August 16 Blog Review

The MVP Bloggers were fairly quiet this week. I think they are probably working hard on CRM 2013 and not allowed to tell any regular people about it. Perhaps we will know more soon. The rest of the blog world is still a buzz. Here are some of this week’s best articles.

Leon Tribe describes how to make a dialog to use when a Contact Moves Employers. The issue here is if you simply move the Contact from one Account to the other the Activity history will move with it. If we want this information to remain with the old company we should deactivate the old Contact and create a clone contact under the new employer. A dialog can assist with this by copying all information to a new contact and entering the new Account that is entered by the user.

MSDynamicsWorld sheds some more light on CRM 2013 in Behind some Key Microsoft Dynamics CRM 2013 Design Decisions. Key takeaways are as follows:

• Focus on speed to boost productivity and user adoption
• Online users will need to upgrade fairly quickly because there are plans for quarterly enhancements
• Goal was to make the interface simple, easy and seamless across devices
• Focus on outcome-driven experiences
• The business process piece allows businesses to standardize their best practices and assist with new user on-boarding

There is also another article challenging common beliefs when planning out a CRM system – CxM through xRM: Focusing on Outcomes when Modeling Relationship Management in your CRM system. Tenets the article challenges: (1) that a relationship can be managed and (2) that managing a relationship can be done by tracking activities or interactions. You can measure interactions/activities but the fact that they occurred does not necessarily mean that it produced the desired outcome. Rather than focusing on those Activities you can instead manage the desired outcome. Interactions need to be customized to achieve the desired result. “Better interactions lead to better experiences which lead to stronger relationships that in turn produce valuable insights that allow a business to create even better interactions.”

With all the news about CRM 2013 Microsoft also announced a new licensing and pricing system, you can learn more about this in Sonoma’s How Much Will I be Paying for CRM?. Now there are 3 licensing tiers, you can choose the level that is right for you and your users. The blog suggests getting the highest level, professional, for your administrators and power users. Then the lower tiers can be for the rest of users that may not need access to as many features.

The CRM Software Blog posted a Summary of What’s New in CRM 2013. Here are the key pieces they mention:

• Mobile Device and Touch-Optimized Screens
• Configurable Business Rules – rules with automatic actions tied to them such as populating a field, making a field required, locking a field, etc.
• Improved solution architecture
• Image support on all entities
• Quick Create Functionality to quickly create new records without leaving the page you are working on
• Workflow Improvements – Synchronous workflow capability, ability to choose if a workflow runs before or after an action, and workflows will work on all devices. In addition, customizers can now select if workflows should run as the owner of the workflow or as the person who modified the record that triggered the workflow.
• Native Mobile Apps

That’s all I have for you today. Have a nice weekend!