July 25 Blog Review

Let’s jump right in to the CRM tips and tricks from the past week.

PowerObjects gave some productivity tips in Tracking Records from Outlook to Dynamics CRM. They talk about how to track, CRM features you can use in your reply and the conversion options.

PowerObjects also wrote Performing Form Merges Like a Pro in CRM 2013. This goes through the process of merging your 2011 forms into 2013 forms. They go over best practices and some tips and tricks. This will be very helpful for anyone upgrading to 2013.

Another helpful 2013 tip from PowerObjects was Four Important Concepts Needed to Understand about Actions in Dynamics CRM. This explains how actions work and how they can be used.

Last one from PowerObjects – Using HTML to Format Text in Email Templates in CRM. As you may know, you can copy HTML e-mails into e-mail templates in CRM, but you may not know that you can actually include raw HTML code and it will be converted when the template is sent.

Hitachi Solutions blogged about Accessing Controls within Composite Control Flyouts Using Javascript. This gives some considerations when using Javascript on fields within the new CRM 2013 flyout fields.

Hitachi Solutions also talked about Naming Records using Real-Time workflows in CRM 2013. This walks through how to create a new process that will fill in the name field for your records. This can be useful when viewing default views and can be configured to fit your business need.

CRM tip of the Day also had a few good tips this week. First of all – Keep Batch modifications Under Control. This describes the importance of discussing the implications of changing Modified By/On with the business and other things to keep in mind.

Also from CRM tip of the Day – Functional Roles all Deployments should have. This describes all the different roles that need to be filled to support your CRM deployment. One person may fill multiple roles, but all these duties must be accounted for.

Thanks for reading! Have a great day!

July 18 Blog Review

Let’s jump right in to the CRM news for this week!

Hitachi Solutions presented an innovated way to keep users up to date with Sending Text Message Alerts from CRM 2013. This explains how to use regular CRM email to send texts to your users. Use this to notify them of alerts, things that require their attention or goals they have reached.

 Rollup 3 for CRM 2013 has been released. Check out CRM in the Field’s Podcast and Overview for more information. This contains all the links and information you will need to get started with Rollup 3.

CRM Tip of the day had several helpful tips this week to keep us working efficiently. First of all, Do you know what a Wildcard is? This discusses how to use the * as a wildcard when searching in CRM. This is a very helpful feature and is often forgotten or overlooked. Personally, I like to use it on entities that have phone numbers as search fields. That way I can leave off the area code and not worry about formatting differences.

Another tip this week was Understand “First Response Sent” for SLA. This discusses some specific details as part of the Spring Wave enhancements for CRM 2013.

One more helpful tip this week was Adminless Traceless Troubleshooting. This describes how you may be able to use the URL for troubleshooting when you receive the generic “An Error has Occurred” message.

Mitch Milam is helping us this week with Monitoring Prospects and their Email Preferences. This describes the functionality of the “Do not allow Email” and “Do not allow Bulk Email” fields. As well as some discussion on how to review contacts with these fields set and then what to do about it.

Also this week the CRM 2013 Quick Start book was released (only ebook currently). You can get more information and a summary of the chapters on Julie Yack’s blog.

Jukka Niiranen wrote a great blog this week on Update Rollups, Service Packs, Major Releases: Understanding Dynamics CRM Versioning. This goes through what those confusing version numbers actually mean, how to interpret and what to expect going forward. It also has some great explanations of what a Rollup means compared to a Service Pack. This is one to read carefully, not skim!

Thanks for reading! Have a great week!

July 11 Blog Review

Today is such a busy day here in America – free Slurpees at 7-11 and Cow Appreciation Day at Chick-Fil-A. Why isn’t it a holiday? How do they expect us to work under these conditions?

Moving on. Let’s take a look at the CRM news this week.

Hitachi Solutions posted New Shoes and Dynamics CRM Upgrades. This contains a great Features Cheat Sheet that describes the new features in 2013 and the Spring 2014 update.

PowerObjects posted a helpful tip: How to Open a CRM XML File on a Windows 8 or 8.1 Device. When you Export some data to Excel from CRM on a Windows 8+ device it will not automatically open in Excel. Follow the directions to fix this.

PowerObjects also posted about how to Display Business Process Values on Forms in CRM 2013. Adding these fields to your form can assist while you figure out reporting or other automation options.

