Customer Effective Blog

Scribe Insight 7.0 Released

Scribe Software released Scribe insight 7.0 this morning.  Read details of the release on the Scribe blog.

This is a major new release of Scribe Insight.  There are many improvements, but in my opinion, the most significant new features are:

1. Support for Windows 2008 R2.  This is a must have if you are running R2.
2. Support for multiple targets—no longer are you limited to just two data connections, one for target and another for source.  With Scribe 7, you can have multiple data connections. This is a game changer that makes some really great things possible, such as:
• For integrations taking records from Microsoft Dynamics CRM 4.0 to another system, such as an ERP, we will now be able to update the records in CRM one the integration is complete, providing validation that the integration has happened.  This will make the integration more reliable, as you can verify which records have been integrated without “jumping through hoops.”
• This is going to make it possible to combine multiple DTS integrations into fewer steps—for example, an integration that sends a value to Microsoft GP and then another process updates CRM with the GP record id—this can now be combined into one DTS.
• Multiple targets makes you think that it’s just an improvement for writing data to multiple connections; however, it also means that we can do DBLOOKUP and SQLQUERY formulas from multiple connections.  This means that integrations that currently have complex pre operation steps to bring supporting data into the source database or internal database can be simplified, and you can retrieve the data directly from the other database.  Kind of makes it multiple sources.

So if you already use Scribe 6.5.2 or earlier, get the new version.  Your existing processes will work fine, but I would recommend re-evaluating your existing integration processes to identify areas where you can use the new capabilities of Scribe Insight 7.0 to make your integration faster and more reliable.  If you would like some help tuning up your integration, contact Customer Effective.

I plan on posting a more detailed review of Scribe Insight 7.0 in a few days.

Connecting to an Oracle Database with Scribe Console/Workbench 6.5

On a recent client implementation we came across a challenge connecting to an Oracle 10g database via ODBC on a 64-bit machine with Windows Server 2008.  We initially attempted to connect to the database through the Scribe 5.3 Oracle driver with the Oracle 10.2.0 client installed.  The jobs were setup and tested through the Scribe Workbench and ran interactively with no problems.

Once the testing was complete, we setup the new collaboration and chose to run the .dts on a timed basis.  However, every time the Console attempted to run the job, Scribe threw an "Error connecting to data source" message.  The bottom line: the jobs ran from the Workbench, with no user name or passwors prompts, but not from the Console.

The solution: Upgrade the Oracle ODBC client to the most recent version, 11.2.0.  It appears that there is a conflict when using an older Oracle ODBC client and Scribe 5.3 Oracle driver, particularly on a Windows 2008 64-bit server.

You can download the latest version of the client from their website here.

AgFirst Farm Credit Bank – Microsoft CRM Success Story Video

Customer Effective is proud to announce a new Microsoft developed video on a Microsoft CRM success story with their client, AgFirst Farm Credit Bank

This is the second of two videos highlighting AgChoice Farm Credit, MidAtlantic Farm Credit, and AgFirst Farm Credit Bank.

To review the video, please click here - http://www.youtube.com/user/CustomerEffectiveCRM#p/u/0/X29B049FT28

Please review the full case study via our website - http://www.customereffective.com/Customer_Success/id/26

Managing Employee Contact Information Part 2

Author note 8/16/2010—when this post was written, there was a potential conflict with having contacts and users with the same email address—this conflict has been resolved in update rollup 12.

On Friday I posted an approach to managing contact information for employees in Microsoft Dynamics CRM.  This approach was to use the user record for both users and non-user employees, and expose read access to this entity to all users.   This approach works well for users who work in front of a computer; however, there is another scenario to consider.

One of the reasons that many companies use Microsoft CRM is the synchronization with Microsoft Outlook for contact information.  This is especially valuable for users who are mobile and need to have business contacts in their Outlook contacts on their smartphones.  When I’m on the road and one of my clients calls me, it’s great to be able to see their name and company name pop up on my smart phone, or be able to look someone up by name when I need to call someone.

This is also valuable for internal contacts.  Sure, you can access the global address book from a Blackberry, Windows Phone, Iphone, etc; however, since the global address book is frequently not updated or only contains partial information, many people maintain internal contacts in the Outlook Contacts, and this leads to problems, such as bad or outdated information, and missing contacts, especially from new hires.

