CRM Best Practices
February 17, 2012
Provide Five-Star Service and Maximize the Value of Customer Relationships with CRM 2011
Lately, I came across the American Express® Global Customer Service Barometer from 2011, which reports on consumer sentiment concerning the state of customer service in America. Interesting survey findings include the following:
- Consumers will tell 16 people about subpar service encounters. Conversely, they will inform only nine others about positive, memorable customer service experiences.
- Consumers value quality customer service and even will pay more to receive it as 70% indicated they would spend 13% more on average with businesses that deliver stellar service.
- Consumers will rebel with their wallets as 78% have canceled a transaction or taken their business elsewhere upon encountering negative, frustrating customer service.
Though this research study was targeted towards individuals, it is safe to say that the same attitudes and preferences on customer service hold true in the B2B world as well. Companies that differentiate themselves from the competition by providing superior customer service will earn repeat business from clients and begin to receive more referrals. On the other hand, customers that do not consistently deliver positive and meaningful customer experiences will suffer instant client churn and defections and lose drastic revenue.
Similar research from the Aberdeen Group entitled “Customer Experience Management: Using the Power of Analytics to Optimize Customer Delight” emphasizes how the customer experience can profoundly impact client acquisition, engagement, and retention. By continually measuring, monitoring, and improving the customer experience, firms can be more in tune with evolving service preferences and provide better service to their high-value clients and outperform their competition. As seen in the graph below that I created to display some of Aberdeen’s key results, Best-in-Class organizations that are committed to Customer Experience Management (CEM) initiatives constantly outperform their peers. For instance, customer retention rates, response times to customer inquiries, customer lifetime values (LTV), and customer satisfaction rates all improve considerably year over year for Best-in-Class companies compared to the Industry Average and Laggards.
Source: Aberdeen Group “Customer Experience Management: Using the Power of Analytics to Optimize Customer Delight,” Jan. 2012
Additionally, Aberdeen stresses how properly deployed CRM technology combined with a client-centric strategy can enable top-tier firms to achieve significant gains in their CEM programs. In fact, one of the recommended CEM strategies by Aberdeen is to replace highly fragmented views of customers with a single unified and consistent view of the organization’s customers via CRM. A robust, intuitive, and easily configurable CRM system, such as Microsoft Dynamics CRM 2011, can certainly give firms this highly coveted all-encompassing 360-degree view of their customers and allow them to better hear and capture the voice of not just their customers, but also their stakeholders and shareholders.
To read more about how Microsoft Dynamics CRM 2011 can serve as the foundation and enabler for your firm’s CEM and CRM strategic initiatives in route to helping improve your overall business results, please visit www.customereffective.com.
February 06, 2012
XRM 2011 JavaScript: Another 101 Lesson in Microsoft Dynamics CRM 2011
When you’re learning JavaScript, you’ll often come across the need to do something to every field on the form. When you do, it’s important to have efficient code to make such widespread changes so the user doesn’t have to wait for the JavaScript to finish. This lesson consists of several parts, some of which you’ll probably already know but hopefully there are some things in here for everyone.
Setting up our Environment
First thing first, open your CRM 2011 development environment and browse to an account form. Once the account form is open, hit F12 on your keyboard. A window should popup that looks like this:
If instead, you see the window in the bottom of your browser page. Click the little “Unpin” button shown here:
This is IE Developer Tools and if you haven’t used this in the past, then I hope you enjoy not having to save/publish/refresh/test nearly as often. To start, we’re going to see how many fields we have on the form. When inside of the CRM form, we’d use something like:
Xrm.Page.data.entity.attributes.getLength()
But when we’re inside Developer Tools, we actually have a different context. So we need to click on the “Console” tab and execute:
frames[0].Xrm.Page.data.entity.attributes.getLength()
Anything we want to execute on the form, we can do by simply prepending “frames[0].” in Developer Tools to get the proper context. This allows us to write and test code instantaneously, which is a huge timesaver.
Iterating Fields
Now that we are playing in our Developer Tools sandbox, let’s iterate through some fields to see which fields are required. To use multiple lines, click the double up arrow in the bottom right corner.
