an activity, contacts without last names now correctly appear in the list.

Activity Review

Increased the column size for Assigned By in the Activity Review form.
Click the Account Manager dropdown in the Activity Review form no longer results in a timeout error for some databases.

Projects

Eliminated “The setting for this property is too long” error in the Project Add/Edit form when too many additional customers have been added to a project.

6.3a

Installation

The full installer has been updated to support installation on Windows Vista.

6.3

General

Simplified Sign-On – You no longer need to type in your server and database. Instead, you type in your “domain” which is your database name without the initial “SMP_”.
Multiple Account access. Use the “Multiple Account Access” tab in the Admin website to grant specific users access to additional customers.
Projects - Last 6 Months Graph now displays correctly.
Remove “Add Comments” from Help menu.
On the company information form, the Add button on tool bar has been removed. Use the SMP Admin website to add branches.
The Options dialog now longer asks for your country.
On home page, the customer count no longer includes vendors and competitors—only customers.
Line numbers will be included in all logged errors, improving the ability of TMMG to identify and fix errors that are logged. Previously, most, but not all, logged errors included line numbers.

Customers

Projects displayed on the Customer form now list all projects the customer is associated with, not just projects for which the customer is the primary customer.
Assigned By is now displayed on the activity tab of the Customer Form.

Activities

Improved TCO Reduction entry – When entering TCO Reduction information for a customer meeting or phone log activity, you can now indicate whether the reduction was a one-time or annual savings. You can also enter a quantity of items and either a new price/old price or amount per item saved.
Moving the mouse wheel no longer causes an activity form to “blank out.”
When pressing ESC while editing a task or Info Request you are new prompted whether you want to save or discard your changes.
When opening an activity that is part of an inactive project, the project name is no longer missing from the list of projects in the project drop down.
An inactive contact’s name will now appear correctly on activities the contact is a part of. Previously the Contact field or Additional Contact fields would be blank if the contact for the activity was inactive.
Inactive reps no longer show up in the list of reps for the Joint Sales Program in Customer Meetings.

Activity Review

Activity Review totals no longer shows previous values when a query returns no records.
Activity Review query on SIC code no longer results in an error if a customer has a non-numeric SIC code.
Added Assigned By as query criteria and as a column to sort by.
Assigned ID, DUNS, and Assigned By have been added to the Activity Management report.
Fixed Activity Review filter list for Account Mgr and Owner.
Updated queries that filter by contact to include activities where the contact is an additional contact.
Eliminated various errors with Activity Review queries.
Activity Management Report no longer shows incorrect query criteria in some cases.
Wild card usage in the Project Ref field is now consistent with the rest of the program.
“Project Name” now correctly reads “Project Ref”.

Projects

Made employee detail subform on Project Add/Edit form read-only.

Project Review

Assigned ID and DUNS have been added to the Project Summary report.

Market Analysis

Improved Pivot Table Report – The “Product Level Excel Pivot Table” report is greatly enhanced.

Goals

Add Goal Year goal vs Prior Year Project columns
Fixed the “Write Conflict” error that sometimes occurred when you tried to change the SIC code of a customer.
DUNS number added to Goals Form and report.
You no longer get an error when you click on “(unspecified)” in the Goals form.
Next Year’s goals and potentials can now be locked (using the SMP Admin website). In addition, you can now view locked goals and potentials in the Goals Form.
Vendors and competitors no longer appear on the Goals screen.
Fixed “String or binary data would be truncated” error when setting level 3 goals with long product level names.

Mailers

Fixed errors that occurs when clicking on the Browse button in the Log Mailer window
Replaced “Merge to Session” / “Merge to Open Session” menu items with single “Merge to Excel” item.
Delete List menu item results in an error.
Added option to include Contact Profile fields in the contact Excel report and not just title.
Added customer profile fields to the Mailers Export for Excel.

Business Totals

Fixed bug in which Monthly Total Account Sales by Account Manager report encounters error on duplicate account manager name.