There were several great CRM Tips of the Day. Check out Tip #175: Miscellaneous privileges with multiple access levels to learn where you can trim down the access those miscellaneous privileges offer. Also take a look at Tip #173: Don’t disable Quick Create for Standard Entities. This discusses what happens if you turn off quick create and try to use the tablet app.

Mitch Milam posted Refreshing you Development or QA Environment with Production Data. This goes through the important steps when you want to update the data in your other environments to match production.

Sonoma Partners loves to talk about mobile and this week is no different. Check out The Seven Use Cases Your Mobile CRM Sales Application Must Nail. This talks about the important features that your mobile workforce needs to be able to accomplish on their device. These things are necessary to achieve good user adoption.

That is all the news I have to pass along this week. Have a great weekend!

July 3 Blog Review

Let’s take a look at the CRM news on this short holiday week. Actually it was a holiday week for several countries – Canada Day on Tuesday and the 4^th of July on Friday!

PowerObjects is still blogging away about the Spring ’14 wave. They talked to us this week about setting up Server-Based SharePoint Integration in CRM 2013. Also they talked about a cool new service feature, Timers. This allows you to add timers to your case form to track SLAs and things like that. Check Out Update on New Feature: Timer Control.

CustomerEffective (sorry Hitachi Solutions) posted a very helpful blog on Keeping up with the Ever Growing Dynamics CRM Roadmap and More. This explains the different products and add-ons under the Microsoft umbrella and all the key details you need to know.

McGladrey posted a helpful tip in Formatting Date and Time Fields in a Mail Merge. This shows you how you can specify how the date will look in your merge. You probably don’t need to send out a letter that includes the whole timestamp.

That’s all for now. Have a great weekend everyone!

June 27 Blog Review

The summer busyness continues to take a toll on my blogging. This will be a review of basically the last month of CRM news. Let’s get started with all the Spring Wave news and then we will go through the other blogs over the last few weeks.

Spring Wave CRM 2013 Updates

A hot topic these past few weeks has been the Spring ’14 Wave of features. To get all the information you need, first check out CRM in the Field’s Podcast and Overview of CRM 2013 Service Pack 1. Then read all these other blogs as well:

PowerObjects wrote a great tutorial on Instalingl Spring '14 Wave, Leo Product Updates on CRM 2013 Organization. CustomerEffective also talked about Getting Ready for Spring ’14 and gave some tips on things to keep in mind.

The Spring ’14 Wave had a major focus on the service area, Jukka Niiranen talked to us about Case Creation and Routing. Check this out to better understand the service improvements that could help your organization. PowerObjects also talked about Spring '14 Wave Closing Case with Open Activities, the update gives user the option to complete the case with open Activities and those Activities will be canceled. They also went through many more of the service features in their blog, but there is not enough time to cover them all today. CustomerEffective chimed in with What’s New With Queues.

CustomerEffective also talked about the Spring Wave with more information on the Server-Based SharePoint integration - CRM Online Spring '14: Server-Based SharePoint Integration.

Scott Durow talked about the Command Bar updates in the Spring ’14 wave in And Then There were seven! Now the command bar allows 7 buttons instead of the 5 previously.

Several Blogs produced their top feature list: PowerObjects Top 10 Spring Wave Updates, CustomerEffective’s Top 5 Features You Might not Know about, Scott Durow’s Top 3 Fixes, and finally Preact CRM’s Top 12 Service Improvements.

However, the feature I am most excited for is Workflow OR Conditions in CRM 2013 SP! (Thank you Adam Vero for giving this insight.) Currently if you wanted to create an OR in a workflow condition you would need multiple ifs and duplicated logic and more thinking than should be necessary. This will save so much time in complicated workflows!

Tips

Reporting is a very valuable feature in CRM. It can be even more valuable if you set the reports to run on a schedule and email them out to people. Learn how in CustomerEffective’s walk through - CRM Report Scheduler.

PowerObjects posted a helpful tip is Color Code Tracked Appointments in Outlook. This shows you how to set up conditional formatting so that your CRM appointments will appear in a different color on your calendar.

As new features are released for CRM it is important to know what system requirements need to be met. CRM in the field released Supported Configurations in Next Version of CRM which relates to the “Vega” release of CRM.

Sonoma Partners talked to us about Controlling Access to Access Team Templates. If an Access Team template is deleted, all of the associated Access Teams will be deleted. This could cause a major problem in your system so ensure you lock down this security and train your users.

