Two Year Blogaversary!

Today, May 3^rd, is my Two Year Blogaversary! I am so happy for this opportunity to have a small voice in the CRM Community. Over the past few years I have come a long way. I have gone from no certifications to five with another one in the works. I used to just attend CRMUG Chapter meetings and now I lead the meeting in Washington, DC (so save the date for May 13). Before, I did not know what a CRM MVP was and now some of them know my name!

In this short time frame I have created 96 blog posts (this will be 97) and had over 16 thousand page views. This may not be a whole lot in the grand scheme of things but it is far from nothing! I am so thankful to all of you for following and reading each week. I couldn’t have done any of this without the great CRM and CRMUG Communities!

I wanted to take this opportunity to review some of my top posts.

#1 – Tools for your CRM Success – This walks you through how to prepare to take your Microsoft CRM certifications. It discusses the resources to use and how to really learn the material.

#2 – Field Level Security vs. Not Searchable – A common point of confusion I run into is the difference between removing a field from the form while also making it Not Searchable and using Field Level Security. This has a handy chart to explain the differences. Even though this is an older post the material applies to all versions.

#3 – Real Life CRM – This is more of a funny post describing how I would use CRM if I had it for my regular life.

Finally, my Summit takeaway blogs have also been fairly popular. Check out Summit 2013 and Summit 2014. I look forward to being at Summit in Reno this year and continuing the tradition!

That’s all I have for you tonight. Thank you again for all your support that got me here!

June 21 Blog Review

This episode should be filled with valuable information since I missed last week’s edition. I have been very busy with different events and things. All the while wondering what these places use to track those involved. I am usually disappointed when I arrive to see that they simply highlight my name on a list. When speaking to the bank this week I was very tempted to ask what they use but I was too nervous they would blacklist me for suspicious activity. Anyways, back to the good stuff – all Microsoft Dynamics CRM news since our last edition on June 11^th.

What to do to be prepared for a disaster? Keep your towel with you and read CustomerEffective’s Disaster Recovery Strategies.

If you are having trouble with some Reports but would still like to follow the psychological path and think through the solution to your issues be sure to read CustomerEffective’s Force CRM 2011 Fetch Report to Show Subreport Even If There Is No Data.

Chris Cognetta has several items for us today. First, Preparing for Orion – be prepared for a full re-design of your forms to fit the new UI and also be ready to upgrade SQL and Windows Server. Also some issue fixes: Missing Ribbon after Rollup and SQL Server Unavailable during Installation.

Leon Tribe is still in love with this Microsoft Surface and tells you all about it in “Surface: One Device to Rule Them All”. I must get one myself. Also, in our environment we are just beginning to use Campaigns so I was interested in his blog on Associating Opportunities Directly to a Campaign.

I also found this compilation of blogs very similar to mine with the only difference of it gets to be published on MSDynamicsWorld.

VERY IMPORTANT: Microsoft posted about what to be prepared for with the next release. Here you will find docs on the changes to the implementation planning guide and SDK. I have not had a chance to read over these but will pass on my comments when I do.

Sonoma Partners will help us get prepared with their Summary of the new SDK and “Orion is Coming – Be Prepared”.

Finally, Jukka Niiranen has a great post on Advanced Queries with Advanced Find. He has some great ideas especially around getting past the limitation of being able to find a record with two types of related records – for example when searching for accounts that have purchased two distinct products.

That’s all for tonight folks.

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!

May 3 Blog Review

Here is a quick review of the top articles and interesting pieces from the CRM world this week:

Yammer Integration Demo Video from Customer Effective – This video demonstrates how you can use Yammer within your organization. There are also a few other important tidbits brought up:

• To use Yammer in CRM you must have the Enterprise Yammer subscription. That’s the paid version.
• If you are already using Activity feeds and you begin to use Yammer, you will lose those posts. They will not be visible in your Yammer feed, but only through Advanced Find.
• Finally, you need to keep Security in mind and verify it is set correctly inside Yammer. Yammer is beneficial because employees without CRM access can view the Yammer feed, just make sure they aren’t seeing more than they should.

Case Study on Data Load Performance – Interesting case study on the time/resources required for a large data load. Here is an exerpt from the Conclusion.

The results of this benchmark illustrate how a Microsoft Dynamics CRM 2011 implementation can scale to support performance on large data loads. By scaling out and adding more CRM application servers and scaling up the database server (with processors, memory and IO capacity), data processing capacity can improve linearly.
Customers may be able to achieve even higher levels of performance and scalability via customization and a finer level of optimization.
SQL Server is the crucial component for Dynamics CRM, proper sizing and performance tuning of the SQL Server/database is very critical for performance. This is not limited to data loads, but also for daily operations and use.

CRM for DHS and DoD – DefenseReady is a new CRM solution designed for Department of Homeland Security and Department of Defense organizations. It contains “out-of-the-box mission-enabling solutions for Force Readiness, Mission Execution and Training Management”. It looks to have many interesting features.

Using CRM to Meet Patient Standards – This describes a new solution developed by PowerObjects that can help to automate Hospital follow up with patients. This can ensure they are getting the care they need. The system can automate reminders to visit their primary care physician, refill prescriptions and even send information to assist patients.

