Tag: CRM 2013

Modern advanced find test drive

The single most powerful end user feature of Dynamics CRM, XRM, CDS and Dataverse was always Advanced Find. Period.

There, now that we’ve settled that argument, it’s time to move forward and see what life is going to look like when Dataverse no longer includes Advanced Find. Yes, there will still be the broad capabilities of advanced find, but I will refer to it without capitalization. This is in line with the fresh new documentation on a very important feature that aims to take the place of Advanced Find: modern advanced find.

So modern you can barely see it

Advanced Find was always its own UI in a separate popup window. This was perfectly in line with the Dynamics CRM 2011 UI – which was the last time there were any material changes to the visible features. Let’s have one last look at Advanced Find’s glorious Ribbon icon before we move on:

OK, so this wasn’t actually the last time Microsoft touched the user experience for this feature. The CRM 2013 release did a complete overhaul of the application UI (I’d say a more visible change than Unified Interface even), which lead to the Advanced Find buttons getting either hidden or missing from parts of the app navigation. I had to write a blog post called “Finding Advanced Find in CRM 2013” to help out users who were worried that the feature had been removed from the product entirely.

The modern advanced find that has been introduced as a preview feature in February 2022 takes the hiding game to a whole new level. You see, the entry point to modern advanced find is hidden within the global search bar. You have to 1) click the bar and then 2) click “search for rows in a table using advanced filters”.

Be sure to not enter any search text into the bar, because that will hide this new option. Also, whatever you do, do not press enter after this text – otherwise you’ll be taken to the global search results page. There’s no way to “go advanced” from here, it’s a completely different search experience.

Search “any” table

A big new feature in the modern advanced find is what happens after you click on the new button within the search bar. (I already forgot the name of that button since it wasn’t anything as nearly catchy as “advanced find”, so I’ll refrain from scrolling up this post to see what it was and just move on instead.)

You will see a sidebar saying “select a table to search”. Cool, just like in good ol’ Advanced Find! The difference you need to understand, though, is that it’s not a list of all the tables in the environment. Yes, it will likely be a longer list that what your Model-driven app’s sitemap navigation contains. This is because modern advanced find covers all the table’s that your app’s maker has chosen to include in the app module when working with the Model-driven app designer.

There are pros and cons to this approach. The obvious upside is the ease of use for the casual data finder. He/she doesn’t need to confront the ever growing list of both standard and custom tables in a Dataverse environment (especially those with many Dynamics 365 apps installed in them). Things are quite different now compared to back when Advanced Find was originally designed for a simple CRM systems. Showing hundreds of cryptic tables isn’t a great UX to most users, so cutting down the noise of the underlying data model is understandable.

How about those users who DO understand the data model, or even work in configuring and extending it? The advanced app makers, consultants and developers will most likely be frustrated by this limitation whenever they need to examine the detailed contents of an environment. Quite often I myself need to build new views and filters just to understand what data has been entered into the system (that has been designed by someone else).

Sounds to me like there will be a growing demand for a “Super Advanced Find” type of a tool to be introduced in XrmToolBox. If you’ve already got a favorite tool for ad-hoc data exploration needs, be sure to leave a comment below.

Query criteria remains the key criteria

The one area where an advanced search feature in Dataverse simply has to perform well is the creation of complex query criteria across the relational data model of the environment. One of the most read articles on my blog has been Advanced Queries with Advanced Find, which illustrates both the possibilities of the tool as well as the demand for such advanced query criteria in real-life business scenarios.

Luckily this is already included in the non-preview feature set of Model-driven Power Apps. The filter editor that you can find in any table view today is a very worthy replacement for what Advanced Find used to offer. Although I haven’t done a detailed comparison, I couldn’t easily spot any missing capability from the tools available for defining the view filters in modern advanced find vs. the classic pop-up query editor for Advanced Find.

