Customer Effective Blog

Windows in Financial Services Article - Customer Effective – Elevating Microsoft CRM to Maximize Performance Through Continued Innovation

Viewpoints: An Inside Look at Innovative Business Models

Jerry Seinfeld’s punch line in one of his routines is “who are these people?” That is a question that every organization deploying CRM software should ask as well. But they need to know more than the who. With a plethora of data and the need to access, parse and process it, the opportunity to retain a customer and make a sale is more important than ever, especially in a withering economy and more importantly in the field of financial services.

Scott Millwood, CEO, Customer Effective, www.customereffective.com, shares some thoughts, best practices and hands-on knowledge as a practitioner of CRM and the innovation it needs to address, embrace and deploy.

Read the rest of the article here -

http://www.windowsfs.com/uncategorized/customer-effective-%E2%80%93-elevating-microsoft-crm-to-maximize-performance-through-continued-innovation

New Scribe Training Resources Available

I have had a chance to play with some of the new training materials from Scribe Software, and they are very impressive.  They use a platform called vBooks, which is a very innovative way of combining text, video and animation to deliver a much more user friendly learning experience.  I really wish this had been around when I went through Scribe certification a couple of years ago.

Watch a demo of a Scribe product overview here:

You can also register for a live webinar with Mark Walker, Director of Scribe Technical Resources, who will demonstrate Scribe's new training delivery through the use of vBooks.
Thursday, 12/3/2009 11:00 AM - 11:45 AM EST.  Register here.

Collaborative Sessions and CRM Sneak Preview Highlight Customer Effective’s User Conference

Greenville, SC - - November 19, 2009 - - Customer Effective Inc., a Microsoft Inner Circle and Gold Certified Partner focused on Microsoft Dynamics CRM, recently hosted its annual user conference in Greenville, South Carolina, attracting more than 125 attendees representing more than 60 companies. Attendees included representatives from companies in financial services, professional services, public sector, manufacturing, technology, as well as key executives from Microsoft, ExactTarget, Hoover’s and Scribe.

Presentations were given by numerous successful CRM customers such as CAPTRUST Financial Advisors, Markel Corporation, Volvo Construction Equipment, AgFirst Farm Credit Bank, Scientific Games, and Comag Marketing Group. The conference offered a wide variety of breakout sessions on CRM portal development, advanced customization techniques, dashboarding and tips from Customer Effective’s Microsoft CRM MVPs.

A special sneak preview of upcoming product capabilities for Microsoft Dynamics CRM was presented by Brian Galicia, Microsoft Product Manager. Brian highlighted Microsoft’s roadmap for the Dynamics CRM product and previewed upcoming product releases in 2010.

“The user conference was fun, engaging, and nicely done to say the least,” said Kerry Benson, Managing Director/Chief Information Officer of Public Financial Management Inc. “The sense of enthusiasm for the Microsoft Dynamics CRM platform exhibited by conference attendees convinced me that customers are pleased with the benefits and value they’re receiving from their investment in CRM. I left the conference encouraged that my decision to invest in this strategic platform and engage Customer Effective as my implementation partner was indeed the right one.“

“We had already implemented a large part of our system before attending the conference, so although I was happy to attend with my team, I had no idea how much we would benefit,” said Allison Denlea, Business Process Supervisor at Markel Corporation. “The conference was a great resource for networking with other CRM users and learning what other Customer Effective customers have done helped bring a new perspective and focus to the Markel CRM project. We greatly benefited from sending the project team to the conference and we look forward to attending next year!“

“Our goal in hosting our annual User Conference is to provide a platform for our customers, partners and consultants to share ideas on how to leverage Microsoft Dynamics CRM to drive business success,” said Scott Millwood, CEO of Customer Effective. “While our team of experts certainly have a lot to share about how to best leverage Microsoft CRM, it was really our customer presentations and round table discussions that made the 2009 conference a big hit. These were lively and collaborative sessions featuring real world stories that help shine a light on the best ways to be successful with CRM. We look forward to doing this again in 2010.”

Customer Effective 2009 Microsoft Dynamics CRM User Conference Video

This video provides an overview of our 2009 User Conference held in Greenville, SC from October 28th thru October 30th, 2009

http://www.customereffective.com/2009%20User%20Conf%20Video

Microsoft CRM Append Vs. Append To—what’s the difference

This is a post I wrote today for the Microsoft CRM Team MSDN Blog.

This post is CRM security 101, but I get asked this question fairly often, so it seems that there is some confusion about what the difference is between “Append” and “Append To” security permissions.  I find this confusion comes from the similar sounding names of these permissions, and also because configuration of relationship security requires permissions to be applied to two separate entities—both sides of the relationship.

Let’s take the example of Accounts and Opportunities.  In this relationship, “Accounts” is the parent and “Opportunities” is the child.  There are multiple Opportunities per Account.  Say a user needs to be able to relate Opportunities to Accounts, either through the Potential Customer lookup field on the Opportunity, or through the “Opportunities” navigation bar area on an account.

