Simon Hutson has a great blog post where he's compiled a lot of the publicly available information about what Microsoft is cooking up for the next version of CRM, creatively code-named "CRM 5." Lots of exciting stuff for us CRM geeks!
In MSCRM 3.0 to hide system view just took a simple trick to the system. In MSCRM 4.0 Microsoft removed the work around now not letting you get rid of unused or unwanted system views. Doing some searches I found 2 different System View Hiding Plugins but I did not Like having to recompile or edit XML outside of CRM to get rid of the View. So looking over the code on MSDN and Darren's CRM Blog, I decided to Modify Darren's Code not to look at pre built into the code GUIDs. Instead I changed the Query expression to look at the name column (CRM View name and not bring in views starting with "Hidden".) once the plugin is in Open an Entity and open the unwanted view and open properties to rename and add Hidden to the beginning and then save and publish and it is gone from User's site. Make sure not to try and hide all views or System Required views as it will throw errors in trying to do so.
To use this you will need Visual Studio 2005 or VS 2008. You will also need the ...
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You might come across some emails in Outlook that are being tracked, but you never tracked them going out, and they don’t have a tracking token (if your CRM instance is set up to use a tracking token).
Is CRM randomly tracking emails it thinks are important? Of course not, CRM is actually behaving, as you, or someone else, has told it to behave.
I emphasize “someone else”, as most likely you copied your outbound email to another CRM user in your company that has their Email settings set to Track “Email messages from Leads, Contacts and Accounts”. When you receive a response from your email, it will be tracked because the other CRM user has told CRM to track all emails from CRM contacts, etc.
Mystery solved…
I recently did an informal poll of a handful of Salesforce.com users and realized that NONE of them were even aware of Email to Salesforce. Trust me ... it's something worth knowing about and, most likely, something you'll want to think about implementing in your organization.
After enabling Email to Salesforce, you can add a Salesforce-provided email address to the bcc line of any email you send and the email will appear in the activity history related list of the correct lead or contact in Salesforce. What if there isn't a match? No problem - a task will be created instead, which you can then handle in Salesforce.
To learn how to easily setup this functionality, just search for "email to salesforce" in the Help and Training section of Salesforce.
And Outlook users can even take it one step further ... some simple code can added that will eliminate the need to add the address to the bcc line - instead, each time you send an email, you'll receive a message asking "Add to Salesforce?". C ...
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It is true, a completed task cannot be modified with workflow. For some custom billing functionality, we needed to modify an attribute on a task, after it had been completed. Although I knew workflow could not modify it, I thought I had read where a plug in can handle this with no problem. Well, no, a plug in cannot modify a completed task either. What were we to do?
A coworker, who can’t stand to be told “it cannot be done”, found a solution for us… using workflow! Although it is true a completed task cannot be modified, we can temporarily change the status of the completed task, make the change, then change the status back to completed. Voila! We have now modified our completed task and our processes can continue as spec’d out.
Here’s what the workflow might look like:
Thank you Michael!
We've had to do research into quoting tools for a number of clients and prospects recently. Unfortunately, there doesn't seem to be a single site that has done a good job of listing out the options for Microsoft Dynamics CRM 4.0 when it comes to tools that assist with quoting, bundling, kitting and/or configurating. Here are some quick results from our research that I hope you will find helpful.
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At times it is helpful to change the document title of a form. In case you aren't familiar with the term, the document title refers to the text that appears at the top of the tab or window (depending on your Internet Explorer preferences) of a form in MS CRM.
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At the Worldwide Partner Conference (WWPC) in Houston last week, Microsoft announced the rollout of a bunch of Solution Accelerators for Microsoft Dynamics CRM 4.0. These will be great tools to significantly improve CRM functionality. Best of all, the accelerators are "free" (see caveaut below).
(read the entire posting for more information)
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There are times where it is helpful to test your CRM changes logged in as a different user. This will allow you to see everything that this user would experience.
Of course you can physically log on to the users machine, but a better way is to run a simple batch script that will start the CRM web client and prompt you for the users password.
The contents of the .bat script would look like:
runas /user:LITWAREINC\PaulW "C:\Program Files\Internet Explorer\iexplore
http://moss:5555/loader.aspx"
You would supply your own CRM instance and user information. You do need to know the users password to test this way.
If you need to test specifically how something looks iwith the Outlook client, this won't help you... you'll still have to log on to the users machine and start Outlook.
