May 2017 Blog Review

Let's jump right in to this short summer recap!

PowerObjects shared about Searching Relevantly in Microsoft Dynamics 365. This discusses the Relevance Search in Dynamic 365 which allows you to use filtering in your regular CRM searches.

Great reminder from Mitch Milam to Always Maintain Control of your Dynamics CRM/365 Assets. It is very important to have a structured release process that is followed and maintain the details/solutions from these releases.

Sonoma Partners also introduced us to Learning Paths with Learning Path Authoring Basics and Learning Path Authoring Guided Tasks. Learning Paths allow administrators to provide more contextual help to users. One of the tools for this is Guided Tasks which walk users through specific steps within the application.

Jukka Niiranen is keeping us up to date on new things in this CRM Life with Spring in the Dynamics 365 World.

As always, it's a good idea to keep an eye on the CRM Tip of the Day to see which of your issues they are solving.

That's all for today!

April 2017 Blog Review

Let's run through some interesting CRM blogs posted over the last month.

Ledgeview Partners posted a quick tip on Custom Coloring Dynamics 365/CRM Dashboards which shows how to set colors for different options in an option set.

Hitachi Solutions teaches the basics of entity creation through an example in Dynamics 365 Roadmap: A complete guide to Dynamics 365 Fields and Entities.

Hosk discusses How Machine Learning will Change Dynamics 365. This explains the basics of what machine learning is and where to look for more information.

Sonoma Partners shared CRM: When Homemade Doesn't Cut it. The article explains the benefits of going with a market-leading CRM system instead of building in house. I would add to this that these benefits also apply to utilizing market-leading CRM systems in the way they were designed (i.e. evaluating how your business should change to fit standard processes, avoiding unsupported changes, not over-customizing, etc.).

ReadyXRM posted on how to Stop Deactivation of Records in Dynamics 365. This utilizes a workflow to solution to inform users they should not deactivate.

Jumping ahead to May for a minute I need to share ReadyXRM's Dynamics CRM Business Rules Not Working Issue. This is an issue that my organization was battling for months and Nick Doelman was battling even longer. Spoiler Alert: even though the issue occurred even for Administrators the issue was caused by security. Microsoft is working on a fix as it involves corrupted security on the form using the Business Rule.

As always, keep an eye on the CRM Tip of the Day for news and help. This month I particularly liked When Export to Excel Fails for No Reason. This explains how having columns of the same name will cause the export to fail.

That's all for today folks! Have a great day!

March 2017 Blog Review

Let's jump right in and catch up on all the CRM News and Training that has been floating around this month!

PowerObjects shared several great how to articles:

• Creating a Bookmark that Shows the Schema Name for a CRM Field - this allows you to quickly click a favorite and change all the display names on a form to show the schema names. This can also be done using Sonoma's CRM Dev Tools which is a great chrome extension!
• A Study in Editable Grids in Three Parts - Walks through setting up Editable grids in your environment
• A Must Know Shortcut: Adding Hyperlinks to an Email Template in Dynamics 365 - this is for anyone who has created an email template in an HTML editor, opened it in IE, copied and pasted into a CRM Template just to get a link to show up correctly.

Ledgeview Partners shared how to Turn your Report into a Dashboard in Dynamics 365/CRM. Take all your beautiful reports and make them easily visible within the dashboards your team is accessing.

For those interested in getting certifications, be sure to check out Hosk's post containing Dynamics 365 Certification Study links.

Sonoma Partners posted Bulkify Bulk Edit which walks through several ways to improve the out of the box Bulk Edit functionality with the help of workflows and plugins. In addition it gives some great background information on Bulk Edit.

Sonoma also shared Dynamics 365: Miscellaneous Security Permissions. This explains what those extra permissions actually control in your system.

And of course you should check out the CRM Tip of the Day!

Releasing Field Level Security Profiles

Field Level Security (FLS) is a great feature which allows you to lock down certain fields to specific users or teams. You can control who can read the data, create the data and edit the data. This allows administrators to account for many security needs. For more detailed information on Field Level Security review this TechNet documentation.

It is also a good idea to use solutions when moving customizations and this includes customizations to your security model and security settings. These are areas that can greatly impact users so they always should be tested in a development environment if possible.

Here are some things to keep in mind when moving Field Level Security Profiles between environments:

1. The field must have FLS enabled before the FLS Profile can be updated. This means your release process must be a 2 step process: (1) Import a solution containing the field and publish, then (2) Import a solution containing the FLS profile and publish. If all is contained in one solution you will get a warning on the FLS profile but not an error. Then all permissions for the field (with FLS freshly enabled) will be set to No. This means that only Administrators can view and edit the field.
2. When creating a new FLS profile, members must be added in each environment. The linked teams and users are not included in the solution and must be added manually.
3. Test thoroughly in each environment. Remember Administrators will always have access to any field with FLS enabled so other users need to be involved in testing. If one users is doing the testing for multiple roles, double check your changes and have them clear their cache between test cases. This will ensure any issues from items 1 and 2 do not occur.