Just imagine if it was this easy to define the filter criteria for Dataverse tables on the modern automation side, too – not just views? Perhaps one day something similar will be made available for Power Automate cloud flows, based on what is being planned for SharePoint data sources in 2022 wave 1 (because priorities). Until then, luckily we have great articles and reference guides created by the community to copy-paste our “flow code” from while we wait for a GUI to arrive.

Actually viewing the data

Far too often I’ve seen people put all their effort in defining the correct query criteria and then being lazy when it comes to actually showing the results of that query. You could say I wrote the book on the importance of Dynamics CRM view design back in the 2013 era, so you can image how such user experience oversights have irritated me over the years.

Smart choice of view columns and sort order are what defines the user experience outcome. Query filters are merely table stakes.
Jukka Niiranen, in this blog post right here.

As a data exploration tool, Advanced Find wasn’t always perfect, but us consultants learned to make the most of it. When needing to dig up data from columns that weren’t readily available in the system views, it was easy to just go and add all columns into an exploration view. Whereas when building more targeted we had two useful features in the “add columns” screen of Advanced Find: sort by name, sort by data type.

Unfortunately this is where the modern advanced find is a little behind on the classic Advanced Find. Let’s look at what the column editor experience is like.

First of all, the editor includes the very same modern stumbling block that you might have noticed when working in the Power Apps Maker portal and searching for table columns. When you open the “add columns” side pane, the list of available columns doesn’t cover everything that the table contains. Instead you are defaulted to a “Default” filter that’s easy to miss. Switch to “All” and you’ll finally see that field you wanted to include in your view.

What exactly does “Default” mean in this context and how is it defined? No one can tell, not even Microsoft. It appears to be one of those good intentions in tidying up the menus of what should be a citizen developer friendly platform yet also serves huge enterprise CRM systems. A tough balance to get right, that’s for sure.

One very nice improvement in the modern advanced find (as well as the Maker portal) is the ability to search for things while you are configuring those very things. Narrowing down the long list of available columns with a free text search term could be especially handy when you’re looking for information stored on a related parental ent… table.

What could make such a feature even better? I’ve got one idea: extend the search index to include also the schema names. Believe it or not, the display names of f… columns can become quite misleading when you eventually need to adjust them for the places in the app UI where they can’t be customized (which just happens to mainly be: VIEWS!).

Anyway, often the schema name may have a pattern that makes it easier to logically group columns, which in turn makes the app maker more productive as he/she finds them more easily when defining the views. Right now that’s something the modern advanced find doesn’t yet support. If you think it should, then go and vote for it.

So, you’ve created a hundred and one views…

If there was something that the classic Advanced Find feature really didn’t handle well at all, it was the process of managing the views created with it. The way how the Ribbon UI managed to both hide the feature and yet make it highly misleading at the same time was something… special.

Compared to what we used to have in Advanced Find, the enanced personal view management now launched in preview is a thing of beauty. Changing the sort order and hiding unnecessary views are very welcome additions to how the power users will be able to take control of their business app UI details.

The new view hiding feature is something to pay attention to:

“Hiding a view is a way to personalize the view list and reduce clutter by making views not be visible in the view selector. A view may be needed for a specific purpose periodically or a view could be shared with you that you may not need it anymore. In such instances, hiding enables you to manage your view list by seeing only the views that are most important for you.”

This probably won’t solve all the pain associated with view management as their number grows in “busy” tables used for different kinds of analysis, both via system and personal views. Yet it’s a simple, user-driven concept to offer personalization within Model-driven apps.

Closing the Advanced Find popup

We’ve known for quite some time that eventually the legacy web client popup with Advanced Find will not be supported anymore. This modern advanced find feature in 2022 release wave 1 aims to include the necessary features to allow deprecating a very central part of the product. It does a pretty good job and the general principles in modern advanced find are quite justified.