PowerObjects gave a quick tip - Adding Columns to Marketing List Members Sub Grid. This describes how to add columns to the default view of members of a Marketing List. Keep in mind, if you just need to pull this every once and a while you could also build a find for all Contacts who are a member of a certain Marketing List. This will allow you to pull in all the information you need as well.

CustomerEffective taught us how to Retrieve a Record GUID in CRM 2013.

Scott Durow talked through important system pieces to be keeping an eye on in Monitor! Monitor! Monitor!

If you have ever had issues with workflows utilizing certain records but needing to update the links between Dev and Live, check out PowerObjects’ Utilizing GUID’s for Importing Data to Multiple Orgs. This shows you what can be done to resolve that issue.

CustomerEffective wrote a great blog on Business Process Flow Lessons Learned. This described the benefits and issues with Business Process Flows and what to consider when you build them for your organization.

I think that is enough for today! Have a lovely weekend!

May 16 Blog Review

Now that I caught up and the backlog of blogs earlier this week, I am hopefully back on schedule. Here are the top blogs this week.

Adam Vero wrote a great blog called, Why Use Access Teams in Dynamics CRM 2013. This describes the reasons to use Access Teams and the benefits they can provide to your system. He also links to some other great resources on the topic.

CustomerEffective taught us about design in Form Style in Dynamics CRM: Tips from the Fashion Industry. Some of the tips are: make sure important things are easy to access, make sure the order follows your process, and to update regularly with input from other people. There are also several great style ideas included.

CRM in the Field wrote a how to article to deal with Sitemap Issues after CRM 2011 Import into CRM 2013. Read carefully and take note of the disclaimer before proceeding.

The CRM Team Blog released Important Information about supported Configurations in the next release for CRM. This describes what you need to know for the next major release of CRM.

Sonoma Partners posted about an Activity Feed Quirk when customizing “Follow” Views. This describes an issue when out of the box entities have been renamed and the view names are not correctly renamed in the import.

Jukka Niiranen also taught us this week in Visualizing Your Progress with CRM Goals. One idea brought up in the post is to use a long continuous goal that is limited in the rollup query instead of creating a new goal for each month. Also make sure that your goals are always visible to users where they can be analyzed and acted upon.

Have a great weekend!

May 9 Blog Review

PowerObjects posted Moving CRM 2013 Business Rules with Static Values from Dev to Production. This describes what to do if you cannot activate one of your solution components due to a reference to the item in a development instance which has a different GUID than the production instance.

CustomerEffective wrote a handy blog on Retrieving a Record's GUID in CRM 2013. This describes how to create a Javascript Bookmarklet that will grab the CRM record GUID for you.

Mitch Miliam posted a helpful tidbit in Workflow Ownership and Disabled Users. Be careful when disabling users that nothing is assigned to them especially workflows which will stop running. Also a good reminder to keep an eye on your waiting system jobs to notice these problems quickly.

Sonoma Partners posted CRM 2013 - Phone Call Fields won't Default from Sub-Grid. This discusses how some fields are not auto populated depending on where you create your Activity from.

Sonoma Partners also posted Five Reasons Your CRM Deployment Needs Enterprise Mobility to ensure that everyone uses the mobile capabilities of CRM 2013.

Jukka Niiranen teaches us a thing or two in CRM Reminder Workflows Done Right. This describes the correct way to create a reminder workflow and some things you should keep in mind.

Biggest news over the last week was the release of Rollup 17 for CRM 2011. Here are the pieces you need to be able to find: Knowledge Base Article, Download Site, PFE Blog. Sonoma Partners also recorded their top picks here. Here is what I picked out of the KB (probably still too much to read but less than what we started with):

Important Fixes

·        Quick Find fails with "Invalid Argument" when whole number fields are added as find columns

·        Removing / Adding any field to the form after enabling the option "Automatically expand to use available space" causes the sub grid to shrink or resize to much smaller in size.

·        Reports cannot be executed once the default filter form the report is removed and the update is saved. The execution fails with the following error on screen. "Reporting Error: The repot cannot be displayed"

·        After applying Update Rollup 16, Solution import fails with overwriting components

·        After installing Update Rollup 16, CRM reports embedded in IFRAME objects (on forms / dashboards /etc...) no longer display correctly when using Internet Explorer 9 or Internet Explorer 10

·        A form has multiple tabs which are initially hidden and then made visible programmatically. Once the tabs are made visible, the navigation bar containing the links to other related entities moves down and part of it gets off the screen, making the users unable to see or select some links.