Here’s some slightly modified code from the SDK that we can just copy and paste into our Console:
var message = "The following fields are required:\n";
frames[0].Xrm.Page.data.entity.attributes.forEach(function (attribute, index) {
if (attribute.getRequiredLevel() == "required") {
message += " \u2219 " + attribute.getName() + "\n";
}
});
alert(message);
Note: I can’t stress enough how awesome the SDK is. Everyone I’ve met who partakes in the SDK creation, maintenance, etc. have been top notch people. If you aren’t using the SDK, you are missing out in tons of awesome tips, features and customizations.
You’ll notice that the above code quickly goes through each field and checks to see if the field is required. We could also check if the field is dirty (meaning the user changed the value), if the field is enabled, or whatever. It’s just a simple way to make mass changes quickly.
About “forEach”
For the experienced developers, you may be thinking did IE get ForEach? No, but the CRM developers were gracious enough to add this into the Xrm variable. For those of you unfamiliar, this was an old Mozilla thing that made life a lot easier when dealing with arrays. Expanding further, the Xrm forEach approach is faster than most arrays people would generate using for loops. You can write some JScript that is faster and I’ll get into that one day, but at this point you are better off using the forEach approach.
I’ve said it several times, but I really like the Xrm object due to its attention to performance. In fact the method here is about a hundred times faster than iterating the crmForm.all object. I’ll back that up with some pretty graphs and such in a later post.
Checking for Changed (Dirty) Fields
var message = "The following fields are dirty:\n";
frames[0].Xrm.Page.data.entity.attributes.forEach(function (attribute, index) {
if (attribute.getIsDirty()) {
message += " \u2219 " + attribute.getName() + "\n";
}
});
alert(message);
Notice how easy it is to change what we are checking for. Whether we are looking for a specific value, dirty fields, required fields, or whatever, doing so inside the forEach function makes it fast and easy.
Back to the Web Resource
To go from the Developer Tools back to the Web Resources, we need to replace all of the “frames[0].” references with blanks. IE Developer Tools is a great way to create and test our code without affecting anyone else and there is a lot more to developer tools than the console. I hope you enjoy!
January 24, 2012
January 23, 2012
January 19, 2012
Use Goal Management in Microsoft Dynamics CRM 2011 to Track and Improve Sales Team Performance
With the Holidays behind us, many Sales teams are in the process of receiving new comp plans for the New Year. Sales management is faced with the dilemma of devising compensation structures that not only reward top performers, but also motivate them to continue producing at a high level going forward. Besides possibly changing compensation, Sales Goals for reps and territory assignments may be altered as well. In many cases, the new Sales Goals may seem extremely challenging at first glance. Regardless of how well management clearly defines and articulates the changes based on their analysis of last year’s company results, current and future market environments, and projected growth rates, some Sales reps may wonder why the changes were necessary, and thus they may have some reservations about hitting their new lofty numbers until they start closing some deals again. Without Goals, though, businesses, Sales teams, and Sales reps have no real measure for success in place.
Microsoft Dynamics CRM 2011 recognizes how important it is for Sales executives and top producers to track and achieve Goals. For instance, CRM 2011 offers Goal tracking and management functionality that Sales reps can use to view their individual performance results and see how they stack up against their respective Revenue or Sales Volume Goals. Plus, Sales management can use Goals in CRM to chart and analyze the progress of the teams or territories they oversee and really target areas for improvement based on how much time is left in the current sales period. The Sales Goals can be for a custom time period, such as monthly, quarterly, or annually or even set to a particular Fiscal period. Moreover, tracking and managing Goals within CRM will make the overall Sales Goal maintenance, roll-up, reporting, and review process far less cumbersome and error-prone, especially compared to the extremely time-consuming and manual-intensive approach of doing the same in spreadsheets.
Furthermore, the built-in robust Goal charts are great visualization mechanisms for Sales reps to see where they stand at a given point in time against their peers and their individual Goal(s). For instance, the chart below displays a comparison of Actual and In-Progress Sales Opportunity Revenue figures versus a Quarterly Sales Goal for three individuals. It is taken from “Tracking status against goals with built-in predictability” on the Microsoft Dynamics CRM Blog, which I encourage you to reference if you want to get more insight on the use of Sales Goals in CRM 2011 and see more sample Goal charts. Being able to always refer to these instant individual Goal results via a Dashboard or an in-line visualization chart helps maintain Sales focus and momentum, instills accountability, and fuels competition amongst reps, managers, teams, and regions.