CRM is a great solution for this.  As discussed on Friday, it is more accessible than the global address book, someone other than the Exchange admin can update it, and it can also synchronize Contact information with Outlook; however, it does not synchronize User record data to Outlook Contacts.  If synchronization of User data to Outlook contacts is required, you will want to use the Contact entity in CRM for User contact information.  The User Contacts can be easily separated from the external contacts by making use of the relationship type picklist.  I recommend adding a value for “Internal contact” and then setting up views to segment internal and external contacts.

Before you do this, there are some considerations

User Contact Record Considerations

Before setting up contact records for users, consider how the CRM synchronization for emails and appointments works.  When an email is tracked, CRM matches the email using the email addresses of the sender and recipients to resolve it to CRM account, contact, user, or lead records.  For this tracking to work effectively, an email address can only exist on one of these records.  If there are multiple records that have the same email address, it can cause issues.  In some cases this can cause CRM to not know which record to track the email or appointment against, and in other cases, it can cause the activity to track against a different record than the one that the user intended. 

The most extreme side effect we see from time to time where the same email address exists on both a user and a contact record is sometimes it will make appointments that the user tracks resolve to the user’s contact record, removing the appointment from his calendar.

So keep in mind that it’s not a problem to have a contact record and a user record for an employee, but it is a problem to have the same email address on a user and a contact record.

Also, any users who send tracked emails in CRM need to have an email address on their user record.

With that in mind, I recommend using the following approach to have user contact record play nicely with user records:

1. Set up a company record for your company and have that company parent all of the employee contact records.
2. Monitor Contact and User records to insure that duplicate email addresses don’t exist.  You can’t create CRM duplicate detection rules between the contact and user records; however, you can find duplicate email addresses with a SQL query.
3. Set up secondary email aliases for the user contact records.  In Exchange, a user can have multiple email address aliases—such as joel.lindstrom and jlindstrom.  By setting up alternate email aliases for your user contact records, you avoid the confilct mentioned above, and your user records and contact records will play nicely with each other.  If an email is sent to either email address, it will all arrive in the users inbox, and since all activities created by the user will be under their primary email address, you won’t have the disappearing appointment phenomenon.
4. Automate the process—consider using a workflow or plug-in to automate the creation of user contact records when a user is added to CRM, mapping the name and phone information to the contact.  This will simplify the new hire setup process.

Following this process you will now have users available in CRM contacts, and can set your contact synchronization rules to include internal contacts.

del.icio.us Tags: User contact information,Microsoft Dynamics CRM,CRM Outlook

CRM 4.0 Workflow Challenges – Part 2 (Update Picklist and Bit Fields)

As a continuation of my previous post on CRM 4.0 Workflow Challenges, CRM 4.0 Workflow Challenges – Part 1 (Fields on the Form and Read-only Fields) (http://blog.customereffective.com/blog/2010/06/crm-40-workflow-challenges-part-1-fields-on-the-form-and-read-only-fields.html), here is another post on workflow challenges.  This post focuses on some suggested workarounds for updating picklists and bit fields with CRM workflow…

Update picklist via workflow from related record.  Unlike other fields on the CRM form which can be updated dynamically (based on a related record) via workflow, picklist values must be set specifically in the workflow.  To further explain I’ll use a recent experience.  We had an entity with a picklist and child entity with a corresponding picklist and planned to create the child record via workflow and set the picklist value on the child to be the same as the parent record.  However, in the Set Properties view of the form in the workflow editor the picklist on the record we were creating did not have the dynamic values in the right hand screen as expected.  The workaround for us was to create IF conditions for each possible picklist value.  With three possible picklist values this was easy enough.  Larger picklists could be handled the same way but would take a fair bit of workflow building.  The IF conditions check the parent entity’s picklist value and each IF has its own Create Record step to create the child record with the appropriate picklist value.

Update Bit fields via workflow.  I haven’t found a good workaround for this yet.  The form you can edit on an Update or Create record workflow step shows the bit field as ‘No’ (the No radio button filled in or an empty checkbox) as it does in the form designer.  Therefore there is no way to set the bit field to ‘No’ specifically – and thus you cannot run an update workflow step to change a record from Yes to No.  A possible workaround that may not be a viable option (based on the data requirements) is to change the attribute (create a new attribute) that is a picklist with No and Yes picklist values.

Plug-Ins vs. Workflows

The Microsoft CRM team blog has an excellent post about when to use a workflow or a plugin: http://blogs.msdn.com/b/crm/archive/2010/06/25/plug-ins-vs-workflows-in-microsoft-dynamics-crm.aspx
This is a very common question from users, and this post does a great job of clarifying when each approach is appropriate.
Also check out this matrix comparing workfows vs. Plugins: http://blogs.msdn.com/b/lezamax/archive/2008/04/02/plug-in-or-workflow.aspx

Managing Employee Contact Information in Microsoft Dynamics CRM Part 1

Author note 8/16/2010—when this post was written, there was a potential conflict with having contacts and users with the same email address—this conflict has been resolved in update rollup 12.

