CRM New Year's Resolutions

At the start of a new year, it is a time-honored tradition to set New Year's resolutions--goals to make yourself a better you.  Besides stopping smoking, losing weight, or running a marathon, this is a great time to evaluate where you are going with your Microsoft Dynamics CRM deployment and take little steps to get more out of it.

Jim Glass asked "What are your New Year's Resolutions?" over at the CRM Team Blog

Here are 10 New Years Resolutions that would help almost anyone get more from their Microsoft Dynamics CRM deployment:

1.  Check out the Microsoft CRM Accelerators. 

The latest accelerator, the Enterprise Search Accelerator, was just released yesterday.

2.  Get your environment up to date. 

If you haven't already downloaded it, you should install Microsoft Dynamics CRM 4.0 Update Rollup 1.  And make sure that you stay up to date on new updates and hotfixes.

3.  Get familiar with the CRM 4.0 server diagnostic tools. 

If you don't have it, you should download the Microsoft Dynamics CRM 4.0 Diagnostic tool and use it whenever you experience unexplained CRM problems.  You run the diagnostic tool, turn on platform tracing, recreate the issue, and turn off platform tracing, it will create a detailed log file of everything going on with CRM, and you can frequently see more detail of what the problem is and find the solution.  Also, this is the #1 step you can take to get a faster solution when you open a support case with Microsoft--submit the platform trace log with your support case--this will save a lot of time, and support won't have to come back and ask you to run the diagnostic tool later.

4.  Get familiar with the CRM 4.0 for Outlook diagnostic tools. 

You may be familiar with the Outlook client diagnostic tool located at Start-->All Programs-->Microsoft Dynamics CRM 4.0-->Diagnostics.  When you run the diagnostic wizard, it will find and even fix some of the most common problems with CRM 4.0 for Outlook.  However, were you also aware of the advanced diagnostic tools available with the CRM 4.0 web client?

When you run the diagnostics tool, instead of clicking "run diagnostics," click the support mode button.

This will give you two tabs to choose from.  The Synchronization Troubleshooting allows you to enable/disable specific synchronization processes.

The Advanced Troubleshooting tab includes options similar to the CRM server diagnostics tool, but this time for the client.  You can turn on tracing, delete Outlook temporary files, and create a file that includes relevant logs and machine profile information.

As with the server diagnostics, if you ever have issues with a PC running the Outlook client, you will save significant time dealing with Microsoft support if you first create a trace file of the issue and generate the troubleshooting file for support and submit with your support case.

5.  Get involved in the Microsoft Dynamics CRM community. 

One of my favorite things about Microsoft Dynamics CRM 4.0 is the strong community of users around the world.  By tapping into this community you can find answers to questions, learn from other user's mistakes, help other users, and meet great people.  Probably the best place to start is the Microsoft Dynamics CRM forums.  There is very rarely a time where I have a question or see a CRM error message that a quick search of the forum finds someone else who has had the same question, and how they solved it.  Another great resource is the Microsoft Dynamics CRM newsgroups.

Next, update your RSS reader with the best CRM Blogs on the web.  Other than the CEI Blog (hey, I'm biased), a good starting point is the Microsoft Dynamics CRM Team Blog.  Any big news regarding Dynamics CRM will be covered there, since that is straight from the Dynamics CRM team.  For other blogs, check out the "Blogs We Read" list on the right side of the CEI Blog.

If you are into the social networking thing, join the Microsoft Dynamics CRM group on Facebook and the group on Linkedin.

6.  Get Certified. 

Just the process of studying to prepare for CRM 4.0 certification will force you to learn about all parts of Microsoft Dynamics CRM, and as a result, you will fully understand how it all fits together and probably find some new ways to use the application.

7.  Clean up your sitemap. 

Take a look at your CRM wunderbar--are there any icons that users don't use?  Or maybe there is a section that certain groups use and other users don't.  One of the easiest things that you can do to make CRM more user friendly is to hide the unused links or make them only available for the groups that use them.

