Jukka Niiranen

Tag: book

  • This Month in CRM: What Have I Been Up To?

    This Month in CRM: What Have I Been Up To?

    If you’re working with Microsoft Dynamics CRM then I bet you’ve had a busy spring so far! At least I have, due to the great buzz around the CRM ecosystem and an ever growing demand for customer solutions that leverage the latest & greatest Microsoft Dynamics product versions. Here’s a quick update on things I’ve been working on recently in the Dynamics CRM community.

    Our Book: CRM Field Guide v2

    Yay, I’m a published author (again)!  Long before I was awarded the CRM MVP title, this group of Dynamics CRM top experts put their smart heads together and came up with a must-have book on practical dos & don’ts of deploying Microsoft Dynamics CRM 2011 in real life scenarios: The CRM Field Guide. Now, after the big platform revolution that took place with CRM 2013, there is a much needed version 2 of the CRM Field Guide available that covers all updated, changed and expanded features of the product. A joint effort from 20+ CRM MVP’s has produced 29 chapters of brilliant content, with my humble contribution on the CRM user experience design aspects being one of them. Great job, guys, and especially Julie for making this V2 book happen!

    CRM_Field_Guide_v2“Hmm, I’m in CRM Online and we’ve already upgraded to the CRM 2015 release. Is there anything in this book for me?” You bet! I’d say 98% of the book’s ~1000 pages will be perfectly applicable for your environment, even though additional features have been introduced in the v7.0 update released at the end of last year. Just have a look at the book’s chapter descriptions to get a glimpse of what type of insights you can expect to gain from this book – and then click to purchase your copy for only $49.99!

    Our Podcast: Ikkunastudio Episode 4

    Even though the market for Finnish language content aimed at Microsoft professionals is a tiny fraction of the audience that all the text produced in English has, that doesn’t mean there wouldn’t be also some quality tech talk out there on the Internet that is catered in this quirky lil’ language of ours. One of the latest entrants into this space is the Ikkunastudio podcast series that focuses on covering the Microsoft scene in Finland. I was honored to be invited into the fourth episode titled “XRM to rule them all“.

    Ikkunastudio_episode_4

    So, who’s behind this Ikkunastudio thing anyway? The show is hosted by two distinguished gentlemen: Jouni is the Regional Director for Microsoft developer community in Finland and Sakari runs a company focused on Microsoft Azure based solution development. The three of us took over the Digital Illustrated HQ on one fine morning and explored a world that many of the MS developers and IT pros may not be so familiar with – Microsoft Dynamics CRM. In addition to explaining what business scenarios CRM is typically used for and how the latest announcements from Convergence 2015 are shaping up the platform’s future in Microsoft’s product portfolio, we also had an interesting discussion on the XRM side of things – where the platform is coming from, what you can do with it today and where it might be heading towards. Jos suomen kieli sujuu, niin kuuntelehan siis miksi Dynamics CRM:ään kannattaa perehtyä pintaa syvemmältä!

    My Webcast: Smarter Sales Process in CRM 2015

    In addition to this glamorous MVP lifestyle consisting of writing books and appearing on radio shows, I also need to spend a fair amount of time designing and configuring real life Dynamics CRM solutions for customer organizations out there. As you listen to the functional requirements coming from customers who want to make Dynamics CRM better serve their own sales processes, you gradually notice that many of these scenarios are dealing with CRM customization work that isn’t exactly unique to the organization in question. At the same time the Dynamics CRM platform has evolved to offer us an extensive toolkit for configuring solutions that can solve these business problems without needing any custom code development.

    When I look at some of the customization work I’ve been doing lately with CRM 2013 and 2015, using features like real-time workflows, business rules, rollup fields, quick view forms and BPF, it has become apparent that the crucial skill is not in just knowing the way a single Dynamics CRM feature works but rather how you can combine them in a creative way to come up with an end product that solves the customer’s business problem. The growing complexity of these no-code solutions means that it’s by no means a trivial task to figure out how they actually work and how they could be applied to different real world business processes that Dynamics CRM customers are looking to manage with the help of modern business software. So, instead of just writing individual blog posts I’ve decided to cover this topic in a one hour webcast: A Non-Developer’s Guide to Smarter Sales Processes in Dynamics CRM 2015.

