March 28 Blog Review

The past few weeks have been very busy it seems - work and vacations and family and all kinds of stuff. So this is not really a weekly review but basically the whole month of March review. It has been a busy month in the CRM world with Convergence and all of the news from there. Make sure you check out Virtual Convergence. There are many sessions you can watch online for free so you can learn some of what those that attended learned.

This month Microsoft released the Scalable Security Modeling with CRM 2013. This is an expansion on the 2011 document including the new information on Access teams.

Since we have so much to cover I will try to hit the highlights quickly:

Power Objects:

Lookup Types and Customizing Lookups in CRM – this describes how to resolve the issue where a lookup only looks at a team instead of user and team.

Preventing Users from Going Back with Child Dialogs – Neat trick on how to prevent duplicate actions from users using the previous button within a Dialog in CRM 2011

Unwanted Activity Types in CRM – Options on handling Activity types you do not want users to use

Adjusting CRM 2013 Field label sizes – tips on how to make your forms look the way you want them to in CRM 2013

Customer Effective: CRM 2013 Update Rollup 2 – Recap on the changes with the CRM 2013 UR 2 release. Also check out the PFE CRM in the Field Overview

Donna Edwards: Update Rollups – Should I or Should I Not, that is the Question – a look at how to know if you should install Rollups and how to plan for that

CRM in the Field:

Useful Tools and Features – a list of tools that they are using from CRM 2011 and 2013 that you may find useful as well

CRM 2013 Form Upgrade Experience – this discusses what to keep in mind when upgrading your forms for CRM 2013

Dynamics CRM Team Blog: CRM Online Sandbox Instances – some changes for CRM Online customers for non-production instances

Mitch Milam: KnowledgeBits – Make sure you sign up for Mitch’s newest tips and tricks newsletter

Salentica: CRM 2013 Form for Every User Error – how to deal with the “There must be at least one form for every user” in CRM 2013

Sonoma Partners:

Convergence Recap – Part 1, Part 2: Unified Service Desk and Part 3: Sonoma Partners Booth – check out everything you may have missed at Convergence

CRM 2013 Upgrade Considerations – things to keep in mind as you plan and execute your upgrade to CRM 2013

Jukka Niiranen:

Spring Cleaning for your CRM System – how to find which fields are not on your forms or which fields do not have data and what to do

Synchronization vs. Tracking: Understanding Activity Management Options in CRM – Understanding the differences between syncing and tracking and determining how you should handle your activities

2014 CRM Roadmap – a look at the 2014 roadmap as presented at convergence

Power User Tips for CRM 2013 – learn how to use CRM like a power user and be productive

That's all for today. Have a great weekend!

February 28 Blog Review

Most of the CRM news this week relates to Convergence next week. It should be a great event with lots of CRM MVPs and other superstars there to report back on the news. Let’s take a quick look at the other news this week.

CustomerEffective wrote about a solution to a customer’s CRM 2013 SubGrid to Associated View button. Basically the issue is that a sub grid on your form may not have the button to see the associated view for that record. The issue results from removing that related record from the main record type’s navigation.

CustomerEffective also wrote about Design and Scalability Considerations when using Access Teams in CRM 2013. This compares traditional owner access with sharing to Access Teams. Both access methods have their advantages but must be used in moderation. Using sharing as the primary method for access can result in slow performance especially in organizations with a large number of records.

McGladrey wrote an interesting blog on Export Limitations from CRM to Excel. As you probably know, there is a limit to the number of records you can export (for good reason because you don’t want people exporting all your data, perhaps accidentally, and causing performance to go down). However, you can get around this either by changing the export limit or through a changing the parameters of a dynamic Excel workbook.

The CRM Team posted the Integration Guide: CRM Online and Office 365 to help our CRM Online readers.

Sonoma Partners posted two blogs this week about dealing with vendors – Six Questions to Ask Before you Sign your CRM Contract and CRM Software RFPs – When Good Ideas go Wrong.

Sonoma Partners also posted about What’s New in CRM 2013 for End Users: Quick Create. Quick Create is a great new feature that allows users to create records without needing to leave what they are working on.

Scott Durow posted Real Time Workflow or Plugin? There are advantages to both options. Two principles discussed are that you should use plugins if there are already plugins on an entity, or if you know that it will need a very high throughput. However the advantage of Real-Time Workflows is that they can be created by end users.

“It is true that Plugins will out perform RTWs in terms of through-put but if the frequency of the transactions are going to be low then this usually will not be an issue. If you have logic that is going to be firing at a high frequency by many concurrent users then this is the time consider selecting a plugin over a RTWF.”

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