Customer Effective Blog

Customer Effective - 2009 Microsoft Dynamics Financial Services Partner of the Year

Customer Effective was named 2009 Microsoft Dynamics Financial Services Partner of the Year, chosen from a field of nearly 2,000 entrants worldwide. The award recognizes partners who have exhibited excellence in providing innovative and unique solutions based on Microsoft Dynamics to customers in the financial services industry. Customer Effective has demonstrated industry knowledge and expertise, as well as consistent, high-quality, predictable service to Microsoft Dynamics customers.

 

“We are very pleased with Microsoft’s recognition of our success in delivering CRM solutions to the unique and demanding requirements of financial services companies,” said Scott Millwood, President of Customer Effective. “I’m really proud of everyone in our company for the hard work they have put into building our customer base and for building superb solutions in complex financial services vertical markets over the past six years. Its great for the team to see their hard work result in this prestigious award. I’m equally pleased with Microsoft’s continued guidance and support in helping us grow to become the recognized leader in financial services.” 

 

Customer Effective has completed over 300 projects with 170 customers and partners since the company was founded in 2003 to focus exclusively on Microsoft Dynamics CRM. The company’s customers include Bank of America, FBR Capital Markets, First Reserve, Markel Corporation, MAG Mutual Insurance Company, Taylor, Bean and Whitaker Mortgage Corporation, Valmark Securities and CapTrust Financial Advisors. Customer Effective’s success in financial services is based upon deep business process knowledge and delivery of Microsoft Dynamics CRM with “XRM” Accelerators specifically configured to address the sophisticated relational models and processes of  financial services micro-verticals.

 

“Microsoft is proud to recognize Customer Effective as the Microsoft Dynamics Financial Services Partner of the Year,” said David Smith, General Manager, U.S. Microsoft Dynamics Partners, Microsoft Corp. “Customer Effective’s innovative solutions based on Microsoft Dynamics CRM have helped their financial services customers achieve their business goals and succeed. Their Capital Effective CRM solution delivers business-class solutions to financial professionals across insurance, banking, and capital markets.”

Tip: Make Microsoft CRM Administration Easier by Organizing Settings Navigation Bar

In an XRM deployment, there are typically some entity links that you do not want to display in the main Wunderbar areas, such as administrative type entities or entities that function as master lists to feed lookups.  You can display these entities in the Settings area so admin users can access them, but they are out of the way of most users.

One problem that can arise in many XRM implementations that include many custom entities is what I refer to as “Settings Clutter.”  This is where you have 50 links in the Setting navigation bar, and it can become very unruly to find the link for which you are looking.

Part of the problem lies in the way that navigation bar items are added to Wunderbar areas.  In the CRM web interface, links are displayed in the order in which they were added.  If you use Microsoft Dynamics CRM for Outlook, this isn’t an issue, because Outlook displays folder alphabetically.

So unless you create your entities in alphabetical order, they will not be in alphabetical order.  This makes it very difficult to find a link when you need it.

Solution 1—remove from settings and re-add

1.  In CRM, navigate to settings—>customization—>customize entities

2.  Open the customization for the first entity displayed in settings

3.  Uncheck the “Settings” checkbox under “Areas that display this entity”

4. Save and Close the entity customization

5.  Repeat steps 2-4 for each entity currently displayed in settings

6.  Re-add each entity to settings, in alphabetical order

The result will be that all custom entities will be in alphabetical order in Settings.  This is good, but in my book, not good enough, because the standard subareas such as Administration, Business Management, Customization, Templates, etc will still be at the top of the list, so it is still not in alphabetical order

Solution 2—Sitemap Surgery

The layout of the CRM Wunderbar is controlled by the CRM Sitemap.  If you are not familiar with editing the CRM Sitemap, see Microsoft Dynamics CRM Sitemap Surgery Tips.

1.  Determine the alphabetical order of the links in Settings.  For this, I typically use Microsoft Excel and type in the names of the settings links and use Excel’s sorting functionality to arrange them in alphabetical order

2.  In CRM, navigate to settings—>customization—>Export Entities

3.  Export the sitemap and open it in your xml editor of choice.

4.  You will find the Settings area under

<Area Id="Settings" ResourceId="Area_Settings" Icon="/_imgs/settings_24x24.gif" DescriptionResourceId="Settings_Area_Description">

5.  by default, the system entities are under

        <Group Id="Settings">

and the custom entities are under

<Group Id="Extensions" ResourceId="Group_Extensions">

6.  Move the subarea lines under the Settings group line  If the Extensions group does not have any items in it, it will not display.  Do not delete the Extensions group.

7.  Referring to your alphabetical list of Entities, arrange the sitemap settings lines in alphabetical order.

8.  In CRM, navigate to settings—>customizations—>import customizations and import your alphabetical sitemap

The result will be that everything in settings will be in alphabetical order, and it will be very easy for admin users to find what they are looking for.

This is a quick change that can make a major impact on user experience.

Along with adding icons to custom entities, this is one small change that can make the difference between a good CRM experience and a great CRM experience.

