Microsoft CRM/XRM Development

A Demo Customer Portal with CRM Online

noreply@blogger.com (Simon Jackson) — Wed, 01 May 2013 19:48:00 +0000

Originally posted from here by Jim Wang.

Why do you need a CRM Portal?

The CRM system is usually an "internal" system, that is, the content in CRM can only be accessed and managed by internal CRM users. It all makes perfect sense until you want something more, here's some business cases that you might want to consider as a CRM Portal solution.

Business Case 1 - Reduce the license cost (where the portal user is the CRM user)

The ESS(Employee Self Service) CAL is 1/3 license cost of the Limited CAL; is 1/10 license cost of the Full CAL. If a company has a big amount of CRM "light users", then the ESS CAL would fit for purpose, so a CRM portal or a helpdesk application is required in this case (access through Microsoft Dynamics CRM clients is not allowed in ESS CAL)

Obviously, in such scenario, you will have to balance the ROI(Return On Investment) of building a CRM Portal and the license cost.

The Employee Self Service (ESS) CAL provides a user with limited API access and limited read-write access to “Microsoft Dynamics CRM functionality” through any application/graphical user interface (GUI), other than the Microsoft Dynamics CRM client. The ESS CAL addresses the licensing requirements for light user scenarios of Microsoft Dynamics CRM 2011. ESS CAL isn't available in Dynamics CRM Online.
Refer to Microsoft Dynamics CRM 2011 pricing and licensing guide for a complete list of use rights.

Business Case 2 - Interactive with business relations (where the portal user is not the CRM user, but map to another CRM entity, i.e. Account, Contact etc.)

That's it! Non-CRM users can also contribute to your CRM system, like your business partners and/or customers. They exist in your CRM system as Account or Contact (or other entities but not the User entity) records, with some development work, they can register (or be given) an unique UserId and Password to login to CRM Portal, then they can perform some by-design actions, for examples:

Creating/Updating their own data in CRM, like personal profile, support case etc.
Booking/Amending a service appointment with available resources/facilities.
Making/Managing online orders, manage invoice etc.

The beauty of it is all their inputs will be synced using the agreed format into CRM without CRM user intervention. For instance:

Your customer login to the CRM portal, select a few products and make an order.
Your CRM user will see a new order has been created in CRM (via Portal) by one of your customers (also in CRM).
The CRM user can fulfill the order and create an invoice in CRM;
The customer will see the order status changed to "Fulfiled" and the invoice for that order.

The external connector license (for non-employee access) is required for this scenario.

Business Case 3 - Interactive with the public (where the portal user is anonymous Internet user, who has nothing to do with the CRM system)

CRM data can be pushed or pulled to the Internet to allow public Read-Only access.

With some development work, the CRM KB Article and Sales Literature can be published to a public website to allow Internet users to access and download. The idea is, you can now use CRM as a "CMS" system, that you can manage contents within CRM.

About the technologies used in CRM Portal

CRM Portal can be built with all major web technologies, i.e.: .Net, Java, PHP, Ruby. It doesn't matter how you design the user front end, on the back end they call CRM references to perform actions.

CRM Portal can be stand along, or integrate with your existing company website.

Here's a demo (but real) CRM Portal website (http://xrmportal.azurewebsites.net/) I built for clients demo.

Some highlights:

Support CRM Online, Azure Hosted VM, On-Premise etc.
Multi-Devices support, like: Desktop/Laptop, Mobile Phone, iPad etc.
Create/Update your CRM profile (update your Contact record in CRM)
Create/Update/View CRM cases
Create/Update/View CRM orders for yourself and your sub-customer (sub-contacts in CRM)
Book a service appointment activity in CRM.
View CRM published articles.

The website is built on top of my favorite Orchard CMS project (LIKE)!

Hopefully this article gives some ideas about what CRM Portal can do!

Using Power View in Excel 2013 to Analyze CRM Data

noreply@blogger.com (Simon Jackson) — Sun, 21 Apr 2013 19:50:00 +0000

Originally posted here.

Now that Power View is built into Excel 2013, business users can easily perform advanced analytics of their real time CRM data in either an online or on-premise deployment. You can use the Export to Excel feature in Microsoft Dynamics CRM to export CRM data, and then you can create a matrix, bar chart, data map, etc. with a few simple clicks. In addition, you don’t need to work in the IT department to perform these steps, as this functionality is designed to be run by the end user.

Note: This procedure reflects the use of Excel 2013 with Microsoft Dynamics. When performing this procedure, please ensure your Account list view contains records have valid values for Relationship Type, Industry, Country, and Territory and that these columns are contained within your list view.

To use Power View with Microsoft Dynamics CRM Online to perform BI Analytics on CRM data, perform the following steps.

Note: The steps below are shown in the Outlook client but can also be performed for static exports within Internet Explorer.

1. In Microsoft Dynamics CRM for Outlook, view the list of Accounts.

Note: It is preferable to use a view that is already configured to display the Relationship Type, Industry, Country, and Territory fields. While you can add them to the view during the Dynamic Export process, the example will flow better if these fields area already exposed within the view.

2. On the Ribbon bar, click Export to Excel.

3. In the Export Data to Excel dialog box, select Static Worksheet, and then click Export.

4. In the File Download dialog box, click Open to open the file in Excel.

Important: If you receive the prompt below, click Yes to proceed.

In the body of the worksheet, you should now see the data from the list view.

5. Save the file in the latest Excel Workbook (.xlsx file) format.

Note: Power View controls cannot be inserted into an .xml file, but you can insert them in an Excel workbook.

Now we need to select all records from the CRM query.

6. With your mouse, select all data values in Excel.

7. On the Ribbon bar, on the Home tab, in the Styles section, select Format as Table, and then select a table style option.

With the table created, we can begin to insert our power View controls.

8. On the Ribbon bar, on the Insert tab, click Power View.

Note: If the Microsoft Excel Add-ins dialog box appears, click Enable.

This will add a worksheet named Power View1 to the Excel workbook.

Now let’s restrict the columns displayed on the Power View1 worksheet.

9. In the top-right corner of the screen, under Power View Fields, deselect all check boxes except for the ones associated with the following fields:

Client Name
Industry
Relationship Type

10. On the Ribbon bar, on the Design tab, click Table, and then from the drop-down list, select Matrix.

11. On the right, under Drag fields between areas below, configure text box titles and associated fields as follows:

∑ Values - Client Name (displays as # Count of Client Name)
ROWS - Country / Region
COLUMNS - Relationship Type

12. Resize the matrix so that is occupies the left half of the window, as shown in the following graphic:

Now let’s create a chart.

13. On the Power Vew1 worksheet, select the matrix and then copy and paste it (using the keyboard copy [Ctrl + C] and paste [Ctrl + V] functions) to the right of the existing matrix.

The worksheet now contains side-by-side copies of the same matrix.

14. Select the matrix on the right-hand side, on the Design tab, click Bar Chart, and then from the drop-down list, select Stacked Bar.

15. Resize the chart control, under AXIS remove Country/Region, and then add Territory.

After completing this step, the window should appear similarly to the following graphic:

Note: You can now filter on the matrix values by clicking on the bar sections in the chart.

16. Click on the chart bar representing Latin America.

The matrix on the left is updated to display only the selected data, which in this case is that for Latin America.

17. Click the white space of the chart to turn off the filter and show all values.

Now let’s create a Bing Map in a separate Power View worksheet.

18. Switch to the Accounts worksheet and if necessary, select that the table you created in steps 6 and 7.

Note: If the Insert Power View dialog box appears, select Create a Power View sheet, and then click OK.

A new Power View worksheet is inserted in the workbook.

Now let’s restrict the columns displayed on the Power View2 worksheet.

19. In the top-right corner of the screen, under Power View Fields, deselect all check boxes except for the ones associated with
the following fields:

Client Name
Industry
Relationship Type

20. On the Ribbon bar, on the Design tab, click Table, and then from the drop-down list, select Card.

21. Resize the card so that is occupies the left third of the window, as shown in the following graphic:

Now let’s create a map.

22. On the Power View2 worksheet, select the card, copy and paste it (using the keyboard copy [Ctrl + C] and paste [Ctrl + V] functions) to the right of the existing card, and then resize it so that it occupies two-thirds of the window.

The worksheet now contains side-by-side copies of the same card.

23. With the right card selected, on the Ribbon bar, on the Design tab, click Map.

24. With the Map control selected, on the right, under Drag fields between areas below, configure text box titles and associated fields as follows:

∑ Size - Client Name (displays as # Count of Client Name)
LOCATIONS - Country / Region
COLOR - Relationship Type

When finished, the window should appear similarly to the following graphic:

Note: You can now filter on the card values by clicking on pie charts of the specific countries within the map.

25. Click on the pie chart for Germany.

The card on the left is updated with values only for the selected data, in this case that for Germany.

26. Click the white space of the map to reset the filter to all values.

SummaryAs you can see, the Power View functionality built into Excel 2013 enables business users to easily perform advanced analytics of their CRM data, whether they are working in a cloud-based or on-premises deployment.

CRM Reporting Undocumented Feature Uncovered

noreply@blogger.com (Simon Jackson) — Sun, 21 Apr 2013 19:40:00 +0000

This was originally posted here.

Most who live in the Microsoft Dynamics CRM world, like Rockton Software, understand that there has been a large change with the functionality of reporting with CRM 2011 and CRM Online. Most of these changes being brought forth were to allow the custom reporting in CRM online. In order for Microsoft to make reporting happen for their online offering of this product, they had to bring in their own custom language—FetchXML—for retrieving data from the online servers. To keep the data safe and secure in the online servers, Microsoft had to implement RDL sandboxing on the SSRS servers. This brings out the ‘one step forward two steps back’ type of scenarios.

For the first time, users are able to create and upload custom reports into CRM Online that are more advanced and personalized for their organization. With that being said, the SSRS Sandboxing brings in many restrictions (see MSDN documentation). Those who are accustomed to using custom code and scripts behind expressions find themselves left without a way to manipulate the data in some of the most basic ways.

It appears that the CRM developers have written a helper class specifically for reporting to help reduce some of these limitations that become a nuisance when writing reports for CRM online—great news! Unfortunately, the methods that were exposed to helper class are not documented nor discussed anywhere that I have been able to find.

For those of you who you have dug into the out of box CRM reports (including reports built using the built in Report Builder) you will see that most of the reports have a reference to the following assembly:

Microsoft.Crm.Reporting.RdlHelper, Version=5.0.0.0, Culture=neutral, PublicKeyToken=31bf3856ad364e35

This RdlHelper file is packaged and installed on the SQL Reporting Server with the rest of the CRM reporting extensions, which should make it available to those running on both: onPremise and Online versions of CRM. However, to the be able to use what they have written for us, we need to know what is available and how to use it.

I have gone into reports that CRM provides OOB and have pulled out the specific areas the Microsoft has used the RdlHelper class in their reports:

CDate(Microsoft.Crm.Reporting.RdlHelper.DateTimeUtility.ConvertUtcToLocalTime

(DateTime.UtcNow, Parameters!CRM_UserTimeZoneName.Value))

This is the most common helper that I had found on most reports, it appears to take in your system UTC time and apply the UTC offset from CRM for the timestamp that is placed on the footer of the reports. So it will display as time run based off of your CRM time zone setting and not the PC time zone setting.

Microsoft.Crm.Reporting.RdlHelper.ReportUtility.GetArrow(Parameters!

CRM_SortField.Value,”name”, Parameters!CRM_SortDirection.Value)

This takes in 3 string inputs. The CRM parameter for what field is supposed to be sorted, the name of the field, and the sort direction and then will return back the sort code value to the column that matches what CRM has so that when the sorting is changed in CRM, the reporting will reflect the same.

Microsoft.Crm.Reporting.RdlHelper.HtmlUtility.GetImage

(Fields!ActivityTypeCode.Value)

This takes in an ObjectTypeCode and returns the CRM defined 16×16 image associated with the entity type to drop on the report for easy identification of the record type.

Microsoft.Crm.Reporting.RdlHelper.UserSummary.GetDot

(count(Fields!systemuserid.Value))

This appears to be specific to the User Summary report, it takes in an integer and if it is set to 1, then it will return a dot, otherwise it will return blank. They are using it to set the indicator on security roles for each user to signify that the user is a member of that security role.

Microsoft.Crm.Reporting.RdlHelper.NumberUtility.GetAbsValue

(First(Fields!EndTimeDelay.Value, “DSTimeParam”))

This takes in an integer and returns its absolute value.

Microsoft.Crm.Reporting.RdlHelper.HtmlUtility.RemoveHtml

(Fields!description.Value)

This takes in a string of text and strips out the markup tags and returns the plain text back.