Additionally, I recommend watching this brief Goals tutorial video from the Microsoft Dynamics CRM Resource Center to learn more on how to create and assign parent/child roll-up Goals and Goal metrics. It actually focuses on an example of Service Case Goals, but the steps are a great primer on how to create Goals in CRM, particularly Goals with a Goal Metric based on a “Count” as opposed to a Revenue $ Amount metric. The video really can serve as a guide if you have the need to create a Sales “Count” Goal, such as number of Opportunities or Products sold per month, number of outbound dials per week, or number of leads generated from a Marketing campaign.
Lastly, if you would like to discuss further and see first-hand how Customer Effective can leverage and tailor the Goal Management functionality in CRM 2011 to optimize your Sales Department’s processes, productivity, and performance, please e-mail us at info@customereffective.com.
January 13, 2012
XRM 2011 - Microsoft Dynamics CRM 2011 Style Buttons
Adding a button to a Form is a great way to add additional functionality right where the user is already focused. Today we are looking at a few different approaches to adding a button. First, we’re looking at handling the upgrade for those of you who have already used the 4.0 button inside of 2011 or if you had a 4.0 environment and are upgrading. If you have a clean 2011 environment, then feel free to skip down to the “From Scratch” section.
There is already some code floating around to create a 4.0 style button inside of CRM 2011. The button we’re creating will instead create a CRM 2011 style button (i.e. “Example Button”).
The CRM 2011 button starts gray and then when the user hovers over it, the button will look like:
Creating our Web Resource
First,name your Web Resource whatever you’d like. In my case, I’m planning to re-use it in various ways, so I’m throwing it in our JS root directory.
1: // CRM 2011 Style Button
2: // Creates a button from a form field
3: // Paul Way - 1/3/2012
4: function ConvertToButton(fldName, btnLabel, btnWidth, evt){
5: var btn = '<button id="btn_' + fldName + '" ' +
6: ' style="width:' + btnWidth + '" ' +
7: ' class="ms-crm-Button" ' +
8: ' onmouseover="Mscrm.ButtonUtils.hoverOn(this);" ' +
9: ' onmouseout="Mscrm.ButtonUtils.hoverOff(this);" ' +
10: '>' + btnLabel + '</button>';
11:
12: var ctrl = Xrm.Page.ui.controls.get(fldName)._control;
13:
14: // Add the new button
15: ctrl.get_element().innerHTML += btn;
16:
17: // Hide the textbox
18: ctrl.get_element().firstChild.style.display = 'none';
19:
20: // Hide the label (optional)
21: Xrm.Page.ui.controls.get('pager').setLabel('');
22:
23: // Add Event to the newly created button
24: ctrl.get_element().childNodes[1].attachEvent('onclick', evt);
25:
26: }
Modifying our Form
To use this new function, you’ll first need to add the newly created web resource to the form. You’ll also want to have a separate JS web resource to call the ConvertToButton function. In my case, I already have a web resource for contact specific JavaScript. If I didn’t, I would need to create a new web resource and then place my contact specific code there. Here’s an example screenshot:
By having two web resources for this, you’ll have only one version of your ConvertToButton function throughout your CRM 2011 environment. Let’s say down the road you’ll need to update the function to change the label to “Button”, then you only need to modify one file. In CRM 4.0, you probably had a lot of duplicate code. With CRM 2011, your browser can cache the JavaScript for better performance and it is easier to maintain when organized appropriately.
In our other web resource, the one we setup with the OnLoad, we need the following code.
1: function contactsOnLoad(){
2: convertToButton('pager', 'Example Button', '150px', function(){alert("test")});
3: }
Why is this so different then the 4.0 code?
If you’ve used the CRM 4.0 code, you’ll notice the code here is a lot shorter. It’s actually pretty different as well.
- For one, instead of modifying the input element we are actually creating a button HTML element. This just means that we can now use about any kind of field instead of just pure textboxes. Not a huge deal, but opens up the email address 3 and other attributes.
- Both are really unsupported but the other uses the deprecated crmForm.all.
- Finally, the button style was meant for 4.0 whereas now we have the 2011 look-n-feel.
