Archive for the 'General CRM' Category
This is the first article in my implementation management series for CRM consultants, developers, enthusiasts, and basically anyone else that will take the time to read it. I am not too choosy and i hope that they will provide help.
As many have seen that the biggest issue with a CRM deployment of any size simply comes down to user acceptance. In some cases user acceptance is really an easy task to accomplish, although rare it is still possible. Visits and meetings at a clients location and getting face time is great if the client can spare it. This is a great way to outline issues that stand in the way of deployment or user acceptance and help develop a strong internal team onsite to report issues.
Alot of the time issues come up when you are back in your office or away from the client site. Communication is always vital to understanding what the client needs. Clients also need the feeling that you are accomplishing the work at hand that you have discussed and like to see progress being made as their issues are resolved.
Here is one easy way that i have found to provide quick development management at a clients location. This is normally implemented after the initial deployment phase is over. Tie in a bug tracking system into your clients Microsoft CRM deployment. Any one will do and trust me there are plenty out there.
After you have chosen your bug tracking system of choice implement it on a webserver and then make sure it is available for use outside your general network. Secure it of course with an SSL Cert of choice, and you have created an easy bug tracking portal.
Next modify the sitemap at the clients location for Microsoft CRM and add a button that says “Report a Bug”, etc and create a page with an iframe back to your bugtracking system inhouse. This way onsite you can have your users have the ability to log issues that they have within Microsoft CRM itself.
There is also case management that you could do within Microsoft CRM itself and create workflows that facilitate tracking the support requests and cases and any contracts that a client may have, etc.
The biggest thing is that you have a system in place. You can use the built in customer service module in CRM as well to track these cases and to not only create new requests.
I chose a bugrtracking option because i wanted the customer to not only be able to do the above, but so that they would be able to login at anytime to my bugtracking system and view the outstanding requests that exist on their location, be able to upgrade priorities, and also remove issues if they have been resolved as well.
Although i didn’t get the opportunity to attend WPC 2008 in Houston this year i have already seen articles released and hearing feedback from additional consultants that are also sharing this great information about the latest add-on modules for Microsoft Dynamics CRM 4.0.
Barry Givens and Reuben Krippner have apparently displayed the latest enhancements that the CRM 4 development team have been cooking up.
In no particular order here they are:
1.) Analytics Foundation:This includes sales, marketing and service dashboards and a range of additional scorecard information from SSRS, and PerformancePoint Server. I know that dashboarding has been a large request out of box to compete with that other CRM provider.
2.) Business Productivity: MSSP, Business Auditing, sales process and common workflow patterns such as incident management.
3.) Enterprise Search: Integration with Sharepoint business data catalog. Audience specific SharePoint Portals with CRM data. One central place to find content!
4.) Notifications : Newsfeeds relevant to employee job roles, Vista gadgets and unified communications in general.
5.) Sales Methodologies : Support for sales methodologies for (TAS) Target Account selling, (SPI) solution and strategic selling that is consistent in your organizations CRM Deployment.
6.) Extended Sales Forecasting: Enhanced pipeline, budgeting, report forecasting features.
7.) Event Management : Campaign management functionality for online management of events through online calendar and online event registration portal.
8.) eService: Customer support portal. Customers can submit their own cases, perform knowledge-base searches, prioritize cases and allow editing of the customers profile.
This is the latest release about the Accelerators and they are planned to be released over the next few months so keep your eyes out for them. I know that i will!
If you have seen this problem happen in the installation process you are not alone. Sometimes this happens during the microsoft crm 3 to 4 upgrade of the crm client.
Something that will aid in this situation is Microsoft’s Internet Facing Deployment Tool. I have had clients mention that they cannot configure Microsoft CRM 4 Outlook client and that they receive the “configuration wizard cannot connect to the Microsoft CRM server” Error message, and it becomes pretty frustrating.
With the Microsoft CRM IFD tool you can easily fix this problem . The tool comes in handy for troubleshooting the errors with the AD SDK Root domain and IFD SDK Root Domain location in the database which seems to cause this issue for the most part. There is more information about the IFD tool below at the following Microsoft Support website.