Many people use Microsoft Dynamics CRM to manage contact information for people outside of their company and provide a central address book of business critical external contacts; however, what about internal contacts?

CRM can also be a very useful tool for internal contact management.  Like with external contacts, there is huge benefit to having a central shared address book of internal contacts with up-to-date contact information.  Sure you have the Exchange Global Address Book; however, this typically is not updated frequently and does not always contain complete information, such as telephone numbers.

There are a couple of main approaches for managing internal contacts in CRM, and the one that you choose should be based on your requirements. 

User Records

If your company uses CRM, you already have a start on user contact record management—the User record.  This record is used to control access to the system, but it also serves the purpose of recording employee contact information.  Like contacts, users can be included as recipients or attendees on appointments.

But, as much as we wish they would, not all employees use CRM, and most companies don’t want to buy user licenses for employees who don’t use the application.  How do you manage contact information for non-user employee contacts?

Administrative Users

In Microsoft Dynamics CRM 4.0, there are several type classifications for users:

• Full
  User will have full access to any part of Microsoft Dynamics CRM that he or she has the security roles ( Defined sets of privileges. The security role assigned to a user determines which tasks the user can perform and which parts of the user interface the user can view. All users must be assigned at least one security role in order to access the system. ) to access.
• Read-Only
  User will have read-only access of Microsoft Dynamics CRM that he or she has the security roles ( Defined sets of privileges. The security role assigned to a user determines which tasks the user can perform and which parts of the user interface the user can view. All users must be assigned at least one security role in order to access the system. ) to access.
• Administrative
  User will not have access to Sales, Marketing, and Service areas. This access mode allows your organization to create an account for a member of the IT department for administering and customizing Microsoft Dynamics CRM without using up a seat from your Microsoft Dynamics CRM license.

With that in mind, the following approach will allow you to include your non-user employees in the User entity without giving them access to CRM or adding to the cost of your licensing:

1. Add the non-user employees as users in CRM
2. in the Access Mode picklist select “Administrative”
3. Save the user record, but do not give them a security role

Now non-user employees will be in the user entity, and can be selected as activity parties, but won’t have a license fee or be able to log in to the system.  The nice thing about this approach is that all internal contacts will now be in one place.  I like to add a link to the user entity from the workplace and give it the title “Employees.”  This makes logical sense to most users, as they know to look in Contacts for external contacts and Employees for Internal contacts.

On Monday I’ll post about an alternative approach for scenarios where you want to have internal contacts synchronize with Outlook.

del.icio.us Tags: Microsoft Dynamics CRM,Microsoft CRM,Contact Management

Marketing Effectiveness with Microsoft CRM

Whether your company has a mature CRM program fostering growth and managing relationships or your company has recently decided to add a CRM solution to support your business model, we are finding that customers are starting to increase their focus on marketing capabilities.  Microsoft CRM provides users with a great starter set of tools for everything from managing marketing campaigns, to building dynamic marketing lists, to tracking and analyzing the productivity of your efforts.  I am not going to write about the individual feature sets within Microsoft CRM for marketing, but instead I am going to focus on some guided stages to ensure marketing success when coupled with an effective marketing management solution.

 

At their basic cores, Marketing and Business Development, work to ensure that your brand awareness is high, prospects and customers are educated on your offerings and your sales teams have a steady flow of potential business to win.  Marketing departments work to cover as many customer touch points as possible - this often includes outbound marketing efforts like email marketing, direct mail, print or television ads, social media communications and trade show attendance.  All of these activities are meant to drive customer interaction to your company –through your website, an inbound sales phone number or a social media forum. The vast majority of these touches are designed to gather information about potential revenue targets.  Another evolving area of marketing is social media and its impact on brand awareness management.  This topic in and of itself is a rather complex and ever evolving set of processes to be discussed later.

 

The success of most marketing efforts is based on an individual interaction’s ability to achieve an end goal.  For example, in an email marketing effort, the end goal may simply be to inform your potential customers about your brand or introduce a newer, better version of a legacy product to your existing customer base.  In the example of the new product introduction, there are many steps to this process.  We will walk through the business processes to manage this type of a campaign while mindfully visiting a successful CRM roadmap for marketing success.