How have you used Field Level Security? Any other tips for Administrators to keep in mind?

February 2017 Blog Review

Let's quickly catch up on the CRM news floating around this past month.

First of all, the December 2016 update for Dynamics 365 is available so you should check out the release notes and podcast. Keep in mind this is just version 8.2 so more like a 2016 update then any kind of upgrade.

PowerObjects posted a great resource on Troubleshooting Solution Import Failures. This walks through common error scenarios as well as gives some general customization tips to avoid these issues.

Ledgeview partners shared 10 tips to Improve User Adoption. This has some great tips for your training and keeping your team informed. Also remember to have strong executive buy in and ensure managers are involved so they can keep their people accountable.

Hitachi Solutions shared What is the Dynamics 365 Common Data Model? The article explains what the Common Data Model is and how you can use it as an Admin or Developer.

As always, you should keep an eye on the CRM Tip of the Day for help with all kinds of issues and questions.

Any articles I missed? What topics are you interested in about CRM right now?

January 2017 Blog Review

Welcome back to another exciting year with Microsoft Dynamics CRM!

I hope all of you are already involved in your local CRM User Group. For those in the DC, Maryland, Virginia area please check out the groups in Richmond, Reston and Chevy Chase (DC). At the DC Chapter, we have scheduled all of our 2017 meetings and these dates/links are below. Please come out and join us for our first meeting of the year on February 22. We will have a presentation on Power BI and a user upgrade success story.

CRMUGDC 2017 Meetings:

• February 22
• May 17
• August 2
• November 15

Let's jump into the CRM blogs and news from the last month.

Leon Tribe posted on Actions: The New Workflow Function. Actions are steps designed in a workflow but called from code. This allows business-side administrators to control some steps or logic in a larger coded effort. Now in Dynamics 365 these can be called from workflows with the added benefit of accepting and returning values.

Sonoma Partners shared Driving CRM Adoption through Effective Communication. This discusses the need to determine where the business is and where you want it to be and then building a strategy to bring you there.

The Dynamics 365 Team blog discusses how to Make Business Recommendations Based on Business Intelligence with Dynamics 365. This gives some examples of how you can guide users and help provide recommendations using Portable Business Logic.

Everyone has been super excited for Editable Grids in CRM. PowerObjects takes this opportunity to show you 2 Rockin' Ways to Enable Editable Grids with Dynamics 365.

Ledgeview Partners shared Dynamics CRM workflow: Mapping Data between Fields. This is a quick walk through of how to create your first workflow and set up dynamic field updates.

As always, be sure to review the CRM Tip of the Day to make sure you didn't miss anything. Have a great day!

December 2016 Blog Review

I hope all of you have been warm and enjoyed this holiday season! Let's catch up on all the CRM news from the past few weeks so we are ready to start the New Year off right!

Ledgeview Partners shared a list of their Top 10 Tips of 2016. These are some great tips to be an effective CRM user.

PowerObjects posted Make Your Own Custom Shortcuts on a CRM Dashboard in Microsoft Dynamcis 365. This is a step-by-step guide showing you how to add a list of shortcuts to a section of a dashboard.

PowerObjects also walked us through how to Change Business Process Flows Using a Workflow. This will allow administrators to automatically switch processes based on certain conditions so that users do not need to click Switch Process.

Hitachi Solutions had some holiday fun while helping us learn more about Dynamics 365:

• Santa Trains the Reindeer with Dynamics 365 Learning Paths
• The Eighth Day of Christmas: Yes Virginia there is a Common Data Model
• The Grinch's Heart Grows with a Little Help from the Dynamics 365 Relationship Assistant

Hosk shared Dynamics 365 - What does Include entity Metadata do. For those building solutions and curious about this little checkbox this should give you the information you need.

Sonoma Partners also talked about Dynamics 365 and posted Updates to Business Rules and Actions. This discusses changes and new features you can start using.

Mitch Milam shared a great article on Always Maintaining control of your Dynamics CRM/365 Assets. This discusses the need to have control of your system and awareness of what is going on in which environments. Also be sure to keep backups of all solutions and use Source Control for any code.

As always, make sure you look at the recent posts from CRM Tip of the Day to see if this can help with any questions or issues you are having now.

That's all for this December day. Have a Happy New Year and a CRM-filled 2017!