Reports

The Report button that has additional reports. We will be adding more reports here in the coming months.
Custom reports can now appear in the Generate Report dialog when you select Reports from the file menu.

6.23

General

When you select a territory level on from a territory level drop-down and you only have access to one territory at that level, that territory will be automatically selected in the territory drop-down.
Territory drop-downs now show only the territory description, not the territory code.
Reports now show the territory description, not the territory code.
Reports now consistently show the territory level name (e.g. “Corprate” or “Branch”), not the level code (“Lvl1”, “Lvl4”).
Reports now consistently show the account manager’s name or initials, not his employee ID.

Customers

When adding a link, you no longer get an error if you typed or pasted in the path to a folder or the URL to a website.

Market Analysis

Market Analysis now has columns for next year’s goals and potential, potential gap, and share for each year.

Projects

Fixed bug that prevented an Additional Salesmen record from being deactivated and thus removed from the project.
When adding a link, you no longer get an error if you typed or pasted in the path to a folder or the URL to a website.

Activities

The owner or assigned salesman on an activity always has full access to the activity, even if he doesn’t have access to the customer or project the activity is associated with.
The Activity Review screen now allows (and defaults to) queries that don’t specify either a territory or account manager for the customer. This allows you to query all activities to which you have access, including:
- Activities you own but are associated with a customer to which you don’t have access.
- Activities that are on a project to which you have access but are associated with a customer to which you don’t have access
Fixed tab order on activity forms.
Pressing tab on a Marketing Mailer no longer causes the form to display blank information.
The controls are now correctly enabled/disabled when creating a new Customer Meeting.
The Activity Management report no longer duplicates activities in some situations.

6.2

General

Toolbar buttons can be added to SMP which will allow you access to your company’s WEB site(s). To have this feature enabled, please contact TMMG Support (Support@TaylorMMG.COM) and provide the site(s) you want accessible from within the application.
Within the Company Form, all Account Administrators now have the ability to make changes to employee names and titles, keeping the information up-to-date. Please note: You will not be able to change employee ID’s or deactivate employees, this is a safety protocol.
When sending out Broadcast E-Mails in previous versions of SMP, the default SMTP Port was used. With SMP 6.2 users now have the option of selecting whatever port their E-Mail Administrator has set-up for their company through the Tools/SMP Options menu.
Several changes have been made to SMP’s general reporting capabilities. All reports imported into Excel will now support text wrapping to make it easier for you to view the information. Reports will also now extract data greater than 32,000 rows which will allow for larger data extracts. Finally, reports have been re-titled, where necessary, to correspond with the report selection name used to run the report making it easier for you to determine what reports you have run.
When users run the Product Manager Business Plan Workbook only active projects will be pulled into the reports. This removes any confusion as to what the totals on the report represent.

Customers

You can now create a new project from the Customer form.

Activities

Users may now associate existing tasks, phone calls, customer meetings, and information requests to open projects. If an activity is not associated with the project when the activity is created, users may now fix the problem.
In previous versions of SMP, users were limited to recording one entry for each contact in a phone log, however it often requires multiple phone calls to the same person to complete the task. You are now able to identify these distinct calls.

Activity Review

Within the Activity Review form, users now have the option to filter by Customer List. This allows you to track activities based upon different groups of customers and therefore managing those activities easier.
Within the Activity Review form you also have the option of filtering by Project Name along with the use of a wildcard symbol (%) giving you further flexibility in searching.
Dropdowns are now restricted to active employees only. Choices are also limited to the names in the dropdown list. This change was done to make sure users did not inadvertently use employees who were inactive or miss-spell employee names.
When running the Activity Management report from your Activity Review form, three new columns will be pulled into your report: Joint Sales Program, Sales Rep and Project Name (if applicable).
In previous versions of SMP, if a task was created without an owner, it would often be “orphaned” during various filtering processes. With SMP 6.2, those tasks will show up when they meet the selected filtering criteria.

