SalesLogix command line switches not working?

For the better part of the past 12 months, I’ve been handling the implementation of SalesLogix, a customer relationship management (CRM) product by Sage Software (formerly Best Software), for one of my clients. In my travels, I’ve found that command line switches for the various SalesLogix applications (such as the Sales Client or Administrator) don’t always work. After some noodling yesterday, I found out why.

First, a little background. Below is excerpts from a knowledge base article outlining how to use the SalesLogix command line switches.

The Sales Client has a series of command line switches which can be used to log on to the Sales Client. For example, a desktop shortcut can be created containing parameters to log on to a specified database. The switches are as follows:
/n is the username
/p is the user password
/b is the “log on to” database alias
…
Examples:
To point to the database “SLX”, and log on as user “jdoe” with password “mypwd”, the value of Target would be “C:|Program Files\SalesLogix\SalesLogix.exe” /b SLX /n jdoe /p mypwd“…

Easy enough. However, it doesn’t work if current user logged in to Windows has a SalesLogix account set up to use Windows authentication. SalesLogix has a feature where “users are automatically logged on without entering their SalesLogix user names or passwords. Users’ Windows IDs are stored in the SalesLogix database paired with their SalesLogix user names and passwords” (from SalesLogix Administrator Help). Unfortunately, if you have this set for a user, that user will not be able to use command line switches for the SalesLogix Client. (The Administrator or Architect, which do not allow any kind of passthrough authentication, don’t experience this problem.)

To fix the problem, remove the user’s Windows passthrough authentication. Hopefully this little tidbit helps those out there who’ve been scratching their heads over this (like I was).