With Mobile Express you can access your Microsoft Dynamics CRM 2011 data wherever and whenever you need it! Follow the simple instructions below to get started with Mobile Express today.  

As a sales professional, here are 25 reasons why I love working with Microsoft Dynamics CRM (and why you should love it too)! Dynamics CRM automates every aspect of my job, making it easy to find and sort through information that I need...

The idea of web resources has always been a little overwhelming to me. In the past I associated them with something a programmer uses for the wonderful, amazing magic they do in Microsoft Dynamics CRM. As it turns out, even those of us who don't consider ourselves to be hard-core programmers have the ability to take advantage of web resources.

At C5 Insight, we use ClickDimensions with Microsoft Dynamics CRM for our email marketing and marketing automation. Recently we decided to upgrade to the newest version of ClickDimensions to take advantage of their new features. Much to our surprise, many of our Lead Source picklist values in Dynamics CRM got changed during the upgrade. As you can imagine, this made us a little nervous. After some investigating, we discovered the problem and learned a little-known limitation of managed solutions in Dynamics CRM.

“Paralysis by analysis” means having so much data that it becomes difficult to take any action. And it is an issue that organizations frequently run into with getting users to adopt a customer relationship management solution. Users see long lists of activities, leads, opportunities, cases and accounts - and they don’t know where to begin to manage their day in the CRM system. The results can be devastating to the bottom line and often include: failing to work the best leads, opportunities slipping through the cracks, key customers being ignored and follow-up commitments aren't met. Ultimately, it may lead your team to abandon CRM and go back to more familiar ways to manage relationships.

Our team recently took on a client that had several Microsoft Dynamics CRM 2011 online deployments. Due to this particular client’s complex business model and wide range of verticals, segregation has been required on every level of the project. When we were contacted to setup another Dynamics CRM deployment on their behalf, the fairly self-sufficient client told us that he failed to move a Dynamics CRM Solution from an earlier deployment to the newest deployment. Once I got in their CRM system and started digging around, I discovered why he believed the solution import had failed.

Customer relationship management (CRM) projects are particularly difficult to successfully deliver. In fact, research into CRM project failures over the last 10 years has consistently found a failure rate between 30% and 70%. A quick scan of the proposals that we have delivered to new clients for CRM projects over the past 12 months shows that fully 59% of new clients who approach us are dealing with a need to administer CPR on their CRM implementation. This is true across all CRM products (we have seen failed CRM projects across virtually every CRM solution on the market). In this article I’ll take a look at one of the most frequent causes of failure that we have encountered and will offer some guidance for avoiding this (or for recovering if you’re already there). I will also be doing a deeper dive into this topic during our CPR for CRM Webcast. 

We use dashboards very heavily internally and have recently expanded our set of core metrics and KPIs to be about 12-15 charts and graphs (depending on special events we may have, etc.). In this post I will tell you about a fairly quick way to create rotating dashboards with SharePoint. SharePoint is the perfect solution for our needs because it allows us to stay within our core systems and leverage the platform.

While many people have enjoyed the “You Might be a Redneck If” jokes by Jeff Foxworthy, few people are aware of the applicability to the IT community. As a professional IT consultant for C5 Insight, I have saved a number of clients from unfortunate situations caused by their previous, not-so-qualified consulting partners.

In a few days, Microsoft will be hosting their annual event focused on Microsoft Dynamics CRM—Microsoft Convergence 2013. This is a valuable event for organizations that are either using or are considering Microsoft CRM. Read on for more reasons on why you should attend Convergence.

Successful user adoption, or the mental acceptance and use of something new, can be achieved in any organization. There are a number of methods that can be used to implement new systems, including "big bang" (single rollout) or "phased adoption" (gradual rollout). Regardless of the method you use to rollout user adoption in your organization, there are a few important items that must be factored into your plan.

Microsoft’s Rollup 12 is not as forgiving as previous versions when it comes to the Currency field. After applying Rollup 12 to an on-premise instance of Dynamics CRM 2011 (this one happened to be running the Internet Facing Deployment deployment) but not enabling the Enhanced User Experience (aka Flow UI), we noticed that we could no longer qualify leads.