From Scratch
So far we’ve mainly focused on if you already were using the 4.0 code and were upgrading. But what if you don’t have the existing code structure? I’d argue against creating a new attribute just to have a button. When adding a new attribute, you are also adding the attribute to the underlying SQL tables and views. Using an existing field isn’t really a great option either because there is always the chance you will need the field or it will overlap with an application from the MS marketplace.
Instead, I’d recommend creating a button place holder web resource and then embedding the web resource on the page. The web resource is just a JPG image like this:
We then place the image wherever we want on the form. Make sure to set the formatting to one column and one row.
Finally, we need a little bit of code added to the /js/formButton.js web resource:
1: // CRM 2011 Style Button
2: // Creates a button from a form field
3: // Paul Way - 1/3/2012
4:
5: function convertWebResourceToButton(fldName, btnLabel, btnWidth, leftMargin, evt){
6: var btn = '<button id="btn_' + fldName + '" ' +
7: ' style="margin-left:' + leftMargin + ';width:' + btnWidth + ';" ' +
8: ' class="ms-crm-Button" ' +
9: ' onmouseover="Mscrm.ButtonUtils.hoverOn(this);" ' +
10: ' onmouseout="Mscrm.ButtonUtils.hoverOff(this);" ' +
11: '>' + btnLabel + '</button>';
12:
13: var ctrl = Xrm.Page.ui.controls.get(fldName)._control.get_element().childNodes[1];
14:
15: // Replace image with buttom
16: ctrl.innerHTML = btn;
17:
18: // Add Event to the newly created button
19: ctrl.firstChild.attachEvent('onclick', evt);
20:
21: }
And as for our OnLoad function, we’ll need to use this instead:
1: function contactsOnLoad(){
2: convertWebResourceToButton('WebResource_btnProfInfo', 'Another Approach', '150px', '119px', function(){alert("test2")});
3: }
Notice that this will require an additional parameter for the left margin.
Summary
As you can see, there are several different approaches to adding a button onto the CRM form for 2011. With 2011, I’d opt for using the button place holder image method. No matter which approach you take, the end goal is enhancing the user’s experience. I hope you enjoy!
December 29, 2011
Identifying Synchronized Microsoft Dynamics CRM items in Outlook
If you use Microsoft Dynamics CRM for Outlook, you may know that Microsoft uses the following icon to display records that are synced from a users outlook client to CRM.
Sometimes a user can do something which causes the icon to disappear. Some examples that would cause this situation include removing the CRM Outlook client, or reconfiguring the users client to point to an upgraded CRM 4 to 2011 Organizations, or editing fields on the record in Outlook that are not synched to CRM. When that icon disappears there is no real way to tell between a personal contact or other synced item to CRM. As a result a user might have hundreds of contacts and not know if they manually created them, or if it was synchronized with CRM.
Well I learned today there is a way. Using the following steps will quickly allow you to see items that are synchronized with CRM.
1.) Go to your views in Outlook. In our example we are going to make this change to the contact view.
2.) Click on Add Columns button and then Click on New Column button
3.) Enter the following new column information below.
Name: crmLinkState Type: select Number
4.) Then add the column to your view
5.) Then look at your outlook view. (2 – Means currently synced with your org, 0 – means previously synced and blank means never synced)
Hope it helps you too!
November 29, 2011
October 25, 2011
Microsoft CRM 2011 -- When to Use an iFrame vs a Web Resource
Sit back and relax a bit because we aren’t going to get into any code today. Instead we are going to take a higher level look at some interesting caveats within CRM 2011.
Even if you aren’t a developer, if you customize the form with Web Resources or iFrames, this should be helpful to you.
Silverlight
First of all, I came across this due to a colleague using Silverlight. Like many of you out there, we do some crazy stuff with Silverlight. Silverlight is awesome and can be leveraged to do some serious heavy lifting. I’m actually more of a JavaScript guy, but until JavaScript supports multi-threading, Silverlight cannot be overlooked.
When using Silverlight, you have three options to put Silverlight on your form:
- Embed a Web Resource and select the XAP file (Figure A – 1)
- Embed a Web Resource and select an HTML wrapper (Figure A – 3)
- Embed an iFrame and enter an HTML wrapper (Figure A – 4)
Figure A (Before)
If you are embedding the XAP file (1), then all is good in the world and everything should behave like any other control. Problems only arise with the magnitude of what you are doing. Let’s say you have a couple of JavaScript resources you need to support your Silverlight control to talk to the form. If that’s the case, setup and maintenance is a little more cumbersome.