Well i just finished up my latest read “Programming ASP.NET” 3rd edition. I typically develop web applications in Classic ASP, HTML/XHTML, CSS, VBScript, and Javascript. I haven’t had the time to delve into the .NET development framework until now and i thought that this book would be a good entrypoint to get caught up on the new server side processing and controls that the framework has to offer.
I started by installing Visual Studio 2008. Honestly the book is written for the .NET 2.0 framework but i thought this would be give me a great start to get familiar with the new IDE. I was right and i did enjoy reading the book through the week. I would reccomend this book to any developer that is looking to extend functionality of Microsoft CRM or Dynamics Platforms through the native application SDK’s as well.
The book also has a decent chapter on building and consuming webservices. It covers more about exposing your webmethods and using them to return or receive data than most articles that i have found out there. I liked the new controls enough that i decided to purchase the new “SAMS ASP.NET 3.5 Unleashed” (Again…. i know…. Not a Microsoft Press Book!)
I figure that i can get some more in depth information on Windows Workflow Foundation (WF) and the new .NET Ajax Controls that are supported natively in the edition of the framework.
After that i believe i will tackle chapter 9 in the “Working with Microsoft Dynamics CRM 4″ book that i received at convergence. Yea! finally a mention of a MS Press Book Right? By the way this is a great book as well, i just haven’t plowed through chapter 9 entitled “Microsoft CRM 4 SDK”as of yet i have a feeling that this time it will be alot easier with a better understanding now of C# and ASP.NET!
Ok. So we have seen the mobile express client for CRM 3 and we know it does an ok job, and we have seen it posted on Codplex. In case you haven’t the link is http://www.codeplex.com/crmmobileexpress
But i was asked the same question again for the zillionth time today at a new prospective client. Does Microsoft CRM 4 also have a version for the mobile? nd by the way….. “we mainly use blackberry’s in our office”. I know that there are 3rd party options such as cwr mobility, but honestly the customers normally don’t like the pricing.
I know that an edition will pop up soon maybe on codeplex or another site. As soon as i find it i will post it for everyone, and for archiving myself. Does anyone else have a clue when it will be released?
If you had the opportunity to attend convergence this year you should be receiving your convergence DVD’s in the mail any day now. I got mine first thing this morning and went ahead to look at it’s content.
I think that the videos are great tools to use as a consultant and for those who have never attended convergence it gives you a great idea about what convergence is all about so that you can plan to attend in the future as well.
We have really been busy with new clients and other conferences such as Microsoft Convergence 08′ in Orlando and some Launch events as well for CRM 4.0. We have also recently upgraded our existing inhouse system to CRM 4 and will be publishing information we have discovered along the way.
If you are completely new to Microsoft CRM or you are currently in the process of upgrading your system to CRM 4 you may find that a jumpstart refresher for CRM is what you need.
We suggest this FREE informational webcast to get the basics of CRM 4 reintroduced so that you can have some ideas about increasing productivity and customer satisfaction in your organization.
This FREE webcast entitled “Do extraordinary things every day with Microsoft Dynamics CRM”will be available on June 4th 2008 from 11:00-12:00 PM. It will be a live Microsoft broadcast online and registration is quick and easy.
Do extraordinary things every day with Microsoft Dynamics CRM!
We have recently added a very valuable tool to help us in being efficient in our CRM Consulting. Nicholas and I can now serve our clients faster and at greater distance. We recommend this to all you other CRM consultants as a valuable addition!
P.S. – For those that don’t know us, this was just one of our designers having fun. We don’t actually have one of these.
So what is FetchXML? What can it do? and how can i easily utilize the functionality it provides? Some of these may be the questions that you have had and if this is the case this article may provide some clues to help you in your CRM endevours.
Fetch by definition (Thanks MSDN) is a proprietary query language that is used in Microsoft CRM, and is used with the Fetch Method. What this translates to is basically a question and a response. For example you want to know how many accounts have addresses in Tennessee. You can simply form a query to the server by using fetch and get the information that you need.
