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Microsoft Dynamics CRM Activity Feeds vs. RSS Feeds

Yesterday I had an interesting question—What is the big deal about Activity Feeds?  We’ve had the ability to have RSS feeds in CRM since version 3.0, but they weren’t widely used.  What makes Activity Feeds different or better than RSS feeds?

Before we started using activity feeds, I had a similar response—why do we need that? We could use RSS feeds and notes.  I thought this was mainly social hype.

However, once I saw the light of how activity feeds could work and what the user experience is like once you have the appropriate auto-post rules configured, I became a big fan.

The main differentiators between activity feeds and RSS feeds that I would highlight are:

1.  RSS feeds are passive—you can’t do anything with them—you can’t click on them to go to the record, you can’t get more information.  You can’t comment on them.

2.  RSS feeds are lists of records—you see the title/name/subject of the record.  Given that activity feed posts can be written in a more conversational way, they can be much more meaningful.  For example, with RSS feeds you will see a list that has company A, company B, company C, it is just a list of records.

With Activity Feeds,  your feed post can say “John Smith closed a deal at company A for $100,000.” The Activity Feed post tells you a lot more, and you can click on any of the records mentioned in the post, so there are so many different ways you can go with it.

3.  RSS feeds are based on views—this is good if you want a list of records of a certain type; however if you want a combination of notes, activities, opportunities, or cases all in the same rss feed, you can’t really do it.

4.  RSS feeds are separate from the application, and the reason a lot of my customers never used them was that for an on-premise deployment, additional work was necessary to make the RSS feeds available externally to your network or on a mobile device.  Activity feeds are more “part of the application” than RSS feeds were—they can be viewed inside of the application, in the mobile app, and this will increase all the more with cross browser support.

Maximize the usability of Activity feeds

To really appreciate the promise of activity feeds, I recommend the following:

• Create auto-post workflows based on the most important system events (the ones that are most important to you, that drive your business)
• Follow the records that are important to you (the users on your team, your employees, the projects you work on).  Have the auto posts appropriately add mentions to make the messages show up on multiple levels.
• After a day or two, you will have a list of system events that are important to you.  This is when the light comes on, when you see actionable notifications in one list, with the appropriate actions.

I equate this experience with the notification center on your smartphone—a single place where you can see what is going on and what is important to you to know now, and one where you can comment on the notifications, which will spur discussions within your group.

I don’t consider activity feeds to be “permanent” records, like activities or contacts.  I consider activity feed posts to be a lighter type of record that is used for notification or internal communication/discussions.  For example, I still recommend to my clients that if you have information regarding an account that you want to be visible when a new sales representative inherits the account in 5 years, use a note; however if you have a discussion regarding an issue you are having with the sales process, activity feeds are a great venue.

I’ve also found that Activity Feeds are very useful for monitoring user adoption.  Granted, CRM can audit when people log into the system, but that doesn’t tell me that they actually did anything.  Given that Activity Feeds give me a fairly easy way to automatically record event specific actions, I can define auto posts around the most important system actions based on my priorities, and see how active various users are in doing the system actions that are most important for my business.

 

Technorati Tags: Activity Feeds,Microsoft Dynamics CRM 2011

Big News in Dynamics CRM Q2 2012 Update: Mobile iOS and Android Versions, Cross-browser Support, Social Upgrades

Microsoft announced today that the next service upgrade (due between April and May of this year) will include a number of big enhancements. At the heart of these updates is the concept of ‘CRM Anywhere’, which means you should be able to access Microsoft CRM from your favorite hardware – not just Windows-based form factors. The Release Preview Guide is here and below are some of the highlights.

Microsoft Dynamics CRM Mobile

The next release will include a cloud based mobile CRM service called Microsoft Dynamics CRM Mobile. This will be a hosted (subscription based) mobile solution that is based on CWR Mobility (it actually is CWR Mobility, but it will be available directly from Microsoft as a Marketplace offering). The mobile clients and service will start at $30 per user, per month and supports the use of up to three devices per user. This is considerably less than $65 for the comparable offering from Salesforce. The supported devices are listed below:

For those that want – or need to – run the mobile offering on-premise on their own servers, they will continue to purchase CWR Mobile CRM directly from a CWR partner under a perpetual license model. The mobile client and UI are identical to between the hosed and on-premises solutions.

 

Browser Flexibility

In addition to mobile flexibility, Microsoft Dynamics CRM Q2 2012 service update provides the ability for end users to access the Microsoft Dynamics CRM Web Client across all modern Internet browsers on various platforms. This includes browsers such as Internet Explorer, Firefox, Chrome, and Safari running on PC, Apple Macintosh or iPad. This is a huge advancement, as the last few years have seen more enterprises becoming client platform agnostic.

 

Enhanced Social Experiences

This updates adds even more social capabilities to the very popular micro-blogging Activity Feeds feature that was introduced last fall. Activity Feeds feature updates in this release:

• Ability to “Like” and “Unlike” Activity Feed posts.
• Improved filtering capabilities, including the ability to filter @names in a timeline.
• Improved following capabilities. You will now be able to filter based on CRM views; meaning even if you don’t follow a particular opportunity or account, if an activity is triggered that would make it visible in your personalized CRM view, then it will appear on your activity wall.
• Update to the Windows 7.5 Activity Feeds Mobile app.