This list is pretty small now, but I could imagine that there are many more methods in the assemble that are available. We just don’t have any documentation behind them at this point. To me this looks like a great direction for the CRM development team to take as it allows end users regain some usability of the reporting engine that are removed by enabling SSRS Sandboxing. I can only imagine that this RdlHelper class will grow over time as the Microsoft developers begin to convert the out-of-box reports over to using FetchXML language.

I have placed a suggestion in the Microsoft Connect page asking for this RdlHelper class to get documented in the CRM SDK. If you get a moment, please go out and give the suggestion your thumbs up, so maybe we can get some more information behind what all exists in the RdlHelper assembly that they have created.

Office 2013 & Microsoft Dynamics CRM on the Surface Pro

noreply@blogger.com (Simon Jackson) — Sun, 21 Apr 2013 19:33:00 +0000

The post Office 2013 & Microsoft Dynamics CRM on the Surface Pro appeared first on PowerObjects.

As you may or may not know, the Microsoft Surface Pro is Microsoft’s professional version of their new tablet. It comes complete with an i5 Intel processor, 2 GB’s of RAM, a full HD (1080) screen AND… Microsoft Windows 8 Pro! (Not RT!)

Not only is the Surface Pro one of the most productive tablets on the market today, but it is also one of the only tablets capable of running the 2011 CRM Outlook client. The web client also works with the full version of Internet Explorer.

There are, however, a few items that you will need to know prior to installing and configuring the CRM for the Outlook client.

The Surface Pro (Most Windows 8 Machines) does not have Windows Identity Foundation 3.5 enabled by default. This feature is automatically enabled with the CRM “Client” Update Rollup 11 and after. You can check to insure this feature has been turned on by accessing “Programs and Features,” choosing “View installed updates” then scrolling to the bottom to make sure the box is checked next to “Windows Identity Foundation 3.5.”
Make sure your Surface Pro is completely up to date with all Windows Updates / Surface Updates by connecting to Windows Update. (Surface firmware is also updated through Windows Updates)
When you run the configuration wizard—either manually from the program list or by launching Outlook for the first time after installing the CRM Client—you may see the following error after trying to connect to a CRM Organization: “Cannot connect to Microsoft Dynamics CRM server because we cannot authenticate your credentials. Check your connection or contact your administrator for more help.”

This error can occur in hosted or on-premise installations of Microsoft Dynamics CRM 2011 using IFD/ADFS, but fear not, the resolution is quite simple.

Resolution: When you access CRM 2011 via the web, the authentication method uses the user@somewhere.com as your username. When you connect to a CRM organization through the CRM for Outlook configuration wizard, change the format to Domain\User_Domain when you are prompted for your credentials. (Note: Use only 20 characters or less for the user_domain)

So, for example, if my email address were Joseph.Smith@powerobjects.com, I would enter my user name aspowerobjects\joseph.smith_powerob

That’s it!

Three Limitations of Using CRM Advanced Find

noreply@blogger.com (Simon Jackson) — Wed, 17 Apr 2013 19:53:00 +0000

Here's a good post from Leon Tribe clearly identifing the limitations of Advanced fine, I must say outer joins is the most common limitations that I hear clients asking for and it's nice to see Leon also provides a potential workaround to the limitation. The original post can be found here.

I got asked a couple of days ago if I knew of a blog which listed the limitations of using an Advanced Find query. I knew of a couple of the limitations off of the top of my head but could not find a blog summarising them. So here it is.

Outer Joins

In my opinion, other than being able to do aggregate calculations, this is the biggest limitation of Advanced Finds. So what is an ‘Outer Join’?

Let us say we have two tables in a database, the Account and Contact table. Advanced Find allows to ask questions like ‘Show me all Accounts which have a Contact whose first name is John’ or ‘Show me all Contacts where their Account is in the Mining industry’. In these cases a record exists in both tables e.g. an Account record linked to a Contact record whose name is John. This is called an ‘Inner Join query’.

However, if we ask ‘Show me all Account with no Contacts’ we cannot do it. In other words, if we ask questions where there is a record in one table and none in the other table we will find it impossible with Advanced Find. This is an ‘Outer Join query’. Other examples are reports showing neglected leads (leads with no activity for six months) which cannot be done with Advanced Find.

In the case of Accounts, Contacts and Leads, we can get around the problem using a Marketing List. In the above example, we can add all Accounts to the Marketing List and then remove those with a Contact, leaving behind the desired list. For other types of records, the only option is to have a flag field to help us. For example, we can have a ‘Contact Flag’ field on the Account which is populated when there is an active Contact associated to the Account. We can then use this flag to return ‘All Accounts with an unticked Contact Flag’, satisfying our Outer Join query.

Titles

Titles are NOT restricted to just the search entity. For example, if we are searching for all Contacts in a certain industry, we can bring in fields from the Account entity, by dropping down the entity selection when adding columns.

However, we can only go one level up. So, for example, if we want to ask ‘Show me all Appointments regarding Opportunities where the Account is in the mining industry’, we can display Appointment fields as columns and Opportunity fields as columns but we cannot browse up to the Opportunity’s associated Account and show their fields. In this case, the only workaround available is to replicate the key fields from the Account onto the Opportunity and then reference these copied-fields.

Grouping Conditions Across Entities

Let us say we want to know ‘All Accounts where the Account is in Sydney OR the Account has a Contact in Sydney’

We can write the above query but this asks for Accounts which are in Sydney AND has a Contact in Sydney.

Normally we would use the ‘Group OR’ button at the top but this can only apply to conditions within the same entity and therefore we cannot group them. In this case the best we can do is run the query twice (once for the Account rule and once for the Contact rule), export to Excel and combine manually.

Conclusions

Advanced Find is one of the most powerful and accessible features of Dynamics CRM and any site not making full use of this function is missing out. Even those sites using it every day may not discover the limitations listed above. However, now you are aware of them, if you do find yourself coming up against one of them, you have some workarounds or the opportunity to rethink to see if you can gain insight through an alternative, supported, query.

Creating and Publishing a Web Portal to an Azure Cloud Service

noreply@blogger.com (Simon Jackson) — Wed, 17 Apr 2013 19:33:00 +0000

Here's a nice example of creating a portal on the Azure platform backed on to CRM online deployment. The following post was originally posted here by John Straumann a Senior Technical Product Manager for Dynamics CRM Product Marketing Group.

At Convergence a few weeks ago I presented some CRM demos and this article will be the first in detailing how those demos were created and how you can mirror the functionality in your CRM Online deployment.

This first article will cover the creation and publishing of a Web Portal published to an Azure Cloud Service that can be used to capture simple lead information and subsequently create Leads in Microsoft Dynamics CRM Online. The creation of the portal involves just a few steps:

Creating an Azure Account
Creating an Azure Web Site
Developing your web portal in Visual Studio using C#
Publishing your web portal to the Azure web site

Note that it does not matter if you decide to create the site first and then create the Azure portal or vice versa, in this article we will first create the Azure account and web site, and then the web site. So let’s get started!

First, sign up for a free trial on Azure and fill out the necessary fields to create a new Azure account. Note that if you or your company has an MSDN subscription you can also access Azure via MSDN subscription benefits. Once on the page shown below (direct URL: http://www.windowsazure.com/en-us/pricing/free-trial/) click the “Try it Free’ button and complete the sign up process.

The next step is to create the Azure web site which will host your new portal. From the Azure main page, click the link for the “Management Portal.”

Once you reach the management portal page, on the left-hand navigation bar click “Web Sites” and then click “New”.

A new page will appear with some information that needs to be filled out to create a new web site.

Click “Quick Create”
Enter a name for your new web site, the new URL will be <yoursitename>.azurewebsites.net. I am using crmblogportal for this example.
Click “Create Web Site”

When Azure finishes creating the site, you’ll see a page like this one showing the site(s) you have created. Click the link for the site you just created.

We need to get the publishing profile for our new site so we can upload our portal from Visual Studio, so on this page, in the middle section with the title “Publish your App”, click the link “Download the publish profile” and when prompted save the file to your desktop (or anywhere on your hard drive as long as you remember where!). The file will be named <yoursitename>.azurewebsites.net.PublishSettings.

And that’s it. Your new Azure web site is set up and ready for you to upload whatever you create to it. The next steps involve creating the portal site itself in Visual Studio.

For the next steps we need to build a web site in Visual Studio so if you have Visual Studio installed, fire it up. If not and you have a personal or corporate MSDN subscription, you can download it there, or you can download and install Visual Studio Express fromhttp://www.microsoft.com/visualstudio/eng/products/visual-studio-express-products.

Lastly, we’ll need the CRM SDK, so download and install the SDK from http://www.microsoft.com/en-us/download/details.aspx?id=24004.

For the Convergence demo we needed a site that allowed a user to register on a web form, and then that web form created a new lead in CRM. I will use this site in this example, but note you can create any site in Visual Studio that you wish.

When Visual Studio Starts, select File->New Project->and then on the left under “Templates” click “Visual C#” and then click “Web” and then select the “ASP.NET Web Forms Application” template.

This template generates a web site with a lot of the portal functionality already there, so saves a lot of work if it meets your needs. In the Solution Explorer view, expand the “Account” folder and double-click the “Register.aspx” file to open it in the editor. Note that this page is generated by Visual Studio and uses a control called the “CreateUserWizard” which has some great built-in functionality, but is also somewhere difficult to modify. For this reason I created a new page for the Convergence demo, so right-click on the “Account” folder, and in the Context Menu that appears select “Add->New Item”. On the left-hand panel be sure that “Web” is selected under “Visual C#”, and in the list in the middle, select “Web Form using Master Page”. Name the new page “NewUser.aspx”, click “Add” and then on the confirmation dialog, select “Site.Master”.

Right-click on “NewUser.aspx”, select “Set as Start page”, and then press F5 to run the site, and you’ll see we have a very simple page but that the style of the site is applied so we have a good starting point.

The first step is to change the image that says “Your Logo here” to a logo of your choosing, I’ll use the Dynamics CRM logo.

Close the browser window, and then in Visual Studio on the right-side in Solution Explorer, right-click the Images folder and select “Add->Existing Item”, and then in the file browser window browse to your logo image file, and double-click on the file to add it to the Images folder of your project. Now, because we are working with a Master site page template, we cannot edit the log on the NewUser.aspx page, we have to make the change on the Site.Master page, so in Solution Explorer double-click Site.Master to open it in the editor. Click the “Source” button in the editor window, and then in the code find the line that says

it should be at line 43 or thereabouts. Change this line to:

Where “crm_logo.png” is whatever image file you used, and of course you can change the URL too! Note that Visual Studio might add

id="A1"

to the line, if so, delete that.

Save the project and press F5 to run it, and you should see the changed logo. Click on it and the Dynamics CRM site will open.

Close the browser.

We are now ready for the next step, which is to add the controls we need to build the New User input form. We’ll keep it very simple and just use 2 fields. In “Solution Explorer”, double-click “NewUser.aspx” to open the form in the editor, and insert the code pasted below in between these lines (should be lines 6 and 7):

<asp:Content ID="Content3" ContentPlaceHolderID="MainContent" runat="server">
<PASTE CODE HERE>
</asp:Content>

Paste this code:

<ContentTemplate>
<p class="validation-summary-errors">
<asp:Literal runat="server" ID="ErrorMessage" />
</p>
<fieldset>
<legend>Registration Form</legend>
<ol>
    <li>
    <asp:Label ID="Label3" runat="server" AssociatedControlID="FullName">Full Name</asp:Label>
    <asp:TextBox runat="server" ID="FullName" />
    <asp:RequiredFieldValidator ID="RequiredFieldValidator3" runat="server" ControlToValidate="FullName"
    CssClass="field-validation-error" ErrorMessage="The Full Name field is required." />
</li>
<li>
<asp:Label ID="Label4" runat="server" AssociatedControlID="MobilePhone">Mobile Phone</asp:Label>
<asp:TextBox runat="server" ID="MobilePhone" />
<asp:RequiredFieldValidator ID="RequiredFieldValidator4" runat="server" ControlToValidate="MobilePhone"
CssClass="field-validation-error" Display="Dynamic" ErrorMessage="The Mobile Phone field is required." />
</li>
</ol>
<asp:Button ID="Button1" runat="server" Text="Register" OnClick="Button1_Click" />
</fieldset>
</ContentTemplate>

We now need to add the Event handler for the Register Button click event, so save the project, then click the “Design” button and double-click the button “Register” to add the event handler. Note that we’ll add the code later to create the lead in CRM, for now just adding the event handler is all we need to do. Save the project, press F5 to run the page, and you should see a page similar to this:

Our page is shaping up, but it still doesn’t do anything to create a lead in CRM. We’ll wire up that functionality in a bit, but right now we need to create a “Thank you” page to display to the user when registration is complete. As we did with the NewUser.aspx page, right-click on the Account folder, and select “Add->New Item”, and then on the left-hand panel be sure that “Web” is selected under “Visual C#”, and in the list, be sure “Web Form using Master Page” is selected. Name the new page “Thankyou.aspx”, click “Add” and then on the confirmation dialog, select “Site.Master”. Double click on “Thankyou.aspx” to open it in the editor, and then in between the 3^rd content tags:

<asp:Content ID="Content3" ContentPlaceHolderID="MainContent" runat="server">
</asp:Content>

Paste the following code:

<ContentTemplate>
<fieldset>
<legend>Thank you!!</legend>
</fieldset>
<p>
<h1>Thank you for registering!!</h1>
</p>
</ContentTemplate>

Save the project.