Will I miss the good ol’ Advanced Find once the new feature is enabled and the icon to the classic experience is gone? Of course I will. Like with many of the modernization efforts around Power Apps as a business app platform, the new experiences always take away something that used to allow XRM veterans like myself to be productive. Often we get less information density in the screens, blocking the use of multiple tabs, slower loading times due to new API dependencies, more options hidden/missing due to simplification efforts…

Enough with the complaining already! Things weren’t better before, they were just different. What used to be a single app in a single service is now a cloud where traditional boundaries are vanishing at an astonishing rate. Now everyone really can make apps, and there can be a thousand “XRMs” in an organization. Both the audience and the purpose of these tools is forever evolving – and so must their features.

Update 2022-06-08: Microsoft has started to roll out an enhancement to the view filter editing screen. There will be a button to download the FetchXML definition of the view filters. Also, export to Excel will now honor the filter modifications done, without requiring the view to be saved. Just like in the good ol’ Advanced Find days then.😊

Update 2022-08-02: As we get closer to 2022 Release Wave 2 when the classic Advanced Find button will be hidden from the UI for everyone (see Modern advanced find turned on by default), you should keep in mind that there is still a way to open the Advance Find page with the direct URL. You can (and should) install the LevelUp extension for Chrome/Edge/Firefox to have access to this dynamic URL. This will hopefully work for as long as Microsoft keeps the legacy web client page infrastructure alive.

February 9, 2022
The Irresistible Force of Great User Experience in CRM Applications
Those who have worked with Dynamics CRM for a longer period of time will remember how the user experience delivered by the platform has evolved over time: from an Office style, data entry focused, Internet Explorer popup window application into the clean and modern Dynamics CRM 2015 application that works on any device and aims to present the maximum amount of relevant information to the user with the minimum amount of clicks. There was a time when CRM didn’t exactly seem like something that was designed with the needs of the end user in mind, but this direction changed quite drastically from the CRM Online December 2012 Service Update onwards, as Microsoft started to redesign the experiences they wanted to deliver for the users of their business applications in the new era where mobile, social and cloud were quickly becoming the most dominating forces in the world of enterprise software. Not forgetting the consumerization of IT, which had shown people that not every app used in a work context needed to look like a 90’s ERP system.

I have covered this transition in quite a bit of detail in my four part article series titled “Dynamics CRM Platform Evolution”, which I’d recommend you to read through for understanding the practical impact of moving from the “first era” of MS CRM v1-v5 onto the current era of largely CRM Online focused rapid product iterations. One of the points I raised in the article was that not all the CRM software providers in the market had chosen to follow a similar path of introducing a big bang revolution to their application. Unlike Microsoft, Salesforce.com had instead opted for an evolutionary path that had seen their application UI remain almost unchanged for the main components and layout, as depicted in the image below.

While being wildly successful in becoming the “next CRM application” after the 90’s generation of Siebel style, on-premises enterprise CRM suites had began to slide out of the limelight, Salesforce also began to receive a growing amount of criticism over the legacy that its user interface had accumulated over its history. The question of “Why doesn’t Salesforce upgrade the UI/UX of its core CRM web app?” did seem more and more valid, especially when competing products like Dynamics CRM were transforming the user experience that one could expect from a customer relationship management application. Well, finally in late August 2015, Salesforce announced that their next era of CRM UX would arrive in the form of the new Salesforce Lightning UI.

Welcome to the Future of CRM, Salesforce!

First of all, congratulations to the product team behind the Lightning UI on the launch! Pulling off a major redesign like this is bound to be a massive task and I’m sure in many ways the work has only begun now, but it’s still definitely an achievement worth celebrating. As many of you may have noticed, in my day job I work exclusively with Microsoft Dynamics CRM, so whatever I write here about a competing CRM solution is not going to be 100% objective. For that I apologize, but the point of my post isn’t to bash Salesforce but rather to analyze some of the trends in CRM software in general and also reflect back a bit on what has taken place in the world of Dynamics CRM during the past few years.