In this example, a user must have “Append” permissions on Opportunities (child) and “Append To” permissions on Accounts (parent).  I think of it this way—I’m APPENDING the opportunity, and I’m APPENDING it TO the account.

The next consideration is what permission level the users should have.  As with other permissions in Dynamics CRM, you can grant a role “User,” “Business Unit,” “Parent/Child Business Unit,” and “Organization” level security permissions for both append and append to.  It is important to think through what records a user should be able to append, and to which records that user should be able to append those records.

In our example of Accounts and Opportunities, if a user should be able to associate any Opportunity with any Account, you would give that user’s role Organization level Append permissions on Opportunities and Organization level Append To permissions on Accounts.  Easy enough.  What if you want to give a user permission to associate only opportunities that they own to any account in their business unit?  In this case you would give that user’s security role “User” level Append permissions on Opportunities and “Business Unit” level Append To permissions on Accounts.

Now that you have the relationship permissions set, there is one more wrinkle you need to consider.  If you want a user to be able to create related records from a parent, the user needs to have write permissions for the parent entity.  For example, if you want a user to click the opportunities navigation bar link from an Account and create a related opportunity, that user’s security role will need to have write permission for Accounts.  If they don’t, the “new” button won’t be available from the Account.  They would be able to go to the Opportunities entity and create a new opportunity and relate it to the Account, but without write permissions on Accounts they will not be able to create related records from an Account.

del.icio.us Tags: Microsoft Dynamics CRM,security,append,append to

Creating XML from a Dynamic Entity

Earlier, I wrote about using extension methods as a way to really enhance the power of the Dynamic Entity class. In this article, I want to demonstrate utilizing an extension method to generate XML from the data in a dynamic entity object. I’ve done a couple of projects where updated records needed to be sent to a middleware platform for integration into other systems and the XML format is generally my preferred method of doing this.

Customer Effective’s Microsoft Dynamics CRM Expertise Delivers Business Expansion Opportunities for CAPTRUST

Greenville, SC - - November 12, 2009 - - Customer Effective Inc., a Microsoft Gold Certified Partner and value-added reseller of Microsoft Dynamics CRM, recently completed a customized Microsoft Dynamics CRM implementation for CAPTRUST - an investment advisory and retirement plan consulting firm. Preferring a Microsoft Gold Certified Partner, CAPTRUST chose Customer Effective for their Microsoft Dynamics CRM expertise. Customer Effective’s technical and development services were leveraged to implement CRM using the solution’s xRM platform to help build more than 20 business applications on a single platform for CAPTRUST. These business applications give CAPTRUST more efficient processes, help recruit financial advisors, and provide differentiated services to clients. The xRM platform was especially attractive because of its technical flexibility allowing CAPTRUST to maintain tight control over sensitive business data.

As part of the project with Customer Effective, CAPTRUST created an online fiduciary management tool for retirement plan sponsors – the first of its kind in the industry. The company was also able to build a portal for financial advisors twice as fast than with any other development strategy.

“We sought out a technology solution that would make our processes more efficient and consistent across all client touch points and let us make rapid changes,” says Garrett Klas, Application Development Manager at CAPTRUST. “With xRM and the expertise offered by Customer Effective, we are able to better support the expansion of our business with unique advisory tools that we can get to market quickly.”

Scribe error: "The Message Processor is unresponsive"

Many Microsoft Dynamics CRM users also use Scribe Insight for integration/migration services. – While it’s a great tool, one warning that I see occasionally is:

Subject: System alert: Scribe EventManager - The job was terminated because the Message Processor is unresponsive.

Unfortunately after this, other jobs fail and nothing seems to work until the Scribe Services are restarted.

The root of this issue is a long-running query in one of the Scribe DTSs – The Scribe Event Manager terminates job processing with a fatal error if a source row or a post DTS script takes longer than 60 seconds to process. This happens because Scribe Insight assumes that the process is hung and should be terminated.

The best fix is to review your source queries and see which ones are taking a long time to run and fixing those. Many times these queries can be optimized to improve their performance with just a few tweaks or indexes – or by converting the query to a View in SQL and then using the view as the source – my preference.

A workaround is to increase the time Scribe waits before giving up on the slow source query.  (I’d still look to improve the performance of the source query, but sometimes you have to get it running now, then resolve the cause later...)

I found this in the Scribe forums recently (https://openmind.scribesoftware.com/) – I verified with Scribe support that it is still valid way to increase the timeout for the message processor. (At least through Insight version 6.5)

Warning: Always be sure to back up your Registry before attempting to use Registry Editor. If you use Registry Editor incorrectly, you may cause serious problems that may require you to reinstall your operating system. Scribe cannot guarantee that you can solve problems that result from using Registry Editor incorrectly. Use the Registry Editor at your own risk.

