Quosal 2012 Resource Center
The Quosal’s 2012 release, the latest release of Quosal, includes many new features and enhancements to the market-leading quote and proposal solution. This page provides information about the release and its impact on new and existing customers. Please check back with this page as we add more videos detailing the features of this release!
2012 Highlights
Visual Quoting
Visual Quoting provides a new and unique method of Quote and Proposal preparation in our market space. It allows you to visually customize your Quosal UI in such a way that it makes it a snap for your reps to modify their quote information. Watch the Visual Quoting video here: Visual Quoting with Quosal
Etilize Premier Improvements
We have rolled out the Etilize UK catalog. With this, we also have language support. In addition attribute filters are now more robust, supporting many new ways to search. For the North America catalog, you can now filter results to ones that have distributor part numbers only. You can watch a video about our Etilize Premier Updates here: Etilize Premier Updates
Collaborative Quoting
You can now group multiple order porter pages together under 1 quote. It’s as easy as just having an order porter link to an existing quote, and attaching it to your current quote. It’s also possible to collaborate with order porters outside of your own company.
Avalara Avatax
We have integrated with Avalara’s Avatax online sales tax applications, which the Quosal platform will use for real-time sales tax authority assignment and tax calculation. Avatax also works with Quosal’s online quote delivery system, Order Porter. The Avatax integration is a premium service and requires an Avatax subscription.
2012 Release Notes
The 2012 maintenence release Build 8992 notes can be found here.
Dell
• We updated the Dell parser to handle new conditions, including the pound sign and item notes changes that our parser did not handle. Many Dell fixes for various other formats.
• Added the ability to select which line items appear in the Item notes from the options -> product setup -> Dell -> Select line items to turn this on.
• Added Dell notes to custom text 1
• Added Dell E-Quote # to custom string 1
Dynamics CRM
• We are now uploading the information necessary to create an opportunity on the iPad.
• The Get Currency function was broken and not returning all results when multiple currencies were available. This affected opportunity creation and updates and has been fixed.
• Dynamics CRM Online is now available. It uses Authentication type 1 (this is noted in the setup screen) and your Windows Live credentials.
Dynamics GP
• We added support for version 10.0 of Dynamics Great Plains. It requires that eConnect is installed and configured on your system.
Quote Requests
• We fixed a problem where Quote Requests would only upload the first Quote Form in its publish list, and not all quote forms.
• We added new Quote Requests to the Content Exchange (File -> Browse Downloadable Content).
• We fixed a problem where images on line items from the original quote request were not copying over to the details of the copied quote.
Load Quote
• There is now a checkbox field next to quotes on the load screen. This is for use with Administrators for mass deleting or deactivating order porters.
• Added the ability to do mass updates to quotes from the load screen. This only affects the quote main object, not tabs and items.
• Old versions were sometimes appearing on the load screen when searching. Old versions will no longer appear, and any data that was incorrect with the old version archive flag not being set will be automatically updated.
• Expiration date is now a searchable field in Load Quote.
Mass Quoting
• We fixed a problem where the ConnectWise group was no longer able to load items.
Order Porter Mobile (for the iPad)
• Deleted Quotes are now ignored in the Open Quote search.
• Fixed a problem with the sort order being out of sorts when publishing a PDF from the Order Porter Mobile API.
• We added the ability for Administrators to automatically sync their metadata for use with the Order Porter Mobile API and Order Porter. This sync function performs a special operation that counts all of your regular templates as Order Porter Mobile available templates and uploads them. It will also upload Users, Order Porter Templates, Quote Forms, CRM Metadata, and Distributor Metadata. If individual content fails in the sync, the entire sync will not fail, but you will receive notification of this after it completes. This sync option knows how to handle deleted templates.
• Autotask and Dynamics had some missing metadata that made some of their functions on Order Porter Mobile not fully functional. This data is now included either in a sync or an order porter upload.
• Language that use to say Web Quote in Quosal now refers to Order Porter Mobile in the Order Porter menu to avoid confusion on what it does.
Etilize Premier
• On the item comparison screen, attributes that are not identical are now called out in a different color. This helps you quickly scan for differences between items.
• We now support the Etilize European catalog.
• You can now do an initial filter of the main distributors when doing searches. This will make sure that Etilize at least has a part number for that distributor before returning a result. It does not guarantee that a distributor will have it, but greatly narrows down the number of results you have to deal with.
