Sage SalesLogix: Sage SalesLogix Customization and Integration

Introduction

Businesses today demand that all their vital data work together to serve the overall needs of the company. What were once discrete "silos" of information—for example, customer data, financials, manufacturing status—all are coming together to provide managers with views of their business that they never had before. Of course, making all these disparate sources of information work as one is no easy task. It requires IT solutions that can readily share information and be customized to take advantage of it.

Sage SalesLogix was designed and built to provide an affordable, highly reliable, easily customizable, and quickly usable customer relationship management (CRM) solution for driving sales performance in small to mid-sized businesses. With its Web-enabled architecture, Sage SalesLogix provides sales tools to users via networked PCs, laptops, Web browsers, and handheld devices. Data synchronization supplies the same data, Microsoft® Windows® user interface, and customizations as the networked software to disconnected users. Administration and maintenance of Sage SalesLogix does not require a dedicated IT staff.

The Sage SalesLogix Architecture has grown from its client/server roots to a tiered architecture. Network and Web clients for all Sage SalesLogix modules utilize a central database. Data access is provided by the Sage SalesLogix OLE DB (Object Linking and Embedding Database) Provider, which enforces data security and synchronization logging.

Tiered Architecture Concept

In a tiered architecture, the data and presentation are separated into distinct application layers. The user interface layer uses the underlying presentation layer to provide data viewing and manipulation services to the user. The rules layer enforces business and data rules as a service to the presentation layer. The rules layer accesses the data layer (the database) through a data access layer.

Table 1. Tiered architecture

This model makes applications more scalable. Instead of each client application consuming resources to access the data layer directly, clients communicate with the rules layer. The rules layer can support many clients, thereby reducing resource consumption and improving scalability. Data services such as connection pooling,