Now we’ll write the code that does the work of creating the new lead in CRM. First, we need to add a few references from the Microsoft Dynamics CRM SDK, so in the Solution Explorer view, right-click “References” and select “Add Reference”. Click “Browse” on the dialog that appears, and then browse to the folder where you installed the CRM SDK, and then browse to the “sdk\bin folder”. Hold the <ctrl> key, select the following files to add, and click “Add”.

Microsoft.xrm.sdk.dll
Microsoft.xrm.portal.dll
Microsoft.xrm.client.dll
Microsoft.crm.sdk.proxy.dll

You also need to add a reference to Microsoft.IdentityModel.dll which is not part of the SDK download, but is likely on your PC already (do a search for it). If not, you can download it here: Download Microsoft.IdentityModel dll

Add the reference the same way you added the SDK references.

We next need to add a reference to several Assemblies from the .NET Framework, so in the Reference Manager window select “Assemblies” from the left-hand navigation, and then select:

System.DirectoryServices
System.DirectoryServices.AccountManagement
System.Runtime.Serialization
System.Security
System.ServiceModel

Click OK and all the references will be added.

Next, we need to add some of the helper classes that come with the SDK to enable authentication to CRM Online. Right-click on the Account folder, and select “Add->Existing Item”. Browse to the folder where you installed the SDK, and browse to “\sdk\samplecode\cs\helpercode” and add the following files:

Crmservicehelper.cs
Deviceidmanager.cs
Myorganizationcrmsdktypes.cs

Next we need to add a line to the web.config (not the Web.config file in the Account folder, but the one under the Project itself) file for our connection string, so double-click web.config to open it. In the <connectionStrings> section, add the following lines:

<add name="Server=CRM Online, organization=your org, user=user name" connectionString="Url=https://yourorg.crm.dynamics.com; Username=username; Password=password;"/>

Where:
your org = your organization name
user = the user name for your org
UserName = full user name
password = the user password

So for example, the org I used for Convergence Demos was called Convergence1 and the username was admin, so my connection string was (with <password> replaced by the actual password for my user account):

Next we need to add the code to the NewUser.aspx.cs file, so right-click on NewUser.aspx and select “View Code”. Add the following using statements:

using Microsoft.AspNet.Membership.OpenAuth;

using System.Configuration;
using System.ServiceModel;

// These namespaces are found in the Microsoft.Crm.Sdk.Proxy.dll assembly
// located in the SDK\bin folder of the SDK download.
using Microsoft.Crm.Sdk.Messages;

// These namespaces are found in the Microsoft.Xrm.Sdk.dll assembly
// located in the SDK\bin folder of the SDK download.
using Microsoft.Xrm.Sdk;
using Microsoft.Xrm.Sdk.Query;

// These namespaces are found in the Microsoft.Xrm.Client.dll assembly
// located in the SDK\bin folder of the SDK download.
using Microsoft.Xrm.Client;
using Microsoft.Xrm.Client.Services;

Then, just below the lines:

public partial class NewUser : System.Web.UI.Page
{

add these lines:

#region Class Level Members
private Guid _leadId;
private OrganizationService _orgService;
public String connectionString;
#endregion Class Level Members

So at this point, the entire NewUser.aspx.cs file should look like this:

using System;
using System.Collections.Generic;
using System.Linq;
using System.Web;
using System.Web.UI;
using System.Web.UI.WebControls;

using Microsoft.AspNet.Membership.OpenAuth;

using System.Configuration;
using System.ServiceModel;

// These namespaces are found in the Microsoft.Crm.Sdk.Proxy.dll assembly
// located in the SDK\bin folder of the SDK download.
using Microsoft.Crm.Sdk.Messages;

// These namespaces are found in the Microsoft.Xrm.Sdk.dll assembly
// located in the SDK\bin folder of the SDK download.
using Microsoft.Xrm.Sdk;
using Microsoft.Xrm.Sdk.Query;

// These namespaces are found in the Microsoft.Xrm.Client.dll assembly
// located in the SDK\bin folder of the SDK download.
using Microsoft.Xrm.Client;
using Microsoft.Xrm.Client.Services;

namespace CrmBlogPortal.Account
{
public partial class NewUser : System.Web.UI.Page
{
   #region Class Level Members
    private Guid _leadId;
    private OrganizationService _orgService;
    public String connectionString;
    #endregion Class Level Members

protected void Page_Load(object sender, EventArgs e)
{

}

protected void Button1_Click(object sender, EventArgs e)
{

}
}
}

Save and build the project to be sure there are no errors. We also need to add some methods from the SDK for processing authentications. Just after the Button1_Click method, paste the following code. So where this method appears in the file:

protected void Button1_Click(object sender, EventArgs e)
{
}

// Paste the code here!!

Code:

    #region Private Methods
    /// <summary>
    /// Gets web service connection information from the app.config file.
    /// If there is more than one available, the user is prompted to select
    /// the desired connection configuration by name.
    /// </summary>
    /// <returns>A string containing web service connection configuration information.</returns>
    private static String GetServiceConfiguration()
    {
      // Get available connection strings from app.config.
      int count = ConfigurationManager.ConnectionStrings.Count;

      // Create a filter list of connection strings so that we have a list of valid
      // connection strings for Microsoft Dynamics CRM only.
      List<KeyValuePair<String, String>> filteredConnectionStrings =
          new List<KeyValuePair<String, String>>();

      for (int a = 0; a < count; a++)
      {
        if (isValidConnectionString(ConfigurationManager.ConnectionStrings[a].ConnectionString))
          filteredConnectionStrings.Add
              (new KeyValuePair<string, string>
                  (ConfigurationManager.ConnectionStrings[a].Name,
                  ConfigurationManager.ConnectionStrings[a].ConnectionString));
      }

       // No valid connections strings found. Write out and error message.
      if (filteredConnectionStrings.Count == 0)
      {
        Console.WriteLine("An app.config file containing at least one valid Microsoft Dynamics CRM " +
            "connection string configuration must exist in the run-time folder.");
        Console.WriteLine("\nThere are several commented out example connection strings in " +
            "the provided app.config file. Uncomment one of them and modify the string according" +
            "to your Microsoft Dynamics CRM installation. Then re-run the sample.");
        return null;
      }

       // If one valid connection string is found, use that.
      if (filteredConnectionStrings.Count == 1)
      {
        return filteredConnectionStrings[0].Value;
      }

      // If more than one valid connection string is found, let the user decide which to use.
      if (filteredConnectionStrings.Count > 1)
      {
        Console.WriteLine("The following connections are available:");
        Console.WriteLine("------------------------------------------------");

        for (int i = 0; i < filteredConnectionStrings.Count; i++)
        {
          Console.Write("\n({0}) {1}\t",
          i + 1, filteredConnectionStrings[i].Key);
        }

Console.WriteLine();

        Console.Write("\nType the number of the connection to use (1-{0}) [{0}] : ",
            filteredConnectionStrings.Count);
        String input = Console.ReadLine();
        int configNumber;
        if (input == String.Empty) input = filteredConnectionStrings.Count.ToString();
        if (!Int32.TryParse(input, out configNumber) || configNumber > count ||
            configNumber == 0)
        {
          Console.WriteLine("Option not valid.");
          return null;
        }

return filteredConnectionStrings[configNumber - 1].Value;

}
return null;

}

     /// <summary>
    /// Verifies if a connection string is valid for Microsoft Dynamics CRM.
    /// </summary>
    /// <returns>True for a valid string, otherwise False.</returns>
    private static Boolean isValidConnectionString(String connectionString)
    {
      // At a minimum, a connection string must contain one of these arguments.
      if (connectionString.Contains("Url=") ||
          connectionString.Contains("Server=") ||
          connectionString.Contains("ServiceUri="))
        return true;
      return false;
    }
    #endregion Private Methods

Save and build the project.

We’re almost there! The next step is to add the code to the Button1_Click method that actually creates the new Lead in CRM from the information entered on the web form. Replace the method:

protected void Button1_Click(object sender, EventArgs e)
{
}

With this:

    protected void Button1_Click(object sender, EventArgs e)
    {
      try
      {
        // Obtain connection configuration information for the Microsoft Dynamics
        // CRM organization web service.
        connectionString = GetServiceConfiguration();

// Establish a connection to the organization web service using CrmConnection.
Microsoft.Xrm.Client.CrmConnection connection = CrmConnection.Parse(connectionString);

        // Obtain an organization service proxy.
        // The using statement assures that the service proxy will be properly disposed.
        using (_orgService = new OrganizationService(connection))
        {
          // Obtain information about the logged on user from the web service.
          Guid userid = ((WhoAmIResponse)_orgService.Execute(new WhoAmIRequest())).UserId;
          SystemUser systemUser = (SystemUser)_orgService.Retrieve("systemuser", userid,
              new ColumnSet(new string[] { "firstname", "lastname" }));

          // Retrieve the version of Microsoft Dynamics CRM.
          RetrieveVersionRequest versionRequest = new RetrieveVersionRequest();
          RetrieveVersionResponse versionResponse =
              (RetrieveVersionResponse)_orgService.Execute(versionRequest);

          //This code grabs the data entered in the Full Name text field,
          //and splits it into first name and
          //last name. The input is expected in format <FirstName> <LastName>
          string strFullName = FullName.Text;
          string delimStr = " ";
          char[] delimiter2 = delimStr.ToCharArray();
          string[] nameSplit = null;
          nameSplit = strFullName.Split(delimiter2);

           //This is the Code that creates the new lead
          Lead newLead = new Lead
          {
            Subject = "New lead from Convergence",
            LastName = nameSplit[1].ToString(),
            FirstName = nameSplit[0].ToString(),
            MobilePhone = MobilePhone.Text.ToString()
          };

_leadId = _orgService.Create(newLead);

// Change this line to point at your web site
Response.Redirect(http://<yourwebsite>.azurewebsites.net/Account/Thankyou.aspx);

}
}

         // Catch any service fault exceptions that Microsoft Dynamics CRM throws.
      catch (FaultException<Microsoft.Xrm.Sdk.OrganizationServiceFault>)
      {
        // You can handle an exception here or pass it back to the calling method.
        throw;
      }
    }

Note, in the Response.Redirect line, be sure to change the URL to point at your web site.

That should complete our web site and we can test it locally by saving, and then pressing F5 to run the site. Enter values for the Name (be sure to enter a First Name and a Last Name separated by a space) and the mobile phone, and then click “Register”. The “Thank you” page will display.

And then if we go to our CRM instance we can see the new lead created by the web page.

And opening the Lead shows that the information from the web form was populated in the Lead:

The last step before we publish the web site is to change the “Register” link on the home page to point at our new Newuser.aspx page. Double-click Site.Master to open it, and then find this line:

<li><a id="registerLink" runat="server" href="~/Account/Register">Register</a></li>

Change this line to this:

<li><a id="registerLink" runat="server" href="~/Account/NewUser.aspx">Register</a></li>

Save the project and the last step is to publish our new site to the Azure web portal. In Visual Studio right-click the project, and then select Publish.

When the dialog shown below appears, click “Import” and browse to the location where you saved the publish settings file, it is named:

<yoursite>.azurewebsites.net.PublishSettings

And select the file, then click Next.

Click Next on this screen:

And click Next again:

And then click Publish.

When the publishing process completes, Visual Studio will display Success messages as shown here:

And then your newly published site will open in a browser, click the “Register” link to open your NewUser.aspx page.

When the NewUser.aspx page opens, fill in some data and then click the “Register” button.

And the “Thank you” page should display.

To confirm our page works, open up your CRM instance and confirm your new lead is there:

This example, while simple, has demonstrated:

Setting up an Azure account
Setting up Azure web sites
Creating web site projects in Visual Studio
Connecting web forms to Dynamics CRM Online
Publishing web projects to Azure web sites

Now that you have the basics in place you can modify the web project whatever way you need to in order to meet your business objectives.

The full Visual Studio project code can be downloaded at CrmBlogPortal Source.

Don't roll your own, use someone else's – A simple logging example

noreply@blogger.com (Simon Jackson) — Sun, 07 Apr 2013 20:32:00 +0000

Love it or loath it most .Net code I write today needs or could do with so form logging. I used to simply write to a text file, I think that could be because I’ve been coding before .Net was invented, but now days there’s an open source project for nearly anything you can think of and to me it’s obvious that code written by a an open community is generally be more robust and feature rich than anything I can write alone.

