Apttus provides powerful, flexible tools that you can use to streamline your contract management. The award winning X-Author tool is an add-on to MS Office.  For this blog, we will showcase the use of MS Word on a Windows PC (sorry Mac users!)

1. Create a Quote/Proposal and add a few product line items by clicking Configure Products >Configure > Add products> Go to Pricing >Finalize

Creating and Using Templates

Templates are Apttus-specific objects in a Salesforce organization that combine static text, such as contractual language, with data from the Salesforce database in order to generate a final document that will be presented to a customer. The merging of data into the template structure is accomplished through the following Apttus technology:

• Fields: These fields denote a specific database field that should be brought into the document at the location of the merge field’s inclusion. They can be interspersed with static text in the template so that the final document reads as naturally as a document that was created manually.
• Lookup Fields: These merge fields rely on a connection between related objects in the database in order to bring in data to the template. In relational database terms, it is akin to performing a table join.
• Clauses: Modular blocks of text that are used repeatedly. By adding these blocks to a library called a playbook, they can be reused continuously in multiple documents.

Creating a template requires Apttus-specific functionality that is included in the X-Author plugin for Microsoft Word. When connecting via the X-Author plugin, make sure that you are using the correct credentials.

The screenshot below shows the X-Author Templates tab in MS Word.  Please note that is defaults to the X-Author Contracts tab and that will NOT work for Quotes.  You will need to click on –Author Templates tab to come to the correct area.

Once connected to the right instance, you can open the Word file for the Quote template and start inserting the appropriate fields. A typical quote template will look like this. Sections highlighted in blue are fields that we need to delete and insert the correct Apttus system fields. Please note that highlighting and over-writing will not give you the desired results. You will need to delete and insert the fields.

The next screenshot shows the window with Apttus fields available to be inserted into the quote template. While the task to insert single fields is quite straight forward, the task of creating a table with fields is a bit more tedious.

So for example if you want to create a table with 3 columns

• Product
• Option
• Quantity

You will need to hold the Control Key down while selecting the 3 fields in the right order, then check the “Insert as a table” check mark and then complete the wizard.

If you miss any of these steps, you will get a badly rendered quote.

Here is what your finished quote will look like. This can be generated as a *.doc, *.docx, *.rtf or *.pdf format.

Feel free to reach out to me on Linkedin if you have any questions about this.
https://www.linkedin.com/in/versashore

Here are the basic steps to setting up an account and an opportunity in SFDC CPQ

1. 1. Log into your salesforce instance
   2. Navigate to the Account tab
      1. 1. Click New

      

   3. Enter Values

1. 1. Then click Save
   2. Click New Contact

1. 1. Enter the following values

1. 1. Create New Opportunity

1. 1. Set the following field values and click save

1. 1. Navigate to Opportunities and click new

1. 1. Click on New Quote

1. 1. Set the following field values and save

1. 1. Click on the pop-up to save the price book

1. 1. Click Add products and add any products you have already defined.

1. 1. If you do not have products, you can enter the following details for products

1. 1. Create a quote by adding the following quantities

1. 1. Save and review the quote lines related list

1. 1. Navigate to the opportunity and review the quote and products related list

1. Create your first quote with the same quantities and prices as mentioned in step 15 and confirm if your grand total matches $ 3,617.50

Here are the basic steps to setting up SFDC CPQ

1. Log into your salesforce instance
2. Navigate to Price Books tab
   1. Deactivate Standard
   2. Activate Standard Price Book
3. Install the Native CPQ package
   1. https://login.salesforce.com/packaging/installPackage.apexp?p0=04tA0000000SCaYIAW
4. Click Install for all users
5. Install package and approve third party access
6. Once successfully installed, you will receive an email confirming successful install
7. Navigate to setup| Installed packages and click configure
   1. Authorize Steelbrick for access
   2. Under Steelbrick settings, enable “Authorize new calculations in service”
8. Setup the following Package Settings
   1. Document Folder Tab: Quotes and enable full page preview
   2. Line Editor Tab: Enable Visualize Product Hierarchy and enable multi-line delete
   3. Subscriptions and Renewals: Month
9. Choose SteelBrick CPQ from the app menu to change to a more convenient layout

Now your Steelbrick CPQ is ready for use.