 

Step 1 - Determine the Marketing Effort

 

Before you do anything in any CRM application, you need to understand your marketing effort and the desired goal or direction.  This likely includes the scope of the effort, budget, start and end dates, expected response or success measurement and who is the target.  In Microsoft CRM, the out-of-the-box Campaign Management functionality is a good place to start.  You can find numerous articles and posts on how this functionality works in Microsoft CRM.  Microsoft CRM is a great tool, out of the box, to track these efforts - including strategic direction meetings to content task definition, ownership and review.

 

While Planning Tasks allow you to track, manage and maintain the campaign direction and planning execution, Campaign Activities outline the tactical execution of the marketing campaign.  These activities include email communication execution and scheduling phone calls for account managers.  Again, there are numerous places to understand the unique uses for each of these items.  One key component to marketing campaigns is marketing lists.  All of the time spent within the organization to build and maintain your CRM database comes into play at this point.  The Advanced Find functionality is a key component of marketing list creation and administration.  Be sure to spend time working with and understanding the intricacies of Advanced Find and the subsequent marketing lists.  These skills are required to communicate with your target audience whether that is through email, direct mail or voice.

 

One additional item to take into account when planning your campaign relates to effectiveness.  It is important to spend time documenting what will constitute a successful campaign.  Be sure to address success metrics like response rate, budget, leads cost versus pull through or many other analytical items.  You should ideally put yourself in the position to know if a campaign has been successful.  If you have expectations that an email marketing campaign is going to have a 15% response rate, be sure to capture that metric up front.  You have a lead generation marketing campaign that targets a specific set of unqualified suspect records in your CRM database.  It is important to know the source campaign of an opportunity (pull through from the lead to a qualified sales opportunity).  Be sure to differentiate lead or contact record source campaign tracking for a lead versus the pull through of a lead to an actual sales opportunity.

 

Once you have identified your marketing efforts, campaign tactical steps, target audience and success metrics, you are ready to launch your campaign.  The basics of marketing management are achieved with the out-of-the box functionality within Microsoft CRM.  You can extend the information you are capturing at the various points, which is not a difficult extension to perform.  In the next article, the topics will include different integration options to bolster your Microsoft CRM marketing management - like email marketing, social media and web analytics.

Invalid Argument Error When Posting A CRM 4.0 Report

Just in case you make a whole bunch of changes to a report and then get an “Invalid Argument” error when you finally post it to CRM, try the following first.  If the report used to have a parent report but no longer does, be sure to remove the value from the Parent Report field.  I came across this situation and thought it was something to do with the changes in the RDL file I had just done.  It was actually a change I made in the Parent Report (making it no longer the Parent Report).  Either way, removing this value cleared up the error and I was on my way. 

CRM Picklist Values for Your Report Parameter

It’s pretty common to have a pulldown menu for your report parameter, but what if you wanted to use the same picklist value that’s in a CRM form?  Here’s one way I go about it:

SELECT DISTINCT crm_picklistvaluefield, crm_picklistvaluefieldname FROM filteredcrm_entity

Or

SELECT crm_picklistvaluefield, crm_picklistvaluefieldname FROM filteredcrm_entity GROUP BY crm_picklistvaluename

The net result is that this will give you the picklist values, but there can be a performance cost, especially if either of those SELECT statements are going across a large recordset. So we know that the picklist values are stored in the CRM database somewhere.  The question then becomes, how do we get our report access to them in a way that CRM security allows? The answer is the FilteredStringMap view. 

In lieu of the above, I would instead use the following SQL statement:

SELECT  AttributeValue, Value

FROM FilteredStringMap

WHERE FilteredViewName='filteredcrm_entity’

and

AttributeName=’crm_picklistvaluefield’

Of course, by all means test this against your existing set-up before you start incorporating this into your reports.  As a start, I recommend taking the user security role with the lowest level access to insure that it works for them.

Securing Sensitive Reports in Microsoft Dynamics CRM

A question that I get from time to time is how to be sure that certain reports are only visible for certain people.  This can be for security reasons—for example, a sales manager report that shows activity levels of employees may deal with publicly available data, but graph or aggregate it in a way that may be embarrassing to some users.  Other times it can be that an administrator wants to simplify the list of reports available to end users, and not have a bunch of reports that are not relevant for a user to wade through to get to the reports that matter to him.

I occasionally get this question from some users who have made a report that they believe to be private, only to realize later that other users can view the report. 

Making a report private requires two components:

1.  The report “Viewable by” setting:  When you select a report and click the “edit report” button and go to the “Administration” tab, you will see a radio button called “Viewable By” with the choice of Organization or Individual.  This report determines if the record should function as an organization owned record, or as a user owned record. 