To make life easier for you and your customer, you could upload your own HTML file with everything self-contained. Now that you have everything nicely contained in an HTML web resource, we can either insert a web resource and select our HTML file (3) or we can use an iFrame and point to our HTML file (4). What’s the difference? Watch what happens when I select a Related entity (e.g. Activities) and then come back to my form. Notice how the Web Resource is blank? That’s because the form reloaded my web resource.
Figure B (After)
HTML
Ok, some of you out there may be saying, “but I don’t use Silverlight”. That’s fine, but this actually applies to HTML files as well. When embedding an HTML page, again you can either use a web resource or an iFrame. If you choose a web resource however, the page will reload when toggling to a new related entity. If you choose an iFrame, it will NOT reload (look back at Figure A&B paying attention to 2 and 5).
Well why?
This is all about your purpose. If you have a HTML page or Silverlight control that is read-only (e.g. graphs, charts, or accessing another system), then a Web Resource would be the better method most of the time. If you are expecting users to input data, then you’ll want to use an iFrame instead of a Web Resource so that the data is persistent. For some of you this could be a gotcha and for others it can be a feature. Hopefully none of your users are on the wrong end of this! Enjoy.
September 29, 2011
How to get the Microsoft CRM “Closed Activities” Nav Bar Link Back (if you delete it)
As we have covered earlier on the CEI blog, Microsoft Dynamics CRM 2011 introduces some great new form customization capabilities. One of my favorites is the ability to remove Navigation bar links from a form.
Prior to 2011, the only way to remove nav bar links was to use jscript to hide them. This complicated form customization, and also made the form appear to “dance” when you first opened it, as all of the hidden nav bar links would appear momentarily and then hide.
Now, with CRM 2011, you can go to the form customization and select the “Navigation” node from the ribbon.
Then from the left side of the form customization, you can select visible navigation bar links and remove them by either clicking delete on your keyboard, or clicking “Remove” from the ribbon.
If you want to add a link to the navigation bar that is not currently displayed on the navbar, you can select the link from the “Relationship Explorer” on the right side of the customization form, and drag and drop it to where you want to display it on the navigation bar. So if you remove one, then want to add it back, just move it over from the Relationship Explorer.
This will work with most of the relationships in CRM. One of the few for which it doesn’t work however is the “Closed Activities” link.
"Closed Activities" is basically a link to the same entity as the “Activities” nav bar link, just filtered to show a different view—Closed activities.
If you delete the Closed Activities nav bar link, you will not be able to add it from the relationship pane. It will no longer exist.
To get the link back, create a solution containing the entity from which the link was deleted and export the solution.
Then from another CRM environment, export the same entity, extract the solution .zip file, and edit the customization.xml file. Search for “<NavBarByRelationshipItem.“ You will find a section in the XML that looks like this:
<NavBarByRelationshipItem RelationshipName="Incident_ActivityPointers" Id="navActivityHistory" TitleResourceId="Tab_Label_History" Icon="/_imgs/ico_18_history.gif" ViewId="21E2B905-6FDB-470d-8517-AD69B4C01268" Sequence="20" Area="Info">
<Privileges>
<Privilege Entity="" Privilege="ReadActivity" />
</Privileges>
<Titles>
<Title LCID="1033" Text="Closed Activities" />
</Titles>
</NavBarByRelationshipItem>
Note this section may be different based on the entity in question. In this example, I’m using the case entity.
Copy this section, then go to your exported solution customization.xml for the environment where you deleted the closed activity link. Paste this section in the appropriate place, then zip up your solution and import into your environment.
You will once again see the “Closed Activities” navigation bar link.
September 26, 2011
July 18, 2011
June 17, 2011
June 08, 2011
May 20, 2011
May 06, 2011
April 26, 2011
April 19, 2011
April 15, 2011
April 08, 2011
Social Selling with Microsoft Dynamics CRM 2011
Social selling has arisen as the word du jour in the sales industry, and its prevalence amongst successful sales representatives suggests that social selling is more than just a trendy buzzword. Seventy-nine percent of global companies use Twitter, Facebook, or YouTube in their sales teams, and Forrester Research estimates that firms will spend $716 million on social media in 2011. So, if social selling is here to stay, what should your sales department do to stay up to speed with the social selling craze?