But first, I need to just get something out of the way. Damn how these two apps look alike! Here’s the brand new opportunity form on Salesforce Lightning UI, a.k.a. Opportunity Workspace:

…And here’s how the opportunity form on Dynamics CRM has looked like pretty much since the 2013 version:

Notice any resemblance? Let me help you out a bit by listing the first five things that come to my mind from the Salesforce screenshot:
- Sales Path for visualizing the sales process stages and related fields, known as Business Process Flow in Dynamics CRM
- Tabs for switching between related activities and social posts, known as the Social Pane in Dynamics CRM
- Composer for adding new tasks, phone calls and events to the opportunity, which simply is an inline activity quick create form in Dynamics CRM
- Related information on Contact Roles, essentially the Stakeholders editable grid in Dynamics CRM
- Persistent four header fields at the top of the form, ditto for Dynamics CRM
Yeah, of course these both are applications for managing your typical sales opportunity information with activities and contacts, so its understandable that the concepts used in the default screens would be unlikely to radically differ from one another. Still, contrasting Lighting UI with the traditional Salesforce UI and looking at how close to the now familiar Dynamics CRM form layout, UI controls and especially the Business Process Flow feature the Salesforce product team has ended up with their design is, well… Quite remarkable in my opinion. Not a bad choice by any means, and also serves in validating the direction that Microsoft’s team took when overhauling their application’s UI a couple of years ago.

Aside from the similarity to Dynamics CRM, there are plenty of nice looking designs and features included in the Salesforce Winter ’16 release notes. Some of them are about filling the functional gaps to Dynamics CRM (list view charts known from CRM 2011 make an appearance here), others are borrowing concepts from the more recent CRM apps out there (Kanban style opportunity board used in Pipedrive, Pipeliner et al., as well as SalesFlow for Dynamics CRM), but many of the release items seem to be focused on fine tuning the application usability and removing unnecessary friction from common tasks that sales people need to perform on a daily basis. Rather than just slapping on a new field layout and updating the icons, it does seem like the user experience of Salesforce will change quite dramatically with Lightning. Of course the true UX can only be evaluated once a live version of the application is available for testing how it truly feels like to use the app, but at this point it looks like a major step forward.

The Price of Revolution

Introducing a new application user experience to new users who don’t have prior experience of the product will always be far easier than forcing it upon the existing user base. While few people would say that they don’t want a nice & easy UI, the reality is that resistance to change is always a factor when dealing with human beings. When it comes to business software especially, disruptive changes are at the very bottom of the want list for the majority of people who are responsible for ensuring that information systems deployed for managing the core business processes of their organization keep on churning out the expected results. What’s going to happen when a CRM system jumps from evolutionary releases to revolutionary changes instead?

The one important thing to keep in mind is that changes like this never take place overnight. Migrating over all the functionality that vast application platforms like Salesforce of Dynamics CRM have accumulated over time isn’t something you can get away with a single big bang release. With Microsoft there was a preview version of the new UX introduced with the Online only Polaris release, launched almost one year ahead of the actual major release of CRM 2013 (v6.0). Initially only five core entities were updated to the new “refreshed” forms, and even today the latest v7.1 still contains lots and lots of entities and menus that follow the old Ribbon based user experience. So, three years later the work isn’t even done for the Dynamics CRM product team in renewing the platform, which means that the end users and system customizers need to cope with a somewhat mixed application environment. The platform legacy becomes most apparent with the new mobile client applications that don’t support the old product architecture, resulting in features like marketing lists or connections not being available on the modern client versions. Sure, life is much, much better with the new UX, but it has also introduced some new complexities into the product.

In the case of Salesforce, the story sounds to be somewhat similar, as not every area of their platform will be Lightning enabled right from the start. The Service Cloud will not yet be updated, nor will features like forecasting, orders or person accounts. In moments like these it’s always interesting to see how companies prioritize their development efforts, as they are likely to indicate either the observed level of usage for certain features of their products, or alternatively possible future plans to scrap something old and rebuild it from the ground up. If you’re working as a consultant that advises customers on what features they should take into use or invest in developing for their CRM systems, the messages conveyed by the application vendors via the frequency of updates to certain functional areas of their products are signals you’ll most certainly take into consideration when deciding on what strategy to recommend to your client base.