• If a distributor is returning a specific message about an item on a lookup, it is now displayed in yellow on the grid. This would include messages like “Authorization required”.
• Etilize will now give you suggested keywords after a search that can help out with misspellings.
• For attributes that support it, such as Processor Speed, you can now search using >= and <= modifiers. These modifiers appear directly in the dropdown.
• You can now specify the Locale in Etilize premier. Not all locals work with each catalog, and you will for instance be given a locale / language error if you attempt to use the US English Locale with the UK catalog.
• Individual sources in Etilize Premier can now be sorted with up to 4 clicks. Click 1 = Price Ascending. Click 2 = Price Descending. Click 3 = On Hand Ascending. Click 4 = On hand Descending. Using the Get Next 50 option or doing another search will clear any existing sorts.
• We fixed a problem where item notes sometimes displayed {/Times New Roman in the preview on the grid. Publishing would always work, or editing the notes would automatically correct it.
Distributor Real Time Content
• When doing a multiple part lookup with Tech Data, errors were not being reported on individual items when they were coming into Etilize Premier search.
• If a Synnex query was too large, the incoming stream would get truncated, and no results were being displayed in Etilize Premier search.
• We made a change to Tech Data to remove RTF Notes that would appear in Electronic Order submissions.
• We removed a comment from Ingram Micro about IM-XML 2.0.
• We fixed a problem where in conjunction with Etilize Premier, only one of the part numbers would get looked up if multiple part numbers for a single distributor were returned from Etilize.
ConnectWise
• If the customer is manually entered into a Quote rather than searched on, you should get a friendlier error when trying to do an opportunity update.
• If you create a ConnectWise opportunity after creating the order porter page, that opportunity id will be uploaded to the order porter quote at that point. This will allow the automatic update status to work with this workflow.
• If Quosal or the iPad is creating a customer in ConnectWise, it will automatically set the Type field to “Quosal API” if that type exists in ConnectWise. This type can then be searched on, and vetted for correct information.
• Added the ability to attach opportunities from a “remote” ConnectWise database instead of your normal one. This is a specialty use case.
• When creating a new customer in ConnectWise, we will truncate the state if it’s larger than 2 characters.
• Line Items that were set to Is Totals Included = false were still getting prices on the opportunity. This has been fixed.
• We added a flag to automatically update the opportunity when uploading to order porter, or emailing a quote. If used, you need to know that you cannot create line items at this level. Any items that do not exist will be put in as a forecast only line. It will create an opportunity if it does not exist.
• Fixed a tax code lookup issue in ConnectWise where ‘;’ or ‘&’ in the Account Name was causing the automatic lookup to fail.
• If there are no site taxes, Quosal will bubble back up to the Financing screen tax code.
• You can now create a quote from Demands when using ConnectWise. When you create a quote from demands, there is a new radio button option when creating electronic orders that allows you to split it up into different electronic orders based on the drop ship (it will use Quote# – 1, Quote# -2 etc as standard EO’s would). Create from demands does support some filtering.
• Quosal 2012 and ConnectWise 2011.3 now supports bundle functionality that allows you to modify the part numbers of a bundle detail, and the quantity of each detail.
• Quosal 2012 and ConnectWise 2011.3 now allow you to send drop ship demands to a new Purchase Order.
• We have added a new configuration that allows you to automatically update or create an opportunity whenever doing a Publish Event (Email, Order Porter). This will not update opportunities that are in a Won or Lost status.
• Non administrative users now get a positive confirmation that they logged into ConnectWise rather than just having the disappearing button.
• 0 Quantity items are no longer being sent to opportunity products, as the API automatically re-assigns these to a quantity of 1 now.
• Quosal 2012 and ConnectWise 2011.3 will now always have the update documents checkbox enabled on opportunity updates. This allows you to replace files on the opportunity documents in ConnectWise as you do updates. Please be aware that having multiple versions will result in multiple Open Quosal’s and View PDFs for each version.
• Quosal 2012 and ConnectWise 2011.3 allow you to post products on a service ticket again when doing Posting from Overview. It is required that these items must exist in ConnectWise for them to appear in the products section. If they do not exist, Quosal will put in notes in the ticket description about what the item was.