In deployments with a decent amount of workflows that fire constantly (i.e., system jobs are spawned), the amount of records placed in the AsyncOperationBase table is quite impressive. However, when these system jobs complete (canceled or succeeded) they remain in this table until you decide to purge them. When these tables begin to grow into the millions of rows it imposes undue performance issues on the Async service and overall system performance may suffer as well.

There isn’t a day that goes by, where I come across some type of challenge, situation, issue, or piece of new learning that isn’t worth sharing with others. This article encourages you to blog, explains why it's important, and provides ideas on how to make it a natural part of your day.

A RAD Approach to CRM Projects

As a company that provides customer relationship management (CRM) services, we’re big advocates of using your CRM system to track and approve sales commissions.  But sometimes it can be impractical to do this.  This is particularly true in complex organizations, small organizations or fast-growing organizations where you need the flexibility to quickly adapt your commission model to a changing situation in the marketplace.  Long-term, everyone should aim to handle commissions in their CRM system, but what do these organizations do in the short-term?

The good news is that SharePoint is an excellent tool for giving you all of the flexibility you need, while still having an efficient process for setting, tracking and distributing commissions.  Here’s how it can work for you.

Using Global Option sets in CRM 2011 can simplify the process of mapping option sets.  But what if you have a local option set in one entity and a global option set in another?  This blog explains how to map data from a local option set in one entity to the equivalent in another via workflow.

Our Project Managers use Microsoft CRM to manage and track all of our projects – including the project plans, financials, time tracking and expenses.  When combined with SharePoint, our Agile Project Management solution has become a great way to carefully track all the details of our projects and communicate with our clients.  During a recent update to this solution, our Project Managers asked us if we could use a different view for the Time Tracking entity than the associated view.

After doing a bit of research we found that this is possible to some extent, but it is not well documented.  So here are some options for changing the associated view on a specific Microsoft Dynamics CRM 2011 form.

Why should you care that the mainstream support phase is ending for Dynamics CRM 4.0 in April 2013? Read this article to understand what this really means for your deployment of CRM 4.0 on-premise, and how you can decide when it's time to upgrade to Dynamics CRM 2011.

Microsoft will be rolling out Update Rollup 12 (UR12), also known as the Polaris update, for Microsoft Dynamics CRM 2011 Online and On-Premise in January, 2013.  This update contains some exciting new functionality that your users will love.  But it may also require that you make updates to the JavaScript on your CRM forms or you may experience errors.  Be careful - if you're not prepared, your CRM 2011 could stop working as expected and slow your team down!

This article was updated on 1/23/2013 with additional information about UR12.

This article contains the information you need in order to make sure that your CRM is ready for this update.

Several days ago I wrote a post in response to the successful South Carolina cyber-attack (that earlier post can be found here).  Although the security benefits alone are enough to justify starting the move to the cloud, there are numerous other cost-saving and productivity improving reasons for state and local governments to consider making the move. 

Earlier this week it was announced than an international hacker had successfully made off with over 3 million social security numbers and almost 400,000 credit and debit card numbers from the state of South Carolina.  State and local governments have collectively spent billions of dollars trying to secure their data systems.  In spite of this investment, a hacker was able to identify and exploit a weak spot in their armor.  As public sector budgets are continuing to shrink, there is pressure to add more software applications to automate tasks and lower costs; increasing pressure to cut costs on security for these applications; and increasing pressure to extend the life of less secure and aging legacy computer applications.  The result is that our government agencies are at increasing risk of successful cyber-terrorism through a greater number of applications, lower security standards, and aging applications that should be replaced.

How could South Carolina and other state and local governments cost-effectively protect vital citizen, business and government records?  The answer comes from an emerging private-sector technology: cloud computing.

 The latest update rollup for the Dynamics CRM 2011 client fixes some compatibility issues with Outlook 2013.  However, we are finding some issues with users that have upgraded from Outlook 2010 to Outlook 2013.  There was a similar issue when Office 2010 was released.  At that time, we had a client who purchased new computers that had Office 2010 pre-installed, but their corporate standard was Office 2007.  They uninstalled Office 2007 and installed Office 2010 – and CRM for Outlook no longer worked.

