Implementing SalesHQ Portal: How SalesHQ Works

This post is part of a series on Implementing SalesHQ Portal, which is one of the GP Elementz Portals from my new employer, ISC Software Solutions.

in the last post in this series, I covered what the SalesHQ portal is, and in this post I’m going to go into a little detail as to how it works.

There are five main components to the SalesHQ portal:

1. The Dynamics GP client component which allows configuration of the SalesHQ portal and allows granting of access to customers and sales people.
2. The SQL Tables which stores the configuration of the SalesHQ portal; these tables can either be in a new database or can be added to the Dynamics GP system database (typically called DYNAMICS).
3. The Connector Service which serves two purposes:
   1. The Microsoft Dynamics GP client talks via the Connector Service with the database.
   2. The Connector Service initiates communication with the Azure Relay; this means all communication is outbound meaning no inbound ports need to be open on the firewall.
4. The Azure Relay which receives information from the Connector Service.
5. The Web Portal which is hosted by ISC Software on Microsoft Azure. The Web Portal is responsively designed to work on any device from PCs to laptops to tables to mobiles/cellphones.

As mentioned, the SalesHQ web portal is hosted by ISC Software on Microsoft Azure; organisations using the portal can supply their own URL for user-friendly naming and access to the portal; for example, I could use https://mobilesales.azurecurve.co.uk/ to give a friendly name for accessing SalesHQ.

The implementation of SalesHQ is a task split between ISC Software and either you or the consultant from your Dynamics GP partner; you, or your partner will install the Connector Service, update the Dynamics GP clients and configure SalesHQ while ISC Software will deploy and configure the Azure components including the web portal.

The key advantage of how SalesHQ has been designed, is that it does not require any incoming ports opened on the firewall as all communications between the portal and Dynamics GP, is initiated by the ,em>Connector Service.