With 150k customers and millions of users, it’s going to take a while before Salesforce will have safely moved each and every one into the Lightning world. In fact, based on the statement by Sara Varni, senior VP of marketing for SFDC Sales Cloud, this milestone may never even be reached, since Salesforce will support the classic experience “indefinitely”. In the oldskool settings of on-premises servers, the way this could have been handled would be for the customers just sticking to an older version of the software and not deploying any updates. When you’re the grandaddy of SaaS platforms, things are obviously a bit different and supporting older versions will require more than just accepting support tickets for ancients releases of your software. With CRM Online, Microsoft has previously been pretty strict on getting every customer to move on to the latest version via the CDU (Customer Driven Update) program, but lately they’ve also changed their update policy to allow skipping the bi-annual releases and updating only once per year. As SaaS products become a more mature market, I bet we’ll be seeing a growing number of options for customers to choose which versions to use, which features to activate and when to schedule these changes to take place.

Universal Experiences

The way Salesforce chose to build their next generation UI is different from the path that Microsoft took. While Dynamics CRM 2013 introduced both the new web client experience as well as the “MoCA” tablet client application as separate experiences (followed by the refreshed mobile app in CRM 2015 Update 1), Salesforce decided to first build the Lightning framework for their Salesforce1 mobile app and then scale it out to the PC screens. As a result, the screenshots that we see in the Winter ’16 release notes look very much like a mobile app placed onto the screen of an iMac. While you could in theory also use the Dynamics CRM for Tablets app on a Windows 8/10 laptop, the users will certainly almost always end up choosing the Dynamics CRM web client designed for interaction with mouse & keyboard rather than touch optimized “Metro” experience.

I think this will be one of the most interesting design choices to keep an eye on when it comes to user reactions to the new Salesforce Lightning UI. Regardless of all the recent Universal Apps hype that Microsoft has been building up alongside the Windows 10 release, I’m personally not quite convinced yet that you can deliver a great UX with a single app that needs to scale from 5″ touch screens to 27″ desktop monitors. As a result, I’m also not a big proponent of the “configure once, deploy everywhere” slogan used in reference to the Dynamics CRM mobile apps, since I’d rather see CRM applications truly optimized for the device and use case in question. However, if Salesforce can pull this off with Lightning, then perhaps Microsoft has been right all along with their OS strategy and the application teams should now move faster towards unifying the client side of things.

Applification of Platforms?

When it comes to products like Dynamics CRM or Salesforce, one of the key reasons why they are being so widely deployed across enterprises today is the ability to customize them to align with the business processes specific to the customer organization. They are not only replacing legacy CRM suites but also capturing an ever larger share of the market that used to belong to custom developed business software, since using a customizable application platform delivered from the public cloud can really drive down the TCO quite significantly. But if the CRM applications are now reaching towards an even more polished user experience in performing common tasks with sales, marketing and service records, what will happen to supporting the business specific scenarios that are more unique than what pre-built application features can cover?

When Microsoft launched the Dynamics CRM 2013 version with the refreshed UI, they didn’t only add more features into the already crammed product, but rather they took away some configuration options that had been previously expected from the platform. As the saying goes about the goal of design work, “perfection is achieved not when there is nothing more to add, but when there is nothing left to take away.” That may very well be true when designing a product to serve a specific set of tasks, but it may not resonate so well with a toolkit used for crafting these end products. Limiting the options shown to an end users is different from limiting the options available to the designer of the final solution that the user will be exposed to.