Here’s an example. I’m currently writing a VSTO add-in and I’ve implemented the following, I dare say there are better recipes but this is what I know and this is my VSTO Logging recipe:

Log4Net
http://logging.apache.org/log4net/release/faq.htmlA common logging framework that has some many types of listeners for everything you can think of.

this.Log Logging Extension http://geekswithblogs.net/robz/archive/2012/12/15/introducing-this.log.aspxSome fantastic extension methods that give some beautiful syntax candy.

I’m currently using a programmatic configuration similar to one found in this post, although I would recommend the XML configuration so that logging can be configured post deployment.

This gives me logging to my trace (output window in Visual Studio) and a rolling log file in the system.

Usage is this simple and syntactically beautiful IMHO:

public class SomeClass { public void SomeMethod() {

this.Log().Info(() => "Here is a log message with params which can be in Razor Views as well: '{0}'".FormatWith(typeof(SomeClass).Name));

this.Log().Debug("I don't have to be delayed execution or have parameters either"); }

public static void StaticMethod() { "SomeClass".Log().Error("This is crazy, right?!");
} }

While learning to use other peoples projects takes time and is never ending, but once your knowledge expands the next time write a piece of code you can implement in no time and have a vast array of features to utilize at your finger tips, leaving you to focus on the problem you're solving.

Microsoft Dynamics CRM: Recap & Product First Roadmap

noreply@blogger.com (Simon Jackson) — Tue, 02 Apr 2013 21:10:00 +0000

Original post: Microsoft Dynamics CRM: Recap & Product First Roadmap

At the Convergence conference, Jujhar Singh (Microsoft Dynamics CRM General Manager of Program Management) presented a session titled “Microsoft Dynamics CRM: Product Recap & Roadmap Primer”. Being software geeks, of course we wanted to learn as much as possible about the product roadmap so that we can share it with our customers.

Fortunately, Microsoft posted all of their Convergence sessions online so that we can really study the presentation, take screenshots, etc. Love it! Here are our notes summarizing Jujhar’s Microsoft Dynamics CRM roadmap session.

High Level Product Roadmap
This slide below outlines the key Microsoft Dynamics CRM releases. We have already spent a lot of time detailing Polaris, and the Polaris Updates related to Yammer and mobile iPad support so we won’t go into those details again. The more interesting stuff (to us) is what’s coming in the future! In particular, let’s talk about the Gemini release which is the release associated with the Marketing Pilot functionality.

Side note, this slide references “BCM” and “Orion MKT”…we assume BCM means Business Contact Manager but we are not sure what that has to do with the Dynamics CRM product roadmap. I would guess that Orion MKT is marketing-related but again we have not heard that codename before. It seems like a good guess would be that this is related to the Netbreeze acquisition? Jujhar didn’t talk to either of these, so we’re left with a little mystery there.

Gemini Release

The slide above shows Gemini releasing right at the end of March / early April so we expect to see it shortly! Microsoft announced the Marketing Pilot acquisition back in October 2012. Marketing Pilot offers integrated marketing management capabilities, complete from asset tracking to email marketing automation.

More exciting to us was that Microsoft showed Marketing Pilot functionality in action. Here are some screenshots showing a campaign and email blast. Please note that these screenshots show email tracking (open, clicks, etc) along with email creation. This is great news because in the past this type of functionality required 3rd party ISV’s.

If you pay careful attention during the demos, you can see more of Marketing Pilot functionality areas flash by. With our quick trigger finger (!!) taking screenshots, we can see they are:

Projects
Marketing Execution
Assets & Media
Finance
Performance

Orion Release
Orion is the next product release after Gemini, and Jujhar’s slide shows it coming sometime in the “second half of 2013”. We could try and interpolate where in the second half it might land based on their line, but I think that is a little nuts even for us. Jujhar outlined the main development themes of Orion.

Jujhar gave some quick demos to give a flavor of what the Orion user experience will be like. He really emphasized the “single window” experience to reduce/eliminate the number of pop-up windows that appear. Yes!

This shows how to navigate from one area to another (moving from “Sales” to “Service” for example).

This screenshot shows how users can access recently used records.

This shows how users would access related records (such as Activities and Contacts related to an Account).

After talking through the new Orion UI, Jujhar spent a few minutes talking about mobility updates. The Orion mobile highlights include:

Mobile client application for Sales (Windows 8 and iPad)
Mobile browsing client for iPad for all entities (not just Sales like it is today)…plus this will be available for on-premise customers too!

After mobile, Jujhar talked through some of the planned Business Process updates. “Business Process” generally refers to the record header outlined below. Jujhar mentioned the following updates are coming for Business Processes:

It will be available across multiple entities, including custom entities
It will not be hard-coded anymore
It will be solution aware

Post – Orion
Lastly, Microsoft outlined some of the areas that the product roadmap will address post-Orion. These releases have been mentioned in the past as “Leo” and “Vega” but they are not called out on the roadmap slide above…so guessing the release timing will be very difficult!

Summary
Lots of great stuff and innovation are planned for Microsoft Dynamics CRM, including a total revamp of the user interface for Orion and beyond. Also great to see that Microsoft plans to support Android phones in the future as well.

What’s new with SharePoint 2013 and Dynamics CRM

noreply@blogger.com (Simon Jackson) — Tue, 02 Apr 2013 21:03:00 +0000

What’s new with SharePoint 2013 and Dynamics CRM:

Recently an analyst asked us what is new in SharePoint & Dynamics CRM with the December 2012 service update. I wrote the below note as a quick summary of what’s revolutionary and evolutionary with SharePoint (specifically SP 2013) & Dynamics CRM.

1. Self-Service BI with PowerView

Excel 2013 introduces the ability to create PowerView charts for advanced data analysis by combining a variety of data sources. With the new December 2012 Service Update, data from Dynamics CRM Online can be included as one of the data sources for PowerView.

SharePoint 2013 and SharePoint Online’s new release provides the ability for customers to render PowerView charts (including bubble animations) from Excel workbooks through Excel Web App. This allows professionals to analyze their CRM Online data in a self-service manner with just a browser (no need for everyone to be running Excel 2013). For example, in the below figure you can see that the customer service data from CRM combined with call metrics from IVR systems to produce a report rendered right within the browser.

2. Self-service Portals with BCS
Business Connectivity Services (BCS) in SharePoint 2013 has been enhanced to natively consume OData endpoint making it easy for customers to integrate Dynamics CRM data within SharePoint. For example, customers can now easily build an internal SharePoint portal for casual CRM users. This is very useful in many enterprise scenarios such as help desk ticketing, vendor portal and many more. SharePoint 2013 also introduces the new notion of SharePoint ‘Apps’ that can bundle such customizations and provide developers with the ability to sell them through the Office marketplace. What previously took multiple days of effort, can now be accomplished with just a few clicks.

3. Document library integration enhancements
With the December 2012 service update, the document library integration with SharePoint has now been enhanced to support SharePoint 2013 along with rendering on multiple browsers including Chrome, Safari, Firefox and IE. SharePoint 2013 also has improved eDiscovery for legal compliance and built-in Content Management Interoperability Services (CMIS) compatibility for interoperability with other applications (like Adobe Bridge and Photoshop) making it easier for customers to manage their CRM digital assets with SharePoint.

4. Identity alignment
Office 365 and CRMOnline have shared the same identity platform for some time now. The same identity platform now has been extended to developers for their custom apps as well through Windows Azure Active Directory. This simplifies the user provisioning and administration of joint solutions spanning Dynamics CRM, Office 365 and other applications within an organization.

5. Social enhancements
Last but not least is the social enhancements in December 2012 service update powered by Yammer which becomes the social layer for Dynamics CRM. We are also heavily investing in unified identity, integrated document management and feed aggregation among SharePoint, Yammer and Dynamics CRM for the future.

The list is just a sampling of what I have been able to do discover so far and I’m sure there are a lot more cool integration scenarios that we’ll discover together as a community. Things like FAST search, SharePoint for Internet Sites connecting to CRM and many more scenarios were possible earlier with SharePoint 2010 and they are enhanced in many ways within SharePoint 2013.

Microsoft CRM Online Performance Tips & Tricks - Part 2

noreply@blogger.com (Simon Jackson) — Tue, 02 Apr 2013 20:59:00 +0000

Here's an artical from the MSDN blog from a Jaden one of Microsoft Field Engineers. I thought this was worth reposting for historical reference.

Microsoft CRM Online Performance Tips & Tricks - Part 2:

Continuing on with the other parts that affect performance, I'll discuss: network connectivity, customizations, and the CRM client for Outlook.

Networking:

Connectivity to the CRM Online service is probably one of the larger areas that people think is a contributor to performance. In many cases the end users network connection to the CRM Online service is adequate. What do we deem as an adequate connection to the service?

Bandwidth > 50 Kilobytes per Second
Latency < 150 milliseconds

The way to measure this speed is with the CRM Online Diagnostics Page. Substitute your Organization Name in the URL below.

https://<Organization>.crm.dynamics.com\tools\diagnostics\diag.aspx

Once on the page click the Run button to test your Bandwidth and Latency, as well as the Jscript rendering times on your machine, measured by JavaScript Dom Benchmark.
If your connection is not within the adequate range for all users, some users, or some locations, start to narrow down what is different.

Prioritize the CRM traffic in your network.
If you have branch offices verify that their CRM Online traffic goes directly out to the internet and is not routed through a main office prior to going outside.
- If you have any Proxy Servers or WAN Accelerators, check their configuration.
- If these scan traffic, exclude this for CRM Online.
  - These devices could be modifying the headers of the packets and stopping compression and caching of the CRM Online traffic affecting performance
    - Run a fiddler trace on the client machine to check if compression and caching is being used.
    - Compression: On the Header look to see that you have Transport: "Content-Encoding: gzip"
If it is not working you will see the Transport look like: "Connection: Keep Alive"
Caching: On the Header, look to see that you have Caching: "Vary: Accept-Encoding"
- If it is not working the Cache will show: "Vary: *"

Customizations:

A CRM Online deployment's customizations are often the biggest area that can affect performance that customers don't realize.

First establish what parts of CRM are slow as explained earlier.
- Views
  - How many Fields/Columns are on the View?
    - Only put the fields that the users need to have.
    - Consider disabling the SkipGettingRecordCountForPaging using the OrgDBSettingsTool if it isn't something the users need or use.
    - Record Forms
      - What is on the Form? How many fields, subgrids, and IFrames are there? The more data on the form the longer it takes to retrieve and render on the end users machine.
      - Can you use role based forms to minimize the amount of data on forms for users?
        For example we could have a Sales form and a Service Form. Different user groups may only need access to certain fields, subgrids, IFrames.
        If users don't need to see certain areas of the form all the time, consider collapsing them by default, especially subgrids. This way when the form loads it doesn't have to load this data initially. If the user needs to see it, they can expand it.
        How much impact is your Jscript having on your forms?
        Test by disabling your OnLoad and OnSave events and comparing against your baseline times.
        Optimize your Jscript code.
        Quick Find
        Limit the number of fields you make available for quick find.
        Don't include Pick List values in quick finds if possible.

Outlook Client:

The last component to consider is the CRM Client for Outlook. There are a number of configuration settings that can impact the performance of machine running the CRM Client for Outlook, namely sync process, email tagging and some functionality.

Outlook Synchronization
- Evaluate the filters you have configured. Only synchronize what data you need to have in Outlook.
  - Filters are set in Outlook under File | CRM | Set Personal Options | Synchronization tab | Outlook Filters | Verify the 'Outlook Synchronization Filters' is selected from the drop down. Disable, add, and update the filters to control the data synchronization to Outlook.
  - Set the synchronization schedule to a longer duration so the synchronization process isn't constantly occurring on the machine.
    - The schedule is set in Outlook under File | CRM | Set Personal Options | Synchronization tab | update the 'Schedule automatic synchronization with Outlook folders every' value.
Address Book Provider
- Set the filter to only match only your contacts.
  - The value is set in Outlook under File | CRM | Set Personal Options | Address Book tab | check the radio button for 'Match only against contacts synchronized to Microsoft Dynamics CRM'
  - Set the other records to 'Not Match', or 'Only Match Owning Records'.
    - The option is set in Outlook under File | CRM | Set Personal Options | Synchronization tab
Offline Synchronization Process
- Evaluate the filters you have configured. Only synchronize what data you need to have while working offline. With CRM Online being available wherever you have an internet connection there shouldn't be many times when you'll need to work with data offline.
  - The filters are set in Outlook under File | CRM | Set Personal Options | Synchronization tab | Outlook Filters | Verify the 'Offline Synchronization Filters' is selected from the drop down.
  - Set your Synchronization Schedule to a longer duration so your sync process isn't constantly occurring on your machine.
    - The schedule is set in Outlook under File | CRM | Set Personal Options | Local Data tab | update the 'Update local data every' minutes value, and validate the checkbox is selected.
Pinned Views
- Pinned views in Outlook take up memory on your client machine. You can decrease this by following the steps below.
  - Disable MAPI Caching Reg Key
    - This will in turn pull down data to local SQL cache.
Email Tagging Queries

Minimize these by queries by adjusted System Settings within the CRM UI that can control how often these queries execute.