• Campaigns have been updated for 2011.3. We can now measure impressions on Order Porter Request pages. Additionally, campaigns can optionally be specified in Overview for Quosal templates, even if no opportunity yet exists for the Quote.
• Inactive users are no longer available for the Primary and inside reps of an opportunity.
• Tax codes will now properly import their tax code instead of description for 2011.2 and 2011.3 instead of having to do the work around of temporarily using 2011.1.
Workspace
• We added an “Is Hidden” property to Tab Information. If a tab is hidden, non-admin users will not be able to see it on a quote, but it is still available for Quote Forms and Order Porter. The main use case is to hide certain content in a Visual Quoting scenario.
• We added section header and footer special line types. These sections can present subtotals within tabs. This works with recurring revenue subtotals, and has specialty print ability for parsing out in Terms & Recurring items.
• Added a special keyword called LINK to the grouping code field. Example: LINK-Item1. If you have a matching grouping code with LINK in it, it will also copy descriptions, prices, and other values as they are changed on a line to other lines. If this is not set, only the quantity is copied over when changed.
• We added a specialty ASSURANCE line type. The assurance item must be in between a sub header and a sub footer. It takes the total of all non-assurance items, and allows you to add a multiplier to it. This could be 20%. You will need to expose the Line Type and Local Price Formula columns to set this up.
• We now display the company logo in the title bar.
• Copying from a template should now work faster. We don’t force the entire copy to have saved first before working on it.
• The recurring amount was not bubbling up to package headers on package items. This has been corrected.
• Grouping codes now affect the package quantity instead of doing nothing when used with package detail items. This is a one way street from the master item. Updating a package detail quantity will not flow in reverse.
Custom Workspace Grids
• We added the ability to have a secondary grid style in Quosal. This grid is highly detailed in setup. It allows you to format individual line types, such as package headers and details, comments, and sections separately. It is recommended that a Quosal power user maintain them. Setup for these custom grids can be found under Options -> Visual Quoting. We have shipped a multi line and a simple version of the new grid. This customization also allows you to get to Tab Level information, providing a header and footer section to allow highly used options such as Is Printed and Is Optional to be available without having to use Tab Information to get to them.
• On the new grid, you are allowed to select multiple items, copy them, and past them into different sections. Other options that are on the standard grid have been hidden, such as Rename Column, that do not apply in this scenario.
Terms and Recurring
• We added a specialty tab type called “Term Options”. If you rename a tab to this on the workspace, it will present a list of the term options, as defined in overview. The options will be greatly simplified to non-setup changes, and also display some totals options.
• We added the ability to round term options to the nearest dollar if desired for financing.
• Term options now have an Is Printed field. If you do not wish to offer an option, you can disable it using this.
• Added some advanced filters to the financing sections. It is now possible to include multiple specific tab names, or exclude multiple ones. It’s a return delimited list of Tab Names.
• We added the ability to “spread” a onetime fee into the recurring amount for term options for the duration of the recurring term.
• We added a flag to allow the term option to enforce whether it displays amounts from optional sections and not-included sections.
• You can set the onetime fee payment to be a percentage of the total when submitting to Authorize.net or PayPal.
• Term groups weren’t grouping correctly and only showing the last item in the group. This has been corrected. Its use case is for pivoting terms and recurring.
Order Porter
• When performing a mass load of order porter quotes created off the iPad or off of requests, it is no longer going to pop the customer not found message. It will still display the exception list after the mass load completes.
• Fixed a problem if the Primary Rep on the quote had never done their own upload to order porter, their information would not appear.
• You can now enforce Quote Expiration dates on Order Porter. There are new tags that allow you to display a custom message when a quote is expired, and to not show the approval area when a quote is in this state. By default, quotes do not expire.
• The order porter upload should go quicker. We allowed for some simultaneous streaming of upload objects.
• The replace function will now attempt to support quotes in the content. It strategically tries “, first for the token separation.
• We have added new templates to Order Porter. These new templates include:
o Quosal Shadows
o Quosal Green
o Quosal Silver
• Existing order porter templates have been updated to support new content when it is available.
• If you were using the Order Porter Line Items Professional template and had a tab that was using tab level margins, an update on the order porter page was setting line item pricing to 0. This has been fixed.
• When checking for Order Porters, you will now be presented with a fetching message, rather than having Quosal active and taking input for a few seconds then suddenly appearing.
