I am working though the list of custom keywords we have in place to get ready for V12. We have a keyword that points to T_ORDER.solicitor. In other tables, I have replacing this with worker_customer_no but in the T_ORDER table, I don't see that column added in our V12 environment.
Is there a field in T_ORDER that will replace the solicitor column? How will an order solicitor be tracked in V12.
Thanks!
- Levi
Levi -
You're in luck. No change to that in v12. :)
- Heather
Troy Nelson
Heather,
That's.... Good news. I guess? I'm actually pretty surprised by that. I had assumed that the "User, Solicitor, Both" field in T_METUSER would become irrelevant. But it sounds like we will need to maintain some level of that logic for box office folks. I'm assuming then that if someone is a solicitor solely for the purposes of orders we won't have to map them to a customer record during the upgrade.
It's fairly distracting to be using solicitor to represent two separate types of data. Although I suppose I should be saying "Worker" for anything relating to plans. But that will take the users a few years to catch up to.
Thank you for clarifying it though. That'll save me several hours of head scratching. :)
Wouldn't that be "initiator"?
Hi Levi - I hope I'm giving you the correct info, but we haven't had to change anything setup or business practice wise for our order side. And I'm seeing the solicitor info populated with the correct stuff - I still have to join it out to the T_METUSER table on the order side to get what I want.
Unless I'm doing it the hard way, which could always be the case.
And Gawain - I think Levi's talking about the actual staff member attached to the order from order header - not one of the owner, initiator, recipient fields which is about the patron's relationship to the order/ticket. Correct me if I'm wrong about that Levi!
I'll attempt to clear up any confusion (attempt being the important word here.) When we changed to the concept of "Workers" in V12 for the fundraising related areas of the system we were faced with the problem of what to do with Orders.
We felt that this value in Orders (whatever it is called) was fundamentally different than Workers in that it was probably a different population of users. There were also a few web API implications with changing this value to point to Workers. So we felt that the best decision (at least for now) was to leave this column in Orders pointing to the users' table (T_METUSER).
After a bunch of discussion internally and with our documentation team about whether to rename this in orders we decided not to since the term "solicitor" was no longer in use anywhere else and we couldn't come up with an alternate name that was better. You will notice that on the Contribution Editor window it no longer says "Solicitor" but has been changed to "Worker".
So that's the reasoning behind what exists now. And it hopefully clears up the thinking a bit.
Thanks Chuck! That definitely helps me understand what's happening. We'll probably incorporate a quick note about this in our user training when we start educating the user base on V12. And make a much bigger push to get them to adopt the vocabulary of Workers for the fundraising side to avoid confusion.
Since Solicitor was changed to Worker, the canned report in Report and Utilities ("New Contributions") no longer shows the name of the person who sold the membership. We are keeping track of how many memberships a worker has sold this month for an incentive program and i'm not having luck figuring out how to do this. Any suggestions? Thank you.