Retrieving Activity Feed Post with the OrganizationService

One of the new features introduced with Update Rollup 5 for CRM 2011 was the introduction of activity feeds to CRM.  Activity Feeds give users the ability to monitor what is happening to various business entities.  The out of the box functionality includes auto posts that include activities such as status changes in business entities, and manual posts that are created by users.  Users also have the ability to post comments to posts that are created in an activity feed.  Recently, I had the need to retrieve activity feeds for various business entities in order to display a summary of interactions that had recently taken place for a set of accounts and its related entities.  While the out of the box functionality allows a user to see the record wall for an individual record, it does not give the user the ability to see activity posts for multiple records on a single wall, hence the need to retrieve the posts using the OrganizationService.

The OrganizationService provides two messages for retrieving activity posts.  These are the RetrieveRecordWallRequest and RetrievePersonalWallRequest.  These messages do exactly what you would think.  The RetrieveRecordWallRequest retrieves all of the posts that involve the specified record in CRM, while the RetrievePersonalWallRequest retrieves all of the posts for a user that they are following or in which the user is mentioned.  Let’s explore these two messages in a little more detail so that we can use the data that they expose.

In order to retrieve post to a record wall we will use the RetrieveRecordWallRequest.  The following shows an example of the service call.

   1: RetrieveRecordWallResponse recordWallResponse = null;

   2: RetrieveRecordWallRequest recordWallRequest = new RetrieveRecordWallRequest();

   3: recordWallRequest.CommentsPerPost = 50;

   4: recordWallRequest.Entity = new EntityReference("account", accountGuid);

   5: recordWallRequest.PageNumber = 1;

   6: recordWallRequest.PageSize = 100;

   7: recordWallResponse = _serviceProxy.Execute(recordWallRequest) as RetrieveRecordWallResponse;

As you can see, in this request to the service we created an instance of the RetrieveRecordWallRequest and passed it to the Execute method of the OrganizationService.  Notice in line 3 that we specified 50 for the number of CommentsPerPost and in line 6 we also specified the PageSize as 100.  Both of these are the maximum allowed values when making a request for wall posts.  This will return up to 100 posts for the record and up to 50 comments for each post.  If more posts are desired, another request can be made with the PageNumber property of the request changed to specify a different page.  Also, notice that for the record wall request that we had to specify an entity reference to the record for which we wanted posts as done in line 4.

The other request for posts that can be made is for personal wall posts.  This is done using the RetrievePersonalWallRequest message.  The following shows an example of the service call.

   1: RetrievePersonalWallResponse personalWallResponse = null;

   2: RetrievePersonalWallRequest personalWallRequest = new RetrievePersonalWallRequest();

   3: personalWallRequest.CommentsPerPost = 50;

   4: personalWallRequest.PageNumber = 1;

   5: personalWallRequest.PageSize = 100;

   6: personalWallResponse = _serviceProxy.Execute(personalWallRequest) as RetrievePersonalWallResponse;

As you can see in this example, the request is a little simpler.  In this case we still specified the CommentsPerPost, PageNumber, and PageSize, but we did not have to specify an entity reference.  This is because the RetrievePersonalWallRequest will retrieve the post corresponding to the user in context that is making the service request.  If we wanted to retrieve the wall for a different user we would have to impersonate the user for which we wanted posts when getting a reference to the OrganizationService used.

So now that we have the data, what does it look like?  Well, both of the request return a result that contains an EntityCollection property that is a collection of Post entities.  Each of the post entities will also contain data for the comments if they exist in the RelatedEntities collection of the individual entities.  The relationship to reference is the “Post_Comments” relationship.  The following diagram gives more detail as to what data is exposed.

Post Entity Attribute Type deleteenabled AliasedValue (bool) organizationid EntityReference text string createdonbehalfby EntityReference likecount AliasedValue (int) followed AliasedValue (bool) postid Guid createdby EntityReference source OptionSetValue regardingobjectid EntityReference type OptionSetValue createdon DateTime relativeimageurl AliasedValue (string) commentcount AliasedValue (int)

Post Entity Attribute Type deleteenabled AliasedValue (bool) createdon Datetime createby EntityReference postcommentid Guid postid EntityReference text string organizationid EntityReference

Probably the most important piece of data in the entities is the [text] attribute.  This is the attribute that actually contains the text for the post of comment.  The text in this field is already localized for the current user, but it does contain placeholders for other records that are referenced by the post.  The format of the placeholder is [ObjectTypeCode,ID,”Display String”] for example, [1,00000000-0000-0000-0000-000000000000,”An example post or comment.”].  This placeholder will have to be replaced with the desired text if the post is going to be displayed for the end user.

Hopefully, this example will help you get the activity post data for your business requirements.  If you need more information concerning activity feeds you can check out the activity feed section of the CRM SDK here.

Creating Microsoft CRM 2011 Activity Feed Auto Posts with Workflow

I love the new activity feed functionality in Microsoft Dynamics CRM 2011 Update Rollup 5.  With a little bit of configuration, you can very easily create auto-posts for relevant system events or changes to records.

Activity Feeds give users a way to follow records that are important to them, and by doing this, they see a feed of any events for any records that they follow.

This really makes activity feeds the “notification center” for CRM, and since users can comment on posts, it naturally provides collaboration between users.

In the following screencast I demonstrate how to automatically create auto-posts for system events.

 

Creating auto posts with workflow