These settings are configured in CRM | Settings |Administration |System Settings | Outlook Tab

Uncheck the 'Perform checks as new e-mail is received'.
Update the 'Promote Incoming e-mail every' to a longer duration.

End of post.

Microsoft CRM Online Performance Tips & Tricks - Part 1

noreply@blogger.com (Simon Jackson) — Tue, 02 Apr 2013 20:54:00 +0000

Here's an artical from the MSDN blog from a Jaden one of Microsoft Field Engineers. I thought this was worth reposting for historical reference.

Microsoft CRM Online Performance Tips & Tricks - Part 1:

In working with CRM Online customers, performance has been and continues to be an area of focus. I regularly have conversations with customers on performance with CRM Online and how to approach the topic and the different areas that impact it. I'll cover some of the important parts of finding the cause of your performance issue and then how to address them.

Where do you start

One of the biggest hurdles with performance issues is figuring out where to start.
The first point I always bring up is that performance is subjective. What is acceptable for one user is not for another user. The same can be said between two customers.

Find out from your users what they view as an acceptable level of performance in CRM Online.

You'll need to make sure that the users' expectations are realistic. If your end users state the need to have views and forms to open in sub second time, their expectations need to be adjusted. A basic installation with minimal customization with all of the performance tuning completed will take at least a couple of seconds to open/close records and views.

When users are defining their levels of performance you'll need to have them specify what parts of the application and what actions they are performing as times these will vary. For example: Opening the My Accounts View, or Saving a Lead Record.

Once you have determined what is slow and what an acceptable level of performance is, you'll need to measure your current times to get a baseline. This way as changes are made to improve performance you can see how much of an impact is made.
- I use Fiddler to measure performance and page load times.
One additional point is that CRM Online takes advantage of 'warm' page loads. When you are measuring performance, make sure you are doing so with 'warm' page loads.
- A 'warm' page load would be a subsequent open/view of a page/record/view. In other words, if you delete your Internet Explorer cache, then open an Account record in CRM, this would be a 'cold' page load. If you were to close that Account record, and open a different Account record, that would be a 'warm' page load.
- CRM Online caches files on the client to speed up processes in CRM. With a 'cold' page load, we would not have any of the images, files, etc. that make up web page cached on the client machine.
The last part I like to check with performance is who the performance issue affects.
- Are there only certain users that this issue affects?
- How are those users different from other users that are not having performance issues?
  - What's the location of the users that are affected?
    - Are those users are in a different geographic location?
  - Do those users have the same type of hardware as other users?
  - Do those users have the same type of software as other users?

Once you've defined the performance issue you'll need to start looking into the different areas that impact performance.

Machine Hardware
Machine Software
Network Connectivity
Customizations
Outlook Client Configuration

Hardware and Software

The first area to look into that affects performance is the client machine's hardware and software.

Verify the client machine meets the minimum hardware requirements, and ideally meets or exceeds the recommendations.
Verify the machine is running Internet Explorer 9 or 10, or at least Internet Explorer 8.
- The Java Script rendering has been vastly improved in Internet Explorer 9/10 and provides the best performance experience.
Configure your Internet Explorer Settings for optimal performance.
- In Internet Explorer in the menu bar go to Tools | Internet Options | General Tab | under the Browsing History area, verify that the checkbox for 'Delete browsing history on exit' is unchecked.
- While still in the General tab click on Settings under the Browsing history area.
  - Select 'Automatically' under the 'Check for newer versions of stored pages'
  - Set the 'Disk space to use' to 250 MB
- In Internet Explorer in the menu bar go to click on Page | Zoom | select 100%
- Disable other IE addins and test against your baseline. We've see addins that have added additional overhead.
Check what other programs are running on the machine. These other programs could be starving the machine of resources which could help with the performance of CRM.
Find out what virus scanning and security packages are running on the machine.
- Disable the scanning on the CRM Website (*.crm.dynamics.com)
- Consider excluding file directories from scanning, in the case of the Outlook Client the installation folder for CRM, ie. C:\Program Files\Microsoft Dynamics CRM
Set the Power Settings on the client machine to High Performance.
- Go to Start | Control Panel | Power Options | Advanced Power Settings | and select High Performance.

Debugging CRM 2011 Plugins with the Plugin Profiler

noreply@blogger.com (Simon Jackson) — Tue, 02 Apr 2013 20:47:00 +0000

I read the below post on using the plugin profiler for debugging plugin's, which is useful to me for CRM online environments and also client production environments.

It's easy to follow and touches on it's limitations at the end. Anyway it's from the Sonoma Blog by one of their senor consultants BJ Dibbern.

The original post can be found here.

Below is a repost for my historical reference:

There are a bunch of scenarios where you might want to debug plug-ins in CRM 2011 where at first glance it may not seem feasible. Need to debug while others are debugging? Need to debug sandboxed plug-ins? Plug-ins for CRM Online? Plug-ins that are registered in a production environment? All of these scenarios have a valid solution, and one that is not that hard to achieve.
Enter the Plug-in Profiler. Long story short, it lets you debug plug-ins offline.

While you may have heard of the Plug-in Profiler before, you may not have considered it for your situation. This may be because it’s not as readily advertised as the standard debugging process of un-sandboxed plug-ins in a local on-premise deployment. Hopefully this post will help you have a better understanding of why the Plug-in Profiler is a great tool, and how it may be able to help you in the future.

First things first, you need to ensure that you have the latest and greatest version of the Plug-in Registration Tool which is included in the Dynamics CRM 2011 SDK. You can grab the latest version of it here: http://www.microsoft.com/en-us/download/details.aspx?id=24004.

If you have an older copy of the Plug-in Registration Tool, you may not be able to see the Plug-in Profiler as it was introduced in version 5.0.5 of the SDK. In the latest releases of the SDK, you should find the Plug-in Registration tool in the Bin folder of the SDK download.

I’m going to assume in this post that you are familiar with the Plug-in Registration Tool already and know how to connect to an environment. If not, please see this article for more information: Walkthrough: Register a Plug-in Using the Plug-in Registration Tool.

Now let’s follow through the few basic steps of debugging a plug-in with the Plug-in Profiler.

Connect to your target environment.

If you have not already, register a plug-in and step in the target CRM environment. Ensure that you keep a copy of the debug version of the plug-in assembly on the computer where you are running the tool – this is needed to use the Profiler.

In the main toolbar of the Registration Tool, select Install Profiler. This will take a few minutes to complete as it installs a solution to your target environment. You can uninstall the solution at anytime without any worry.

Now we can enable profiling on a plug-in step. To do so, select a plug-in step (not a plug-in class) and click on the Profile button (highlighted below).

In the dialog that presents, the defaults are fine for most use cases. Click OK

Back in CRM, perform an action that causes an exception to occur in the plug-in step you are profiling. You will be presented with a Business Process Error dialog box. Note the key difference here is that the exception is not immediately visible in the dialog. Instead the error detail actually contains the profile the tools uses to allow you to playback execution.

Click the Download Log File button and save the details to your computer. This is the profile that the Profiler will use to allow you to playback execution.

Open your Visual Studio solution and attach to debut the process named PluginRegistration.exe and set your desired break point in the code.

Back in the Plug-in Registration Tool, click the Debug button, the below dialog will be presented.

In the Step #1 box, browse to the file we downloaded in step 7.

In the Step #2 box, browse to the location of the debug version of your plug-in assembly. The plug-in type (field labeled “Plug-in”) should default if you’ve selected the correct log. Note that if you get an error here stating it could not parse the organization service fault, that you probably don’t have profiling enabled correctly.

Once you’re ready to debug, click the Start Plug-in Execution button on the dialog. This will allow you to step through your plug-in as you would normally when attached to the actual service.

Note that while it’s an awesome and powerful tool, the Profiler isn’t perfect.

One thing to be aware of: errors with partial trust do not seem to be caught when attached to the profiler. You will need to debug those another way. You’ll notice that in playback of these types of issues, the profiler will throw an exception (generally on service calls) basically telling you that you’ve stepped through the execution past the point where the actual exception occurred.

Other than that one caveat however, the tool is excellent and I highly recommend checking it out.

Head, Heart and Hands: Setting Up Your Team For Success

noreply@blogger.com (Simon Jackson) — Tue, 02 Apr 2013 20:37:00 +0000

I was reading a post from Leon an CRM MVP about motivating your team at work, I found this interesting as it is relevant to my role at work but also how he convoy's his point succinctly.

You can see the original post here: Head, Heart and Hands: Setting Up Your Team For Success

Here's a re-post:

Motivation Theories

I did an MBA about ten years ago and learned a bunch of ways to encourage people to do things you need them to do and set it up so they actually enjoy it. You learn how to divine what gets them out of bed in the morning and whether a dinner out with their partner or a bag of cash is going to get the best results.
Of the various theories we covered, one has stuck with me and is quite easy to use. It is Kehr’s Compensatory Model (http://www.tu-chemnitz.de/phil/psych/professuren/sozpsy/Abstracts/2004-Kehr-Motivation-Volition.pdf). The paper is quite academic so feel free to move to the pretty picture on page 12.

The author of this paper was my lecturer which was HIS motivation for teaching it.
Essentially, people are driven by Implicit motives (what is in their heart), Explicit motives (what is in their head) and Perceived abilities (hands/what they believe they can do).
For effortless achievement (the ‘flow experience’, similar to Csikszentmihalyi’s concept of ‘the zone’), all three must be in alignment.
As an example of misalignment, alignment of Explicit and Perceived abilities means someone can do something but their heart may not be in it. An example may be giving up smoking. Our head tells us it is good for us and we certainly have the ability but if our heart is not in it, it simply will not happen without a lot of willpower (volition).

Using The Model

How I use this model is in one-on-one meetings. By discussing what gives people passion (heart), where they want to go with their career (head) and whether they have the tools to do their job (hands) identifies what is blocking them from doing the best job they can.
To be honest it feels a little weird being in a small room and trying to pry the innermost thoughts of my team out in the open but using a model like this adds a level of formalism which makes it easier.

Addressing the Gaps

Let us say the person has passion (heart) and they are heading where they want to go in their career (head) but their skills are not quite up to scratch or they do not have access to the information they need (hands). This is addressed with things like training, mentoring or setting up better information systems.
If the heart is lacking i.e. their career is on track and they have the tools they need but they are going through the motions, perhaps a better understanding of their needs is required, perhaps there needs to be more fun in the workplace or perhaps they have fears which need to be addressed.
If the head is lacking i.e. they love their work and they have the tools they need but they lack direction, this can be addressed by giving them a vision to work towards, setting clear goals or removing goal conflicts.

Conclusions

If you are managing a team and have one-on-ones with them (perhaps it is the annual appraisal), Kehr’s model provides a useful framework for starting a conversation about what is working well and, more importantly, what is in the way. It also then gives guidance on how to address these problems. Unlike other models it is also easy to explain so your team understand the framework and appreciate what you are trying to do. Good luck.

Announcing Sonoma Partners Editable Grid for Dynamics CRM 2011

noreply@blogger.com (Simon Jackson) — Mon, 04 Mar 2013 22:47:00 +0000

This post was orginally posed on the Sonoma blog here.

A common request that we hear from our Microsoft Dynamics CRM clients is the ability to quickly edit records directly in the grid, without having to open up each record one at a time to make updates. The great news is that now you can!

Sonoma Partners is pleased to announce the latest and greatest FREE solution available for download. You heard that correct. This solution is absolutely free and just takes a couple minutes to install.

The Sonoma Partners Editable Grid for Dynamics CRM 2011 can be downloaded from the the download page. This is available for both CRM Online and CRM OnPrem versions of CRM 2011.

The editable grid solution works with the Lead, Contact, Account, Opportunity, and Case entities out of the box. You can also enable the solution to work with custom entities. Those instructions are detailed on the help documentation for the editable grid solution.

As mentioned above, after downloading the solution, the installation is very simple. Just import the solution using CRM’s native import process and you’re done. After that you’ll notice an Edit Records button in the ribbon of those entities listed above.

Clicking on this button will open up a new window (or tab) that has the editable grid in it. The editable grid that appears will have all the views that are available for that entity (System and Personal) so you can filter between records to edit. The view and data that appear by default is the view and data that was appearing in CRM’s native grid when you clicked the Edit Records button.