We recently completed our first Wave Analytics project for a leading financial institution in North America. Here is a tabular comparison of key features in OBIEE, Tableau and Salesforce Wave Analytics.

	OBIEE	Tableau	Salesforce Wave Analytics
Report	Analysis	Sheet/Analysis	Lens
Data Snapshot	View	View/Query	Dataset
Dashboard	Dashboard/Page	Story/ Dashboard	App/Dashboard
Guided Navigation	Yes	Limited	Yes
Prompts	Supported	Supported	Supported
Caching	Yes	Yes	No
Parallelism	No	Yes	Yes
Aggregate Aware	Yes	No	n/a
Report Alerts	Yes	Yes	Yes
Supported Data types	Several	Several	CSV and JSON
Built in ETL tool	None	None	None
Security	Row Level	Row Level	Row Level
Parameters	Yes	Yes	Yes
Variables	Yes	Yes	Yes
Cloud	Yes	Yes	Yes
On Premise	Yes	Yes	No

Basically, PolyBase allow you to connect

• structured and
• un-structured data

in a Microsoft Analytics Platform System (APS) appliance using T-SQL.

Project PolyBase was based on the research done by Technical Fellow David DeWitt at Gray System Lab. The primary goal was to find an easy, seamless way to integrated unstructured Big Data with relational, structured data residing in an RDBMS. PolyBase make it easy to blend all data types using the familiar syntax of T-SQL. Here is a simple example on how to create an external table with data sourced from a Hadoop cluster.

–Create a new external table in APS

CREATE EXTERNAL TABLE [ database_name . [ dbo ] . | dbo. ] table_name

( <column_definition> [ ,…n ] )

WITH ( LOCATION = ‘hdfs_folder_or_filepath’,

DATA_SOURCE = external_data_source_name,

FILE_FORMAT = external_file_format_name

[ , <reject_options> [ ,…n ] ]

) [;]

<reject_options> ::=

{

| REJECT_TYPE = value | percentage

| REJECT_VALUE = reject_value

| REJECT_SAMPLE_VALUE = reject_sample_value

}

The Hadoop region is not automatically installed on APS. It is an option and therefore needs to be configured appropriately in APS V2 AU1 and beyond.

Here is a list of pre-requisites before Hadoop can be used on APS:

• Java runtime libraries need to be installed
• Static PDW_User has to be created on Hadoop
• Hadoop connectivity has to be enabled and configured for
  • HDInsight,
  • Hortonworks or
  • Cloudera

This is huge for SQL Server customers looking to integrate Big Data with their Relational Data.  By choosing APS/PolyBase, they can extend their existing in-house staff that is already familiar with T-SQL. Additionally the fully parallelized nature of PolyBase allows users to write heavy duty, industrial strength queries that can handle Petabytes of data without breaking down.

Stay tuned for more blogs on Microsoft APS.

The Microsoft APS Appliance consists of the following domains

• Fabric Domain,
• PDW Workload Domain &
• HDI Workload Domain

The Fabric Domain consists of

• Physical Hosts
• Virtual machines needed to maintain infrastructure and workload VM configurations

The PDW Workload Domain consists of

• PDW Workload
  • SQL Server 2012 Enterprise Edition (PDW/APS build)
  • Control node and compute notes for PDW workload
• Storage
  • More files per filegroup
  • Leverages multiple spindles in parallel

The HDI Workload Domain consists of

• HDI Workload Details
• Windows HDI (Hortonworks HDP)
• Head/Security/Management nodes and Data nodes

Stay tuned for more information on Microsoft APS.

What is Microsoft APS?

The Microsoft APS Appliance is a Massively Parallel Processing (MPP) database appliance that is engineered

to support businesses challenges around

• Data Growth,
• Infrastructure Modernization &
• Real-Time Analytics.

The following three vendors manufacture Microsoft APS Hardware:

• HP
• Dell
• Quanta

Typically APS is bought as a “RACK” or a fraction of a rack.

• HP sells APS hardware in 1/4, 1/2, 3/4 and Full rack configurations; going up a size adds 15TB in disk space
• Dell and Quanta sell APS Hardware in 1/3, 2/3 and Full rack configurations; going up a size adds 22TB in disk space

So if you were to buy HP hardware, this is how you would scale up:

On the other hand, if you were to go down the path of buying Dell or Quanta hardware, this is how you would scale up:

Stay tuned for more information on Microsoft APS.