The most important, and often most perplexing, aspect of social selling is its definition. While millions of business people connect with professional acquaintances through LinkedIn and Twitter every day, they do not all recognize that they are social sellers. In a recent study, advertising powerhouse OgilvyOne learned that while forty-nine percent of salespeople think social media is important to their success, only nine percent of US salespeople feel their companies have adequately trained them to use social media to increase their sales success. This vast disconnect lies in the reluctance of sales leaders to label their sales strategy as social media based. However, chances are that if ninety percent of your sales representatives research their prospects’ social media presence at any point during the sales cycle, your team has embraced social selling. Whether or not a sales team terms their selling approach as social, sales representatives who recognize that they can use social media to learn everything they ever wanted to know about their prospects – without even picking up the phone – have mastered the art of social selling.
Deciding which social media tools to engage with can also confuse sales teams. Millions of bloggers post opinions and intelligence on just about everything – every day. As of January 1, 2011, Twitter users were tweeting 110 million tweets per day. With so much traffic to popular social media sites, such as Twitter, it is a no-brainer that you will find your customers and prospects through social media. The challenge lies in determining the relevant social media sources amongst the millions of impertinent ones. Sales representatives that get the importance of social selling can spend hours sorting through hundreds of sources every day to find the one gold coin that will help them win a deal. Which brings us to the next social selling challenge: finding the right platform to enable your success with social selling.
Social selling can be as simple as following a customer on LinkedIn, but the most successful salespeople fully integrate all relevant social media with every aspect of their sales cycle. Sales intelligence applications, such as InsideView, bring social media into Microsoft Dynamics CRM 2011 so sales people can incorporate social media into their existing sales pipelines. When social media integrates into your sales pipeline, you don’t have to open twelve separate tabs to show LinkedIn, Twitter, Facebook, Google Alerts, company blogs, etc. Social selling becomes a lot less elusive when you can practice it with every lead, every prospect, and every customer.
Besides bringing in real-time content from social media sites, InsideView also triangulates and aggregates company and executive contact information from leading and more traditional data sources, such as Capital IQ (a Standard & Poor’s company), Thomson Reuters, Jigsaw, Cortera, and NetProspex. As seen below, core company data, including Revenues, # of Employees, Industry, business description, and org structures, are accessible within Microsoft Dynamics CRM 2011 along with social media profiles and recent tweets of key contacts and decision makers. Constantly receiving these compelling prospect and client insights directly within CRM 2011 in such an organized and timely fashion will definitely increase your sales productivity and accelerate your sales cycle.
--- Source: http://www.insideview.com/resources/sfa-crm-microsoft.pdf
Brad Wilson, the General Manager of Microsoft Dynamics CRM, further comments on InsideView for Sales and the strategic partnership with Microsoft:
“InsideView for Sales is a great addition to Microsoft Dynamics CRM. InsideView for Sales provides an entryway to the social Web and empowers sales and organizations to gain valuable insight from a wide range of information sources beyond data contained in Dynamics CRM. As a partner, InsideView complements our mission of enabling businesses to find, win, and grow profitable customer relationships.”
--- Source: http://www.insideview.com
Additionally, InsideView, when used with Microsoft Dynamics CRM 2011, gives you the added capability to bring social media intelligence right into your Outlook email. Sales reps can opt to receive daily emails containing the latest stories on highly coveted prospects, such as leadership changes, funding news, new product offerings, or expanding operations. In the example below, I opted to receive a daily email for one of my favorite companies, Nike. The email contains feeds on some new product offerings, a few announcements on new office and warehouse locations, and one story about an upcoming business challenge. Having this relevant, up to date information delivered to your inbox can certainly give you a better understanding of your prospects and give you an immediate edge on other sales reps.
For more information on how the use of InsideView’s sales intelligence solutions in conjunction with Microsoft Dynamics CRM 2011 can help you find and close more deals, please visit www.insideview.com.
Lastly, special thanks to Lisa Fugere at InsideView for contributing content to this post and sharing her insights!