The fact that the field is called “Viewable By” has frequently lead to the misconception that if I set a report to be viewable by Individual, only the owner will be able to see it.  That is not necessarily true.  It all depends on #2.

2.  The user’s Report entity Read permission:  Keep in mind that a report is a record in CRM, just like any other record, and the same rules apply for security.  A user’s read permissions for Reports in their security role determine which reports they will see.

• All users will see Organizational Viewable Reports
• All users will see User Viewable reports that are owned by them
• All users will see User Viewable reports owned by other users within the scope of their Read permissions.  For example, if a user has Business Unit read permission for Reports, they will see reports owned by other users in their business unit, even the ones set to viewable by individual, such as “junk” reports created by other users with the report wizard.

Most of the time I see users who inadvertently give other users access to private reports, it is due to the report read permission being set too high.  Some have done this because they think that a user has to have Organizational read access to read Organization Viewable reports—this is not the case.

So if you really want to have private reports, I recommend the following best practices:

1. Set all security roles except for system admin to user level read access.
2. Only give organization-level “create Report” permissions to users whom you wish to be able to deploy organization viewable reports .  Give everyone else user level create permissions.  Otherwise, users will make their private reports Organization Viewable.
3. Rather than making reports that are only needed by a handful of users organization viewable, make them user owned and use CRM’s sharing functionality to expose these reports to the other users who need them.
4. Have a user or group of system administrators who can promote user viewable reports to organization viewable.

This will keep your private reports private, and make the report menu more navigable for the majority of your users by removing the clutter.

del.icio.us Tags: Microsoft Dynamics CRM,reports,security

Customer Effective Top Finalist for the 2010 Microsoft Dynamics CRM Partner of the Year

Greenville, SC - - June 23, 2010 - - Customer Effective Inc., a Microsoft Inner Circle and Gold Certified Partner focused on Microsoft Dynamics CRM, announces their selection as a finalist for the Microsoft Dynamics CRM Partner of the Year award. This award recognizes Customer Effective for delivering consistent, high-quality, predictable Microsoft Dynamics CRM services which help ensure significant business benefits for customers. Customer Effective has also demonstrated strong business leadership and success with new customer additions and revenue growth.

“This is a killer award and we’re thrilled to be a finalist,” said Scott Millwood, President of Customer Effective. “We’ve knocked out some great work this year. Our leadership in helping our clients achieve success on the CRM platform and extending CRM into collaborative web portals really caught fire in 2010. Our team loves to see all of that hard work and dedication being recognized at this high level. Now we’re ready to pour on the gas in the upcoming year!”

Awards will be presented in a number of categories, with winners and finalists chosen from a pool of almost 3,000 entrants worldwide. The Microsoft Dynamics CRM Partner of the Year Award honors partners who have exhibited excellence in providing innovative and unique solutions based on Microsoft Dynamics CRM.

“Congratulations to the 2010 Partner Award finalists for delivering such creative and superior Microsoft solutions and services,” said Allison Watson, Corporate Vice President, Worldwide Partner Group, Microsoft Corp. “It’s incredible to see the level of expertise our partners continue to exhibit as they create and deliver innovative solutions and services to grow their businesses, meet customer needs, and drive down costs.”

About Customer Effective

Customer Effective, with headquarters in Greenville, S.C., is a leading innovator in customer interaction solutions based on Microsoft Dynamics Customer Relationship Management (CRM).  The company is a Microsoft Gold Certified Partner, CRM Consultant and Solution Implementer having completed hundreds of Microsoft CRM implementations and development projects.  Recent CRM and Microsoft awards include recognition as the 2009 Microsoft Dynamics Financial Services Partner of the Year, being named to the 2009 Microsoft Dynamics President’s Club, recipient of the 2008 and 2009 Microsoft Dynamics Inner Circle distinction, and member of the 2008 Inc. 500 list. For more information, visit www.CustomerEffective.com.

Microsoft Dynamics CRM Rapid User Creation

Sometimes in a large deployment of Microsoft Dynamics CRM, it can be a challenge to create users.  When you have 25-50 users, it’s not hard to manually create each user record, or to use the add multiple users tool to create user records.  However, when your user count is in the hundreds or thousands, even the add multiple tool can be a very tedious process.

Many of our customers use Scribe Insight to migrate data into CRM, or to integrate CRM with other business systems; however, not many are aware that you can also use it for creating users records.  Here is the simple process that you would use to do this:

1.  Create a spreadsheet with the domain credentials of the users that you want to import.  I recommend saving the spreadsheet in CSV format, as it requires the least level of file manipulation.

