April 2017 Blog Review

Let's run through some interesting CRM blogs posted over the last month.

Ledgeview Partners posted a quick tip on Custom Coloring Dynamics 365/CRM Dashboards which shows how to set colors for different options in an option set.

Hitachi Solutions teaches the basics of entity creation through an example in Dynamics 365 Roadmap: A complete guide to Dynamics 365 Fields and Entities.

Hosk discusses How Machine Learning will Change Dynamics 365. This explains the basics of what machine learning is and where to look for more information.

Sonoma Partners shared CRM: When Homemade Doesn't Cut it. The article explains the benefits of going with a market-leading CRM system instead of building in house. I would add to this that these benefits also apply to utilizing market-leading CRM systems in the way they were designed (i.e. evaluating how your business should change to fit standard processes, avoiding unsupported changes, not over-customizing, etc.).

ReadyXRM posted on how to Stop Deactivation of Records in Dynamics 365. This utilizes a workflow to solution to inform users they should not deactivate.

Jumping ahead to May for a minute I need to share ReadyXRM's Dynamics CRM Business Rules Not Working Issue. This is an issue that my organization was battling for months and Nick Doelman was battling even longer. Spoiler Alert: even though the issue occurred even for Administrators the issue was caused by security. Microsoft is working on a fix as it involves corrupted security on the form using the Business Rule.

As always, keep an eye on the CRM Tip of the Day for news and help. This month I particularly liked When Export to Excel Fails for No Reason. This explains how having columns of the same name will cause the export to fail.

That's all for today folks! Have a great day!

March 18 Blog Review

Welcome to this week's blog review. We are going to jump right in to avoid rambling about the pitiful mess my March Maddness bracket has become.

Microsoft announced a new Voice of the Customer Survey feature. Check out this article for more information about the information available and answers to your most common questions.

PowerObjects posted about How to Use Dependent Lookups for Dynamics CRM 2013/2015/2016 Like a Pro. This walks through how to use two related entities and business rules to create dependent lists without code.

CRM Tip of the day shared the Illustrated Tipster Guide to CRM Forms. They feature a great chart that describes the use of each type of form and the features it supports.

Salentica blogged about CRM Full-Text Search and the Mysterious Case of Mr. Way. This describes an interesting issue where certain records were not pulling up when full text searching was in use.

Sonoma Partners asked How well do you Delegate? They provide a solution for when one user want's to delegate visibility of certain records to another user.

That's all for today folks. Have a great weekend!

October 2 Blog Review

Suddenly it is very apparent that fall is upon us! It is dark, cloudy and rainy. But it is only a week until I escape to sunny Reno for CRMUG Summit!

Let’s quickly catch up on some blogs this week so all of us east-coasters can get back to preparing for the hurricane.

CRM Tip of the Day shared Why can’t I set the Default Dashboard? This talks about the difference between your home dashboard and default sales or marketing dashboard.

We have looked at lots of items from the PowerObjects blog so you should check out Behind the Scenes with the PowerObjects Blog: A Dynamics CRM Workflow in Motion. This walks through how they use workflows inside CRM to review and approve blog articles before they are posted.

One of the pieces that went through this workflow is How to Find MS CRM Records without Activities using Advanced Find. This gives a step by step guide on how to use Marketing lists combined with Advanced Find to find records without a certain associated record. Keep in mind Marketing lists can only have Accounts, Leads, or Contacts as members so you can only use this method when you are looking for one of those 3 record types.

Lastly, if you have ever wondered about what CRM consultants really do check out Sonoma Partner’s Day in the life: Meet Melanie. This walks through a day for one of their consultants.

That’s all for today folks. Have a nice (hopefully flood-free) weekend!

January 23 Blog Review

Let’s take a quick look at the CRM news that came out this week.

PowerObjects gave a few quick tutorials to help with CRM 2013. First check out, What to do when: The ‘Set As Default’ button for Dashboards Disappears in CRM. This talks about how to resolve an issue that occurs when your Homepage is set to Dashboards. Then also check out, Accessing the Business Process “Name” in CRM. This shows you how you can create a workflow to populate a field with the current process that is running. This allows you to do charts and reports on that data.

Hitachi Solutions discussed Complex Goal Calculations Using CRM 2015 Calculated Fields. This describes how to use Calculated Fields to determine the weighted percent achieved.

CRM in the Field wrote about the Dangers of Guid.NewGuid();. This is more technical than I usually include but it is very interesting. Apparently when GUIDs are automatically created they are sequential to provide better SQL performance. So don’t try to create your own through plugins/integrations unless you have a very good reason.

Mitch Miliam posted a tutorial of how to Find All Activities for a Particular Entity Type. This is a very helpful tip if you want to only look at Activities regarding Accounts or something like that.

CRM Tip of the Day had an interesting Truckstop discussion about turning off e-mail tracking with CRM for Outlook. You should also check out their tidbit on Dynamic Excel Export Not Working (hint: it has to do with CRM for Outlook too).

That’s all for this week. Have a great weekend!

November 14 Blog Review

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

PowerObjects posted Keeping Afloat with CRM System Requirements for Dynamics CRM. This goes through the dynamics related products and the support dates that you need to be aware of.

PowerObjects also blogged about Understanding Global Option Sets. This describes what Global Option Sets are and how to create them.

Several new videos were highlighted this week. Adam Vero takes a look at CRM 2015 videos from the MS Product Team. These are more technical videos focusing on new functionality available in CRM 2015. Hitachi Solutions also highlighted a video, CRM 2015: Every Interaction Matters. This is an ad from Microsoft showing the value of using the integrated Microsoft products and what we can expect in the future.

Adam Vero also blogged about Modifying Dashboard properties in CRM 2015. In CRM 2013 the properties button was removed when editing dashboards so you could not change the description once the dashboard was initially created. This is corrected in 2015 and you have the option to enable multiple dashboards for tablets.

Jukka Niiranen recapped his top 2013 blogs in CRM 2013 in Retrospect. This is a great way to remember the most-exciting features of 2013 before our focus shifts to 2015.

Let’s finish off with some CRM Tips of the day:

• How can Administrators update read-only fields?
• Google took me to the 2013 documentation when I want 2011, what do I do? (This is so helpful – it was part of my 6.92 Summit Takeaways)
• What happens when I delete tracked Outlook tasks?

Thanks for reading. Have a great weekend!

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!