After selecting your view to work with, you can update any field that’s editable within CRM. System fields (such as Contact Full Name, Created On, Modified By, etc.) are not editable.

Fields that are read only on forms aren’t automatically read only in the editable grids as CRM 2011 allows multiple forms.
However, you can even configure additional columns to be read only by using the Editable Grid Settings entity.

You’ll need to create one record in this entity
per entity that you want to include additional read only fields.

Simply enter in the schema name of the entity, and a comma delimited list of field schema names that you want to make read only.

Functionality that’s included with the Sonoma Partners editable grid:

You can update any field that’s editable (taking in mind the detail in the section above). Changes aren’t saved until you click one of the save buttons.
You can save the changes and stay on the editable grid, or save and close the editable grid window.
Any unsaved changes you also have the chance to undo with the Cancel Changes button.
You can open the records in the native CRM form by clicking the magnifying glass on the far of the grid.
You can create a new record. This assumes that the view you’re using has all required fields included in it.
You can change the view using the view selector.
You can also filter the data more using the down arrow on each column. This is the same filtering that CRM makes available in the native grids.

Grab your FREE copy of the Sonoma Partners Editable Grid from the download page and enjoy!

iPad UI with Microsoft CRM 2011 Online

noreply@blogger.com (Simon Jackson) — Mon, 04 Mar 2013 22:38:00 +0000

This is a good summary of the new iPad experience you get with Microsoft CRM online. This was originally posted here from Microsoft.

Some years ago, CRM entered the mobile world with the release of Mobile Express. We’ve heard from customers about the limitations of this experience, and we’ve worked hard to address their concerns. In our current release, we’ve made a serious commitment to our mobile customers by offering Mobile Safari support.

We’re proud to say users can now access Microsoft Dynamics CRM Online from an iPad.

Let’s look at what we’ve shipped.

What is the experience?

We designed this iPad experience to solve the key Sales scenario of taking a lead from opportunity to close. We optimized the user interface for touch interaction, with work surfaces presented “flat” inline. No more annoying popups!

You can access CRM on the iPad from Mobile Safari without having to install a separate application. You just have to be connected to the internet to access your data.

Who gets the iPad experience?

iPad experience is available ONLY for CRM Online customers and only for orgs that are opted in to the new user experience (to do this, accept the Product update from the settings -> administration page). Sign up via the web browser on a computer, and sign in to your org on the iPad.

How do I opt in to the iPad experience?

There is no separate opt-in for the iPad. As long as you opt into the new experience by installing Product Updates, you can access your org from an iPad.

Which iPad does this work on?

We support this experience on iPad devices which have iOS6.0 and above, with the exception of iPad Mini. We do not redirect to Mobile Express in iPad Mini, nor do we offer this new experience there.

Which components are supported?

The iPad experience supports the following key components

Dashboards
Entity grids
Activity Feeds
New Forms for these records:
- Contact
- Opportunity
- Lead
- Account

Dashboards

This is your landing page by default. You set up a default dashboard when you’re logged in from a computer, and it loads that dashboard when you log in.

Dashboard renders with full capabilities
Dashboard picker is available to switch between dashboards
Expand charts to drill down into them
You cannot create a new dashboard but can switch between already created dashboards

Record Grids

Selecting a record from the sitemap loads the record grids.

Select the view you want
Sort columns in the grid

You can view and drill down into charts from record grids.

Clicking the Expand button to maximize the chart—this replaces the double-click on the chart slider.

Sitemap

This is restricted to COLA (Contact, Opportunity, Lead, and Account) records, Dashboards, and What’s New. The sitemap honors permissions on these items, but you can’t customize it.

If you switch to a portrait layout, the sitemap automatically hides. It comes back when you switch to landscape.

You can collapse the sitemap in the landing pages and in the new forms to get more space

You can create a new record by selecting the entity in the sitemap and hitting the “+” button.

Forms

Opening a record or creating a new record will open a new tab.

For the COLA records, we render the new form mode with all the capabilities of the new form experience. Auto-Save will fire just like the web browser as you make changes.

All other records render in Read Optimized mode

To make quick changes in the record from Read Optimized mode, click Edit and Mobile Express loads inline. If we detect scripts in the form, we will load the form in Mobile Express.

Activity Feeds

What’s New is available in the iPad experience as well. You can create a new post, reply to an existing post, or like a post—just as you do in the web browser.

How have we optimized for iPad?

We’ve done a few things to optimize the experience for touch

We support both portrait and landscape mode
- Switching between them collapses the left navigation pane automatically
- You can also manually collapse the sitemap
Made things easier to tap by increasing the spacing between them
Flattened more popups, like Delete confirmation, and Lookups
Removed the ribbon at the top—it took up too much space, and invoked a lot of popups
Removed the help visor to save space
Removed the jump bar(A-Z) from grids

Limitations

Here are the restrictions of the iPad experience

Since we render new forms, Read Optimized forms, and Mobile Express forms, there is no JavaScript support. We detect events, and launch those forms in Mobile Express
No ribbon actions. Command bar in the forms is the only thing that is available
No sitemap customizations.
Yammer integration doesn’t work in iPad. You have to go to the Yammer application to view Yammer posts in an iPad
We have turned off Pinch & Zoom due to restrictions with our current form layouts.
Voice Over doesn’t work.
Lync integration does not work. Lync integration requires Internet Explorer.
Skype integration works from grids but not in forms.

How do I go back to my old Mobile Express experience?

We understand that this experience targets a particular scenario and if this doesn’t work for you, we have provided an easy way for you to switch to Mobile Express and continue using the experience that you did before this release.

This is our first big step into the mobility world. Look out for more capabilities in our future releases.

SharePoint Online & CRM Online Document Management

noreply@blogger.com (Simon Jackson) — Sun, 17 Feb 2013 20:21:00 +0000

Donna Edwards original post here:

In November 2011, Eric Boocock from Microsoft announced a change to SharePoint Online (Office 365). The change included the ability to enable document management using the SharePoint List Component with CRM Online.

Since I’ve been waiting for this feature for several months, I decided to give it a try. The first thing I did was to clear a 4 hour block of time from my schedule to implement the solution. I was aware that several articles list a few clicks here and a few clicks there, a tweak here and a tweak there and you’re done. I also understand that one person’s experience with a new feature can vary from another’s so I decided to allow ample time to deal with any unexpected issues.

The key article I used to understand the steps required to implement the solution is one written by the Microsoft Premier Field Engineers; CRM Online Document Management with SharePoint Online (Office 365). If you don’t already follow this blog, I encourage you to consider adding it to your list. The articles are packed full of great advice, helpful hints, issue resolution and more.

A couple of things you need to get started:

CRM Online, you can obtain a trial account if you don’t have an account.
Office 365, you can obtain a trial account if you don’t have one.

You’ll have two choices with the Office 365 account; Small Business (P1) or Midsize / Enterprise (E3). Ensure you select the E3 type as P1 does not have CRM Online integration capability. Once you’ve completed the sign up and activation steps, you are ready to begin the integration.

The first step in the process is to download and save the Microsoft Dynamics CRM 2011 List Component for Microsoft SharePoint Server 2010 to a folder on your hard drive. I created a folder for the list component so it would be easy to find when I needed it.
The list component will download as an exe file which you can select to run after the download is complete. Run the exe and accept the license terms when the screen appears.

When you select the Continue button you will be prompted to save the extracted files to a folder. I selected the same folder where I saved the original download.
You should be able to see the list component file in the directory when the extraction is complete.

Now the fun begins.

Sign into your Office 365 account and select Team Site from the top navigation menu or select Visit SharePoint Home from the left navigation menu under Team Site:

Next select Site Actions from the top navigation menu and select Site Settings

Select Solutions from the Galleries section

Select anywhere in the Solution page and the Upload button will appear on the Ribbon. The dynamic ribbon is one of the nice features of SharePoint 2010 and many other Microsoft Office and business application products

Select the Upload button and browse out to the list component file. Select the list component file and select the Open button from the lower right.

Leave the Overwrite existing file checkbox and select Ok.

Select the Activate button and select Close

The SharePoint List component will upload to the SharePoint site. You should see the component listed with a Status of Activated

Copy your SharePoint URL to notepad or some other document and save it for the next step.
You can copy the URL from the address bar of Internet Explorer or go back to Site Settings and it will be in the left window under Site Information

At this point you are ready to configure CRM Online to use SharePoint Online as the document repository. It’s now time to login into CRM Online.

Log into CRM Online and select Settings, Document Management from the left navigation menu and select Document Management Settings

You can now select the entities that you want to allow for document management or leave the default selections. You should also copy the SharePoint URL into the URL field.

Select Next and CRM Online will validate the settings to ensure that the SharePoint URL is valid and available.
- If CRM Online is not able to validate the URL, you will receive a message asking you to valid the site or correct the entry.
- If CRM Online is able to validate the URL a dialog window will open asking you to select the Folder Structure

If you leave the default settings, the folder structure will default to a simple approach; Entity, Record Name, Documents.
If you select the Based on entity checkbox, the folder structure will be more complex and locating documents from the SharePoint repository could prove more challenging for the end user. I recommend keeping the structure simple but you’ll need to decide which is best for your implementation.
Select Next

Select Ok to continue and the document libraries are created
Once completed you will receive a status message.

If all entities completed successfully you can select the Finish button. If not, select back and resolve issues as needed.
Next, go to one of the entities that you selected for document management and open an existing record or create a new record as needed.
For this example, I opened an Account record and selected documents from the left navigation menu.

The first time you select Documents from an Entity, you will receive a notification that the folder will be created in the SharePoint site.

Select Ok to continue
Once the initial folder is created you will be able to add a new document or take a different action.

At this point you are done with the steps required to integrate the systems. It is now time to get familiar with the new feature. Adding new folders, changing document locations, uploading new documents are just a few of the actions available. I encourage you to explore the various options to gain a comfort level with each. As you will discover, it is very easy to open SharePoint from CRM Online and go back and forth between applications.

Although I cleared my calendar for 4 hours to ensure I had enough time to implement and troubleshoot the solution, it took less than 30 minutes to complete. It actually took me four times longer to write this article than it took to integrate CRM Online with SharePoint online.

Well done, Microsoft, this is about as easy as it gets.

Microsoft Dynamics CRM and Agile Development Methodology

noreply@blogger.com (Simon Jackson) — Sun, 17 Feb 2013 20:15:00 +0000

Original posting here: Microsoft Dynamics CRM and Agile Development Methodology

Consulting companies like PowerObjects often use a predefined methodology during Microsoft Dynamics CRM implementation projects. We do this because good methodologies provide a roadmap and best practices to guide the project team.

Most methodologies for implementing packaged software are primarily based on a traditional waterfall model.   This model is a set of sequential processes contained in phases such as Analysis, Design, Construction, Testing, Deployment and Maintenance that represent a single release of software.

The length of each phase is based on the amount of work required to complete a set of agreed upon features or requirements for each release. Each subsequent release requires the project team to start the methodology over again from the beginning.   When implementing Microsoft Dynamics CRM, project teams will meet with each business unit to analyze their business requirements in full before starting to design or build the solution. Once the requirements have been identified, the team will move on to designing, constructing and deploying the system.

More recently, software developers and consulting companies have begun using a more iterative approach to implementing software like Agile Development. Agile can be traced back to the early 1970’s but has become more prevalent since the introduction of derivatives like Scrum and Extreme in the late 1990’s.   Before we can dive into CRM and agile development, let’s take a deeper look at Scrum.

Scrum

The Scrum methodology is based on three concepts; short iterative build/deployment cycles called “Sprints”; self-directed and empowered project teams and minimal documentation. Like Waterfall methodologies, requirements are gathered through interviews with business owners and requirements gathering sessions. The deliverables from these events are captured as “User Stories”. User stories are business requirements from the user’s perspective. For example, a typical user story is written as “As a sales rep, I would like to store customer information so I may quickly retrieve it at a later date before meeting with the customer”. The User Story also contains the acceptance criteria as defined by the business. For example, the acceptance criteria in our previous example would list the fields needed to store customer information. The user story also contains the test cases needed by QA to determine if the software meets the acceptance criteria.

Releases

Scrum projects consist of releases and sprints. Sprints are short two or three week work windows and a release is a collection of sprints. Prior to the first sprint, the project team will conduct user interviews and build a collection of user stories called a product backlog. This is often called Sprint 0. For more extensive projects, the requirements gathering process can be lengthy and occur prior to Sprint 0. Some project teams will utilize alpha sprints such as Sprint A or Sprint B and place all requirements gathering activities into these two or three week long alpha sprints. At the end of Sprint 0, the project team will point the product backlog

Planning (Scrum) Poker or Pointing

Pointing, also known as Planning Poker, is a process in which the members of the team assign a point value to each user story. Points are a theoretical representation of the effort needed to complete the user story. Points don’t represent time, but rather the combination of work, risk and complexity. Each member of the team is asked to point the user story simultaneously. Team members who point lower or higher than the group consensus are asked to explain their score. The objective of pointing is to reach team consensus regarding the user story and to hear the concerns of each team member.
Once the product backlog has been pointed, the business owner is responsible for placing user stories into individual sprints based on the needs of the business. The number of users stories contained in any given sprint is based on the total number of points. Mature sprint teams, can often work on Sprints with 150 points or more. Prior to the start of each sprint, the project team repoints the user stories contained in the sprint. This is required as the project team learns throughout the process and a user story may become easier or more difficult once prior sprints are completed.