2.  Create a DTS in the workbench with the CSV file as your source and the CRM adapter as your target.

3.  Add an insert step creating the systemuser records.  Map the domainid field of the source csv to the domainname field of the CRM system user entity.

At a basic level, that’s all there is to it.  in addition to this process, you could also include the role and have a second step to create the user role record; however, if you don’t have that, it’s not a big deal because it’s pretty easy to bulk assign users to roles after the user record is created.  Also, if other attributes like first name, last name, email, phone are present in AD, they should automatically populate in the user record.  You can include them in your mapping if they are not present in AD, or if you desire them to be something different than their values in AD.

This is also a useful capability for companies looking to maintain a test and production environment that want to keep the user accounts synchronized between the two environments.

This is a great example of the extra value that Scribe can add to your CRM implementation, and the power it has to import data to areas where the out of the box tools cannot go.

del.icio.us Tags: Scribe Insight,Microsoft Dynamics CRM,User creation

New Microsoft Dynamics Podcast – Listen and Learn why RCN selected Microsoft CRM

RCN (WMA, 06-20 min)

With over $740M in annual revenue, RCN is a competitive broadband services provider, delivering all-digital and high-definition video, high-speed internet and premium voice services primarily to Residential and Small and Medium Business (“SMB”) customers under the brand names of RCN and RCN Business Services, respectively.

In addition, through the RCN Metro Optical Networks business unit RCN delivers fiber-based high-capacity data transport services to large commercial customers, primarily large enterprises and carriers, targeting the metropolitan central business districts in our geographic markets.

RCN operates their own networks, and their primary service areas include: Washington, D.C., Philadelphia, Lehigh Valley (PA), New York City, Boston and Chicago.

Headquartered in Herndon, VA RCN and RCN Business Services network passes approximately 1.4 million addressable homes and businesses, and they currently have licenses to provide video, data, and voice services to over 5 million licensed homes and businesses in their footprint.  They serve approximately 428,000 residential and SMB customers.

RCN Metro also has numerous points of presence (“POPs”) in other key cities from Richmond, Virginia to Portland, Maine as their fiber network continues to expand.

RCN Metro currently enters approximately 1,300 locations through their own diverse fiber facilities, providing connectivity to private networks, as well as telecommunications carrier meet points, and local exchange central offices owned and operated by other carriers.   The RCN Metro fiber routes now exceed 7,000 route miles, with hundreds of additional commercial buildings on or near their network. RCN also has nearly 313,000 fiber strand miles, which highlights the fact that many of their metro and intercity rings are fiber-rich.

Microsoft Dynamics CRM Leads new Forrester research for Midsize and Large Organizations

Microsoft Dynamics CRM is positioned as the top Leader in the Forrester Wave for CRM Suites.  Microsoft CRM is positioned above other competitors for Midsize and Large Organizations.  We’ve moved ahead of other vendors including salesforce.com & Oracle/ Siebel!

 

See below analyst relations announcement for more details and you might want to check out the blogs below as well.

· The Inside Scoop On How The CRM Vendors Stack Up

http://blogs.forrester.com/william_band/10-06-16-inside_scoop_how_crm_vendors_stack

· Large Organizations

http://www.forrester.com/rb/Research/wave%26trade%3B_crm_suites_for_large_organizations%2C_q2/q/id/55828/t/2

· Midsized Organizations

http://www.forrester.com/rb/Research/wave%26trade%3B_crm_suites_for_midsized_organizations%2C_q2/q/id/56879/t/2

Finding Your Inner Report Server: Why?

Previously in this series, we blogged about how to find the report server URL.  This blog will cover more of the why we would want to do such a thing.  Specifically, we’ll show you how to use Jump To URL through SSRS with a URL that you don’t have to change as you post the reports between lanes.  (For a great, must-read blog on a similar subject, see our own Joel Lindstrom’s blog titled “Simplified Dynamic Drill-Through to Microsoft CRM Using Logical Entity Name”).  To do this, you’ll need to know what the Report Server URL is, among other things.

 

Here’s what you’ll need to do:

 

1)   In CRM Publish the report you are jumping to for external use (Report à Edit Report à Actions à Publish Report for External Use)

2)   Following the instructions in the previous blog in this series, navigate your way to the report on the Reporting Server.  Access the report from there and copy the URL so you can check your work.