• Sitemap surgery tips for manual sitemap editing
• Use the CRM demonstration tools to automatically edit the sitemap
• Use the privilege element in the sitemap to hide or reveal sub-areas for certain users

8.  Clean up your data

The beginning of the year is a great time to do some cleaning, and if you have used your CRM system for more than a year or two, chances are that you have some level of disorganized data in your system.  Like with your car or house, you want to periodically check for junk and clean it out.  Otherwise, it has the potential to build up and cause problems or affect user experience

• Clean out old leads.  If you use the Lead entity in CRM, you will want to make sure that you don't persist data for long periods of time in the lead entity.  The reason is that if you have a lead that you use for long periods of time, there is a potential that someone may set up a contact record in the system for the same person, and users will record activities and other data against both.  Also, there are certain pieces of data, such as notes, that do not convert when you convert a lead.  So the longer that you keep a record as a lead, the more likely that you are that notes will be added to that lead, which will be lost when you finally convert the lead.  Leads can also be a major source of database crud, especially if users are not extremely disciplined about qualifying/disqualifying leads.  Take a look at your lead entity--do you see a bunch of leads that were created in 2002?  If so, clean them out. We recommend using the lead entity only as a quick starting entry.  It is convenient to be able to enter data one time and have CRM create an Account, contact and opportunity at the same time when you convert it.  We recommend converting leads to accounts or contacts as soon as possible.  If they are not yet qualified prospects, give the Account or Contact records a relationship status of "Lead" or "Suspect." 
• De-duplicate your data.  Nothing frustrates user's experience with CRM more than the appearance of bad data--if I don't think that the data in CRM is correct, or if there are multiple records for the same company, I will be less likely to trust the application, and in turn, less likely to use it.  One of the most powerful features of Microsoft Dynamics 4.0 is Duplicate Detection.  Even if you have duplicate detection running on create of records, it is still a good idea to periodically run a duplicate detection job of your main entities, such as accounts, contacts, and opportunities and clean out any duplicates. 
• Get rid of duplicate e-mail addresses.  I mention this separately from the de-dupe point because I wanted to highlight it.  One of the worst things that you can do in CRM is have duplicate e-mail addresses.  For example, you never want to have the same e-mail address on a user and a contact record, or on a contact and an account record.   The reason is that CRM for Outlook and the e-mail router use the e-mail address of in-coming and out-going e-mails to resolve which records to track the e-mail against.  If, for example, you have the same e-mail address on a contact record as well as that contact's account record, when an e-mail comes in from that user, CRM will not now which record to set that e-mail regarding.  The e-mail will track, but it will not be associated with any CRM records (what good will that do).  I recommend using the SQL Query found here to quickly identify if you have duplicate e-mail addresses in your system, then editing those records in CRM to correct the problem.
• Monitor the health of system jobs in Microsoft Dynamics CRM.  Periodically you want to check that the Asynchronous Processing Service is running and take a look at the system jobs in Settings to make sure that system jobs are running.  And if you have a lot of workflows, plugins, imports, or duplicate detection jobs, you really want to monitor the size of the asynchronousbase table in your MSCRM database.  If you have a large number of completed system jobs, consider deleting them so your database doesn't grow exponentially.

9.  Set up a test environment. 

It amazes me how many CRM deployments do not include a dev/test/sandbox environment.  Microsoft has made it very easy to make configuration changes, so some users feel like it is not necessary to have a test environment; however, it is still recommended best practice to have at least one other environment.  While it is very easy to make configuration changes to Microsoft Dynamics CRM, it is also extremely easy to make a big mess if you don't know what you are doing.  You should always try any development, workflow, or configuration changes in a test environment before implementing these changes in your live production environment.  And you will thank me when your CRM server fails and you have another environment to keep going.

And especially with 4.0, there is no excuse to not have a test environment.  It is very easy to take a copy of an existing production environment and import to a different CRM environment.  If you have the Enterprise version, you can even set up a sandbox organization on your existing CRM environment.  Not quite as good as having a totally separate test environment, but better than nothing.

10.  Find out what's coming.

Microsoft Dynamics CRM is never standing still.  Microsoft is very open about where they are going, and there are many good resources on the web highlighting what's coming for CRM 4 and the next version of Microsoft Dynamics CRM, due in 2010.

• Microsoft Dynamics CRM Statement of Direction white paper--this is the roadmap for where Dynamics CRM is going.  You should check this document periodically, as it is a "living document" that will be updated.
• Video chat with the CRM 5 platform team from Channel 9
• Secure code on the server video from Channel 9--this is pretty interesting and talks about some of the hurdles to running ISV custom code on CRM Online, and how they are going make it available in CRM Online 5.
• CRM Team Blog an early look at CRM 5

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