Technorati Tags: Microsoft CRM,organization

Troubleshooting CRM Authentication on Windows Server 2008

Windows Server 2008 has been out for a little while now. Many of our installs are still on W2K3 boxes, but we’re starting to see more 2008 installations. I recently had the pleasure of having a very funky set of authentication issues in IIS 7. I decided to take a look at all my notes and compile a quick punchlist of items to run through when setting up (or troubleshooting) authentication for CRM on a 2008 server. This also is a good procedure for troubleshooting any Windows Authentication issue for IIS 7.

Microsoft Dynamics CRM 4.0 on Windows 7: 1 month review

I have been using the Windows 7 Release Client since it was released early May.  I intended to post a review, but didn’t want to do it until I had run it for several weeks.  With operating systems, I like to see not just how it works following a clean install, but also what the experience is like after a month or two of normal use. 

For background, I’m using a 2.5 year old Dell D820 laptop, previously running Windows Vista 32.  Installed Windows 7 64.

Installation:  I chose to do a fresh install, rather than upgrading my Windows Vista installation.  This is always a good idea, and it give you a good chance to “clean house” and get rid of all of the junk files you accumulate through normal use.

The installation is very fast—significantly quicker than previous versions of Windows.

After the install, everything was working, but the graphics looked strange.  Then a message popped up saying that a new NvIdia driver had been found.  After a reboot, all was well.

Performance:  Windows 7 feels much faster and lighter than Windows Vista.  I’m probably a medium to heavy-use PC user, and I typically have Outlook w/ CRM open along with multiple Office application, messenger, and multiple IE windows open.  With Vista, system memory usage was typically 1.8-1.9 GB.  With Windows 7, it averages 1.2-1.4 GB.

CRM Performance: CRM has performed beautifully with Windows 7.  It is very similar to the experience with Vista.  If anything, it is a bit quicker to load because of more available system resources in general.

CRM Usability: I also frequently find myself with multiple CRM windows open at the same time.  I’ve found that the Windows 7 full screen preview is a great usability enhancement for CRM.  This lets you hover your mouse over an icon in the Windows taskbar and preview open windows.  If you have multiple CRM records open, this allows you to very quickly browse through open records and select the one you want.

Issues:  I haven’t seen any major issues with running CRM 4.0 on Windows 7.  There are a couple of minor considerations I have found:

1.  Pop-up error when opening records in IE8.  This is not really a Windows 7, more of an IE 8 known issue.  I’m including it here, as with Windows 7, you have to run IE8.  The issue is that when you open a record from a view in CRM for Outlook, you get the following error message:

This has to do with protected mode.  Turning off protected mode, adding the CRM site to your intranet zone and then re-enabling protected mode fixed it for me.

2.  VPN.  I have found several VPN clients to not be compatible with CRM.  Not Microsoft’s fault, but something to be aware of, if your clients have users who need to use VPN to connect to CRM.  Solutions are to consider using IFD for these users, or use the integrated Windows XP mode virtual PC to run the VPN client.

Technorati Tags: Microsoft CRM.,Windows 7

Side-by-Side IFRAMES

I was recently asked if it was possible to use a little bit of javascript to create two IFRAMES and have them be side-by-side on a form. Here’s what I came up with:

CRM Helper Class for Custom ISV ASPX Pages

Most of my development work these days consists of creating custom ASPX pages that reside within the ISV subfolder of CRM. Anyone who’s done more than a couple of CRM-related projects probably has found a need to create some sort of "helper” class to make all of that easy (ain’t that part of the point of object-oriented programming???). The CRM SDK does have some helper code included that does a little bit of work for you, but I find it to be lacking. At Customer Effective, we have an extensive library that we’ve built up over time (we call it our API) that really makes interacting with the CRM web service pretty easy and efficient. Separately, I’ve also compiled a more lightweight version that is really easy to implement. Most of the code in this class follows the sample code found within the SDK and is intended to be fully multi-tenant and IFD compliant.

Client-side Web Service Calls for Microsoft Dynamics CRM 4.0: Parsing The Results

This is the final article on client-side web service calls for Microsoft Dynamics CRM. The previous articles I wrote focused on making javascript calls to the MetadataService and CrmService web services and setting up some generic functions for re-usability. With this article, I will be focusing on the xml responses of these service calls and how you can parse the results. The SDK has some examples of working with the response xml, but I’ve had to do some playing around to get exactly what I was looking for in some of my functions. As with most things involving programming, there are several different ways to parse xml in your javascript, but I’m going to focus on using techniques that have worked the best for me.

Troubleshooting the Microsoft Dynamics CRM Client for Outlook

Over at the CRM Team Blog, they’ve just posted a very nice article on troubleshooting issues with the CRM Client for Outlook. Having done my share of troubleshooting for CRM, this post is a big help in trying to make sense of what’s occurring with the CRM client. The article does mention (and I want to re-iterate) that before going too far down the troubleshooting path, you really should update to the latest Update Rollup (currently, Update Rollup 4).

One item in the article that I was glad to see was checking the locally Managed Passwords on the client machine. I’ve come across a few scenarios where the user has saved their password and when it changes, then CRM suddenly stops working. This can be a particularly tricky thing to track down on it’s own.

This article is definitely worth bookmarking for future reference – almost a “checklist” of items to run through when working on CRM client issue resolution. Cheers!