May 29 Blog Review

Let’s jump right in to the CRM news of the week!

PowerObjects posted Preparing for CRM Upgrades. This is a great quick reference guide about what you need to know for all types of upgrades from simpler cases (2013 to 2015) to the bigger ordeals (4.0 to 2015).

Sonoma Partners talks about Avoiding Form Script Errors with CRM Online 2015 Update 1. The update includes a new way of loading forms which can dramatically impact performance. However, there are a few things you should keep in mind and be aware of.

CRM Tip of the Day posted an interesting tip – Where did the Opportunity subgrade pop-out button go? This talks about how administrators may make new lookup fields on the opportunity but if you ever make any sub-grids you will want to use the Potential Customer relationship.

One more post to highlight from CRM Tip of the Day is Please Subscribe me to All you’ve got. This is a great way to allow users to add contacts to multiple Marketing Lists at once by using a sub-grid.

It’s a quiet week with the holiday and everyone starting off their summer plans. Hopefully we will have more exciting news next week. Have a great weekend!

May 21 Blog Review

It seemed to be a quiet week in the CRM world. Let’s jump right in!

CRM in the Field posted Customers’ choices… The most popular “Dynamics CRM in the Field” technical blog posted from Premier Field Engineering! This reviews the top posts over the last few years. These are full of great information so make sure you check them out.

Leon Tribe discussed Tools for an Awesome CRM Demo. This gives tips to make sure that your demo wows! This includes setting up a portal demo and using a workflow to make emails appear to have been sent.

Jukka Niiranen has been working through a series on customizing 2015 sales processes. This week he talks about Using CRM 2015 Calculated Fields for Opportunity Estimated Revenue. This gives a basic overview and how-to for calculated fields and also talks about some limitations to be aware of.

CRM Tip of the Day posted an interesting tip on creating Mandatory Fields in Dialogs. Although this is not technically possible you can use conditions and logic to force the user to enter a value before proceeding.

CRM Tip of the Day was also busy instructing everyone on SLAs. Check out all 3 parts – Part 1: Fields, Part 2: SLA, and Part 3: FAQ.

That’s all I have for this week!

May 15 Blog Review

The most important CRM News this week was (of course!) the Washington, DC CRMUG Chapter Meeting on Wednesday May 13! If you are a CRMUG member, you can view all the notes in the DC Chapter blog. If you are not a member, check out the CRM Lady’s Blog from that day as she captured some of our top topics.

Also for everyone in the Washington, DC area – block of July 18^th on your calendar! CRMUG DC will be having a joint event with the Baltimore user group at the Nationals game vs the Dodgers. You can come with your family and friends then come meet fellow CRM users at the Red Loft Bar throughout the game!

Also important this week is that Microsoft announced the Annual Dynamics Product Satisfaction Survey! Take a few minutes to go through this and let your feedback be heard!

Now let’s get to the other CRM Blogs posted this week.

PowerObjects posted on How to Retrieve all the Access Team Members for all Accounts in CRM. This talks about how you can grab Access Team data so that you can use it in other queries and reporting.

Sonoma Partners discussed the CRM Online Spring 2015 – Plug-in Trace Log. We have talked about this before but it is a great new feature so it never hurts to share more! This new option allows Administrators to view plug-in errors easily from within CRM.

Jukka Niiranen shared Customizing Lead Qualification process in CRM 2015. This walks through how you can use Business Rules and edit your processes to fit your needs.

CRM Tip of the Day posted an interesting tip – Why aren’t my Workflows running? This explains how Real Time workflows do not show up in the System Jobs as you might expect.

That’s all for tonight. Have a great weekend!

May 8 Blog Review

The most important news this week is that you need to be coming to the CRMUG Washington, DC Chapter meeting next Wednesday May 13^th (Blog, Video, Register). You can also see other news and posts below.

This week the CRM Team announced the General Availability for Spring 2015 Release of Microsoft Dynamics CRM and Microsoft Dynamics Marketing. Their post discusses the key improvements to be aware of (and excited for!).

If you need more information, Anne Stanton compiled a list of Great Resources for Dynamics CRM v7.x.x. This links to the Microsoft videos as well as the different announcements.

Related to this update, Sonoma Partners posted CRM Online Spring 2015 – Folder Level Tracking. This is a great new feature which allows users to set up specific Outlook folders which automatically track and even set the Regarding to a specific record.

Adam Vero continued his charting series with “Mind the gap” to make your CRM Charts look better. This describes how to use the PointWidth and MaxPixelPointWidth properties to ensure your chart looks good on all size monitors and devices. These properties set the amount of the screen filled with columns and (from the opposite perspective) the max size that your columns can be.

