February 3 Blog Review

This blog review will encompass the updates for the weeks of January 29th and February 5th. Let's jump right in to it!

PowerObjects posted about Business Process Flows: Conditional AND Statements in Branching Logic. This explains how to properly use branching logic in Business Process Flows.

PowerObjects also shared Who Wore it Best: System Views vs. Personal Views. This gives some comparison information about the types of views and where they can be used and accessed.

Adam Vero added a post on the Exams for Dynamics CRM 2016 and 2015 Update 1. This talks about the exams that are available and some information about each.

CRM Tip of the Day posted Avoid Cherry-Picking in the Queues. This discusses some solutions for people grabbing easy items out of queues. This talks about several routing and automation ideas.

For those using the Social components in CRM please check out the CRM Team's blog video: Exciting New Features in Microsoft Social Engagement 2016 Update 1.2.

That's all for today folks. Enjoy!

August 21 Blog Review

Lots of tips, tricks and news to share with you this week!

First check out the DynamicsCafe post – Start-up Trupanion and Microsoft Dynamics CRM Help Ease the Minds and Hearts of Pet-Owners. I clicked on this mainly because of the picture of the puppy but I was pleasantly surprised. The video describes how this pet insurance company uses CRM to better serve their customers. They use CRM to route the call to the most appropriate agent based on if they own the same kind of dog or live in the same city. They also use Unified Service Desk to make sure everything they need is right at their fingertips.

PowerObjects did not post and puppy pictures but did share Utilizing Alternate Keys in Dynamics CRM Integrations. Creating an Alternate Key can allow you to interact with records through the API without having the GUID of the record. Keep in mind that adding an Alternate Key will create a new database index on that field.

Be sure to check out How to Ensure a Successful CRM Implementation and Adoption also from PowerObjects. This goes over the important things you need for your CRM rollout to go well including formalizing your business processes before setting up CRM and getting management support and buy-in.

Ms. Dynamics CRM shared Social Engagement (formerly known as Social Listening) Trial. This shows screenshots from the Social Engagement tool and gives instructions on how to try it out yourself!

Finally, let’s check out the tips shared on CRM Tip of the Day:

• Windows 10 Support for CRM – CRM 2015 will be supported on the Edge browser with the upcoming release in September
• Smart Contact Filtering – Filter synced Outlook contacts using a Last Contact Date so that you only see contacts you are currently working with
• Get your Icons here – Check out these free sites to download icons for your CRM system
• Tipsters guide to Dynamics CRM App for Outlook – Video walkthrough of the CRM App for Outlook

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

May 1 Blog Review

Welcome to May everyone! Let’s hop right in to this week’s blog review.

As promised last week Adam Vero published a couple articles on charting within CRM. Check out Highlighting Contribution using conditional formatting in CRM Charts and Conditional Formatting in CRM Leaderboard Charts.

The CRM Team blog posted some great documentation on Microsoft Dynamics Marketing Update 1,  Microsoft Social Engagement 2015 Update 1 and Parature. They also posted on the New Form Rendering Engine with CRM Online 2015. This provides performance benefits to the users as well as some changes for developers working with the form.

Sonoma Partners blogged on CRM Online Spring 2015 Immersive Excel. This describes how you can use Excel Online directly through CRM. You can edit records using this method or just work with them and close out.

A common limitation with Advanced Find is that you cannot search for say Accounts without any Activities. CRM Tip of the Day solves this with NOT IN for the Rest of Us. This presents the option of using a Rollup Field to calculate the number of child records which you can use in Advanced Find.

That’s all for today folks. Have a great day!

February 27 Blog Review

Let’s get right to the CRM news of the last week of February.

PowerObjects gave a quick tutorial on Creating Monthly Goals in Bulk via Importing. Goals can be a great feature but there is no way to copy a goal. So to overcome this you can import your goals to create a large number at one time.

PowerObjects also discussed Customizable Help Now Available in CRM 2015. This describes how to set up custom help for the system and entity specific within CRM 2015.

Hitachi Solutions posted Great FetchXML Tool for CRM. This talks about the “Download FetchXML” button in Advanced Find and how you can use the XRMToolbox to work with the results.

Hitachi Solutions has also been working on a series about the Social Pane in CRM. Check it out to learn what posts are and how to use workflows to create and intact with them. It consists of Part 1, Part 2, and Part 3.

The Microsoft Dynamics Team announced this week that there is a new CRM for Outlook ebook. This talks about everything you need to get started with using CRM for Outlook.

Mitch Milam discussed System-Wide Alerts in CRM 2015. This is a new feature in CRM 2015 that allows the user to see new alerts that can be triggered from things such as an import finishing. Still not much is known about this feature but it could be very powerful because it is viewable in Advanced Find and accessible via code.

I think that is all I have for today. Have a great weekend!

November 7 Blog Review

It was a busy week in the CRM world so let’s jump right in.

First of all, Microsoft published the CRM 2015 Prerelease content. This will give you all the information you need to start planning your 2015 update.