Recently while performing a client upgrade from CRM 4.0 to 2011 I ran into an issue with the SiteMap stripping out the Org Name in a URL. This particular client’s 4.0 environment had a SiteMap entry that brought them to a report to view. During a review of the system post upgrade I found that these links were broken. After further investigation I found CRM was stripping out the Org Name even though it was in the URL inside of the SiteMap. I struggled with this for quite some time. I discussed this with a few of my colleagues and we threw around some suggestions such as creating a dashboard which would then reference the report via an iFrame. However, this client had some special security policies around the SiteMap and we all know that there is zero security controls around a system dashboard so I kept digging. After some testing I figured out a way to get this to work 2011 without CRM stripping the Org Name out.

Dynamics CRM makes it easy to customize forms.  But businesses frequently require that a form needs to inherit some data from the parent record.  A hypothetical example of this is a part on a piece of equipment might inherit some information about the piece of equipment that it is a part of (in this particular case, both of these would be custom entities).  This article discusses some best practices for using JavaScript to inherit this data.

It has come to our attention that the Activity Feed solution is temporarily unavailable for download from the Microsoft Marketplace (the link for the download had been: http://pinpoint.microsoft.com/en-us/applications/microsoft-dynamics-crm-activity-feeds-12884926310).

Fortunately, we had downloaded a recent copy of this for a client deployment. If you need a copy of the file, please contact us (click here) and request the file and we will email it to you. To install it:

1. Be sure you are running UR6 or later (we have tested it on UR8)
2. Import the .cab file into CRM as a solution

It is provided without warranty, but we have installed it in a test environment and it works without an issue. If you become aware of the download becoming available again, please reply to this post so we can update it accordingly.

Thanks!

UPDATE 6/11/2012: The solution is now available from the Microsoft Marketplace again. You can now visit the above link to download it directly. Cheers!

This is my third blog in a series concerning data integration. In my first two blog entries we overviewed some of the data integration hurdles as well as some of the common methods used to discover the net-change data that will need to be translated. Here in my third blog I’ll discuss some of the benefits of not integrating in real-time, but creating a batch job to perform the integration. We’ll also look at the Business Rules that may need to be applied within the integration process.

In my previous blog focusing on the hurdles of real-time, two-way data integration, I highlighted the hurdle of how to discover the data you need translated. In most cases, discovering the net-change data is all you want to translate on a real-time basis. Remember, a two-way integration means net-change data going in two directions or more (depending on the number of systems you’re integrating) at a rate determined by how many end-users there are on each of the systems being integrated. Business systems with a significant amount of end-users can create substantial volumes of net-change data.

I am back home from Convergence and still trying to digest the wealth of information that was shared!

Of course one of the most anticipated parts of the Microsoft Convergence 2012 event in Houston was learning about the future of Dynamics CRM … what new features and functions does Microsoft plan to add?  I must say that Microsoft did a better job than normal in providing a vision of what the future may hold.  The very short summary is that over the course of the next 12 months, you will see Dynamics CRM become more: anytime, any device, any business – than ever before.  In this article we’ll take a deeper look into exactly what that means and how to expect this to translate into changes in the platform over the next several releases.

After concluding the first day at the Microsoft Convergence 2012 event here in Houston, TX, I can summarize my feelings in one sentence, “It is a great time to be alive and working on collaboration!”  Why do I say that?  Here are a few brief insights:

In some cases, if not all too some extent, integration between Dynamics™ CRM , Salesforce® or/and SharePoint® with your back-office system is the key to user adoption. Real-time, two-way data integration allows all segments of the business to access the very latest transactional data, and the information that the data contains.

This weekend I’ll be packing my bags and heading off to Houston, TX to attend Microsoft Convergence 2012 to experience all of the Microsoft Dynamics CRM goodness I can get.  I’ll plan to publish at least a couple of blogs while I’m there on whatever news or tips I can pick up.  Feel free to leave a comment here if you’d like to request any specific topics

Are you planning to attend?   Great!  Ping me and let’s plan to chat.  It would be great to network with individuals who are looking for career opportunities or who would like to chat about the challenges that you are experiencing with your CRM project.  I’ll hook you up with a free copy of our CRM 2011 Bible if you don’t already have one (or if you want a second copy for your nightstand).

Have you finally gotten users to start creating contacts in CRM only to find out that they are often forgetting to associate them with an account?  For B2B organizations, this can become a significant data quality issue.  Most B2B organizations are business centered rather than contact centered.  What this means is that users tend to use the account entity in CRM to search for information.  So if a contact is not associated with an account, then users are not nearly as likely to find it.  This problem is exacerbated by Outlook integration features, such as the ability create a new contact directly from an email address.  In this blog, I’ll offer a couple of practical solutions to aid you with creating higher quality data by ensuring that the Parent Customer field is always populated on contact forms.

