Customer Effective Blog

Workflow From jScript

An on demand Workflow called from jScript can open many new possibilities.

For example, say you have documentation records related to a project record (2 custom entities) and there is a need to update a set of the documentation records when one of them is rejected or approved. With a bit of FetchXML to build the collection of documentation records, use a jScript for loop to call the workflow and update each of the records.

If the async service is down, the workflow will be queued and will execute when async is started again.

Workflow Gotcha

On an entity with a related workflow that creates records, if you delete a bit attribute and then recreate an attribute with the same name but as a picklist, the workflow will produce errors. To get around the issue, change the name of the new attribute, or delete and recreate the steps that create the new records.

Two New XRM case studies published by Microsoft

We are very excited about two brand new case studies published by the team at Microsoft last week

These stories truly reflect the power of Microsoft Dynamics CRM as the leader in the "XRM" platform market (building line of business applications). 

CapTrust Financial Advisors (they will be presenting at our upcoming User Conference)

http://www.microsoft.com/casestudies/Case_Study_Detail.aspx?casestudyid=4000005323

ValMark Securities 

http://www.microsoft.com/casestudies/Case_Study_Detail.aspx?casestudyid=4000005305        

                               

Effective Dashboards for Microsoft CRM

Ask yourself:  How effective is my CRM program?  Am I getting everything I need to manage my business and make informed decisions? 

 

If any of your answers aren't backed by CRM supported facts, then you should keep reading.  If you've partnered with Customer Effective in the past, you know about our User First Design Formula.  Nearly everything we do is weighed against it's impact to the end user - from the Executives to Administrators to End Users.  Within the methodology we feel it is extremely important to inspect what your business does and surface value-added detail through CRM.  Yes, we are talking about Dashboards and Managing by Metrics.

 

A common approach taken to resolve this business need leverages SharePoint and custom web parts.  All of these are exposed via CRM.  Recently, Customer Effective has added a new tool to it's CRM project toolkit.  If you are a customer working with us, you know about Interactions.  Our value added add in that truly provides a one stop shop for that 360 degree view of what is happening with your customers, prospects and organization.  Effective Dashboards bring additional tools to the end users.  Out of the box, CRM doesn't provide end users a simple way to build visual elements and add them to your deployment.  The SharePoint approach is still extremely valuable and a recommended strategy for projects that really push Business Intelligence.  Effective Dashboards can supplement this approach or be utilized on it's own.

 

Effective Dashboards gives trusted end users or Business Analysts, where security appropriate, the ability to create a dashboard on the fly that leverages CRM entities.  You can take this responsibility out of the hands of the IT department to build specific web parts and manage a SharePoint site.  Imagine being able to build a dashboard based on CRM records from within CRM.  Salesforce.com commonly targets this "missing" functionality in CRM.  For Customer Effective, that is no longer an issue.  In fact, we believe we now are able to address Business Intelligence in a way that Salesforce.com cannot.  You now have multiple BI delivery points and possible solutions.  Did I mention we will bring this to the table for all of our projects going forward?  As part of our project offerings, we bring all of our toolkit items to the table for your use. 

 

What do you need to know about Effective Dashboards?  Just like views, Effective Dashboards leverage Advanced Find functionality.  You have the ability to create both System-wide and My Dashboard applications.  Yes, you can drill through the dashboard charts and graphs to CRM records.  It honors your security model.  You can create a dashboard to look at your business metrics and expose it in CRM in hours instead of weeks.

 

 

You can learn more about Effective Dashboards and the rest of our project offerings, hear real world examples from our customers and gain a deeper insight into Microsoft CRM at the Customer Effective User Conference.  The event is being held October 29th and 30th in Greenville, South Carolina.

 

You can find more information about the User Group here: Customer Effective 2009 User Conference.   If the User Conference doesn't fit your schedule, you can contact us at (877) 252-2171 or (864) 250-2170.

Optimize Scribe Insight Webinar

Our friends at Scribe Software are offering a free webinar October 1 at 11 AM EST on the topic of optimizing Scribe Insight performance. 

Presenters:

Eddie Cole, Senior Software Engineer
John Gravely, Vice President of Marketing and Product Marketing for Scribe Software
Brendan Peterson, Technical Support Analyst

This will be a great session for anyone who uses Scribe and wants to optimize their integration processes.

Sign up here.

For a preview, see Brandon’s blog post from the Scribe blog Getting the biggest bang for your buck--Improving Scribe Insight Performance.