Goals & Potentials

The Goals & Potentials Summary report identifies the customer list when a customer list was used as a filter.

Mailers

You now have the ability to sort your labels by Zip Code, Customer Name, or Contact Last Name.
When merging Marketing lists into Excel, column headers are now included. The DUNS number has also been included for each contact.

Market Analysis

A DUNS column has been added.
Query timeouts have been increased so that queries returning tens of thousands of customers are less likely to result in a time-out error.

Part Analysis

Parts will show up from all customers, not just active customers.
You will receive an error message when the date range is invalid.
“Date Range” has been relabeled “Invoice Date” for clarity.

Project Add/Edit

A bug was fixed which sometimes resulted in an error when clicking on the Email button next to the contact’s email address.
A “Links” tab has been added, similar to the one on the Customer form.
The Type drop down now includes a description column.
When a project is flagged as “won” or “lost” the Probable percentage will change to either 100% or 0% respectively.

Project Review

The Customer filter now filters projects where the customer is the primary or secondary customer on the project.
Product groups will now sort by correct sequence number and display the product abbreviation instead of code.

6.1

Opt-out

The Mailers window now shows the date that a contact opted out of a marketing list (if a list has been opened).
When viewing the list of marketing lists that a contact can be on, the date that the contact opted-out of a list is also displayed.
Marketing Lists that are web enabled can now be “Opt-Out Enabled” in addition to “Opt-In/Out Enabled.” Opt-Out Enabled lists will let recipients opt-out of the list, but recipients who are not already on the list will not be able to opt in to it.
Only SMP admins can modify a marketing list’s web-enabled setting.
Added new “Opt Out List” report in the Mailers window that will list all customers who have opted out of receiving all marketing and promotional e-mails.
When viewing a contact in the customer form or the project form, clicking the Email button will now warn you if you are about to send an email to a contact that has opted-out of all marketing and promotional email.
When sending email through the Mailers window, email will only be sent to those recipients who have not opted out of the list (if a list is being used) and have not opted out of all marketing and promotional emails.
When sending email through the mailers window, a link to the opt-out page will be added to all emails. This will let recipients opt-out of further emails.

Emailers

If an error occurs while sending, you now have the opportunity to retry and continue with the rest of the list.
If an error occurs while sending, you can now save the remaining recipients as a mailing list.

Goal Setting

When setting goals, you can now filter the customers displayed by a customer list.
When editing product level 1 and 3 goals for a customer, an additional line “(unspecified)” now shows how much the higher level goal exceeds the sum of the lower level goals.
When editing a goal, higher and lower level goals are not adjusted up or down until you go to a different set of goals to edit. This means that if you make a typo in a goal (such as an extra or missing zero), you will have longer to catch and correct the type before it affects higher and lower level goals.
Performance improved.

Forms

The bug that prevented editing the name, description, and other settings for a marketing list has been fixed.
Marketing lists can only be deleted by the list owner or an SMP admin.
Marketing lists’ name and other properties can only be changed by the owner or an SMP admin.

Reports

Fixed several minor bugs on a variety of reports.

Get more detailed information.

6.03

Bug Fixes

When adjusting all goals or potentials, if any values will be overwritten, the user is asked to confirm the adjustment.
The timeout value for the Goal Setting Adjust All function has been doubled, reducing occasional timeout errors that would occur if the server was very busy.
The Market Analysis, Parts Analysis, Business Comparison, Goal Setting, and Mailers forms will now show more than 20,000 records. This only affects a few users who have access to more that 20,000 customers or contacts and run a query that would return more that 20,000 records.
The sorting has been fixed in the mailers form.

6.02

Reports

Support for Windows 98 with the Market Analysis Summary Report
Growth Column realigned in Monthly Total Account Sales by Account Manager Report
Product Manager Business Plan Workbook (an optional module) includes support for Account Manager Reports and Target Account Worksheets with same Reference Name

Market Analysis Form – Customer Lists

Lists are now viewable even if user does not have access to Customers on the list. Accessible List Count will show zero but User will now be able to add to the list.

