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!

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!

October 3 Blog Review

Somehow it has become fall. Even though it is getting colder, the CRM news keeps coming. Let’s take a look at the news and blogs from this past week.

PowerObjects discusses Importing and Updating Records in CRM 2013. This talks about how to update records if you cannot use the Export/re-import functionality.

Hitachi Solutions also talked about CRM 2013 in The Best Little CRM 2013 Feature you might not Know what to do with: Timers. This discusses the timer feature release with 2013 service pack 1 and how to use it.

The CRM in the Field Blog blogged about Table Bloat Due to Workflow Log Entries. This talks about issues related to workflow history retention and what you can do about it.

Leon Tribe discusses Bringing Graphs Down to the Record Level. If you have ever wanted a graph on a record form – now you can learn how to do it!

Finally, Jukka Niiranen talked about 10 tips for Designing a Great User Experience in Dynamics CRM. Use these tips to increase user adoption and help your users enjoy the system experience.

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

Originally posted here:

July 3 Blog Review

Let’s take a look at the CRM news on this short holiday week. Actually it was a holiday week for several countries – Canada Day on Tuesday and the 4^th of July on Friday!

PowerObjects is still blogging away about the Spring ’14 wave. They talked to us this week about setting up Server-Based SharePoint Integration in CRM 2013. Also they talked about a cool new service feature, Timers. This allows you to add timers to your case form to track SLAs and things like that. Check Out Update on New Feature: Timer Control.

CustomerEffective (sorry Hitachi Solutions) posted a very helpful blog on Keeping up with the Ever Growing Dynamics CRM Roadmap and More. This explains the different products and add-ons under the Microsoft umbrella and all the key details you need to know.

McGladrey posted a helpful tip in Formatting Date and Time Fields in a Mail Merge. This shows you how you can specify how the date will look in your merge. You probably don’t need to send out a letter that includes the whole timestamp.

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

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!

February 21 Blog Review

It’s time to start enjoying the weekend! So let’s cover this week quickly.

PowerObject’s Creating If Then Else Logic in CRM 2013 Business Rules – Tutorial on how to handle AND and OR conditions in your Business rules.

CustomerEffective’s A Better Way to Control User Synchronization Settings in CRM – this describes a new tool that allows you to set up the default sync filters and reset users to the default sync filters in Outlook.

CRM in the Field’s PFE CRM Trace Log File Reader – describes the CRM Tracing log reader and how to use it to gain more information about issues you are having.

Leon Tribe’s Developer Essentials for the Functional Consultant – this is an excellent post that describes things that non-coders should understand – JavaScript and Plugins. He gives details on each, their limitations and alternatives.

Jukka Niiranen’s Information Overload: Cleaning Up CRM 2013 Forms – some helpful tips on how to clean up your CRM 2013 forms and clean up titles.

Jukka Niiranen’s How Would You Change the CRM Navigation? – this post links to several suggested CRM improvements on Microsoft Connect. Login and vote for these items so that the product team will consider including then in a later release.

Mitch Miliam’s Searching for Emails to a Specific Person – This is a handy tip describing how to find all E-mails a contact was involved in using Activity Parties.

Also when working with E-mails, if you need to search for all E-mails To or from a specific e-mail address you can use the contains operator. Try searching for E-mail where the TO field contains test@emailaddress.com and you will see all the messages sent to that address.

 

Have a good night folks!

January 31 Blog Review

This week appears to be relatively quiet. Most of the news is for those just getting started with CRM 2013.

If you only look at one link this week it should be the CRM Team Blog Handy Links for CRM 2013. This compiles all the blogs you will need as you implement, upgrade and get started on CRM 2013.

In CRM 2013 you can now add Tool Tips to fields. PowerObjects talked about this in Tool Tips for CRM 2013. This will make use of the Description field on the attribute. That means two things: 1) if you have behind the scenes information in that field (who created it, why, etc.) you will need to remove it and 2) you will need to put valuable information in that field.

CustomerEffective talked to us about several new features in CRM 2013. First, Working with Subgrids in CRM 2013. Subgrids allow users to view details from related records of another entity within the record they are viewing. In CRM 2011 the ribbon was context sensitive, meaning that if you clicked in a subgrid your buttons would change. This was powerful but could be confusing. This has changed in CRM 2013, now there is only two buttons per subgrid – an Add New and an Expand. The Expand allows you to get back to all the other buttons you once had.

CustomerEffective also posted about Real-Time Workflows in CRM 2013. As you know, in CRM 2011 if you wanted something to happen synchronously you would need a plugin. Now we can set a workflow as real-time so it will run synchronously. Keep in mind that this could impact your performance so it is best to use asynchronous unless it needs to be processed immediately. 

Have a nice weekend everyone!