SharePoint has had excellent dashboard presentation capabilities for a long time now.  Dynamics CRM formally rolled out dashboard reporting with CRM 2011 (although using SharePoint and/or SSRS enabled dashboard reporting with previous versions of CRM).  Now that this functionality is getting embraced and adopted by many organizations, how can it best be leveraged to change the game by truly accelerating performance?  Simple.  Combine the best of Microsoft SharePoint, Dynamics CRM 2011 and TV or large monitors placed in public areas within your business.  Here’s how we’ve done it at C5 Insight.

Activity feeds are a great new feature of CRM 2011.  But, as compelling as they are, there is a problem.  Getting users to adopt them can be daunting.  Some users are not yet comfortable with social networking.  Others don't want to have to go to yet another place to track and record information.  Still others just have a hard time establishing new habits and work patterns.  

But starting to get value out of activity feeds doesn't have to be difficult.  This article outlines 3 practical ways that we have been working with activity feeds to boost the value of them, and the adoption of them by users.  Read on for more - including a free solution to expand how activity feeds are used in your organization.

Security roles are inherited by child business units in Microsoft Dynamics. As I mentioned in a previous blog Sneaky Cylon Copies of Your CRM Security Roles, security roles have linked copies that have the same name but are separate entries with their own unique guids for each business unit. This creates an interesting situation when you want to base business logic on a user’s security role memberships. Since the only thing that is effectively guaranteed to be the same between parent and inherited security roles is the name you need to enact some design patterns to use them in a consistent manor in your code.

I was on a conference call the other week when Jack Bender, a Senior Consultant from Microsoft, mentioned Harvey Balls in reference to security role privileges. Later on I asked him what the heck he was talking about with this Harvey Ball stuff. If you already know the whole Harvey Ball story then feel free to roll your eyes and give me the gas face. I just thought it was a somewhat odd description of the little balls used to adjust security permissions. For those of you who don't know what Harvey Balls are here is a brief summary so that when the time comes and you hear about Harvey Balls or you just want to impress someone by talking about them you'll be in the know.
 

There is something to be said for simplicity. When writing custom web application for CRM you can get fancy with Infragistics or Telerik controls and do all kinds of interesting and fun things. There are situations where using third party controls is certainly warranted. In the past I've always leaned towards using third party controls because they can make my life easier. I like being able to just throw a grid on a web form and update a few properties and have most of the work for display of data taken care of for me. As of late I have seen the value of bare bones custom web applications for CRM. As always it just depends on what you are doing and what you need to accomplish as to the need for the overhead of third party controls. But if possible it can be better to try and use vanilla HTML, JavaScript and CSS to accomplish your goal.

Do you see the person in the picture to the left?  She is a salesperson.  Why is she so happy?  Because she is using her CRM system right now, while she’s talking on the phone.  And it’s taking her less time than ever before.  And her manager is getting the reports that he wants at the same time!  And she gets her work done in CRM when she would otherwise have “down time”?  How is all this possible you ask?  Read on …

We frequently hear complaints from sales users that they don’t like having to take the time to track meetings and phone calls in their CRM system.  Many sales people feel that this just takes away from the time that they can spend in conversations with prospective customers.  While it is critically important that sales people are disciplined about tracking relevant activities in CRM, there are some helpful shortcuts available to save some time – or to make use of “down time” while driving or waiting for a meeting.

In the movie Star Wars Chancellor Palpatine outwardly appears to be a well-intentioned and loyal public servant and supporter of democracy, yet underneath his affable public persona lurks his true identity. His Sith name was Darth Sidious and accurately describes his true hidden nature. In a CRM project of any size you may end up with a decent amount of JavaScript to implement client side form customizations. Most likely there will be a need to make web service calls to get certain pieces of information about things such as the user, his/her roles, etc. You have to make sure your web service calls are being made correctly or else you could run into some "insidious" problems on your server.