 

Technorati Tags: Microsoft CRM,Scribe,migration

CRM Data Integration Considerations

UK MVP David Jennaway has a fantastic post on the CRM Team Blog today about the considerations when integrating external data with Microsoft Dynamics CRM.  It is a great overview of the various approaches—when to move data into CRM, and when to integrate data by leaving the data in the external system and displaying it in CRM via a report.

I find that frequently integrations can be simplified using the report method.  if no CRM processes are driven by the data, and the data does not need to be displayed in CRM views, a report can be a quick way to make data available to CRM users without having to move the data into CRM.

Worth the read--Check out the article here.

Technorati Tags: Microsoft Dynamics CRM,data integration

The CRM Configurator’s Dilemma: Repurpose or Create?

As you configure Microsoft Dynamics CRM, one question that frequently arises is should I create a custom entity or repurpose a system entity.  By repurpose I mean take an entity that is designed for one purpose and modify its fields and form layouts to serve a different purpose.    Say you are configuring CRM for a property management company.  There are no system entities in Microsoft CRM called “properties” or “leases,” but there are entities that are somewhat similar, such as Contracts and Opportunities.  It can be tempting to say “I’m not doing sales opportunities, let’s repurpose the opportunity as the Property entity.”  The perception is frequently that adding additional entities will complicate the configuration. 

Before you repurpose system entities, you should first consider several things:

1.  Consider the future—is there any chance that you might need the entity in the future?  Sure, you might not use sales opportunities right now, but can you say for sure that there is no chance that another department might not see what you are doing in CRM and decide that they want to use it too?  If you repurpose a system entity and later have a need for it, you will paint yourself into a corner and make it very difficult to impossible to change course down the road.

2.  Consider the overhead—While the perception is that repurposing system entities will simplify a CRM configuration, frequently the opposite is true.  In the example of the property management company that repurposes opportunities for properties, by doing so they are bringing many unnecessary fields into their property configuration, some of which cannot be removed from the form (such as price list, is revenue system calculated, and the convert to order button).  Other system entities such as campaigns, cases and contracts all have fields like subjects and date fields that can’t be removed from the form.  Sure these things can be hidden using javascript; however, that will add a lot of unnecessary complexity to the configuration when compared to a custom entity with only the fields and links that are necessary, and the more javascript you add to repurpose entities, the more things you will need to test and potentially re-do the next time you upgrade.

3.  Consider the user experience—due to the added overhead of a repurposed system entity, typically a custom entity containing only the fields and links that are necessary will be more user friendly than a repurposed system entity.  Take a simple example, like the entity icon.  Microsoft CRM does not allow you to modify the icons of system entities, so when you repurpose a system entity, your property entity will still have the standard CRM Opportunity icon.  This can be very unintuitive for users.  A custom entity, however, can have an icon of a house or office building, or whatever makes the most sense.

Simplicity in a CRM configuration is not determined by the total number of entities in the system, but rather in how they are presented (or not presented) to users.  Really no user should see every entity in the system when they log in to CRM—they should see only what is necessary for them to do their job.  Adding custom entities will not complicate their experience, especially if you remove the unused system entity links from their view.

In case you don’t know how to do this, here are some related links:

Microsoft CRM Sitemap Surgery Tips

Using the sitemap privileges element to hide sitemap subareas for certain users

Technorati Tags: Microsoft CRM,Microsoft Dynamics CRM,configuration

Microsoft Dynamics CRM “Invalid E-Mail” Error

Rollup Update 6 saves the day

A while back we noticed some e-mails having problems tracking in CRM.  If you clicked the track button prior to sending the email, the e-mail could not be sent, if you tracked after sending the email, the following error would be returned:

Invalid e-mail address. For more information, contact your Microsoft Dynamics CRM administrator.

This was frustrating, and especially because it appeared to be hit or miss.  Users who saw it did not see it on every e-mail.

After identifying several e-mails that had the issue, we noticed that the emails that had problems all had recipients that had e-mail addresses with parentheses in them.  This happens when you have a contact in Outlook with more than one e-mail address, the addresses will resemble “Smith, John (john.smith@live.com).”  The reason that Outlook does this is so that when you look at your contacts in an email list view, all email addresses for a given contact are grouped together. 

It appears that something changed in recent updates that causes a problem with emails in this format—it appears that CRM is trying to validate the email address including the parentheses. 

The good news is that the problem has been fixed with the recently released Update Rollup 6 for Microsoft Dynamics CRM 4.0.  After installing the update on the server, the problem is gone.

Technorati Tags: Microsoft CRM,Microsoft Dynamics CRM,Outlook,invalid e-mail