Late Weekly Blog Review – June 11

My Friday Blog review is very late since it is now in fact Tuesday. Still, let’s see what we can find.

Leon Tribe has some interesting thoughts on Associating Opportunities Directly to a Campaign.

Madrona posted a Review of Polaris Features. Interesting, most has been covered in the blogosphere already. One point I did find interesting is that in Polaris the Outlook Client search will be consistent with the Quick Find behavior in the web client, as opposed to just searching within the view.

MSDynamicsWorld has an interesting article discussing “Will Marketing Acquisitions change CRM competitiveness?” ExactTarget may be bought by Salesforce soon which could impact the many other CRM software platforms that are integrated with it. Also, with Microsoft’s acquisition of MarketingPilot some marketing vendors may be worried about losing business. General conclusion is that yes, things will change but it will take time. Marketing vendors have been working in the Marketing space longer so they will be able to stay in front of the curve.

Recently CRMUG hosted a great webinar about User Adoption, Gamification and the Yankees. You can read the summary on MSDynamicsWorld. If you are a CRMUG Collaborate member you can view the PowerPoint Slides as well.

Quick Tip from Mitch Milam about Working with Queues – create a new system view for all queues whose name does not begin with “<”. Use this to quickly hide all your personal queues.

Sonoma posted a review of the recently released Scalable Security Modeling White Paper (jump directly to the White Paper if you like). Main takeaways as highlighted in the article are: be careful with using too much sharing, do not have more than 1000 Business Units, don’t put users on too many teams, don’t modify team membership or user details often and be careful if a many users are logging in at the same time.

That's all the goodies for today. Good night!

May 17 Blog Review

Here is my overview of some of the interesting blogs and news in the Microsoft Dynamics CRM 2011 World this week:

This week PowerObjects keeps the daily tips coming with Out of the Box Repoty: Dynamics CRM User Summary. If you haven’t already seen this feature you should check it out. Consider the situation where someone says to you, I want to change this role how many people will be affected? Sadly, there is no way to search for users who have a specific role using Advanced Find. So how do you do it? Go to your Enabled Users view and then to Reports -> User Summary. Make sure you choose all records in all pages of this current view. Do not choose all applicable records because then you will see data on records that have already been disabled. This report will list all users by business unit and indicate the roles that they have.

CustomerEffective told us to Use the Right Tool for the Job in their article about reporting and analytics within CRM. There are many analytics tools built right in CRM such as Advanced Find, reports, dashboards, etc. Plus you can always export to Excel. Each of the tools available can fit specific use-cases and levels of complexity. There are several things to keep in mind when determining the right tool: Limitations (views have 5,000 limit, charts have 50,000 record limit), Questions that need to be answered (what you trying to find out?), Next Steps (what is going to be done with the data?), Don’t forget about Pivot Tables, Don’t forget about SSRS Reports and other such tools and finally keep it simple. Use the least-complex tool for the job.

Altico’s Friday Funday helps us out by explaining some abbreviations and acronyms that might have us confused. They also led me to this article, Secure Software Standard in the Spotlight, which talks about how Microsoft is working to push a new security standard/framework/lifecycle to encourage developers to build more secure systems.

DynamicsWorld discussed lowering costs and improving patient care with Automated CRM Systems. Chronic Diseases were mentioned specifically as the long-term nature of these diseases causes them to be very expensive. Also many lifestyle factors can contribute to chronic diseases so health care providers need to find ways to modify these behaviors in patients. CRM can automate notifications, integrate systems, ensure compliance as well as patient services such as automated alerts and online portals.

Jukka Niiranen had a great article: LinkedIn, Dynamics CRM and Social Selling. It describes your options for integrating with LinkedIn and the troubles associated with actually getting that data into your CRM system.

That’s all folks! Have a nice weekend!