• Certificate errors when updating Opportunities and Tickets via ConnectWise will now be ignored during the approval process.
• Added 4 new #Begin tags for Order Porter Use:
o #BeginIf(“”,”") to test Equality
o #BeginIfNot(“”,”") to test things that are not equal
o #BeginIfGreaterThan(“”,”") to test to see if one value is greater than another
o #BeginIfLessThan(“”,”") to test to see if one value is less than another
Greater and Less Than should both know the difference between a string comparison and a numeric comparison. It automatically tries to convert both parameters to a double first.
• #Quote.RecurringPlusOptions is now available at the Quote Level.
• Recurring amounts are available in all standard order porter templates if a recurring amount is present on the quote.
• It is now possible to set Time Zone as a parameter in the order porter URL. Please see Knowledge base 682 in Quosal for more information about this.
• The #ForceHTTPS() tag no longer forces the main .pdf link to have https:// in the URL.
Product Buffet
• You can now specify a custom ODBC query for Product Buffet.
• You can now manually add a table to the query list if ODBC Schema does not return on an ODBC mapping.
• You can now map to Z_CustomText1 and some additional Quosal fields.
• We added line item fields for Quote Name and Quote Number that can be mapped from product buffet. This can be useful for historical quotes from other systems.
ACT!
• ACT! 2012 is now available as a version.
Order Porter Payment Processing
• Subscriptions are officially supported in PayPal and Authorize.net. If you have term options set up, especially on managed services proposals, you can automatically take a recurring subscription for those processors.
• Added the ability to combing a payment plan together with a recurring payment for a single subscription. This will only work in situations where the payment plan and the term have equal length.
• Authorize.net customer ids are truncated to 20 characters.
Quote Content
• We added a purchase order field to the main Quote Content. This purchase order field will be available in all of the standard Quosal order porter templates by default. It will also appear in Workflow.
• Gross margins and Markups will no longer include Shipping Tab numbers in the calc.
Publish & Deliver
• We added a field for tax labels in the main quote object so that quote forms can easily use them.
• Default Original has been officially retired from new installs and can now only be found in the content exchange.
• Custom Decimal Extended fields are now available to the quote forms, on a tab and quote level. Before, only item level was available.
• Multiple publishing of a quote form would sometimes result in an error message about the saved documents being in use. This will no longer happen
• We added Phone to the basic list of Word tags. It will use the Day Phone + Extension of the different customer templates.
Administrative
• We added the ability to export and import users between databases. The password is a hash code, so cannot be copied. You will be prompted for a default for all new users. If the username is already in the system, it will not import.
• Internal Item Maintenance now has additional fields to bring it closer to all the fields that you can map to from Product Buffet.
• The Right Click Customize Grid and Pick Fields options have been added to the Security Role options. This makes it possible to customize a standard user so they have no ability to add additional columns to a grid. This might be important if you never wanted them to see line item Margin, for example.
Multiple CRM Support
• You can now enable the CRM toggle to appear on the Customer Quick search area on the screen. This can be enabled under Options -> Quote Setup, and is off by default. When active, CRMs that have Username and Passwords defined will appear in the selection list.
• Quosal will prompt you to try to automatically look up a customer in the new CRM system rather than just erase them when you toggle. Opportunities are still always cleared.
Autotask
• Autotask has been upgraded to use the 1.5 version of the web service.
• When creating products in Autotask, we now truncate the description to 100 characters rather than allowing it to throw an error.
• Added the ability for Autotask to be able to Post to a contract from a Quote in the Overview section. You can set certain tabs in Quosal to be Autotask contract tabs and post only those sections.
• Recurring services from Autotask now map to the Recurring amount field in Quosal, and not the regular price field.
• Service bundles are now available to search on.
• You can now create a Purchase Order in Autotask from any Electronic Order in Quosal.
Salesforce
• Updated how the Salesforce 2 product buffet group works to have faster searching, and better obey price books.
Options Setup
• Real Time pricing setup has had its button moved from the bottom to the top of the Product Setup section.
• Require Customer option has been removed.
• When configuring colors under Order Porter setup, there is a new widget to display what the current color is.
• You can now test the ConnectWise integrator login that is used by Order Porter in Order Porter setup.