I also found these two blogs from a few weeks ago from Ms. Dynamics CRM – Import Case, Account and Contact at once in Single File in CRM Import Wizard and Tips & Tricks: How to solve the Common Bulk Import Problem: ‘The Lookup Reference Could Not Be Resolved’ in CRM Import Wizard. Both of these are things that I have never tried but sounds very interesting. I can’t wait to experiment with it!

Finally, from the CRM Tip of the Day – Training? On New Features? Free? Yes, Please! This directs you to some training for the 2015 Spring release that is available on YouTube.

That’s all for tonight. Have a great weekend everyone!

Q2 2015 DC CRMUG Chapter Meeting

I want to personally invite all of you to the Washington, DC CRMUG Chapter meeting next week! We will be meeting on May 13 at the Microsoft Office in Chevy Chase.

Check out this video for more details:

CRMUG Q2 Washington, DC Chapter Meeting from Kylie Kiser on Vimeo.

If you would like to come, please register with CRMUG. If you are not a CRMUG Member, please Join. If you are already a member, make sure you join the Washington, DC Community to get all of our announcements!

Looking forward to seeing all of you there!

Full Agenda:

The Q2 DC Chapter Meeting will be focused on technical users. Henry McCallum of the largest and most famous development bank will be talking about "The Gotchas of Implementing CRM 2013 Cloud, On-Premise and Office 365 for multiple lines of business in large multinational NGO or Enterprise". Henry has a wealth of knowledge and will assist with technical questions you may have.

We will also be discussing Certifications as well as what was covered at Convergence this year. Please prepare your takeaways to share with the group!

We will focus our roundtable discussion on technical questions as well. Come prepared with any issues you may be having in your environment as well as solutions that may help others!

Time: 8:30 AM – 12:00 PM

Location:

Microsoft Office Chevy Chase

5404 Wisconsin Ave

Suite 700
Chevy Chase, MD 20815

Two Year Blogaversary!

Today, May 3^rd, is my Two Year Blogaversary! I am so happy for this opportunity to have a small voice in the CRM Community. Over the past few years I have come a long way. I have gone from no certifications to five with another one in the works. I used to just attend CRMUG Chapter meetings and now I lead the meeting in Washington, DC (so save the date for May 13). Before, I did not know what a CRM MVP was and now some of them know my name!

In this short time frame I have created 96 blog posts (this will be 97) and had over 16 thousand page views. This may not be a whole lot in the grand scheme of things but it is far from nothing! I am so thankful to all of you for following and reading each week. I couldn’t have done any of this without the great CRM and CRMUG Communities!

I wanted to take this opportunity to review some of my top posts.

#1 – Tools for your CRM Success – This walks you through how to prepare to take your Microsoft CRM certifications. It discusses the resources to use and how to really learn the material.

#2 – Field Level Security vs. Not Searchable – A common point of confusion I run into is the difference between removing a field from the form while also making it Not Searchable and using Field Level Security. This has a handy chart to explain the differences. Even though this is an older post the material applies to all versions.

#3 – Real Life CRM – This is more of a funny post describing how I would use CRM if I had it for my regular life.

Finally, my Summit takeaway blogs have also been fairly popular. Check out Summit 2013 and Summit 2014. I look forward to being at Summit in Reno this year and continuing the tradition!

That’s all I have for you tonight. Thank you again for all your support that got me here!

May 1 Blog Review

Welcome to May everyone! Let’s hop right in to this week’s blog review.

As promised last week Adam Vero published a couple articles on charting within CRM. Check out Highlighting Contribution using conditional formatting in CRM Charts and Conditional Formatting in CRM Leaderboard Charts.

The CRM Team blog posted some great documentation on Microsoft Dynamics Marketing Update 1,  Microsoft Social Engagement 2015 Update 1 and Parature. They also posted on the New Form Rendering Engine with CRM Online 2015. This provides performance benefits to the users as well as some changes for developers working with the form.

Sonoma Partners blogged on CRM Online Spring 2015 Immersive Excel. This describes how you can use Excel Online directly through CRM. You can edit records using this method or just work with them and close out.

A common limitation with Advanced Find is that you cannot search for say Accounts without any Activities. CRM Tip of the Day solves this with NOT IN for the Rest of Us. This presents the option of using a Rollup Field to calculate the number of child records which you can use in Advanced Find.

That’s all for today folks. Have a great day!