Finally, in the April 26 Blog Review I discussed the Meet the Experts Webinar. There were several articles released this week related to the announcements made there:

Vision for Game-Changing CRM - For his part, Stutz maintains his focus on innovation and forward progress. "We're innovating at a pace that is pretty unbelievable," he said near the end of last week's webcast. "We made some very serious decisions to not charge for social, to just blend it in. If you buy CRM you get those capabilities. We're not charging for mobile, we think it's just another piece of CRM that you can't charge for. Things that become part of a CRM suite should just become part of the experience. That's one of the things that is so powerful about our system. Some we've acquired, some we're building, some we've borrowed from Microsoft, all come together for a solution."

Will Microsoft split MarketingPilot into a series of Components? - While features like campaign management, email automation, and lead nurturing are core features of many third party solutions, they are just a small sliver of what MarketingPilot offers. But based on market interest over the last few years, these features are the ones that most Dynamics CRM customers are interested in tackling first, and have been doing via third party marketing automation solutions.

May 26 Blog Review

The week of May 26^th had a few different topics on the blogosphere. There were several articles about Gamification (or with mentions of it) as well as several new articles about Polaris/Orion features. Finally, I will tell you a bit about the Meet The Experts webinar hosted by Dynamics Café featuring Bob Stutz and Connor Marsden.

Gamification is a hot topic in the CRM world right now. Everyone wants to know how to make their employees more productive at work. The answer of course is, employees work harder if they enjoy the work they are doing. What do people enjoy doing? Playing games. How can we make their work seem more like a game?

Here are the specific related articles I am referring to:

Forbes: When Work Resembles A Video Game, Millennials Thrive – This is not just a CRM topic. This is something employers everywhere are working on. This is especially prevalent in call centers where the employees are young people who grew up playing games and immersed in technology. Plus, these places are trying to reduce turnover.

Microsoft Dynamics World: MBS president Kirill Tatarinove Sees future of Microsoft Dynamics in more large enterprises – This relates to gamification in some of the research Microsoft is working on. The article mentions they are working on more immersive experiences with unified communication. They are investigating machine learning and artificial intelligence. However, this is the most interesting quote:

"We'll be tracking eyeball movements, going to motion-based user experiences with Kinect and touch," he said. "Almost everyone will have access to technology. Just 10 years ago, people couldn't use computers because they required programming skills and technical knowledge. Today anyone can access that power."

One day, we will be managing our CRM contacts through our Xbox Kinect. Definitely some interesting times coming.

Microsoft Reports profit growth, beats earnings estimates – Of course they are investigating how to make CRM more like Xbox. Xbox LIVE has over 46 million members worldwide. This is an 18% increase.

Ok enough playing around.

In regards to the new features introduced in Polaris and continuing in Orion, there were two articles that stood out.

Explanation of Auto Save – Auto save is a new feature that comes with the process-centric forms. This means it is only included with the process forms, so no need to re-evaluate code/script/WFs, etc. until you plan to begin using these forms. However, when you do begin using these process forms it will affect things that are called when a save occurs: Plugins, workflows, auditing of records. The Auto Save will save the form 30 seconds after the first edit is made and when the form is closed but this only occurs for updates. New forms will only be saved when they are created. The auto save does not reload the form but it will grab and display any updated data from the server. In Polaris the auto save is no be default and the timer (30 seconds) is not configurable.

Side Effects of the Polaris UI – When upgrading to Polaris there are several things to keep in mind. This article summarizes some of the side effects to keep in mind.

Upgrade vs. Re-implementation – This is not related to the Polaris upgrade but to upgrading between 4.0 and 2011. It discusses the challenges of Upgrading along with the problems of re-implementation. There is a very handy chart that describes which way is easier for each area of CRM (Data migration, Data integrity, code, etc.).

Finally, there was also the Meet the Experts Webinar hosted by Dynamics Café. It featured a Q&A style conversation between Connor Marsden, Microsoft Dynamics Directory US CRM, and Bob Stutz, Microsoft Dynamics Corporate VP CRM. A major topic of the discussion was social components. Today, customers decide how they interact with businesses. So every interaction has to take into account social.

The Process driven forms are meant to make it easier for people to work, do job better and interact better. Also the goal is to allow people to collaborate easier. Individual applications need collaboration tools. People are already using Microsoft products to collaborate (Lync, SharePoint) so they are working on bringing these together.

Also everything needs to be mobile. It needs to be available on any device and allow people to work how they want to. Users need the right data at their fingertips. Microsoft is working towards location specific information so when you arrive at a location you will see all the information about that account without needing to search for it.

Marketing is quickly becoming integrated with everything. Marketing used to be a separate department but now it plays an important piece in everything a company does. Marketing is a very broad topic it is not just sending emails, it is not just marketing automation. MarketingPilot is a full Marketing Suite, it should allow users to do everything related to marketing from buying media time, to building and executing sophisticated campaigns.

Orion will bring the social components, marketing components and process-driven forms all together. For the future, they will continue looking towards how customers interact on the web, how they use Xbox and apply these principles to CRM. The goal is a fully collaborative system that helps people in their lives and that has an emotional connection with users. They want users who love the system and are happy to use it.

Schedule discussion indicated that Orion will be out this summer; Leo will arrive 6 months later. There will be some incremental releases in between, especially for Online. There will be no change for social or mobile, these will just be features of CRM.

That’s all I have for today. Soon I will have an update on the happenings of the week of May 3^rd.