The best practice stated by Microsoft when dealing with security roles is not to create security roles underneath the root business unit of your organization. Each security role defined at the root is inherited by its child business units. In the case of a new organization the roles you get will be the out of the box security roles. The interesting thing about this is as a developer is that the UI deceives you into thinking that when you are looking at security roles that there is only one when in fact much like the Cylons in Battlestar Galatica there are multiple copies. What is happening behind the scenes is that for each child business unit the security role is being duplicated down the business unit hierarchy. If you are asking yourself why you should care then you have to consider instances when you want to know information about certain security roles in the system. If you are ever in a situation where you are looking for a security role by its guid like in a configuration setting you'll have to keep in mind that you can't just copy the guid you find in the interface and expect that it applies to all business units because they are all unique records with their own guids in the database.

E-mail templates are a great feature available in Dynamics CRM.  When Microsoft introduced the ability to access them directly from within Outlook in CRM 2011, it became even more efficient to quickly grab a template for any outgoing email.  In order to use an email template, you first have to track the email in CRM.  So the process works something like this: create an Outlook email | click the Track in CRM or Set Regarding button | select a template | send the email.

When reviewing a lead, account or contact prior to a sales call, it is always helpful to have as much context about a company prior to making the call.  Putting a Twitter feed on the CRM record for a lead can put this information in a place where it is easy for a sales person to quickly see it.  By passing in the name of the company dynamically, the feed can show relevant information about the specific company.

Twitter makes it pretty easy to generate the “base” code for integrating with CRM (or any website) as a widget.  You can find their tools for generating widgets here.  Even if you use my code, below, as a starting point, you’ll likely find this link helpful as you start to fine-tune your code a bit.

When working with solutions in a project often times I come across a few exports that I made previously. The probably I have is most people never update the version numbers on a solution. You end up with two or more solutions not really knowing what is in one versus another. Granted not knowing exactly what is in one solution versus another is still a problem, but the issue can at least be minimized.

Working on a project with multiple developers can be challenging. It requires collaborate and organization in order to take advantage of tasks that can be done in parallel and keep everyone on the same page. If you’ve ever tried to do this on CRM project you’ll find that as you add more developers to the project you quickly reach a tipping point where it becomes very difficult for them to not step on each other’s toes.

If you've ever worked on a large CRM project or had to deal with a CRM 4 upgrade of any size you may quickly find yourself in a sea of JavaScript that can begin to look a little overwhelming. Personally I loathe most JavaScript that comes my way because you tend to get these 5 page long methods that do everything, all the field names are hard coded strings and option sets/form event mode constants are all numeric values so you can't just read the code and quickly understand what it is doing. To make matters worse JavaScript is not like coding in C# so there are so many more opportunities for things to go wrong. Since JavaScript is very loose and the tools available at the moment aren't very strong in design time error and dependency checking are not up to par with managed code it will pay big dividends to try and be a little stricter up front when it comes to writing your client side code and keeping those libraries organized.

This is the third in a three part series I’ve been writing on Microsoft Dynamics CRM 2011 and Microsoft Outlook integration.  In the first two blogs, we reviewed the pros and cons of using CRM 2011 for Outlook and CRM 2011 for the Web.  In this article, we will take a look at CRM 2011 and Outlook functionality that everyone in your organization should use (regardless of whether they are using CRM 2011 for Outlook or not).  This integration functionality is easy for users to understand, saves a lot of time, and enables your organization to better track interactions with customers and other stakeholders.

For the previous two articles in this series see:

• Part 1: 4 Reasons to Use the Microsoft CRM 2011 Web Client
• Part 2: 6 Reasons to Use Dynamics CRM 2011 for Outlook

Every developer has their own style of writing code. I'm sure I'm not the only person that has inherited code from someone else only to make grimacing faces when you open it up in Visual Studio. I will admit that sometimes I want to slap people for what they have handed over to me but I'm sure someone has wanted to slap me a time or two as well. If you are like most developers you will have the immediate urge to "fix" this code to bring it up to your "standards". I'm no different. Not that I claim to be the swami of coding standards. I'm always learning and getting better but I think I am not bad compared to stuff I've seen. Here are a few of my philosophies. I have to say that a book that I read called Clean Code by Robert C. Martin has really made an impact on my thought process. I think in general we get so caught up in the work of writing code that we step back and think about how we are writing code. When it comes to coding with CRM 2011 I have some basic thoughts on what things should look like.