Hitatchi Solutions was also talking about CRM 2015. They blogged about the CRM for your Business ad which shows how you will be able to use CRM along with the social listening and marketing components in the future.

Hitachi Solutions also showed us how to create Duration Calculations in CRM with Little or No Customizations. This utilizes a new custom entity and a workflow to calculate the days or minutes between two dates.

PowerObjects highlighted Marketing features in What’s New for Marketing in CRM: Fall 2014 – Part 2. (We looked at Part 1 last week.) This looks at Microsoft Dynamics Marketing and Microsoft Social Listening.

McGladrey discussed CRM 2013 errors in Google Chrome. This is related to Google Chrome no longer supporting the JavaScript method showModalDialog(). Their recommendation – “when in doubt, user Internet Explorer.” I tend to agree.

Finally, CRM Tip of the Day posted a few great tips to keep in mind. Globally Manage User Setting in CRM discusses how to use the XRM Toolbox to easily manage user settings all in one place. Prevent Export to Excel By Entity talked about using the Ribbon Workbench to essentially prevent users from Exporting to Excel for specific entities.

Have a great weekend everyone!

August 15 Blog Review

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

Dynamics Café posted 7 Social Listening Tips for Customer Service. Fred Studer talks through tips on how to keep your organization’s social strategy on track including empowering employees and creating a social media policy.

A common trouble administrators have is ensuring their Development environment matches production. PowerObjects talks through How to Create a Copy of a Poduction Instance in Dynamics CRM Online. This describes the process of replicating production in a development environment for CRM 2013 online, through Office 365.

If you need to do more intense analytics than available with the built in options of Charts, Advanced Find, and Reports you can try Exporting Dynamic Pivot Tables out of Dynamics CRM (Thanks again PowerObjects). This walks through how to create a PivotTable from your CRM data and how this can be dynamically updated from CRM.

One of the exciting features of CRM 2013 is the Business Process Flows that can move between entities. Hitachi Solutions discusses Dynamics CRM Cross-Entity Business Process Flow. This discusses a Lead to Opportunity sales process, some items to keep in mind and notes on what the process is actually doing. An important consideration that is highlighted is how this affects your existing records – what will happen for records that are already mid-way through the sales process but at the beginning of the process flow?

Joel Lindstrom of Hitachi Solutions was involved in the CRM 2013 Quick Start book. He posted an excerpt from the book on Quick View Forms on the Hitachi Solutions blog. This discusses the benefit of using Quick View forms and some important information to remember.

All of the new developments in social and marketing are very exciting but it can be difficult to find the information that you need. Leon Tribe compiled all this information into Getting Demos for Social Listening and Dynamics Marketing.

Let’s finish up by looking at a couple CRM Tips of the Day from this week:

• Don’t forget the Cascading – security is more than the Security Role. Also check the relationship properties on the entity to see what kinds of permissions are cascading.
• Understanding Upgrade Options – another excerpt from Joel Lindstrom and the CRM 2013 Quick Start Guide. This walks through the CRM 2011 to CRM 2013 upgrade options and the benefits and risks of each.

That’s all for today.

April 18 Blog Review

In Smart Ways to Use CRM Technology Tools Across the Company, DynamicsCafe discusses how technology has evolved over time and how everything is becoming more digital. Examples are given of how to fit CRM into all areas of your business.

PowerObjects posted, How to Expand the Email Description field in CRM this describes how to expand the description area on an E-mail Activity form. If you use the traditional form editing techniques the description box will not change size. You can follow these directions to edit the XML to actually change the appearance of the form.

If you are receiving an error when Activating/Deactivating records check out this post from PowerObejcts -Error when Activating/Deactivating Accounts or Contacts in CRM 2013.

CustomerEffective posted Dynamics CRM 2013 on Tablets: App or Browser. When looking at mobile options users want to know how they will access CRM – will it be from within the tablet browser or from a special app? This post discusses the differences and how the App can be used in conjunction with the browser to make everyone happy.

Parature: What is it and How Can it Help Boost Customer Satisfaction? This post from the CRM Software Blog discusses the Parature Acquisition and the main takeaways from the Convergence presentation. Parature is a customer service offering that allows you to have a single portal to communicate with customers. This gives a place for customers to look for their own answers or to submit support tickets. It also gives user the analytics they need to see what is helping their customers the most.

The CRM Software Blog also shared - How to Manage Cross-Entity Business Process Flows in CRM 2013. This works through how to begin using Business Process Flows from the Analyze/Design phase through to full use. Remember to fully document the process you want first to prevent unnecessary changes later in the build process.

Sonoma Partners discusses Microsoft’s social offerings in Microsoft Gets Social. This describes your many different listening options, tips for your set up and what the future holds.

You might need a CRM system re-launch if...(or how to avoid Zombie CRM) was also posted by Sonoma Partners. The reasons they mention to re-launch your CRM are: Consolidating CRM Deployments (many tools/systems across different departments), CRM system is stagnant (Zombie CRM – bad data quality, low user adoption, behind on updates), or you are outgrowing your CRM implementation partner (need higher quality, desire long-term vision, systems are too complex).

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!

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!