    MSDynamicsWorld_Smarter_Sales_Process

    In this webcast hosted by MSDynamicsWorld.com I’ll be introducing a few scenarios that I believe are common needs for Dynamics CRM customers and show you how the graphical customization tools offered by the CRM platform’s latest versions can be put into use in building solutions for them. For example, would you want to bring back the ability to not always create a new sales opportunity from every qualified lead record? Or how about being able to use Dynamics CRM for tracking not just the current sales pipeline value but also storing historical data about how the pipeline has developed over time? Join me on May 6th to see a few tricks on how a system customizer could tackle such requirements and make the Dynamics CRM application support the sales process management work even better than the product does with out-of-the-box configuration.

  • Our New Book: CRM 2013 QuickStart

    A few people have asked me for recommendations on what books they should get if they want to learn about the ins & outs of the current Microsoft Dynamics CRM 2013 version. Even though there’s a wealth of blog articles out there that study specific features and an ever growing library of content produced by Microsoft themselves, there’s not been a whole lot of material in traditional book format that would have covered the latest CRM 2013 functionality. Well, now there is a great title available that I can recommend: the CRM 2013 QuickStart.

    CRM_2013_QuickStart_cover_smallHow do I know the book is any good? Because I wrote a part of it! Aside from shameless self promotion, I can honestly say that the writing team behind this book is quite an extraordinary league of CRM experts:

    If that’s not a group of CRM MVP’s you’d trust for advice on how to work with the platform then I don’t know who you would!

    What exactly does the book cover then? As the title suggests, it’s not a complete A-Z of each individual feature included in the Dynamics CRM 2013 platform. Neither is it meant to be “my first Dynamics CRM manual” for people who are unfamiliar with any version of the product. Let me borrow some of the official intro text for the book here to explain the reason for its existence:

    The CRM 2013 Quick Start is a first look at Microsoft Dynamics CRM 2013 and all the new features that have been included.

    In the CRM 2013 Quick Start you will find details that can help administrators, customizers (functional consultants) and developers; not to mention power business users wanting to know all the details the admin never tells them. If you run CRM in the cloud or sitting in a server room at your office the information is useful.

    This book is targeted to someone who has some CRM prior experience. By that we simply don’t spend any time explaining the basics of Microsoft Dynamics CRM from a beginner’s point of view. That said, the information in this book would still be useful on your journey to become proficient.

    Imagine that you’re someone who’s started their Dynamics CRM journey with an earlier version like 4.0 or 2011 and you’re now faced with the upgrade project for moving the solutions onto the latest CRM 2013 version. Is this the right book for you to gain an understanding of what’s new & what has changed in the platform? Absolutely! How about if you’re a system administrator or a customizer that has some exposure to the new version (via CRM Online perhaps) but are looking to ramp up your knowledge about the platform for future projects, enhancements or admin tasks. Will the CRM 2013 QuickStart help you get up to speed faster than searching for random articles online? You bet!

    Now, this is actually the first book that I have ever written content for and it makes me immensely proud to have managed to make my debut in such a prestigious crowd of co-authors. My personal contribution to this title focused on describing the founding principles of how to design a great user experience for the CRM solution that you wish to deliver to your end users. While some of the topics I covered in the book are specific to the latest CRM 2013 version, many of the solution design guidelines are actually universally applicable to any Dynamics CRM version, representing best practices that I’ve personally learned over the past decade of working with the product. I’m really glad to have been given the opportunity to present them in a format that allows for a different type of discussion than your typical blog post.

    Being a newbie in authoring content for books, it was also a valuable learning experience for me. Although I’ve been writing down my thoughts  on all things Dynamics CRM on this blog for six years now, the project of producing close to 50 pages of content on a given topic to create a coherent book chapter that can stand on its own was still a very different kind of assignment. Let’s just say that I have new found respect for authors that have managed to create entire books for new software products on their own.

    The great thing about my writing project was that it provided me a really concrete reason to dig into the details of the various new customization options that Dynamics CRM 2013 offers and experiment with different scenarios that I’m likely to encounter in real life customer projects. As they say, the best way to learn a new topic is to teach it to someone else. If this content that I’ve put together as a part of my own learning process then ends up helping also other members of the Dynamics CRM community to discover better ways to solve customers’ problems with the application, then I consider that a win-win result.