How do such limitations show up in everyday life with the latest Dynamics CRM version? Today we have inline quick create forms for effortlessly adding activities for records, but we can no longer choose if we want to record a future phone call activity instead of a completed one. We can use an editable grid for adding line items into opportunities, quotes and orders, but we can’t configure these grids to contain those fields that the business logic would require to be recorded onto these line items. The price of added convenience for some is therefore resulting in the reduced usefulness to others. Looking at the Salesforce Winter ’16 release, it’s apparent that also here the polished UX will be come at the cost of reduced options. For example, there will be a brand new, great looking Home screen offered for sales users, but the components shown in it cannot be customized at this time.

Is there an inherent conflict between the needs of the application end user and the platform customizer? I don’t believe this is necessarily the case, but it is obvious that there are trade offs in building something that works great and building something configurable when it comes to the allocation of development resources for these software products. As the release cycles get faster and faster, the pressure for getting a new feature out there can mean there’s no time to perfect the first version into something that will meet the needs of all user groups and align with the rest of the platform functionality. The real question is, will the features be made more customizable in the subsequent releases, or will the requirements be pushed down in the backlog when the demand for more new features arises?

When discussing the user experience of applications that are not commodity services like email but highly business specific process management tools (at least when properly deployed), it’s very important to understand what the final UX really consists of. It’s not only about having the slickest UI controls for working with the data, the flashiest graphics for visualizing the sales pipeline or most creative layouts for presenting different data sources on one screen. At the end of the day, the users need to feel like they can easily accomplish the tasks they are responsible for, with the help of the application – not despite of it. Understanding what exactly those tasks are and what pieces of information are relevant to the process of their completion is something that requires careful analysis conducted at the organization deploying a new CRM solution. Failure to do this will quickly wash away any value that the software features could have potentially delivered to the organization.

As today’s CRM platforms become more and more sophisticated with the functionality and data presentation options available, the design work of those who configure the customer specific solutions also needs to be aligned with the increasing expectation levels for application usability. It’s still not rocket science, but it does require a greater attention to detail than the earlier, more primitive business applications where the UI was essentially a reflection of the data model. I’ve illustrated some of these design aspects in my 10 Tips for Designing A Great User Experience presentation, which hopefully can give an idea of how the system customizers can do their part in building CRM systems that the business users will find great value in – a Useful Experience, if you will.
September 3, 2015
CRM Navigation Hacking with Bookmarks

When you spend your days working closely with an application like Dynamics CRM, such as when customizing or developing solutions for your customers, your mind will often times be working much faster than the application. You know exactly which feature you want to access, but if you need to navigate through several levels of menu hierarchies to get there, the process may be too slow to keep up with your train of thought, making it hard to concentrate on the actual task at hand.

My personal strategy for reducing the cognitive burden involved with navigating inside Dynamics CRM has been the use of smart bookmarks. Here’s some tips on how I’ve set up my current working environment. If you have any similar CRM productivity tips of your own, please do share them in the comments section below.

Launching New Tabs from “Quick Nav”

While piling up a mountain of open browser tabs may not be great for your productivity either, the cost of moving between tabs is still lower than constant in-app navigation between menus. When working with CRM customizations, I always tend to have the end user content in one tab (views or record detail forms) and the Solutions view on the other one, so that I can quickly access the component I want to modify and validate the results with an F5 on the other tab.

Dynamics CRM 2013 and beyond unfortunately don’t support the standard convention of right-clicking on menus and opening them up in a new browser window. Nothing stops you from opening CRM in a second tab and working with the settings via it, but this means you always have to start from the first page and navigate back to where you wanted to go. To speed things up a bit, I keep a “Quick Nav” available menu in all my browsers, created as a folder in the favorites/bookmarks bar that I also keep open at all times.

