October 18 Blog Review

Relatively quiet in the blog world this week. Everyone is beginning to use CRM 2013 and posting about its features. Of course everyone is also getting ready for CRMUG Summit next week! I will be there and hope to be posting about all the knowledge I acquire.

In CRM 2011, you could set a default view simply by hitting the “Set as Default View” button. This has changed in CRM 2013. PowerObjects talks about Default Views in CRM 2013. Check out the different Pin positions to see how it relates to what is the default and how to pick a new default view.

CustomerEffective discusses CRM 2013 and working Browser Independent. Browsers that are not yet supported will automatically open in Mobile Express, there are several ways to prevent this but you also need to be aware of the limitations and work that is still being done.

Candlewest prepared a great Infographic – One CRM to Rule Them All! It shows us how much faster the Lord of the Rings could have gone if they had a CRM system to keep them organized.

The Microsoft Dynamics CRM Team posted several helpful blogs for us this week – Manage Auto Save, Collaborate with new Access Teams, and New Capabilities in CRM Lookups. All of these give great insight into some of the benefits of moving to CRM 2013. 

Dynamics Café posted about using CRM to Support the New Customer. Customers today have a new way of buying. They research, read reviews, and look to social media. Today marketing is not what it used to be – “It is about social, it is about video, it is about turning customers into future advocates.”

Don’t forget to register for the CRM 2013 Global Premiere Event on November 4^th! This will be an hour long virtual premier live from Barcelona.

Since it’s a quiet week I want to take this opportunity to brag on CRM Rock Star. CRM Rock Star is a place where you can record your CRM and SharePoint experience and it rates you against other Microsoft professionals. This is a great way to showcase your skills and see how you stack up. I am currently #11 in the United States! (You will have to log in to view profiles.)

That’s all for today! I am looking forward to passing on all the news from CRMUG Next week!

May 10 Blog Review

Here is a summary of the most interesting happenings this week in the world of CRM.

CustomerEffective: Everybody has bad data – People interact with data so it is not perfect. It naturally is grouped into silos and separate systems. When we try to gather this together into one system it can be very daunting. Plan to work hard to get the data clean and plan the migration. Involve a service provider and/or a data cleansing tool to assist you. Make sure you have a strategy. Don’t forget this is an on-going effort and you should consider implementing a tool to help keep your data clean in the future.

CustomerEffective: Data Types available with CRM 2011 – a nice review of the available data types and what they mean.

Dynamics World Top 100 – The Dynamics World top 100 most influential people in the world of CRM were announced. I was not on the list even though I am ranked 80^th in the world on CRM Rock Star. Maybe next Year. See the blog section to see get the link to Chris Cognetta (#49) and Leon Tribe (#55).

Electronic Arts: Social Technology But a Less Social Attitude – EA was again voted Worst Company in America. Leon Tribe discusses the COO’s thoughts on this and how this shows a bad attitude towards social listening. They have implemented Salesforce but are not using it to listen and respond to their customers.

C5: Web Resources on a Dashboard – this describes in simple, non-developers terms how to create a web resource and put it in your dashboard. The situation they describe is interesting – use a Web Resource to include your directions. Great idea! Put the instructions they need directly in front of them!

C5: Option Set Best Practices – Be careful with your option set options especially if you are working with outside vendors. When a vendor sends a managed solution with an Option Set it will contain all the Options – so if you have modified the labels on those options, they will be changed back. So it is better to delete options you don’t need and add new ones. Or at least keep very good documentation on the Label-value combinations so you can correct them when necessary.

Pandas are Terrible Investments – Not related to CRM except that it is on a consultant’s site. Still humorous.

PowerObjects: Date of an Email – Sometimes it can be confusing to look at an Email in CRM because it will say created on say 5/10/2013. Does this mean that’s when it was sent/received? Or is that just when it was tracked? Answer is when it was tracked. Look at the Actual End field. This will be the date on the actual email.

PowerObjects is good for quick, helpful tips that you can use every day. Check out their 5 Tips for Daily Work in Dynamics CRM. They also had a good blog about Migration tips for the consultants among us.

Auditing Workflows – This is a bit older but a helpful tip; use Auditing on your workflows to see who Enables/Disables them. Good idea since this is not automatically tracked.

That’s all for today folks! Have a nice weekend!