June 27 Blog Review

The summer busyness continues to take a toll on my blogging. This will be a review of basically the last month of CRM news. Let’s get started with all the Spring Wave news and then we will go through the other blogs over the last few weeks.

Spring Wave CRM 2013 Updates

A hot topic these past few weeks has been the Spring ’14 Wave of features. To get all the information you need, first check out CRM in the Field’s Podcast and Overview of CRM 2013 Service Pack 1. Then read all these other blogs as well:

PowerObjects wrote a great tutorial on Instalingl Spring '14 Wave, Leo Product Updates on CRM 2013 Organization. CustomerEffective also talked about Getting Ready for Spring ’14 and gave some tips on things to keep in mind.

The Spring ’14 Wave had a major focus on the service area, Jukka Niiranen talked to us about Case Creation and Routing. Check this out to better understand the service improvements that could help your organization. PowerObjects also talked about Spring '14 Wave Closing Case with Open Activities, the update gives user the option to complete the case with open Activities and those Activities will be canceled. They also went through many more of the service features in their blog, but there is not enough time to cover them all today. CustomerEffective chimed in with What’s New With Queues.

CustomerEffective also talked about the Spring Wave with more information on the Server-Based SharePoint integration - CRM Online Spring '14: Server-Based SharePoint Integration.

Scott Durow talked about the Command Bar updates in the Spring ’14 wave in And Then There were seven! Now the command bar allows 7 buttons instead of the 5 previously.

Several Blogs produced their top feature list: PowerObjects Top 10 Spring Wave Updates, CustomerEffective’s Top 5 Features You Might not Know about, Scott Durow’s Top 3 Fixes, and finally Preact CRM’s Top 12 Service Improvements.

However, the feature I am most excited for is Workflow OR Conditions in CRM 2013 SP! (Thank you Adam Vero for giving this insight.) Currently if you wanted to create an OR in a workflow condition you would need multiple ifs and duplicated logic and more thinking than should be necessary. This will save so much time in complicated workflows!

Tips

Reporting is a very valuable feature in CRM. It can be even more valuable if you set the reports to run on a schedule and email them out to people. Learn how in CustomerEffective’s walk through - CRM Report Scheduler.

PowerObjects posted a helpful tip is Color Code Tracked Appointments in Outlook. This shows you how to set up conditional formatting so that your CRM appointments will appear in a different color on your calendar.

As new features are released for CRM it is important to know what system requirements need to be met. CRM in the field released Supported Configurations in Next Version of CRM which relates to the “Vega” release of CRM.

Sonoma Partners talked to us about Controlling Access to Access Team Templates. If an Access Team template is deleted, all of the associated Access Teams will be deleted. This could cause a major problem in your system so ensure you lock down this security and train your users.

PowerObjects gave a quick tip - Adding Columns to Marketing List Members Sub Grid. This describes how to add columns to the default view of members of a Marketing List. Keep in mind, if you just need to pull this every once and a while you could also build a find for all Contacts who are a member of a certain Marketing List. This will allow you to pull in all the information you need as well.

CustomerEffective taught us how to Retrieve a Record GUID in CRM 2013.

Scott Durow talked through important system pieces to be keeping an eye on in Monitor! Monitor! Monitor!

If you have ever had issues with workflows utilizing certain records but needing to update the links between Dev and Live, check out PowerObjects’ Utilizing GUID’s for Importing Data to Multiple Orgs. This shows you what can be done to resolve that issue.

CustomerEffective wrote a great blog on Business Process Flow Lessons Learned. This described the benefits and issues with Business Process Flows and what to consider when you build them for your organization.

I think that is enough for today! Have a lovely weekend!

May 16 Blog Review

Now that I caught up and the backlog of blogs earlier this week, I am hopefully back on schedule. Here are the top blogs this week.

Adam Vero wrote a great blog called, Why Use Access Teams in Dynamics CRM 2013. This describes the reasons to use Access Teams and the benefits they can provide to your system. He also links to some other great resources on the topic.

CustomerEffective taught us about design in Form Style in Dynamics CRM: Tips from the Fashion Industry. Some of the tips are: make sure important things are easy to access, make sure the order follows your process, and to update regularly with input from other people. There are also several great style ideas included.

CRM in the Field wrote a how to article to deal with Sitemap Issues after CRM 2011 Import into CRM 2013. Read carefully and take note of the disclaimer before proceeding.

The CRM Team Blog released Important Information about supported Configurations in the next release for CRM. This describes what you need to know for the next major release of CRM.

Sonoma Partners posted about an Activity Feed Quirk when customizing “Follow” Views. This describes an issue when out of the box entities have been renamed and the view names are not correctly renamed in the import.

Jukka Niiranen also taught us this week in Visualizing Your Progress with CRM Goals. One idea brought up in the post is to use a long continuous goal that is limited in the rollup query instead of creating a new goal for each month. Also make sure that your goals are always visible to users where they can be analyzed and acted upon.

Have a great weekend!