Sprints

Each sprint consists of the following activities: Planning, design, development, testing, acceptance and demonstration. The idea is to develop small chunks of software, demonstrate it to the business and move forward. This allows for continuous improvement while reacting to the changing needs of the business.

Reports

Agile projects use a variety of reports to track the project’s progress. One such report is the Task Progress Report. At the beginning of each sprint, team members are responsible for entering tasks for their assigned stories. Throughout the project, each member of the team will close out a task as soon as they are finished with the required work. The Task Progress Report shows the total number of tasks and how many are closed, in progress and active. As you reach the end of the sprint, the number of active and in progress tasks start to reduce. This is also called burn down. Any tasks and user stories left unfinished at the end of the sprint get pulled out of the sprint and moved to a future sprint.

CRM and Scrum

So now that we know a bit more about Agile and Scrum, how would you use this methodology to implement Microsoft Dynamics CRM. We can use a standard Salesforce Automation (SFA) project as a guide. With SFA projects, the typical user constituencies include inside sales, outside sales, sales assistants and management. The standard CRM entities to implement would include Accounts, Contacts, Opportunities, and Activities as a minimum. In addition to the entity development, there are often workflows, data migration tasks and reporting requirements as well.

CRM Pre-planning and Sprint 0

To build the product backlog, the project team would interview each user group to gather their requirements. This is a similar approach to the analysis phase of the waterfall methodology. The requirements would be documented as user stories with acceptance criteria. The user stories would include requirements relating to data entry, searching, data conversion, integrations, workflows and reporting. At the end of Sprint 0, the project team along with the business owner would prioritize the users stories into future sprints.

Sprint 1

Sprint 1 is the perfect sprint for configuring the servers, installing the software and setting the base security rules. All of these tasks must be accomplished before the project team can move into development.

Sprint 2

Since Accounts are one of the fundamental CRM Entities and we have completed some of the server and security work in Sprint 1, we will start Accounts in Sprint 2. The users stories for accounts would include stories that would translate into tasks for creating forms, creating views, data migrations, reports and workflows. For example, the user story might say, “As a sales rep, I would like to save information about companies I am selling to inside CRM”. The user story would detail the fields such as account name, account number, physical addresses, billing address, phone numbers, etc. A second story would describe any data integration or importing requirements. For example, “As a sales rep, I would like to convert my existing Act accounts so I can view them in Microsoft Dynamics CRM”. It is important to remember that you wouldn’t be able to include stories about contacts until those entities are created in future sprints. So if we included contacts in Sprint 3, we could include a user story that establishes the relationship between the account and contact in sprint 1 or future sprints. For example, “As a sales rep, I would like to associate a person with the company they work for and store this information in CRM”. For data migration tasks, the activities would be limited to the fields identified in the user stories for Accounts only.
At the end of Sprint 2, you would demonstrate full Account functionality or even deploy Accounts to your users.

Sprint 3 – 5 Contacts, Activities and Opportunities.

Each subsequent sprint would handle another CRM entity. In Sprint 3, we will move to Contacts, Sprint 4 would be Activities and Sprint 5 would be Opportunities. Each sprint builds on the code written in previous sprints.

Sprint 5 – Firming

The idea behind firming sprints is to catch up on issues, bugs or refined requirements that the project team encounters during previous sprints.

Sprint 6 – Deployment

If the project team did not deploy at the completion of individual sprints, you can always add a deployment Sprint as part of your initial release.

Conclusion

The benefits of Agile (Scrum) development for a Microsoft Dynamics CRM implementation are the iterative nature of short sprint cycles. Changes in business processes or new requirements can be quickly implemented by the project team without the need to wait for the “next” release. In addition, the short development cycles also tend to expose risks and issues earlier in the project as opposed to later development phases. To learn more about Agile development and Scrum, please visit the Scrum Alliance @ http://www.scrumalliance.org/ or the Agile Alliance @ http://www.agilealliance.org/

Custom CRM 2011 Form Notifications for UR12

noreply@blogger.com (Simon Jackson) — Sun, 17 Feb 2013 20:13:00 +0000

Nice post by David Berry on using the notification area in CRM 2011 after Rollup 12:

Before Update Rollup 12, it was relatively simple to use the original “form alert” hack (seen here, here, here, and here) to produce custom, inline alerts and notices for the end user. It’s a great feature of the form, and I wish I knew why using it is unsupported.

Alas, many realized that these customizations would be undone by Update Rollup 12, and indeed they have. So, allow me to show you what appears to be the “Microsoft” way of accessing the new form notification system. The added bonus is that this method requires no additional libraries or external references, and should be cross-browser. (Disclaimer: the following information was not released or documented by Microsoft; I discovered it after a few hours of pouring over Developer Tools in IE10.)

The original hack could never have been cross-browser, because it relied on the “htc” behavior file which backed the original “crmNotifications” element. Fortunately, these functions haven’t changed… just moved to a new home. Here’s the old way (pre-UR12):

var notificationsArea = document.getElementById('crmNotifications');

notificationsArea.AddNotification('noteId1', 1, 'namespace', 'Message.');

And here’s the new way (post-UR12):

var notificationsList = Sys.Application.findComponent('crmNotifications');

notificationsList.AddNotification('noteId1', 1, 'namespace', 'Message.');

Both examples do the same thing in their respective CRM 2011 revisions. This customization remains as unsupported as it ever was; however there is relatively little danger in using it.

CRM 2011 - Control Which Browsers Your Organization Supports

noreply@blogger.com (Simon Jackson) — Thu, 17 Jan 2013 06:56:00 +0000

This article describes a CRM 2011 managed solution that enables a CRM organization with Update Rollup 12 or the December 2012 Service Update to control which browsers are supported for their organization.

It's a good article and I particularly love the detail on how it technically works and the javascript.

Link: Control Which Browsers Your Organization Supports

What Does the Solution Do?

When the Control Browser Support for Organization managed solution is installed and someone accesses Microsoft Dynamics CRM using a browser that is supported by Microsoft Dynamics CRM but is not supported by the organization, the user briefly sees the Microsoft Dynamics CRM application as the page loads. However, as soon as the browser support rules are applied, the user will be directed to a page that explains what browsers the organization supports.

A system administrator can add a security role called Any Browser Allowed that is included in the solution to any user who should be exempt from this behavior. This allows for developers who are writing and testing scripts to use other browsers supported by Microsoft Dynamics CRM. Also, users who have the system administrator security role cannot be prevented from using Internet Explorer.

This solution can only restrict access for pages that display the ribbon. This solution is not intended to protect data. This solution enables an organization to take steps to enforce policies about browsers they support. It is possible for a user to defeat this solution and access the application by using an unapproved browser. Many browsers include capabilities to spoof other browsers by changing the navigation.userAgent property to represent a different browser.

CRM 2011 Mitch Milam's Free Utilites

noreply@blogger.com (Simon Jackson) — Sat, 05 Jan 2013 01:31:00 +0000

I was googling for a CRM tool today and stumbled over some free tools on Mitch Milam's site, I found a few useful tools there so thought it worth the mention.

Mitch Milam's CRM 2011 tools


Find Privilege Locates the name of a user or a CRM security privilege given a valid ID.
CRM 2011 Development Skeleton A Visual Studio 2010 project to help jump-start your CRM 2011 development efforts.
Export Web Resources for CRM 2011 A Visual Studio 2010 project to help jump-start your CRM 2011 development efforts. See this post for the original announcement and this post for an update.
Count CRM Users If you have multiple organizations and you found a need to get a count of the number of users across all of your organizations, then this utility is for you.. See this post for more detail.
CRM 2011 Plugin Configuration A customization that allows you to store settings for plugins inside of CRM itself. See this post for more detail.

CRM 2011 Date handling across different timelines

noreply@blogger.com (Simon Jackson) — Sun, 23 Dec 2012 19:58:00 +0000

Here's a good post from George Doubinski on handling Date fields across different timelines: How to correctly record the end of the world in CRM:

Far Away Long Time Ago

Once upon a time at precisely 6:15 PM on a pleasant spring afternoon in far far away land a baby was born. The baby grew up, got a girlfriend, learned how to swim, finished high school, got his heart broken, drunk profusely, got a degree, fell in love, got married, quit science, moved to Australia, lost a fortune, cloned himself twice, got his friends together to celebrate his birthday then ruined the celebration by realising that it's not his birthday. You see, when he was born far, far away, it was already tomorrow in Sydney.

I consider myself lucky, in fact, that I was not born on 31^st of December that would make me one year older in Australia.

Money To Be Made But The End Is Nigh

If you think that birthday example is far fetched - after all who cares if you start celebrations just a few hours earlier (though in some countries it's considered to be a very bad luck, look for #87) - but how about postponing company's profits by moving money from New York branch late afternoon on 30^th of June to Auckland, New Zealand so that money leave the bank this financial year but arrive to the destination in the next one?

Of course, it all pales compared to the end of the world but here I am really confused. Is it a rolling event with the world slowly rotating into abyss? Or is it a preset moment in space-time continuum when the last timezone rolls over? Edit: apparently it all blows at winter soltice at precisely 11:11 AM UTC. Not cool, I'd rather have it at 21:12:12 UTC but that would get a lot of people off the hook and into tomorrow. Rolling end of the world is so much cooler which would have been bad news for our Samoans neighbours - not only they already lost Friday, they would perish first - that's what you get for cheating the system!

CRM To The Rescue

Regardless whether humanity will end its existence one by one or expire all at the same time, one thing for sure, I don't want to rely on my feeble memory to remember that date. A few minutes later our CRM had a new entity Important Date with a date-only field.

Very nice. Let's find out now how our users from Seattle, WA branch are going to see that list.

March Simpleton Day, an extra day to party on New Year and my birthday is not quite right either. All due to the fact that CRM does not have a true date-only field, and for "date only" fields always sends midnight to the server where it's duly converted to UTC and stored away. Only to be converted to a local date/time when users ask for it.

We've had some explanations of the design, good discussions and some attempts to fix the problem which can be distilled to the javascript code on the client setting time portion of the field to 12:00 PM. Nice try, our egocentric US friends, it does not work if you have users in Australia, New Zealand, Japan, China and many other countries that are massive 12-19 hours ahead of you.

What we really need is a datetime field not dissimilar to the money field where we would use multiple database columns and, in addition to a UTC value, save the timezone information, updating user timezone and include ability to eliminate offset altogether creating a true date-only field. But until that date comes, we need a reliable workaround.

Rescue To The CRM

Cool running

As for our cheeky Samoan neighbours, the move in 2011 to a whopping +14 hours zone was plain cheating. Now they are up to 25 hours ahead of their sibling American Samoa and the phrase "come back tomorrow" never was more ambiguous.
I call this "the lap effect" - running around the stadium so fast that you can see your own butt. As a result, the workaround does not work for Samoan users but they brought it upon themselves (same with being first in line for the rolling end of the world).