Steps
1. On the Scribe server open the Registry Editor and go to HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Scribe\EventManager\Settings.
2. Right-click on the Settings folder, on the shortcut menu, point to New and then click DWORD Value.
3. Name the new value ProcHangTimeout.
4. Right-click on the new value, on the shortcut menu, click Modify.
5. In the Edit DWORD Value dialog box, in the Value data box, type 600. This is the amount of time, in seconds, to wait before terminating the process.
6. In the Base box, choose the Decimal.
7. Restart the Scribe services for this setting to take effect

* Be aware that Scribe Insight Updates can wipe out these keys, so make sure to check post-upgrade to see if they need to be re-added.

Implementing Field Level Security in CRM 4.0 - Options and Constraints

The CRM E² team has released an excellent new white paper Field-level Security in Microsoft Dynamics CRM: Options and Constraints,  available for download from the Microsoft Download Center at:  http://www.microsoft.com/downloads/details.aspx?displaylang=en&FamilyID=471f8670-47b3-4525-b25d-c11a6774615c

“This document provides selected aspects of the conceptual application of the Dynamics CRM security model, with details about the various options and constraints that are associated with using supported custom logic to control of access to data at a more granular level than is provided by Microsoft Dynamics CRM out-of-the-box.”

I found it helpful in thinking about how to frame discussions around customer requests for field level security, and a good explanation of potential gaps / holes left behind by different approaches.

It’s an excellent resource and introduction / background on the challenges of layering in additional security on top of CRM’s existing security model.

Dynamic Entity Helpers Using Extension Methods

For most of my development work in the last couple of years, I’ve stayed in the .NET 2.0 framework. Even though I moved to VS 2008 last year, I kept targeting the older framework. A couple of months ago, however, I really started doing all my projects in .NET 3.5. The main factor for me finally moving up is the ability to create Extension Methods. If you’re a regular user of helper classes, then you’ll really appreciate the ability to add methods to existing CRM SDK objects without having to implement a derived type.

Creating Customer Relationships From the Grid

One of the cool things about CRM has been the ability to define and create relationships between customers. In v3.0, we used this a lot as a workaround for not being able to create a relationship from one entity to itself or many-many relationships. In CRM 4.0, we’ve seen the use of the Customer Relationship almost fall by the wayside, but the functionality still exists and I believe it is still useful.

One of the more recent “to-do” items I received was creating a way to open the Customer Relationship form in CRM 3.0 and have both of the relationship parties be pre-populated with records selected from the standard account grid. I figured it was blog-worthy because the code works in CRM 4.0 as well with only a minor tweak.

Tips for installing Scribe Insight on Windows 2008

Lately have have found myself doing a lot of Scribe work, much of it on Windows Server 2008.  I’ve found several suggestions that make the installation of Scribe in Windows 2008 go more smoothly:

1.  Install Insight 6.5.2 update.  This will fix many of the issues with running Scribe in Windows 2008.  Download it here.

2.  Turn off UAC.  By default, User Account Control is enabled in Windows 2008.  During the installation of Scribe Insight or the 6.5.2 update, the installer makes changes to program files and registry settings—things that are protected by UAC.  Turning off UAC during the installation will eliminate many of problems.  Post installation, UAC can be re-enabled, if you desire to do so.

3.  Change the login account used by the Scribe Services.  I have seen multiple instances where the Scribe Services won’t run on Windows 2008 under the default windows service.  I recommend setting up an AD account with non-expiring password and setting the services to log on as this account.   It important to use a non-expiring password for this account, otherwise your integration processes will break when the password changes.  You will also need to make sure that this account has database owner rights of the ScribeInternal database.

del.icio.us Tags: Scribe Insight,Windows 2008

Date field lookup cut off in IE8

About a month ago, I noticed a problem when a crm record was viewed full-screen if there was a date field in the right hand column of the crm form.  The problem was that the calendar lookup went outside of the Internet Explorer Window, so if the form was viewed full screen the calendar control was not usable.

This seemed strange to me, as I knew that I had used right hand date fields in CRM 4 previously, and it had worked.  I tested on another machine, this time with IE 7, and the calendar lookup was not cut off.

   

Internet Explorer 7                                          Internet Explorer 8

I reported this issue on Microsoft Connect, Microsoft’s official channel for user feedback.

Turns out that it’s not really a bug in CRM, but rather a side effect from some changes in Internet Explorer 8.  The CRM team worked with the IE team and came back with a fix for this issue.  The fix is to install IE update 974455 and make the following registry change on the client:

HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\Software\Microsoft\Internet Explorer\Main\FeatureControl
Create a new Key, and name it as follows:
FEATURE_FORCE_POPUPS_ONTO_MONITOR_KB974537
Within this key, point to New , and then click DWORD Value
Type iexplore.exe for the name of the key
Right-click iexplore.exe , click Modify and then type 1 in the Value data field

Read more about this fix at the UK MSCRM Support Blog.

del.icio.us Tags: troubleshooting,Microsoft CRM,Internet Explorer 8,date fields