Customer Effective Blog

Your First Interactive Look at Dynamics CRM 2011

Want to get a in-depth look at CRM 2011 before the public beta is available?  Sign up for XRM Virtual User Group's free “First Look” web conference on September 7, 2010 at 12:00 PM EST/9:00 PST.  You can register here: http://www.xrmvirtual.com/events/interactive_crm2011

“Join Senior Technical Product Manager Eric Boocock for a dive into CRM 2011 before the Beta. Learn about new features and opportunities for developers at the 90 minute session. Bring your questions! September 7 at 9am pst.”

del.icio.us Tags: Dynamics CRM 2011,Microsoft CRM,XRM Virtual User Group

When should I use a Marketing List in Dynamics CRM?

A common question when building a list of records in Microsoft Dynamics CRM is “should I use a view or a marketing list?”  This question doesn’t always have a straightforward answer, because there is some overlap in functionality, as you can see from the table below:

	Advanced Find / View	Marketing List
List of Contacts, Accounts or Leads	X	X
List of other entity records	X
Automatically refreshed list	X
List that is not automatically refreshed		X
Multiple-step logic/list composed using a variety of lookup, advanced find, and ad-hoc members		X
“Not” queries from related records		X
Quick Campaign	X	X
Campaign		X
Mail Merge	X	X
Bulk E-mail	X	X

A common misconception when doing mailing lists or direct e-mails is that you HAVE to use a marketing list.  This is not true—you can use either a marketing list or a view/advanced find.  The answer to the question will depend on the the nature of the list and what you want to do with it.  Here are the main differences:

1.  Entities:  Marketing lists can only include members from the account, contact, or lead entities.  Views/advanced find can include any entity, including custom entities.

2.  Auto refresh:  A view is automatically refreshed every time that you open it.  You can perform an advanced find, save the query, and the next time you select that view, you will see the latest data.  Marketing lists are not automatically refreshed.  This is by design.  Since marketing lists are used to maintain a list of subscribers for a mailing list or attendees for an event, you typically don’t want the members of the list dynamically changing.  Imagine if you had an annual conference attended by clients in a certain industry.  You built a marketing list for the 2010 event and invited the attendees.  If the list automatically refreshed, you could potentially have somebody show up on the list that wasn’t invited, or have someone fall off the list, if the industry on their record changed.  This would be problematic for the event planning staff.

That being said, in some situations it might be nice to have a marketing list automatically refresh.  This is not offered as out of the box functionality, but there are some solutions documented, such as Muhammad Ali Khan’s blog post using workflow to automatically refresh marketing lists.

3.  Multiple-step logic:  One of the key strengths of Marketing Lists is the ability to build a list using multiple queries or steps, or create a list that is based on an advanced find, and then add some other records to the list that are not part of the advanced find—for example, get all contacts who are named John, then add three Larry’s to the list, then remove everyone from the list who is in Michigan.  Say you have a newsletter that goes out to all of your clients, but you also want to add some additional recipients that are not clients to the list—Marketing lists can be built from an advanced find, then you can add additional records to the list in an ad-hoc manner. 

4.  “Not” queries from related entities:  One thing to keep in mind about Advanced Find, it is great at telling you what IS true, but not that effective at telling you what is NOT true, especially what is not true about related entity records.  For example, I could do an advanced find for all companies where City is not Chicago—that’s very straightforward; however, I can’t do an advanced find for all companies that have NOT ordered product X, or all companies where a related contact name is NOT “John.”  The reason is the way that “NOT” works with advanced find.  Say a company has ordered product X, product Y, and product Z.  If I do advanced find for companies where related product does not equal Product X, this company will still be returned, because it has order records for products that are NOT product X.

Marketing list’s capability to build a list based on multiple advanced finds can answer my “NOT” question.  I can build a marketing list, use advanced find to add all companies to the list, then use advanced find to remove companies from the marketing list where related product equals product X.  The resulting list will be a list of just companies that have not ordered product X.

5.  Campaigns:  If you want a list of companies or people to associate with a campaign, use a marketing list; however, Quick Campaign recipients can be either a view or a Marketing List.

del.icio.us Tags: Marketing Lists,Dynamics CRM,Microsoft CRM

CRM Pre-Filtered Reports and SSRS P1 Parameter Error

A few weeks ago, we upgraded some environments to SQL 2008 R2.  After that upgrade, we started to see a strange issue when uploading a report with pre-filtering to CRM.