Approvals
• We have implemented a new template called Secure_Approvals for the approval system. Also, you are allowed to set a new custom template for the approval process in options. New installs will use this secure approval form, while existing patches will continue to use the original approval form and have the option to change it.
• Login is now available to use on approval pages. When implemented, an approver must have at least uploaded to Order Porter once, or in the main menu, Order Porter -> Synchronize Content for Order Porter mobile must have been selected.
• If you are customizing an Approval Order Porter Template you must use the comment tag in the quote to make it available in the dropdown.
• Users can now be designated as “Is Approver” in the administrative setup. When used, this allows an end user to override who they are sending an approval to if their primary approver is not available. Only users designated as Is Approver will be available for them to choose from. When an override user is selected, the primary approver will get a notification message next time they log into Quosal stating that this happened.
• Copying a quote will no longer copy over the approval information from that quote, thus allowing you to bypass it.
Peer Reviews
• It is now possible to override the default Order Porter template with a custom one. You can select what template is being used in Options -> Workflow.
Tab Templates
• We added the ability to support Tab Templates in Quosal. A tab template is designated by going to the Tab Information section, and checking the “Is Template” checkbox. Once a template is set, Quosal should be re-logged into to activate the template.
• When a tab is named / renamed to a Tab Template, it will copy over all of the attributes of that tab. If there are items on the tab template, it will automatically copy them over if there are no items on the current tab. If there are items, it will prompt you about adding items.
• There is a “Pick Tab Template” button at the bottom of the workspace that will allow you to add a new tab based off of a tab template to your current quote. If you are an administrative user, this is also where you can go to edit existing tab templates by opening their source quotes, and refresh the tab list without re-logging into Quosal.
• If you are using Quote Templates, be wary of having any Tab Templates outside of the Quote Template that match tabs on the Quote Template. They will override each other with unpredictable results.
Proxy Connections
• We provided a way to globally activate Proxy on all outgoing connections in Quosal. Some cloud connections were not available to be proxied before.
• We provided an override list to not perform a proxy on specific addresses.
Importing/Exporting Quotes
• When exporting Quotes, you will now be presented with an option to export the metadata along with that Quote. The metadata will include Quote Forms, Order Porter Pages, Visual Quotes, and Etilize Premier Profiles that it finds associated with that Quote. If you answer no, it will export just the Quote information only as a .Quosal file.
• All the different import options have been consolidated to their own Import option under Menu, including Netformx.
• We added the ability to import a Cisco QPT XML file format.
Updating All Costs
• If you have Etilize Premier, you will get an option to use it for Updating All costs rather than the current method. The advantage of this is that we are able to use the same price lookup functionality that is in the Etilize Premier Search screen here, thus speeding up how long it takes to get pricing and availability from the major distributors. If you do not have Etilize Premier, you will not be presented with this option.
QuickBooks
• There is a new flag for QuickBooks that allows you to specify the entry of an override Invoice Class when posting in overview. It will default to the standard class first.
• We will now check the length of the QuickBooks purchase order number before creating it to make sure it is within the acceptable QuickBooks limit.
• We have added some additional error message captures when posting a QuickBooks PO that won’t allow you to post a PO until tab settings are changed to QuickBooks on candidate tabs.
Database and Behind the Scenes
• Made some changes how the backup and load database function works in the menu. The Create Local Database function now behaves when creating a SQL Express copy of a database. The Create Local Database will work for Azure, but not the original SaaS server.
• Occasionally with Azure, we run into a Transport level error. This error is essentially a broken connection. Quosal realizes this, and re-opens the connection and submits the BO again for saving. However, if the business object was a NEW item, it would first generate an insert statement, and then an update statement on the re-submit. This essentially means in bad network conditions, it was possible to get an item to not save and that error has now been corrected.
• Added the ability to Export and Import only the main content of a database. This would include quote templates, scripts, order porters pages, quote forms, and visual quotes.
• When exporting a quote, you will now be prompted to include all known extraneous data associated with that quote, including forms, order porter templates, and visual quote data.
• New file extensions have been registered for Quosal, including .quosalvt and .quosalgrid.
• The patching program has had a UI update.
• If Quosal is doing a schema update, the splash screen will now notify you about the extended launch time.
• Using the LOG command in a dbinfo.ini file will now also capture everything that is sent to the Console (accessed with ctrl ~ in Quosal).