Fetch is great at providing data easily for use inside crm, outside crm (such as via a webservice), and for other items like pre-filtering lookup fields in CRM. There are many ways to also utilize FetchXML so lets talk a little about the Structure of a Fetch Query.
So now that we are getting started looking at fetchxml structure you really should visit http://www.stunnware.com/crm2/topic.aspx?id=FindingData6 and click on the “Download” Area to download the FetchXML Wizard Software. You don’t have to have this by any means to write fetchxml queries, but it will definately be easier on you.
Below is an example of a fetchxml query.
<fetch mapping=”logical” distinct=”true”>
<entity name=”email”>
<attribute name=”from” />
<attribute name=”ownerid” />
<attribute name=”sender” />
<attribute name=”subject” />
<filter>
<condition attribute=”ownerid” operator=”eq” value=”{AD1A55EE-D5AC-DC11-BF6D-000D60559FC9}” />
</filter>
</entity>
</fetch>
There are a few things to examine in the structure of this query. The first thing is to define the mapping of the query. This is the first line that defines the query, i have also specified distinct=”true” this means that i am looking for unique only records in my resultset.
<fetch mapping = “logical” distinct=”true”>
The next line: <entity name=”email”> Defines the entity (or you can think of this as a table in the database) that we are going to query for record information. In this case it is the email entity.
Next you will see the following lines:
<attribute name=”from” />
<attribute name=”ownerid” />
<attribute name=”sender” />
<attribute name=”subject” />
These are the attributes or basically the columns in the database that we are going to bring back in our query. So far we have outlined the information we want to pull out but what really specifies the criteria that this data is captured? This is where the filter element comes in. With the filter element you can specify which attributes should have specific criteria in order to create your result set.
In the above example this is specified by the following condition attribute:
<condition attribute=”ownerid” operator=”eq” value=”{AD1A55EE-D5AC-DC11-BF6D-000D60559FC9}” />
This is basically saying that the ownerid of the email is going to equal me. Just about every operator is supported so it is unlimited the types of comparisons that you can do.
That is all there is to a fetch query. With this query i can now pull all emails from our demo system here that i happen to be the owner of. There is a ton more that you can do with fetchXML so here is a quick usage for these types of queries.
This is known as lookup filtering and can be done with any supported lookup attribute in CRM. On the onload event for the account form add the folowing code
***** Beginning of Code
var accountID = crmForm.ObjectId;
crmForm.all.primarycontactid.lookupbrowse = 1;
crmForm.all.primarycontactid.additionalparams = “fetchXml=<fetch mapping=’logical’> <entity name=’contact’> <all-attributes/><filter type=’and’><condition attribute=’parentcustomerid’ operator=’eq’ value=’” + accountID + “‘/><condition attribute=’statecode’ operator=’eq’ value=’0′/></filter></entity></fetch>”;
crmForm.all.primarycontactid.additionalparams += “&selObjects=2&findValue=0″;
***** End of Code
The purpose of this short code is to pull the GUID of the current account that is open and then pre-filter the primarycontactid form with only available contacts that have been related within CRM to that account. This pre-filters the results and is easy to accomplish.
There are lots of interesting places in CRM you can filter to save yourself some time with searching. This is just a quick example to give you an idea of the possibilities. Until next time.
Take Care!
I have found that consultants like most of us are sometimes forgetting to put an emphasis on the basics as we are working with our internal users and our clients. Like forgetting to tell loved ones we love them or forgetting to put gas in the car, sometimes we take basic things for granted.
A good CRM example is using an asterisk to aid in using find. We all know its there and CRM even pops up a handy reminder that says “use asterisk(*) wildcard character to search on partial text” but I’ve found many users that are frustrated with the find functionality because they have either not been told by their consultants or have forgotten about the asterisk.
Hopefully this brief example will be a reminder to us all to not always get caught up in the complicated (sometimes fun) customizations and to remind our users of simple functionality to make their lives easier.