The report will upload fine, but when you run the report, you get an error regarding parameter P1.

When you upload pre-filtered reports in CRM, CRM adds a parameter called P1 to the report, which is used in pre-filtering.  This parameter is a hidden parameter used behind the scenes by CRM.  It appears that since my upgrade to 2008 R2, the parameter is not being correctly set.  I’m not sure if this is a bug, or a quirk with this environment, but if you have a report that has this issue, I have a way to fix it.

The fix for affected reports

If you have reports that are returning this error, here’s how you can get them to work correctly:

1. Go to SQL Server Reports Manager.  This url is typically something like http://yoursqlserverurl/reports.  You will need to be logged in as a user that has Content Management permission in SSRS.
2. You will see a folder for each crm organization.  Click the folder for the affected organization.
3. If the folder is empty or says “there are no items to display,” click the “Details View” button on the right side.
4. You should now see a subfolder called “4.0.”  Click it.
5. In the 4.0 folder, you will see a list of the reports deployed in the selected organization.  You can use the search to search by report name.

6.  Hover your mouse by the desired report.  A yellow drop-down arrow will appear.  Click the arrow and select “Manage.”

 

7.  Go to the Parameters link on the left side of the Manage report form.  You will see a row for the P1 parameter.  Check the box for “Hide” to make the parameter hidden.

The report should work now.

del.icio.us Tags: SQL 2008 R2,Pre-filtereing,Microsoft Dynamics CRM

Getting Rid of the CRM Export to Excel Warning Message

When you export to Excel from CRM, when you open the exported spreadsheet in Excel, you will receive the following warning:

This warning is due to a security feature in Excel 2007 and greater that checks the contents of a file to make sure that they match the file extension.  Given that the CRM data is exported using XML and saved with an .xls format, Excel doesn’t think that the format of the file is correct.

While this is probably designed to prevent some legitimate security concerns, it winds up having the opposite effect for people who export frequently from Excel—since this message will be popping up for them frequently, they will be conditioned to always click “Yes,” and as a result be prone to allow more legitimate security warnings to be ignored.

There are two options for getting rid of this warning:

1.  Group Policy – Adam Vero at the “Getting IT Right” blog has a good post on how to globally suppress this warning using group policy.  http://blog.meteorit.co.uk/2010/07/01/annoying-file-format-warning-when-exporting-crm-records-to-excel/

2.  Per Computer – You can easily get rid of this warning using a simple registry change on your computer.  The following instruction are for Excel 2010.  If you have 2007, the only change would be the location of the registry folder will be …\Microsoft\OFFICE\12.0\EXCEL\SECURITY.  Normal warnings apply—don’t modify your registry unless you know what you are doing.

   1. Open your Registry (Start -> Run -> regedit.exe)
   2. Navigate to HKEY_CURRENT_USER\SOFTWARE\MICROSOFT\OFFICE\14.0\EXCEL\SECURITY
   3. Right click in the right window and choose New -> DWORD
   4. Type “ExtensionHardening” as the name (without the quotes)
   5. Verify that the data has the value “0″

 

del.icio.us Tags: Microsoft CRM,Excel,export warnings

CRM for Outlook Install Warns About Minimum IE Version

Occasionally I will see people with brand new PC’s who cannot install CRM for Outlook.  The installation will fail with an error that the PC does not meet the minimum required version of Internet Explorer.

In this case, this error does not make sense—the PC is new, running the latest version of Windows.  Obviously, it includes a version of Internet Explorer greater than v6.

In the cases where I’ve seen this error, it is usually a computer from a manufacturer such as HP.  These are fine computers, but they typically have a lot of “bloatware” installed, including some proprietary Internet Explorer plugins.  The HP Touchsmart 600, in this example, included a HP-specific version of the Windows Live Bing toolbar.  These add-ons can sometimes change the default settings of Internet Explorer, making it appear to the CRM for Outlook installer that the correct version of Internet Explorer is not present. 

If you have this error, the following process should fix it:

1. Uninstall or turn off any installed toolbars/IE Add-ins.   This even applies to other Microsoft add-ins, such as the Bing/Windows Live bar.
2. Reset Internet Explorer Settings.  Go Tools—>Internet Options—>Advanced Tab.  Under “Reset Internet Explorer Settings” click the “Reset” button.  Note—this will put IE in a new state—any “remembered” url’s or passwords will no longer be there.  Favorites will still be preserved.
3. CRM for Outlook should now install without issue.