·        After exporting the results of a Quick Find search to Excel Pivot Table, the resulting file cannot be opened. The following error appears: "[Microsoft][ODBC SQL Server Driver][SQL Server]The SELECT permission was denied on the object 'AccountBase', database '...._MSCRM', schema 'dbo'."

·        Cannot change owner on create of Appointment after Update Rollup 16

·        Audit setting disabled when changing cascading behavior

·        Activity Types change when importing Solutions. As a result a view on the Activity entity that references the custom activity entity stops working. Warning message on the filter: This condition had one or more list values that no longer exist in the system.

·        After applying Update Rollup 16 in Microsoft Dynamics CRM 2011, users are unable to remove Deployment Administrators if the account exists in a separate domain.

·        After installing Update Rollup 12, there are changes to the Microsoft Dynamics CRM 2011 forms that may impact the visually impaired such as lighter colors and the absence of highlighting on items such as the SiteMap and Tab titles.

Interesting/Odd Fixes

·        Bulk Edit on Cases shows wrong dialog box

·        Advanced Find date range with "last-x-fiscal-years" is wrong when exported to a Dynamic Worksheet

·        When you have an HTML web resource on a form, the web resource is removed when clicking the backspace button in Internet Explorer

·        Users attempting to delete the oldest audit log in Microsoft Dynamics CRM 2011 after Update Rollup 12 receive the following error:

"You can only delete the oldest audit log"

·        If the number of notes on a record exceeds the records per page set in a user personal options, you will not be able to see the additional notes in the control. For example, if the records per page is set to 25, and you have 26 notes on the record, you will not be able to see the first note. Prior to Update Rollup 12 the Notes Control had "Add a new note..." and "Show more notes" hyperlinks on the notes control.”Show more notes" would allow you to display the next page of notes in the notes control.

·        Even though the print preview fits one page, always blank page 2 is printed.

CRM for Outlook Issues

·        When you create service activities and you sync those activities to your Outlook Exchange Mailbox, and you have devices like an iPhone or Windows Phone you will see UNKNOWN:UNKNOWN on the activity parties or invitees on those devices when viewing those service activities. This can lead to invitees getting removed from the service activity or becoming duplicated in CRM.

·        Poor performance with smart matching when the Email Hash and Activity tables have a large number of records.

·        Clicking the mail merge button in the Ribbon bar of the Advanced Find screen opened from the Contacts entity doesn't do anything.

·        The context sensitive ribbon is not displaying in the Outlook 2011 Client when configured to a CRM 2013 deployment

·        After Update Rollup 12 or greater is applied to the Outlook client, the startup time for Outlook.exe can be significantly impacted if the configured organization contains many customizations

·        Microsoft.Interop.Mapi.MAPINameId.GetHashCode module led to Outlook crash

·        Outlook start-up time is impacted post Update Rollup 12

·        Outlook Quick Find does not work correctly for custom entities after Update Rollup 12

·        When users have several forms open in the Outlook Client and then open a model dialog such as a Lookup, several of the forms will be forced to the background, losing focus.

·        An environment where the SendEmailSynchronously OrgDbOrgSetting set to 1 the message below is presented when forwarding e-mails from Outlook.

"A record with these values already exists. A duplicate record cannot be created. Select one or more unique values and try again. Do you want send the e-mail? If you click Yes, the e-mail will be sent out, but no corresponding activity will be created in Microsoft Dynamics CRM."

·        When a manually tracked contact in Microsoft Dynamics CRM 2011 Client for Outlook is merged with another contact as a subordinate record, that contact can be incorrectly synchronized to Outlook if the Outlook Client is reconfigured.

·        Untracking an email you do not own results in the email being deleted from CRM

·        Quick campaigns are not working in Outlook client when Critical Update is installed

·        Users of the Microsoft Dynamics CRM 2011 Client for Outlook may experience issues where shared personal views may not show up on entity grids if the views had been shared or unshared previously.

·        After installing Update Rollup 10, 11, or 12, file attachments for emails get a contentId appended to them. If file name is mywordfile.doc, then the file attachment in CRM will show {cid:somecontentid@somedomain}mywordfile.doc