3)   Back to Visual Studio. From whatever report you are jumping from, copy this in the Jump To URL (assuming it’s a text box:  right click à Text Box Properties à Action à Jump To URL:

 

=Globals!ReportServerUrl + "/Pages/ReportViewer.aspx?" + Replace(left(Globals!ReportFolder,instr(Globals!ReportFolder,"/4.0")),"/","%2f")+"Report+Name+Here+Notice+How+I+Handle+Spaces+With+Plus+Signs

rs:Command=Render"

 

4)   Publish this report in CRM and try jumping to and fro.

5)   Check your URL against what you copied in Step 3.

6)   Post the reports and publish for external use as needed in each lane to give it a full tour.

 

 

 

 

 

 

CRM 4.0 Workflow Challenges – Part 1 (Fields on the Form and Read-only Fields)

While the workflow engine in Microsoft Dynamics 4.0 is a very powerful tool, there are a few challenges when designing the workflow rules – especially around building an ‘update’ step.  Here are a few challenges and some suggested workarounds for each.

• Fields being updated MUST be on the CRM form.  You’ll learn this one pretty quickly as you go to set the properties for an entity and realize the fields you can update are those on the form.  If there’s a need to update a field via workflow but that field doesn’t need to be viewable on the form then using javascript to hide the field is probably your best bet.
• Update read-only fields via workflow.  Another challenge when updating a record via workflow is around a field set as read-only on the form.  In the workflow ‘Set Properties’ section the form you are editing is the actual form the users see – so read-only fields are not editable.  It takes a few steps to get around but nothing trick: 
1. Go to the form in customizations and remove the read-only setting on the attribute
2. Save the form and publish the entity
3. Open (or create) the workflow step and set the value in the field that will be read-only
4. Go back to the form in customizations and set the field back to read-only
5. Save the form and publish the entity

Part 2 will focus on challenges around picklist and bit attributes so stay tuned…

An Easier Way to Monitor Your Scribe Integration Processes

For anyone that's used Scribe to develop integrations between Microsoft CRM and any other application, you know the importance of monitoring your Scribe Integration Processes for potential errors. It's extremely important to notify administrators of potential problems or errors as soon as possible after they occur.

While Scribe does offer built in alerting functionality, as well as email capability, it can sometimes be difficult to setup. In contrast, you've most likely setup workflow based emails in CRM and know how easy that is to do.

On a recent project, I decided to try a different approach for monitoring my Scribe processes.

As I'm sure you're aware, every time a Scribe DTS runs, either manually or automatically via an integration process, it writes a record to a table called EXECUTIONLOG within the SCRIBEINTERNAL database. My solution was to create a Scribe integration process to query the EXECUTIONLOG on a timed basis, and import all new rows into a new entity in CRM. The steps I took were as follows:

1. Create a new entity in CRM called Scribe Logs. The attributes in this entity should match up with the fields in the EXECUTIONLOG table within the SCRIBEINTERNAL database. The attribute list looks something like this:

   

   1. Note that the new entity does not need any relationships to other entities within CRM
   2. Be sure and specify that the entity should be visible in Settings within CRM
2. Modify the form for the new entity to include the desired attributes. Mine looks like this:

   

3. Modify the default view for the new entity so that it looks like this (notice all of my Scribe Log records):

   

4. Create a DTS that pulls records from the EXECUTIONLOG table into your new CRM.
   1. The source of the DTS should be the SCRIBEINTERNAL database, and the query looks something like the following. Note that I am joining the EXECUTIONLOG table to my new entity and only pulling in new records (that don't already exist in CRM). Also, there are a couple of exclusions, including my Scribe collaboration for the ExecutionLog updates (I don't want a record for my process that populates my CRM entity):
      
      

      "select SCRIBE.EXECUTIONLOG.*,ORG_MSCRM.dbo.NEW_scribelog.NEW_execid

      from SCRIBE.EXECUTIONLOG

      left outer join

      ORG_MSCRM.dbo.NEW_scribelog on SCRIBE.EXECUTIONLOG.EXECID=

      ORG_MSCRM.dbo.NEW_scribelog.NEW_execid collate database_default

      where ORG_MSCRM.dbo.NEW_scribelog.NEW_execid is null

      and collaboration<>'exec log to crm'"

5. Create a query based Integration Process in Scribe that runs the aforementioned DTS and populates the new entity in CRM. The finished product looks something like this:

   

6. Finally, create a workflow rule or rules in CRM to alert a user or set of users anytime an error condition (or anything you want to monitor for that matter) occurs. In my particular case, I'm sending an email anytime a Scribe Log record gets created that has any failed records or a fatal error message.