Bonus tip—have you been using your computer for several years, and IE (or CRM specifically) is slowing down?  Resetting IE settings can help make your browser feel like new again.

del.icio.us Tags: Internet Explorer,CRM for Outlook,Windows 7,Internet Explorer Minimum version

Embedding CRM Pre-filtered Reports in CRM Iframes

Sometimes you want to enhance a form beyond the standard form components.  For example, you want to display a graph of related records, or show a custom block of text, or data from a different system, not stored in CRM.

One of the easiest way to do this is by displaying a SSRS report in an iframe.  There are several blogs that include instructions for doing this, but many are not done in a way that really works well in Dynamics CRM 4.0.  Most of the posts I’ve seen detail embedding a report URL directly from the SSRS server, not through the CRM Report Viewer.

While these approaches can work with CRM 4, they have several disadvantages:

1. They don’t take advantage of pre-filtering
2. If it is a report that you also run through the report menu, it requires that you maintain two versions of the same report (one in CRM, one External to crm).
3. Embedded reports are not available to IFD users (or on-prem users without direct access to reporting server)
4. Embedded reports are not available offline

I prefer to do things in a way that works well no matter how you access CRM—on premises, IFD, offline, etc.

Fortunately, it is possible to embed a report in a form iframe in a way that harnesses the standard CRM report viewer, and also harnesses crm reporting functionality, such as the CRM_URL parameter and pre-filtering.  Here’s how to do it:

1. Upload your pre-filtered report to CRM, just like you would for reports run via the CRM report menu, selecting the entity to which you want to relate the report
2. Add an iframe to the form that you want to embed the report.  In this example, I call it IFRAME_report.  Give it a URL like “about:blank.”
3. Run your report for a specific record.  Open a record from the desired entity, click the reports button.  Select “Run on Current Record” and select the desired report.

5.  When the report runs, copy the URL of the Internet explorer window.  It will look something like https://crmserver/crmreports/viewer/viewer.aspx?action=run&id=%7b315C371A-4693-DF11-A498-000C29F9FFEC%7d&context=records&recordstype=10007&records=%7bDE38FBCE-79D0-DE11-A9E1-000C29F9FFEC%7d&helpID=CPUH.rdl

You will notice that the URL contains two GUIDS.  The first(colored RED in the example) is the ID of the CRM report record, the second (colored GREEN in the example) is the ID of the record to which the report is pre-filtered.

6.  Using CRM onload jscript, change the URL of your iframe to the URL of the report, replacing the ID of the record with the ID of the record displaying the iframe.  Here’s a code snippet—replace the URL in the example with the url copied in step 5:

var newTarget = "/crmreports/viewer/viewer.aspx?action=run&id=%7b315C371A-4693-DF11-A498-000C29F9FFEC%7d&context=records&recordstype=10007&records=%7b" + crmForm.ObjectId.replace('{','').replace('}','') + "%7d&helpID=CPUH.rdl";
   crmForm.all.IFRAME_report.url = newTarget ;
   crmForm.all.IFRAME_report.src = newTarget ;

The result will be a report embedded in an Iframe which will be available to all CRM users, no matter their connection type.

del.icio.us Tags: Microsoft Dynamics CRM,CRM 4,Reports,prefiltering

Register for Customer Effective's 2010 User Conference

Customer Effective's third annual User Conference will take place October 13 - 15, 2010 at the beautiful, historic Westin Poinsett hotel in downtown Greenville, SC.

We're looking forward to another great conference full of engaging customer presentations, informational discussions from our MVP team and more! We're also excited to discuss the CRM 2011 Launch in our Microsoft Keynote Address.

We hope to see you in October. Space is limited, and registration is free!

Visit our website for more details and registration information.

Click here to Register now!

Contact and User Conflicts Resolved in Microsoft Dynamics CRM

In prior posts we have discussed conflicts that can happen when a contact and a user share the same e-mail address.  Traditionally, if the same email exists on a user and a contact record, it could cause problems when activities like e-mails were tracked in CRM.  Sometimes these issues were minor, such as the activity being connected to the contact record instead of the user, but other issues were more major—the most troubling one was when you tracked a meeting request that included the email address that was duplicated in CRM, sometimes when it synched back to outlook from CRM, it would resolve to the contact instead of the user, which would cause the appointment to be removed from the user’s outlook calendar—not good when it is an important meeting getting removed from your calendar so you forget about it.

