OK, we’ve set up the data in SAFE. But there’s also the matter of setting up various options as to the workflow and look and feel over the web. It’s beyond the scope of this document to go into
all the specific details, but we want to give you an outline of what you’re looking at if you want to take customization to the next level.
Why on earth would I want to do this?
That’s a great place to start. Because in general, for all our talk about how you can customize
Ollie, we don’t necessarily recommend that you do so. In fact, it is our recommendation that you work with your Customers to get the most out of all the options we’ve already discussed. In our experience, most of the customizations Distributors try to sell Users involve customizing the
look and feel of the program but not the actual things that Ollie does. So, although it is tempting to tell each customer that you can make Ollie ‘look like this’ and ‘work like that’, your efforts may be better served in other areas besides simply providing a new coat of paint. Disclaimer done. Onward.
Now, the reasons customers want customizations tend to fall into these categories:
1. They have a corporate look and feel for applications that they feel it is important to maintain.
2. They have security needs that require a different
3. They have a workflow that simply cannot be accommodated with the standard Ollie. Now, there are two basic kinds of customizations that can be applied to Ollie:
Global: Customizations which will affect all your customers.
Customer Specific: Customizations which are applied only to a single customer.

Global Customizations

Changes which affect all customers are, in general, easier to manage, since they are shared by all
customers. Your employees will find it easier to become comfortable with these kinds of changes since they apply to all the Users they will deal with. The modifications fall into the following categories:
· SAFE Global Options Browse
· Style Sheets
· Global Images
· Global Language
· Custom Scripting

SAFE GLOBAL OPTIONS
These are options in SAFE which allow you to customize Ollie for all your Customers. They are
managed in SAFE under the Setup|Global Options Browse by selecting the type ‘OLLIE’.

STYLE SHEETS
Style sheets are the changes you will most often want to make. Almost every object in Ollie is
associated with a style stored in the standard style file, which is located in the Styles folder. Since they will be quite familiar to any web designer, they are quite safe to manipulate (…er… so long as you don’t make any typing errirs ?. Changes you can make include:

· <span >Font sizes · <span >Type faces · <span >Font colors · <span >Color schemes· <span >Icons

An easy example: You are satisfied with the look of Ollie except for the green/saddlebrown color scheme (since your company uses a blue/yellow-themed logo). To change Ollie to this new scheme you would:
1. Open the standard CSS file in the Styles folder.
2. Change all the standard green color references to ‘blue’ and all the references from
‘saddlebrown’ to ‘yellow’.
3. Open your image editing software and load all files in the Images subfolder.
4. Use your software’s ‘fill’ tool to replace the greens with lovely shade of blues.
5. Save your images.
Instant extreme makeover! ?
GLOBAL IMAGES
These include all the icons such as buttons which also contribute to the overall look and feel of
Ollie. For example, you may want buttons that are gold and shaped like buttons. If that’s your thing, simply replace the global image files with those to your taste—but do not change the file names!
GLOBAL LANGUAGE TRANSLATION
All the ‘boiler plate’ text Ollie uses is actually stored as a series of text files we call a Translation
File. You may have translations set up for multiple languages which are customer specific, but there is always a main translation file which is the default for all new customers. There’s nothing to prevent you from changing this text to meet your needs.
For example, in Ollie, we use the term Product ID over and over and over because that’s what it’s called in SAFE. Now, if you don’t like the term ‘Product ID’ (or have a streak of evil!) you

could open the translation file in your Notepad application, locate the word ‘Product ID’, change it to ‘Gizmo’ and save the file. From that moment on, every place in Ollie where the term Product ID used to be, the term ‘Gizmo’ will now appear.

If you do anything like the above, you will, of course, have to remember that when your Users call you with a question regarding ‘Gizmo 12-49044′ it actually refers to a Product ID in SAFE ’12-49044’.

GLOBAL HTML
Getting into the next level of changes, you can edit the base HTML for each page. Our base
warnings apply (in short, ‘this is probably not a good idea!) Still, this is safe so long as you stay completely away from any commented blocks!!!
But why? (Oh no another lecture!)
At times, our customers (that would be you) have found an aspiring web designer in-house (since
you’re naturally creative people!) who see these HTML pages and immediately want to spruce them up a bit. That’s great, except that we don’t want anyone re-inventing the wheel. For example, there is the tale of one person who spent an afternoon learning how to change the background image of every Ollie page to a really neat looking watermark of the distributor’s logo, only to find out the following week that this could be effected simply by changing one line in the standard style sheet!

GLOBAL SCRIPT CHANGES
Finally, you can make changes to the ASP.Net scripting, which is at bottom, the mechanism by
which Ollie converts database information (from and to SAFE) into web pages that your Users will see. We do not however recommend that you make such changes on your own. Rather it is strongly recommended that you do so in concert with Suntower Systems.
Some changes can be made easily and are rather benign (for example, changing the way dates number and phone numbers are formatted), others are more involved and cannot be safely achieved without taking considerable care.

Customer Specific Customizations

In addition to the global changes just discussed, there are many customizations which can be
customer specific. Most of these are addressed inside SAFE, that is, by configuring the database. However, there is one ‘biggee’ that is configured exclusively in Ollie: Product Templates. In fact it’s such a biggee that we’re going to devote a whole section to it in a minute. So we’ll skip over that temporarily and address the other type of customer-specific changes you can make in Ollie.
If you’ve examined the file structure of your web server (which we discussed earlier) you may have noticed the ‘Custom’ folder underneath each customer’s main folder. This baby is usually empty. But if you have a customer with specific needs, you can include scripts and style sheets here which are unique for those Users’ Ollie experience. Thus, you can, basically override almost every aspect of Ollie for one particular customer.

Global Versus Customer Specific Customizations

OK, time for another disclaimer:
The Custom Folder Disclaimer
Over the past three years we have found the following hard truth: The Custom Folder is a
bargain with the devil. It offers a tremendous amount of power, but like all such bargains it comes at a cost: be warned! (Muwhahahahahah!)
Once you begin using custom styles and scripting you basic disconnect your Ollie from the fold in two important ways:
1. You are no longer in conformity with our standard code. This is not a trivial point. We are constantly upgrading our code with improvements in features and bug fixes based on the entire community’s reports. If you elect to use custom scripting, you lose this connection. In essence, your code is frozen in time. If flaws are found, or new features added to Ollie, you will need to pay to have these bugs fixed or features added to catch up with the standard code base.
2. It becomes more and more difficult to manage Ollie as you add more and more custom styles and scripting. When customers call for help, it becomes harder and harder for your people to lose track of what features and capabilities each customer actually has in place. In other words, it becomes harder to remember how each customer’s version should work.
In short, there is a good reason why conformity is good! It makes your life easier. The goal is to find a balance between giving your customer the flexibility they need without losing your mind.