   

   

Now, with all of your Scribe log records in your CRM database, you can use CRM workflow to monitor and alert as you wish. You'll obviously still need to login to your Scribe/CRM server to resolve any issues, but using CRM workflow for alerting has proved much easier for me that utilizing the built in Scribe tools. Plus, you have a nice and easy place within CRM to go and see how many processes have run, etc.

Note you will probably also want to setup jobs or tasks to clear out your Scribe Execution log as well as the Scribe Log entity in CRM on a periodic basis. That might just be a topic for my next blog post…

Child report changes not showing when published for external use

I ran into an interesting issue while working on a subreport that is published for external use.  I was tasked with adding an additional column to the subreport that listed the Contacts for this Account.  I made the change and published the report in CRM.  I then published the report for external use.
With the changes made, I ran the report from the external site and the changes would not show.
To get the changes in the subreport to "show up", I needed to publish the parent report in CRM and then publish the parent for external use as well even though there were no changes to the parent report.

Randomly Missing ISV Menus and Side-NAV Items

In a recent deployment, a client was experiencing seemingly random disappearances of side-navigation items that had been added via ISV configuration. These were meant to appear as side-navigation items on both the Account and Contact entities.

The symptoms were that on certain machines, the ISV navigation items would show up, but on others they would not. After further investigation, it was determined that the Outlook client was installed on those machines where the ISV items were not showing up.

A quick check of the System Settings (Settings|Administration|System Settings) revealed the problem. In the screenshot below, notice the setting for "Custom Menus and Toolbars":

As it turns out, if you have the Outlook client installed on a machine, the ISV navigation items will not show up if you have only "Web Application" selected for "Select the clients that will display custom buttons and menu items configured in ISV.config".

The solution? Simply included "Outlook" and "Outlook Offline" in that option as well:

CRM with Outlook 2010/UR11 + Workaround for Missing ISV Menu items

If you’ve been digging Office 2010 since the beta like me, but you’ve been disappointed in the way CRM’s tools shows up under an “Add-In” menu..

You’ll be very happy to know that CRM UR11 greatly improves the UI experience. – Highly recommended since it adds the CRM functions into the ribbon as you’d expect:

You can download it here: http://www.microsoft.com/downloads/details.aspx?displaylang=en&FamilyID=f84f2bfb-393d-4b90-bf1b-300a82ec6083#filelist 

* Latest Information as of June 12th, 2010 regarding bug in display of ISV items *

However, if you’re reliant on any ISV add-ins (such as Hoovers’, ExactTarget, Report Builder etc.) you’ll notice that there is no ISV menu for these add-ins in the UR11 version of the menu – this is now a confirmed bug – and a fix will be forthcoming. – However in the meantime, if you’ll add the following key to your registry on the client, the ‘old’ style ‘add-in’ menu will re-appear and give you access to the ISV add-ins. -

[HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Software\Microsoft\MSCRMClient]

Add the following DWORD key: "InitToolbarForO14" and set the value to "1"

After adding the registry setting you’ll have both the old and the new style menus. Microsoft will be posting a blog entry + a forthcoming fix – will update this posting with new information as it becomes available.

CRM Data Imports, CSV, and Leading Zeros

If you import data into CRM from CSV files via the CRM Import Untility or a tool like Scribe Insight, one frequent headache is columns with leading zeros.  This most frequently comes up in postal codes or phone numbers that don’t have any formatting characters, just numbers.

When you have an Excel spreadsheet and save as text or .csv format, the leading zeros are preserved.  So if the value in your spreadsheet is 09352, when you export to CSV, it will still be 09352, and if you import to CRM, the leading zero will be there.

If you reopen the csv file in Excel, it interprets the data to determine what format the column should be—general, numeric,etc.  So when it sees the 5 digit postal code with leading zero, it interprets it as a number, not displaying the leading zero.  It will display the leading zero if you have the full postal code with a hyphen and four trailing characters, like 09352-1111, it will display the leading zero, because the presence of the hyphen tells it that it is a text value, not a numeric value. 

The problems arise if you edit the csv file in Excel and make changes.  If you reopen the csv file and save it, the leading zeros will be stripped out of the csv file, and your import will create postal codes without the leading zero.

To avoid leading zero import issues, I recommend the following best practices:

1.  Make all edits in Excel format, then save to CSV.

2.  If you need to edit the csv file, do so in a text editor, such as notepad.

3.  If you still have issues, edit the trouble rows in notepad and place double quotes around the values with leading zeros.

 

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