As mentioned in an earlier post, Update Rollup 12 for Dynamics CRM fixes this issue. 

The way that the duplicate e-mail synch conflicts are resolved is by giving the user record top priority.  When resolving a tracked activity using the email address, CRM now first matches against the User records.  If it finds a match, it stops.

This is a great improvement and should make life easier in those cases where you need to have people as both contacts and users.

 

del.icio.us Tags: Users,contacts,Microsoft CRM,Dynamics CRM

Error in Custom UI XML – Hoover’s + Outlook 2010 + UR12

Be aware that there is a problem with the apostrophe in the Access Hoover’s menu when combined with Office 2010 and CRM UR12.

The apostrophe was in the isv.config entries for the Access Hoover's menus in CRM for Outlook- The application builds the menus for outlook and apparently it grabs menu names as it goes to use as IDs. – When it picked up “Hoover’s” – it attempted used that as a menu resource id and failed.

 

 

I did a search for "Hoover\'s" and for “Hoover’s” in the isv.config file and replaced with "Hoovers", reimported and everything works fine now.

Microsoft Dynamics CRM Named a Leader by Two Independent Research Firms

News Release from Microsoft

Microsoft Corp. today announced Microsoft Dynamics CRM has garnered recognition as a Leader from two leading independent research firms, Gartner Inc. and Forrester Research Inc. Forrester acknowledged Microsoft Dynamics CRM for offering a flexible customer service solution, earning a Leader position in The Forrester Wave™: CRM Suites Customer Service Solutions, Q3, 2010 (July 2010) report, while Gartner placed it as a Leader in the Magic Quadrant for Sales Force Automation (July 2010) report.

These acknowledgements follow recent placements for Microsoft Dynamics CRM among the Leaders in The Forrester Wave™: CRM Suites for Midsized Organizations, Q2 2010 (June 2010), The Forrester Wave™: CRM Suites for Large Organizations, Q2 2010 (June 2010) and the 2010 Magic Quadrant for CRM Customer Service Contact Centers.

"We provide a strong vision and a road map of ongoing innovation to help customers get the maximum return from their CRM investments," said Brad Wilson, general manager, Microsoft Dynamics CRM. "With the upcoming release of Microsoft Dynamics CRM 2011, customers will reach new levels of productivity and collaboration with a low total cost of ownership, and partners will unlock new opportunities with a single development environment for cloud-based and on-premises deployments."

Results From Gartner

Gartner's Magic Quadrant for Sales Force Automation evaluates vendors on their ability to execute and completeness of vision. Evaluation criteria weighed for each included product/service, overall viability, sales execution/pricing, customer experience and operations, and offering (product) strategy, business model, innovation and geographic strategy, respectively.

According to Gartner, "Vendors placed in the Leaders quadrant of Gartner's Sales Force Automation Magic Quadrant demonstrate a market-defining vision of how technology can help the top sales executives achieve business objectives. Leaders have the ability to execute against that vision through products, services and demonstrated solid business results in the form of revenue and earnings. Leaders have significant successful customer deployments in North America, EMEA and Asia/Pacific in a wide variety of vertical industries with multiple proof points above 500 users."

Results From Forrester Research

To assess the market of CRM suites customer service solutions software and see how vendors compare with one another, Forrester evaluated the customer service strengths and weaknesses of the top CRM suites vendor products against 196 criteria organized into three high-level categories: current offering, strategy and market presence. According to Forrester, vendors in the Leader category have both a strong product and strategy.

"Microsoft Dynamics CRM shines by offering customer service flexibility for large and midsized organizations," wrote William Band, vice president and principal analyst, and James Kobielus, senior analyst, Forrester Research, in the report. "It supports flexible options in deployment (on-premises, on-demand and partner-hosted deployments); how to pay (license, subscribe, finance); and how to use (Outlook client, browser, SharePoint site, other interfaces). Microsoft Dynamics CRM provides strong support for: phone agents; call center infrastructure; agent collaboration tools; knowledge base; customer data management; analytics; email response management; architecture and platform; business process and workflow tools; integration; security; and Web 2.0 tools."