I wish I could take a credit for the solution but it was given to me on a platter by one of the members of Dynamics CRM team who observed that the following SQL:

SELECT fiscalcalendarstart FROM OrganizationBase

yields something similar to 2011-07-01 10:59:00.000. As you guessed correctly, the secret sauce is 10:59 and the solution is to force time portion of the field to 10:59 AM UTC. Converted to user's date time when value is retrieved, results in correct date for all time zones in the world including cool +13 hours for New Zealand in summer but excluding some uninhabited US islands, tiny Chatham Islands and all Samoan Islands (though American Samoa will work correctly in summer);

Cool Stuff - The Code

Here is the entire code of the plugin. To keep it short, I have not included any error handling or safeguards.

using System;
using System.Collections.Generic;
using Microsoft.Xrm.Sdk;

namespace Georged.TrueDate
{
    public class Plugin : IPlugin
    {
        private List<string> dateAttributes;
        public Plugin(string unsecure, string secure)
        {
            dateAttributes = unsecure == null ? new List<string>() : new List<string>(
                unsecure.Split(
                    new char[] { ',', ';', ' ', '\r', '\n' },
                    StringSplitOptions.RemoveEmptyEntries));

            // Sanitise the list
            foreach (var systemAttribute in new string[] { "createdon", "modifiedon", "overriddencreatedon" })
            {
                if (dateAttributes.Contains(systemAttribute)) dateAttributes.Remove(systemAttribute);
            }
        }

        public void Execute(IServiceProvider serviceProvider)
        {
            IPluginExecutionContext context = (IPluginExecutionContext)serviceProvider.GetService(typeof(IPluginExecutionContext));
            Entity entity = (Entity)context.InputParameters["Target"];
            foreach (var attr in dateAttributes)
            {
                if(entity.Contains(attr) 
                    && entity[attr] != null
                    && entity[attr].GetType() == typeof(DateTime))
                {
                    DateTime utc = (DateTime)entity[attr];
                    if(utc.TimeOfDay >= new TimeSpan(11,0,0)) 
                    {
                        // Calling user is to the right of Greenwhich
                        // and conversion to UTC moved value to the previous day 
                        utc = utc.AddDays(1);
                    }
                    entity[attr] = utc.Date.AddMinutes(659);
                }
            }
        }
    }
}

Few notes about the code:

We need to let our code know what attributes we are interested in processing. In CRM 4.0 we used filteringattributes property during the plugin registration, however in CRM 2011 this property is no longer supported for create plugin. Not sure why, I have not thought about it yet. So instead, we simply define the list of attributes to process in unsecure configuration property of the plugin. The attribute names can be separated by commas, semicolon, space, new line and the upside is that the list can be updated without re-registering the plugin.
Plugin receives the value of the attribute already converted to UTC. To figure out what user actually entered we need to find out the timezone of the calling user and convert the value back to user's. But since we know that user has entered date only, i.e. time part of the user input was midnight, we can figure out if UTC conversion cost us a day. If user is to the "right" of UTC, i.e. offset is positive, we would lose a day. As explained above, we only support up to +13 so cut off time is (midnight - 13 hours) == 11 AM. That does not overlap with Hawaii which is -10.
entity.Contains performs case-sensitive search - make sure you get your attribute name right. For example, the schema name is Anniversary but the attribute name is anniversary.

Registration

The plugin needs to be registered for both create and update messages either for pre-operation step:

Pre-validation step should not be used as security checks are not applied yet an this point.

For update message performance can be improved by setting filtering attributes to only date fields requiring intervention.

Existing Records

To fix the existing records all that is required is an update message for the record that includes the required date attribute. The value itself does not need to change, in fact. That can be done by:

Writing few lines of code iterating through the records and updating the values
Running SQL update directly against the database. Brave enough to do that surely can figure out the SQL required.
Executing simple one-step on-demand workflow that "updates" attributes using existing values.

Future Enhancements

In CRM 2011, instead of registering the plugin for every single entity we'd like to support, we can register single plugin for all the entities in the system. To figure out what entities and attributes we need to process, configuration would need to be slightly extended to include names of the supported entities and attributes as part of the configuration. That's the homework, folks.

I don't do no code

Some people deliberately avoid any customisations that involve code. For their benefit you can download unmanaged solution containing the following:

Compiled and ready to use plugin
Registration of the plugin for create and update messages for the contact entity. Registration is preconfigured to deal with birthdate and anniversary attributes of the contact.
Sample on-demand workflow fixing the dates above for the existing records.

CRM 2011 Charts - Group By Any Related Entity Attribute

noreply@blogger.com (Simon Jackson) — Wed, 19 Dec 2012 18:30:00 +0000

This is a good introduction into editing Chart XML in CRM, the following example shows how to group by a related entities attribute, this can't be done using just the CRM UI.

Originally from Can’t Relate to your Charts? by Peter Majer, from Sonoma Partners.

CRM 2011 introduced some very powerful analytical tools including Charts and Dashboards. With Charts (or Inline Visualizations) you’re able to quickly see a graphical representation of your current record set that’s being displayed in the grid. You can also drill into components of your chart to slice and dice your data even further. Even better is that the record set in your grid is also updated as you drill in!

CRM 2011 comes with a set of standard charts out of the box for a handful of native entities (e.g., Accounts and Opportunities). Even better is the fact that end users and administrators are able to create their own charts based on their security settings. This allows users to define specific analytical charts they can share and use to quickly see a graphical representation of the data that’s important to them.

However, there’s a small limitation with building charts in CRM. You can only display data from the current entity that you’re on, or from the primary attribute of lookup entities. For example, if you’re interested in seeing a breakdown of your current open Opportunities Estimated Revenue by Account Industry, this isn’t possible using the native chart designer tools that CRM provides. This is because Account Industry is a field on the parent Account, not on the Opportunity, and isn’t the primary attribute (Account Name is the primary attribute).

Luckily there’s a way around this. It involves a little bit of knowledge of XML
but not too much that you’d need a developer to complete this for you. The overall approach is to create a chart using fields on the base entity, exporting it, updating the XML manually, and re-importing the chart back into CRM.We’ll go into more detailed steps on how to accomplish this below.

In order to create the “Opportunity Est. Revenue by Account Industry” chart displaying data from the related Account entity, perform the
following steps:

1. Create a New CRM Chart
First navigate to the entity you’re interested in building the chart off
of. In our example, this is Opportunity. After you’re in Opportunities, you can click on Charts in the Ribbon, and then New Chart.

2. Enter the Basic CRM Chart Details Using Fields on the Opportunity

In our example we’ll use the following settings for our basic Chart which will show Estimated Revenue by Potential Customer.

Type = Pie
Legend Entries (Series) = Est. Revenue (Sum)
Horizontal (Category) Axis Labels = Potential Customer

3. Save Your Chart

Now save your chart using the Save & Close button in the Chart Tools
Design tab of the Ribbon.

4. Export Your Chart

The chart created above was a start, but we wanted to display Est.
Revenue by the Industry of the Potential Customer (Account), not the Name. Therefore we need to export it and modify the XML to get what we need. To export your chart, click on the Charts tab of the Ribbon, and then click on Export Chart.

5. Open the Chart XML

Navigate to the XML that was exported above, and open it in any text editor. You’ll notice something that looks like the following:

6. Modify the Chart XML

The section of interest is the <attribute> nodes of the XML in the <fetch> section. More specifically the one that has the Potential Customer field in it (customerid) is the one that needs to be updated. Comment out this line by adding in the comment tags for XML at the beginning !-- and at the end -- of the node. Those go between the begin and end carrots of the node.

Now enter in the new

XML right above the XML you just commented out:

<link-entity name="account" from="accountid" to="customerid" linktype="outer"> <attribute groupby="true" alias="_CRMAutoGen_groupby_column_Num_0" name="industrycode" /></link-entity>

In a nutshell, this is indicating to use a link-entity to join to the Account entity from the current entity (Opportunity).
The link is on the customerid attribute of the Opportunity linking to the accountid attribute of the Account.
Then, after that linkage is done using link-entity, you’re indicating to now use the industrycode attribute for your chart’s groupby. The XML we commented out previously indicated the groupby was the customerid field which displays the Name of the Account (primary attribute).

In the end, your XML should look something similar to this:

7. Optional 3D Step

This step is optional and is another neat styling feature that is available with the CRM charts. Again, this is available only by modifying the XML and not available by using the designer CRM provides you.

If you search the XML for Area3DStyle, you’ll see Enable3D=”false”. You can update this to true, and save the document, and now you’ll see a fancier 3D chart when you import back into CRM.

8. Import Your Chart
After saving the XML, you’re ready to import your chart. In CRM you can go to the Charts tab of the Opportunity Ribbon, and select Import Chart.
Browse for your XML you just saved.

9. Enjoy Your Chart!
After uploading the chart, you can now see your 3D chart that shows Opportunity Estimated Revenue by Account Industry.

And that’s it! You can apply the same steps above to create complex charts by modifying the XML that will create charts based on fields that you’re not able to create using CRM’s native designer.

Note that if you click on Edit Chart in the ribbon, you’ll see that it’s correctly showing you that your chart’s “Horizontal (Category) Axis Label” is the Industry field from the Potential Customer (Account).

However, if you do end up changing this value and saving your chart, you won’t be able to change it back to this “non-primary-attribute” related field without going through the steps above to manually edit the XML.

When Will CRM 2011 Rollup 12 (Polaris) be release?

noreply@blogger.com (Simon Jackson) — Mon, 17 Dec 2012 07:49:00 +0000

CRM 2011 UR12 (POLARIS) – Release Update

Source: Partner Source via Christopher Cognetta

RELEASE: Using Multi-tenancy in Microsoft Dynamics CRM 2011 to Address Challenges in Enterprise Business Environments

noreply@blogger.com (Simon Jackson) — Sat, 15 Dec 2012 08:26:00 +0000

From the CRM Team blog

RELEASE: Using Multi-tenancy in Microsoft Dynamics CRM 2011 to Address Challenges in Enterprise Business Environments:

On behalf of the CRM Engineering for Enterprise Team and CRM Content Publishing, I am pleased to announce the release of white paper, Using Multi-tenancy in Microsoft Dynamics CRM 2011 to Address Challenges in Enterprise Business Environments, which is available for download from the Microsoft
Download Center at: http://go.microsoft.com/fwlink/?LinkID=275385

There are a number of complexities associated with implementing large-scale CRM projects in Enterprise business scenarios. In these situations, using multiple tenants in Microsoft Dynamics CRM 2011 can help to address several typical challenges, which include:

Functional localization, for organizations with different business units or areas that have varying business requirements or processes
Master data management, for organizations that need to distribute but maintain control of business data in certain ways
Physical distribution, for organizations with user base that is physically distributed in ways that introduce challenges such as distance of connections
Security and privacy, for organizations that need complex control of distribution or access to data
Scalability, for organizations with workload requirements that exceed or are prohibitively costly to host within a single system

Microsoft Dynamics CRM offers a variety of capabilities that allow customers to implement rich solutions to address complicated business requirements, which tend to have an even higher degree of complexity for customers in the Enterprise. For solutions that incorporate multiple instances of Microsoft Dynamics CRM 2011, a second major consideration is any potential need for integration or interaction between the different instances in the overall business solution.

This white paper discusses scenarios in which using multiple instances of Microsoft Dynamics CRM 2011 to separate areas of functionality can assist in addressing business challenges in the Enterprise. The paper also describes some common approaches for integrating multiple, separate instances of Microsoft Dynamics CRM 2011.

Get the Full Picture of Bank Relationships with Microsoft CRM

noreply@blogger.com (Simon Jackson) — Wed, 12 Dec 2012 18:37:00 +0000

Simple post that explains the basics of relationships in a banking context. Written by MVP Joel Lindstrom.

Get the Full Picture of Bank Relationships with Microsoft CRM:

Banks are always looking to expand and improve their client base. Personal Bankers, Financial Consultants, Business Bankers, and Loan Officers are always in search of high net worth individuals and business owners while Private Bankers covet ultra-high net worth families. Without a clear picture of a client’s total assets and liabilities, Banks will find it difficult to adequately serve and grow relationships with their customers.

Though Banks may employ Relationship Managers to quarterback the relationship with their clients, there may be a time when a client interacts with the Bank on their own. For instance, imagine the case of a client with a multi-million dollar net worth who happens to own numerous businesses and have multiple deposit and loan accounts opened with a Bank. One Saturday, he decides to respond to an offer he received on a travel rewards credit card because he knows he will be traveling a lot in the near future. So the client calls in to apply for the card. Much to his chagrin, however, the client is rejected for the card due to having too low of a credit score. Oops! As a result, the client becomes livid, yells at the call rep, leaves a wicked voicemail for his Banker, and closes half of his deposit accounts and pays off all of his loans on the following Monday. Ouch! It turns out his credit score had indeed declined years ago as he used some leverage to grow a few of his companies. Recently, though, his credit has improved and he does after all have multi-million dollar deposit and loan holdings with the Bank. The probably here, nevertheless, is that the credit card call center rep did not know the extent of his other existing relationships with the Bank. If the rep had access to such information, which can be easily be brought in from multiple core banking systems into Microsoft Dynamics CRM and viewed by all Bank employees as seen in the example below, this crisis could have been averted.

On a related note, imagine if the client was actually approved for the credit card and a few months later decides that he wants an increase in his credit limit. Sure enough, underwriting decides to deny the request because once again all they are looking at is his credit score, and the Bank’s cookie cutter policies do not factor into the overall client relationship. With CRM, though, total asset and liability values along with client tenure and profitability rankings can all be centralized for easy viewing. Front-line and back office Banking staff can use this key data for enhanced and case by case decision making to accommodate and approve the client’s request. Doing so will definitely earn the trust and repeat business of this and other highly profitable clients for the Bank.

Top-tier clients with complex portfolio holdings deserve special treatment from the Bank and CRM makes this possible. Without a robust, comprehensive, and intuitive system, such as Microsoft Dynamics CRM and the financial services industry-tailored platforms, though, Banks will continue to miss out opportunities to better serve the mass affluent and high net worth markets.