January 17 Blog Review

Seems quiet in the CRM blog world this week after so much to cover last week. Let’s jump right into it.

PowerObjects is always working to instruct and train new users. This week they came out with 13 CRM 2013 How-To Videos. This can be a great way to start learning and spend some time looking around the PowerObjects How-To Portal.

CustomerEffective has a great blog about CRM 2013 Access Teams. This explains some of the surprising features of Access teams such as:

• You can control who has access to add members to Access Teams
• You need to use a different SDK call to programmatically add the first member to an access team than the regular add member because this also creates the team
• There can be a maximum of 2 Access Teams per entity
• Also Access Team Templates cannot be moved between environments but the subgrid on the form needs to be related to a specific Access Team Template. So you will need to use a tool to move these between environments

Jukka Niiranen posted about the Microsoft Acquisition of Parature. This is a Customer Service product that already had an integration with Dynamics CRM. Since this was just announced, it is likely that any major new functionality from this will be a year or so out.

The Affiliated CRM Blog posted a good tip for upgrading to CRM 2013 – Avoiding Disappearing Lookups and Data Loss. This describes that in CRM 2013 lookup fields cannot be linked to a record with no name filled in. In CRM 2011 this would just show up with the icon and no text, now it is just blank. To avoid losing this data in the upgrade process, make sure you use an import or some kind of workflow to clean these up.

That’s all the CRM news I have for this week. Have a great weekend (long weekend for some)!