The Gartner Sales Force Automation Magic Quadrant and The Forrester Wave™: CRM Suites Customer Service Solutions, Q3 2010 (July 2010) reports are available at http://www.microsoft.com/presspass/itanalyst/default.mspx. Readers who want to learn more about Microsoft Dynamics CRM should visit http://www.microsoft.com/dynamics, follow the Microsoft Dynamics CRM conversation at http://www.twitter.com/msdynamicscrm and engage with the community at http://www.twitter.com/msdyncomm.

Dynamics CRM 2011 Videos

Microsoft has released a video from the partner conference. I highly recommend watching the video, the presenters show demos of some of the new features and abilities.  With the software being released at the end of this year online, now is the time to start planning your conversion from CRM 3/4 to 2011.

Partner Conference Video (60 minutes): http://65.55.21.250/showcase/en/US/details/f9625bd7-7009-4bed-ab7a-c3fbb548d6ac 

For our more technical audience, there are three videos on Channel 9 that I encourage you to review.  The videos are one-on-ones with the program managers and technical staff at Microsoft on the CRM 2011 team, they walk through some of the new features and deep dive on some technical concepts.

• Platform Team Review
• http://channel9.msdn.com/posts/benriga/CRM-5-Chatting-with-the-platform-team/
• Deploying Line-Of-Business Solutions
• http://channel9.msdn.com/posts/benriga/CRM-5-Deploying-Line-Of-Business-Solutions/
• Secure Code on the Server
• http://channel9.msdn.com/posts/benriga/CRM-5--Secure-Code-on-the-Server/

Dynamic Drill-Through Using Logical Entity Names: Multiple Entities

In May our own Joel Lindstrom had a great blog on how to use Logical Entity Name in a dynamic drill-through. If you ever have a report that drills into more than one custom entity using a UNION statement, consider adding the entity name into each section of it.  For example, say you have two entities called new_widgets and new_doodads (both highly technical terms) which are in a UNION query.  In the SELECT statement, add a line ‘new_widget’ as entity_name and ‘new_doodad’ in the corresponding section of the UNION clause.

Once in the dataset, this can now be referenced in the JumpToUrl section of the report.  The key part here will be at the end of the JumpToURL as follows:

…& LogicalName= “ & Fields!entity_name.Value

as opposed to:

…& LogicalName= new_widget”

This will insure that if you have multiple entities in one report all of your links will work. 

Dynamic Jump To Report Method

If you’ve ever run across a situation where you would like a CRM report to jump to one or another based on the value of a certain field or parameter, you’ve no doubt run into a stumbling block. Does this scenario sound familiar?  You have a report where one field is “Color”, another is a location, and the other is count of widgets of that color.  You’re logic is such that if the Color field value is “Red” you want to jump to the “Red” report and if the color is “Blue” the “Blue” report.  Assume that you have a color parameter to restrict records to one color or another (and that this is a really great example).

In this scenario, create two columns, both having the Fields!Color.Value as their value.  In one of those columns have the Jump To report value be Red.rdl and the other Blue.rdl.  The trick here is to set the visibility of the columns to be conditional based on the color parameter.   So when the parameter is set to Red, the “Red” column will show jumping users to the proper report.

Certainly this has its limitations,  but in a pinch it might be just what the doctor ordered.

Custom Search Button in (Almost) 5 Letters

I had a requirement on a project a while back to implement a custom search button on a report.  As luck would have it, CRM MVP Mitch Milam wrote a great blog on the subject on the Microsoft Dynamics CRM Blog. That  blog was written in the context of modifying the ISV, and I was able to use it in a “button” of sorts on the report in question.  Do read that blog, it is well worth it.

Since then it occurred to me that there was another way as well to accomplish the same goal in reports using CRM report pre-filtering.  The following is a synopsis of the steps I took:

1. Create the child report.
   • This simple list report would have the basic fields you might have pulled into the Advanced Find.  Of course, be sure you give users the ability to drill through to the CRM record.
   • Here’s where the 5 letters come in:  use CRMAF_ as an alias to the Filtered Views (i.e. SELECT [whatever] FROM FilteredAccount as CRMAF_FilteredAccount) in your dataset.  This will cause the familiar CRM filter form to be invoked when the report is run.
   • Load the report to CRM, and remove it from the Reports area so it does not show in the Available Reports view.
   • Set the default filter as appropriate. Keep it simple: my direction was “Keep it so simple that no one has to think.” I liked that.
2. Create a “button” in your parent report by making a fancy looking text box with something to the effect of “[Entity] Search”
3. Set the Jump To Report on the button to the child report you created in step 1.

Enjoy.