Mailer Form

Creating a new Mailing List in the Mailer Form is now an option if a Mailing List is already open. Prevents accidentally overwriting a Mailing List that is being worked on.

Broadcast Email

Expanded support for a wider array of email server – email status responses

6.0

Enhanced Market Analysis Form – More Intuitive Analytics

New columns
- Cost columns for all years
- Current year projections
- Previous YTD values
- Totals from two years ago
- YTD vs. Previous YTD comparisons
- Projected Year End vs. Previous Year comparisons
- Projected vs. Goal comparisons
Selectable columns – You can now select which columns you want to see.
Resizes to take advantage of larger screen space.
Sort by any column—just click the column name.
Improved reports
- Market Analysis Summary Report will now show exactly what you see in the Market Analysis results. Select the columns you want and create a report with just those columns!
- Month-by-month reports can now display cost or sell values.

New Forecasting/Goal Setting Form

Set goals and potentials for this year or next year.
See all you customers on one screen at one time.
Set GP and GP% goals.
Quickly set all goals or potentials to the prior year’s goals or actuals—or apply a percent increase or decrease. This is handy way to start your goals setting by quickly filling in reasonable numbers that you can then fine-tune.
Current year goals and potentials can by locked by TMMG if your company wants them locked. This will prevent any changes from being made to goals and potentials.

Improved Parts Analysis and Business Comparison Forms

Resize to take advantage of larger screen space, allowing you to see more rows.

Gross Profit and GP% Goals in Addition to Sell Goals

GP, GP%, and Sell goals can now be set using the new Goal Setting form.
You can also query on these in Market Analysis.
The Sell and GP% goals are displayed on the Customer form on the Sales and Sales Details tabs.

5.45

Users may now change their own passwords.

Under the Tools menu, select “Change Password”.

SMP now supports configurable password policies

A company may specify its policy for passwords including:

Minimum password length.
Whether password must include digits and mixed case.
Whether a user’s password may be the same as one they previously used.
Whether passwords expire after a certain number of days, requiring users to change their passwords.
Users can be prevented from changing their own passwords, if this is not desirable.

5.44

Deactivate Customer warning

You will now be asked to confirm the deactivating of a contact or Customer. Please note that deactivating a customer with sales figures for the last 3 years will result in inaccurate sales figures in Market Analysis

Website Smart Link

A new button is located to the right of a customers website that hyperlinks to the address.

Last Mailer date automatically set for broadcast emailing

When doing a broadcast e-mailer through the mailers module, the Last Mailer Date is automatically set as the emailer is sent regardless of whether or not you log the activity. This assures that, should the emailer fail for some reason, you will be able to know who it successfully sent to by the date.

5.43

New Market Analysis Reports

We have added two new reports to Market Analysis

Product Levels Monthly Totals by Customer with Notes - This report prints up a separate report for each customer on your Market Analysis list. The report shows sales detail broken out by Product level and includes the Notes Section from the customer module.
Product Lvl Monthly Totals By Customer – Yr Cmpr - This report compares last year to this year by month including the percent of change.

Projects

You know have the ability to create and filter projects down to Prod Level 3.

5.42

Move Customer Button

You can now move a contact from one customer to another. From within the customer module choose the contact who needs to be moved.

Click Edit / Move Contact

You will be asked to Choose the Customer you want to move the customer to.

5.40

Broadcast Email

Version 5.4 has made significant changes to using the Broadcast Email function. Because of the new security patch in Outlook it became difficult to send broadcast emails through SMP. SMP now uses your own SMTP Server to send mail and is no longer reliant on Outlook.

Project Report

There is a new report in Projects that will print a more detailed report of your individual projects.

Extra profiling fields

We have opened up some additional customer profile fields. If you have suggestions for how these fields can be populated for your company please discuss this with your SMP administrator.