Check out your new orange creamsicle logo in Salesforce! I'll highlight some of the updates in the Summer '08 release in the next few blog entries.
One of the highest impact features is the ability to create Cross-Object Formulas - meaning you can use parent record fields on a child record. FINALLY! Prior to this release, various workarounds had to be used ... such as creating workflow to copy a value over, embedding an s-control, etc. Now cross-object formulas will solve the problem.
Some standard real-world examples of this functionality are placing the Account Number on the Opportunity, or creating a Discounted Amount formula on the Opportunity referencing a Discount Percentage on the Account.
Here's a cross-object formula I just created for a client. They used a different commission percentage based on whether the account was a new or repeat buyer. So, on the commission custom object, I referenced the "# of Opportunities" roll-up summary field on the Account to determine whether or not t ...
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When working with Contact records in Microsoft Dynamics CRM, you might find it frustrating if someone asks you to send them the address of a particular contact. You either have to re-type it or copy it line by line. To save yourself the headache, use the ISVConfig customizations in CRM 3.0 or CRM 4.0 to add a button to the Contact form that lets you copy the address to the clipboard. The example in this entry illustrates how to do this for the Contact.
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Microsoft Dynamics CRM 4.0 has built-in duplicate detection which is great, but in 3.0, which many businesses are still using, the only options for duplicate detection were some third-party applications or a a custom-developed one like the minimally functional example in the 3.0 SDK.
[BEST PRACTICES NOTE: Duplicate detection should be only one of the tools in you data quality arsenal. The best approach is to have some solid practices that govern data entry, and to train users well on things like searching for a record before entering new data.]
Because of the shortcomings of duplicate detection in version 3.0, a lot of these systems have ended up with some data quality issues. If you're running CRM 3.0 and you'd like a quick way to check your duplicates, here's a simple SQL query you can run to find them.
Open SQL Server Management Studio and select your CRM database (it will be called something like 'YourCompanyName_MSCRM')
Right-click th ...
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Traditional CRM needs to evolve to keep pace with customers who are accustomed to two-sided relationships, a la Web 2.0 social media/communities.
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Thanks to gokubi (a really great blog that I read often - it's written by a CRM consultant for non-profits, but has tons of good info for any Salesforce.com user), I just found out that the Summer '08 landing page and release notes are live! Multiday calendar events, inline editing on list views, filtered lookups, and lead conversion improvements are just a few of the many highlights. More info to come ...
I posted previously about my experiences upgrading CRM 3.0 SBE (the Small Business Server edition) to CRM 4.0 Professional. One major area I wanted to address also was the upgrade of the Outlook client. We've dealt with a lot of upgrades of the laptop, or offline, client, and run into some issues.
Basically, you want to uninstall the 3.0 client and then do a clean install of the 4.0 client. Of course, you need to be logged in as the user who will be using Outlook/CRM, and have local admin rights.
The problem is that the uninstall of the 3.0 client is not very clean, especially with the laptop client, because it leaves behind the SQL Express databases, and there's no easy way to see them. Simply deleting the files after the uninstall is not enough. You actually have to delete the databases from SQL using Management Studio. Since most people don't have management studio installed on their machines, and due to networking differences, many computers won't be visible to your SQL Server's Management Studio, t ...
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I recently performed my first upgrade of CRM 3.0 SBE (on Small Business Server 2003 R2) to CRM 4.0 Professional. Here are some important considerations if you are planning for your own upgrade
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The last two Salesforce releases - Winter '08 and Spring '08 - were rolled out in rapid-fire last November and February, respectively. Maybe because of the large number of new features in each release, or maybe because of the holidays in between, I've just realized during conversations with a couple of different clients that many folks aren't aware of some of the great new functionality. With the Summer '08 release right around the corner, I wanted to provide a couple of quick refresher courses to make sure you aren't missing out on any of the functionality that's already out there. I'll focus on the Spring '08 release below, and will go back in time even more to cover the Winter '08 release in my next blog entry.
(By the way ... there are many, many more features that were rolled out the past two releases and I don't mean to short-change all of the others, but the ones I'll cover are some that will give you the biggest bang for your buck in terms of low implementation t ...
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Web to lead: Creating a new lead record based on a web form automatically in Microsoft Dynamics CRM On Premise. Complete code for web2lead is included in this entry.
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CRM 4.0 now offers the ability to turn off the tracking token and still track most email messages.
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