August 2 & 9 Blog Review

I have been a very bad blogger. My blog for two Fridays ago was just posted and my blog for last Friday is obviously not here. So here we have a two week blog review.

Biggest news from last week was the Rollup 11 Critical Update. To find out what you need to know check out the CRM in the Field Recap, PowerObjects Blog and the KnowledgeBase Article. This is an update for systems currently on UR 11 who are unable to move to UR12+ because of compatibility. This update includes performance fixes from UR 12, 13 and 14 as well as an update to split the CRM for Outlook process from the Outlook process (to fix those pesky out of memory errors). This cannot be installed if you are on UR 12, 13 or 14 and if you install the critical update you cannot install another rollup until UR 15.

Preact CRM has three great blogs about what to expect with CRM 2013. There is so much information included; I could never do it justice. Check it out:

• What’s New in Microsoft Dynamics CRM 2013
• CRM 2013 (Orion) Update: 10 Things you Need To Know
• Previewing the New Dynamics CRM 2013 Navigation

Jukka Niiranen also posted a great blog summarizing all the announcements and excitement from the World Partner Conference – Dynamics CRM 2013 Finally Revealed.

PowerObject talked to us this week about Duplicate Detection. It is important to remember that if duplicate are being checked as records are created or updated these can only be checked against records the user has access to. So consider giving users read access to all records or having a duplicate detection job run separately by an administrator.

For our custom report people, CustomerEffective describes a quick way to download multiple reports to edit. They also gave us a Beginner Guide to Pivot Tables.

Leon Tribe has a glowing review of Zero@Ten’s Bulk Workflow Extension tool. This tool allows you to run a workflow on more than 250 records at a time. Leon notes that this will be very beneficial in CRM 2013 when Workflows become even more powerful and take on some of the functionality currently handled by plugins.

Alternatively, PowerObjects gave a tutorial on running On-Demand Workflows from Outlook. This also allows you to run a workflow for more than 250 records.

The CRM Software blog also presented us with Thoughts on Microsoft CRM 2013 which talked about the strides Microsoft is taking to improve user adoption, integration, and mobile use with CRM 2013.

I hope this helps you stay up-to-date on the world of CRM.