Sunday, October 19, 2014

Summit 2014: Day 2 Takeaways

Sorry for the delay in Day 2 and 3 takeaways, I determined sleep was slightly more important. So let’s get caught back up.

BPM and Process Automation in CRM 2013 – Gus Gonzalez
Always keep in mind the following: (Admin rule #1) keep it simple and (Admin rule #2) check if something already exists before creating a new one.
Sales teams that adopt a sales process experience a 35% higher win rate than those with a random process.
Think about bottlenecks in your current process to find ways to automate.

Business Process Flows
Microsoft has provided Business Processes for download that you can use as a starting point (Settings -> Data Management -> Add Ready to Use Business Processes).
Required fields in the Business Process are only required to pass that stage. If they are passed that stage when the change is made, the field will not be required unless they go back.
2011 BPFs do not upgrade to 2013. In2013, you can only move to child records and then back to the parent as the last stage (closed loop).
There are many enhancements in 2015 including Conditional Branching.

Real-Time Workflows
You can leverage the “Run as” option to run as either the owner of the workflow or the user that caused the workflow to fire. Keep in mind that they will need to have access to do what the workflow is doing.
If the workflow is stopped as canceled you can return a message to the user.
Best Practice: always start workflows with a check condition.

Business Rules
Limited to one entity (cannot search parent records like in workflows).
Benefit over JavaScript is that the dependencies are automatically tracked.
If an error is returned it is displayed in a small bar, Real Time Workflows display a large pop-up error.

Actions
Actions are like workflows but called from code.
Easy to administer, allow changes without a developer.
Can be created to be used on multiple entities.

Bonus: for Duplicate Detection check out Jason Lattimer’s tool that will prevent duplicates from being created.

Partner Showcase: FastPath – Security, Audit and Compliance – Andy Snook, Nate Boettcher
FastPath provides a variety of tools to check who is editing or even just viewing data. They also have tools to help standardize and automatically assign security roles and teams.
They handle the auditing using SQL triggers on tables and add this to a custom table on the CRM server which is moved to their database overnight.

CRM 2013 Email Architecture – Gustaf Westerlund
If you have questions about your sync options check out this whole presentation for the pros and cons of each method.
Server Side Sync – [Incoming Email] cannot do “Set Regarding” so Outlook Client is still required; uses exchange web services; part of Async service; probably future investment. [Appointment/Contact/Task] filters are hard to set, some scenarios not supported, still a new technology and tracing could be better.
Custom/3rd party program – keep in mind this will need to keep up with Microsoft Development
Note – beware of blacklisting. This can be a problem if you are sending large volumes of emails from your personal Outlook or the CRM server.

Outlook Client Troubleshooting – Derek Braun, Jon Bimbaum
When tracing the Outlook client the following types of traces can be generated: (1) OUTLOOK-CLIENT (Outlook Nav, Manual Tracking), (2) WebFormsHost-bin (web forms in Outlook), (3) crm-addin (Background synchronization), (4) ETL Tracking (event tracing) and (5) Configuration Wizard (more details than config log file).
If duplicate items are being created check the crmid (text) and crmlinkstate (number) in Outlook.
If an issue with Appointment/Contact/Task – check the SubscriptionSyncIssue table using the Outlook sync subscription ID.
If an email appears tracked but is not in CRM, use the “View in CRM” button to determine if it has been deleted.
Tools you will need: Fiddler, Debug Diagnostics (automated crash/hang analytics), Diagnostics Tracing, Notepadd++

Resources you can use for the Spring ’14 Release – Jackie Smith, Jim Daly
All help for CRM 2013 and beyond can be found at www.CRMCustomerCenter.com
On Tech Net pages there is an “Other Versions” selector near the top of the page if you want to see the page for a different version.
Through the customer center you can download training and adoption kits. These are customizable presentations, quick videos, etc.

For developers, all resources are linked to the CRMDeveloperCenter.com

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