February 7 Blog Review

The big news this week is that Microsoft announced their new CEO, Satya Nadella. The Dynamics community was excited because he has experience with the Dynamics Product line. Now that could mean we can expect more focus on Dynamics or it could just mean he worked at Microsoft for a long time and is well-rounded. Either way, it is interesting news.

PowerObjects posted about how to Use Duplicate Detection Rules in CRM 2013 when Qualifying a Lead. Duplicate Detection is a feature that allows you to create rules to find duplicates. These rules can then be applied in different situations or in jobs that search the whole system for duplicates. The process changed in CRM 2013, removing the pop-up when creating a record. However, you can still use this functionality when qualifying a lead.

Also you can check out Jukka Niiranen’s blog on Making Better Use of Business Process Flow Data. This describes how to handle situations where you have multiple processes running on the same entity and want to be able to report and compare the records together and broken out by process.

Encore Business Solutions also posted this great blog comparing CRM Marketing Automation tools. There are many great tools available but the choice comes down to how much marketing functionality you need and want as well as how much you want to spend.

Also the CRMUG DC chapter meeting was this week. We had a very good turnout on a rather icy day. The first half of the meeting was a presentation from Monique Riviere from Independent Sector describing the work on their implementation of CRM. They are working on many interesting things and working with lots of different vendors. The main takeaways were to make sure you have a good partner that can be your first line of support and assist with the communication between vendors. Also we discussed the question of making CRM fit your process or making the process fit CRM. This is a pitfall that many implementations have fallen into. In the end there needs to be a balance. Streamline the process but make sure you are not making changes that will impair your system in the future.

The other half of the CRMUG meeting with a Social Integrations presentation from Robert Contreras of Microsoft. He demoed the Yammer integration as well as Netbreeze. Both of these are very powerful features and they seem to be continually improved. No licensing or price information has been released about the Netbreeze integration but he said to watch the Social section of the CRM page for details.

That’s all the news I have for today folks. Have a great weekend!