February 7 Blog Review

The big news this week is that Microsoft announced their new CEO, Satya Nadella. The Dynamics community was excited because he has experience with the Dynamics Product line. Now that could mean we can expect more focus on Dynamics or it could just mean he worked at Microsoft for a long time and is well-rounded. Either way, it is interesting news.

PowerObjects posted about how to Use Duplicate Detection Rules in CRM 2013 when Qualifying a Lead. Duplicate Detection is a feature that allows you to create rules to find duplicates. These rules can then be applied in different situations or in jobs that search the whole system for duplicates. The process changed in CRM 2013, removing the pop-up when creating a record. However, you can still use this functionality when qualifying a lead.

Also you can check out Jukka Niiranen’s blog on Making Better Use of Business Process Flow Data. This describes how to handle situations where you have multiple processes running on the same entity and want to be able to report and compare the records together and broken out by process.

Encore Business Solutions also posted this great blog comparing CRM Marketing Automation tools. There are many great tools available but the choice comes down to how much marketing functionality you need and want as well as how much you want to spend.

Also the CRMUG DC chapter meeting was this week. We had a very good turnout on a rather icy day. The first half of the meeting was a presentation from Monique Riviere from Independent Sector describing the work on their implementation of CRM. They are working on many interesting things and working with lots of different vendors. The main takeaways were to make sure you have a good partner that can be your first line of support and assist with the communication between vendors. Also we discussed the question of making CRM fit your process or making the process fit CRM. This is a pitfall that many implementations have fallen into. In the end there needs to be a balance. Streamline the process but make sure you are not making changes that will impair your system in the future.

The other half of the CRMUG meeting with a Social Integrations presentation from Robert Contreras of Microsoft. He demoed the Yammer integration as well as Netbreeze. Both of these are very powerful features and they seem to be continually improved. No licensing or price information has been released about the Netbreeze integration but he said to watch the Social section of the CRM page for details.

That’s all the news I have for today folks. Have a great weekend!

November 15 Blog Review

This week was fairly informative with some helpful tips for real life as well as some ideas for the future.

PowerObjects had a very helpful blog this week – How to Mass Send Emails in Draft Status. When working with E-mail records via workflow there are two actions: Send E-mail (a new E-mail) and Create E-mail. There is no action to send a draft email. There is a way around this, what you need to do is change the E-mail status to Pending Send and set the Number of Delivery Attempts to 0. This will cause the E-mails to get picked up and send. I really, really wish I knew this before I manually sent several hundred stuck, draft E-mails.

PowerObjects also posted about how to add an Image to a record in CRM 2013. As you know, there is a new data type of “image” available in 2013. This allows you to easily store a picture for your contacts or perhaps a logo for businesses you work with.

A topic that many people asked about at Summit was how to deploy CRM for Outlook. CustomerEffective wrote a great blog – Enterprise Deployment of Microsoft Dynamics CRM for Outlook – that covers your options and things to keep in mind.

Donna Edwards wrote a very detailed article for the MVP Award Program blog about Business Process Flow. It is interesting to see how this will work. It is very nice that the flow can be associated with specific security roles, similar to forms. So this allows us to control which users have access to which processes.

The CRM team is trying to help use with our upgrade to 2013 by showing the pieces we should see in each menu. If you have made any kind of modifications to the site map, these should be preserved in the upgrade but you could be missing something you want to see. This article is a good way to check. The CRM Team also posted about working with Activities right in the Activity Feed. Now you can complete Activities, create new Activities and even filter the Activity list from directly within the Activity Feed. Interesting Note – one of the available filters is “Overdue” but this filters on UTC time not your time zone, so you will see some discrepancy there from what you may expect.

Sonoma Partners presented a great use case for Custom Actions – The End of Configuration Entities. Custom Actions are created through the user interface but instantiated through code. Consider a case where you have a plugin that needs a certain piece of data like a Server URL (Sonoma’s example) but you may need to update this (say for your different environments). Previously you could create a separate configuration entity that the plugin could look at for the information. Now, you can have it call the Action and get the information it needs that way. Then when changes are necessary, a user can simply edit the action.

Chris S also wrote an interesting blog on the New Features of Workflows especially how you can use Synchronous workflows. Most interesting tidbit for me was that if you stop a synchronous workflow as “Cancelled” it will throw an error message out to the user.

Remember the Industry-Specific solutions Microsoft released? Forceworks broke those down for us in – Unpacking the Industry Templates for Dynamics CRM 2013. Take a look because there may be a solution that can help you get started.

I hope you found something useful today. Have a great weekend!

May 31 Blog Review

The blog world was relatively quiet this week, seems like everyone was out enjoying the long weekend. Leon Tribe was reading over the weekend and posted a Book Review for an Applications Certification Guide. Personally, when I took the Applications exam I only used the Microsoft training. Since they wrote the test I assumed they knew what was on it. This worked very well for me. Although now studying for the Extending CRM certification I feel I could use a Certification Guide to fill in the missing pieces so I can understand the Microsoft training.

There were several good blogs from PowerObjects this week. First, Comparison: Using Workflows vs JavaScript vs Plugins in Dynamics CRM, this helps describe what processes when and how to decide the best tool for the job. Also, How to Create a Power View Report in Excel with CRM Data showcases how to use the Excel add-on, Power View to manipulate and analyze your CRM data. It is also cool to see the use of Excel 2013. It matches the design of the new CRM process-driven forms nicely. Note: Power View is an Excel Add-on from Microsoft not Power Objects, even though it has Power in the name.

Jukka Niiranen has a post on MS Dynamics World about Preparing for Orion. Some important tidbits (or Timbits for my fellow Canadians):

•           The left navigation bar is being replaced by the top navigation ribbon. This means that after Orion, there is no going back – only the new user interface will be available. You can no longer go back to the “classic” forms.
•           End user training will be required
•           Time will be required to map your business processes to the process-driven forms and test that this is the best layout
•           No more legacy support for CRM 4.0 APIs – start replacing these today
•           Remember forms will now auto-save – think about how this will affect your plugins, workflows, etc.
•           Be prepared for scripting changes
•           Upgrading to Orion most-likely will be necessary to use the new add-on features such as Yammer integration, Skype integration, MarketingPilot, Netbreese, Bing Maps, new mobile client
•           Partners will need to evaluate their add-ons for compatibility and modify to blend in with new UI – make sure your partner is ready!

Microsoft posted how to get started with your CRM surface Apps, complete with code and screenshots.

That’s all for today! 

May 24 Blog Review

PowerObjects provides a great blog on how to use Query Strings to populate data on a form.

CustomerEffective describes how to create meaningful charts to show campaign ROI. First, track your campaign costs on the campaign form and relate them to Opportunities where you capture revenue. On your Opportunity form add a “Source Campaign Cost” field and populate it via workflow (just grabbing the rollup field off the campaign). Then make a handy chart on Opportunities showing “Actual Revenue” and “Source Campaign Cost”.

If you have ever been confused about what “The Cloud” is and the benefits of “moving to the cloud” check out Altico’s Infographic on the subject.

While On-Premise Deployments are still catching up to Online, you may want to disable the new Process Driven Forms to display a more accurate representation of what a new user’s experience will be. Leon Tribe discusses how to Get Rid of the Flow Forms by using Form Security.

Congratulations PowerObjects on being name the 2013 Partner of the Year. Check out the summary on DynamicsWorld.

DynamicsWorld also hosted an MVP Interactive discussion this week hosted by Donna Edwards. The session is now available On Demand.

You can also check out Chris Cognetta’s introduction to Geoflow.