March 30, 2011
March 11, 2011
March 04, 2011
Preparing for CRM 2011: Talking with Friends (Part 2)
Last time we looked at SOAP XML and the potential drawbacks to Cross-site scripting. Collectively this falls into “Preparing for CRM 2011”, but the 3-part “Talking with Friends” looks at how your current environment fits into Online, Hosted, or On Premise. When evaluating CRM 2011, I think it is important to look at the cloud option and knowing what your CRM environment “talks to” will allow you to better understand cost comparisons as well as short/long term direction.
I started with SOAP XML because from the .NET perspective this is where everything has been for the past decade when it comes to web services. The landscape is changing though, and this can be seen with Microsoft’s offering of JSON REST web services within CRM 2011. In looking at SOAP XML within CRM 2011 though, we saw that there are plenty of ways to continue to use SOAP XML services. (Also note that the SOAP XML 4.0 endpoint is still there for backwards compatibility to CRM 4.0.)
Outside the CRM Box
Today we are going to look at two other ways in which you may be incorporating outside information or applications within your CRM 3.0/4.0 environment. The first of which is external databases. This could be data from your ERP system or really any other database backend. Secondly, we’ll look at web applications within your environment that you have integrated within CRM.
External Data
Sometimes as I write this I feel like I’m doing a marketing plug, but seriously we don’t recommend a tool unless we use it frequently and know that it works. When it comes to loading data into CRM from another database you can of course use SSIS, but often times we recommend using a tool called Scribe. Scribe offers an Online solution and allows you to easily integrate data from CRM Online to your ERP (or any other) system. The main point here is that you can integrate data from any of your systems while still being able to join the Microsoft cloud.
Web Applications
To clarify, I’m mainly talking about internal applications hosted within your CRM environment. You can find these by browsing IIS and looking at both your CRM App pool and the Web Sites that exist under Microsoft Dynamics CRM.
When it comes to applications, you will want to go application by application to see what is necessary to upgrade to CRM 2011. You could have applications pointing to the CRM 3.0 endpoint and those will be required to be upgraded no matter Online or On Premise (if you plan on keeping them of course). You may also have applications that utilize an iFrame to simply display data from another system. This is quite common and so long as the other system is accessible from the web, there really should not be much of an issue to keep this functionality.
Within the “Talking with Friends” series, embedded applications may tilt the scales in a direction when evaluating Online versus On Premise versus Hosted. It’s not to say that you can’t do everything from Online, but there are design considerations with each approach. With Online, custom web applications existing on the CRM 2011 cloud have to be written in JavaScript or Silverlight. To integrate a traditional ASP.NET web application, you have to host the application on another server (internally or within Windows Azure for example). Each web application you have integrated within CRM 3.0/4.0 will have its own set of options, enhancements and considerations to be evaluated. This is an important part of the upgrade and you should not only look at existing applications but also any future applications you have planned to integrate into CRM.
Anything is Possible
Microsoft has done an excellent job of making sure that anything that is possible on Premise is also possible in the Cloud; but, that doesn’t mean you can necessarily jump right in. There are caveats that you will need to iron out, but thankfully there are a plethora of options allowing you to really choose what’s best for both your short term and long term goals. When it comes to custom functionality and integrating external data, I certainly think Microsoft has made a strong case for keeping their CRM Cloud service on the table.
March 01, 2011
February 28, 2011
January 27, 2011
January 26, 2011
January 21, 2011
January 20, 2011
CRM Online E-mail Security Message: This content cannot be displayed in a frame.
I starting working with a client using CRM Online, who had previously installed a sales methodology accelerator. While trying to send an e-mail from CRM, I would always get the following message:
Having another client with CRM Online, I tested sending an email there and I didn’t encounter the security message. I also made sure this site was listed in my ‘Trusted Sites’ in Internet Explorer 8, as well as enabling “compatibility mode”. To complicate things, a test of this issue using IE7 did not create the problem. Unfortunately, the client PC’s are all running IE8 and reverting back to IE7 is not an option.
Solution
The installed accelerator changed an obscure email setting in CRM. It made CRM require the use of secure frames to restrict e-mail message content.
To change this setting, go to ‘Settings’, ‘System Settings’ and click on the ‘E-mail’ tab. Under the ‘Set E-mail form options’ section, set ‘Use secure frames to restrict e-mail message content’ to “No”. See below.
This seems like an easy-to-find solution, but the added variable of IE versions really increased the size of the “haystack” where the needle was hiding.
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