So where exactly do those bookmarks lead to? A specific menu in a certain CRM organization? Nope, those are generic bookmarks that apply to the currently open CRM organization. They work in any CRM 2013 or CRM 2015 environment, on-prem or Online. You see, they are not actual bookmarks with a static URL pointing to a resource somewhere, rather they are bookmarklets that contain a short piece of JavaScript. (more…)

February 17, 2015
Dynamics CRM 2013 in Retrospect

Dynamics CRM 2013 was released only a bit over year ago, on October 8th 2013 to be exact. With CRM 2015 already knocking at the door, this seems like ages ago already, even though the actual time between these two major releases is shorter than their marketing names imply.

Since the discussions in the Dynamics CRM community will inevitably be moving towards the latest 2015 version as the year turns, it’s a good moment to reflect back a bit and recap what the previous release gave us. I took a look at some of the blog posts I’ve personally written regarding CRM 2013 specific functionality since the version came out. By analyzing the page view stats from my blog, the following articles came out on top as the five hottest topics that you, the readers, were interested in reading about. If you missed any of the articles, now’s the time to do a quick catch up before CRM 2015 steals all the attention.

Synchronization vs. Tracking: Understanding Activity Management Options

(Article link)

CRM 2013 introduced a new feature called server-side synchronization, which allowed the CRM server to communicate directly with the Exchange server for the first time in the product’s history. Upon first look it might have appeared like the long dependency on Dynamics CRM Outlook client was about to be history. However, in our brave new “cloud first, mobile first” world there are many more aspects to managing activity data in relation to CRM records that you need to understand.

While the synchronization options for activities and contacts were indeed expanded with CRM 2013, the tracking options were not. In addition, the combinations supported email client and server applications for each entity and action type were quite a maze to navigate in. Since this is not such an easy topic to grasp nor explain, I ended up building a support matrix of my own, so that I was able to clearly communicate the various synchronization and tracking options to our customers.

Getting Your Head Around Dynamics CRM 2013 Processes

(Article link)

Changes in the application’s UI may have grabbed most of the attention when it came to the CRM 2013 release, but there were also notable enhancements made to platform capabilities behind the scenes. Business Rules and Real-time Workflows opened up a whole new world of possibilities for the system customizers to create custom business logic that had previously required JavaScript or plug-in development.

The one process type that was highly visible to the users, Business Process Flow (BPF), was also perhaps the most demanding one when it came to applying it in real world scenarios. Since BPF’s themselves don’t provide any automation but rather rely on the other process types to work in conjunction with the BPF process stages and steps, understanding the role of each of these components will require a fair bit of experimentation. This is why I wrote a two-part article where I tried to lay out the big picture of process automation in CRM 2013.

Connecting to CRM Online OData Feed with Excel 2013 Power Query

(Article link)

While the CRM 2013 release itself didn’t provide any dedicated feature for the Power BI tools announced by Microsoft a bit earlier, there were updates made to the Power Query component in Excel 2013 that made it very interesting for CRM Online customers. More specifically, the December 2013 version of Power Query finally delivered the ability to connect to OData feeds what utilize Office 365 authentication – with CRM Online being such an application.

There isn’t a whole lot of official documentation available on the topic of how to leverage CRM Online OData feeds to build reports utilizing the Power BI toolkit. The process isn’t necessarily very straightforward and requires a fair bit of experimentation with the various Excel components (Power Query, Power Pivot, Power View). In addition to the OData feed connection part, I also wrote a couple other posts on what to do once you have the CRM data flowing into Excel via Power Query.

Setting Up a Microsoft Dynamics CRM 2013 Development Server on Azure

(Article link)

Running Dynamics CRM in the cloud via CRM Online is a popular option these days, but for performing testing and development tasks it’s often more convenient to have your own sandbox where you can control each and every part of the system. Azure has evolved into quite an attractive option for running virtual machines, especially with MSDN subscription credits and discounts for development environments.

I’m not an infrastructure specialist that enjoys configuring servers very much, but when new versions of Dynamics CRM become available as preview/beta versions, it’s a good exercise to set up your own sandbox server. To better remember what the minimum steps are to be able to install the Dynamics CRM server application, I decided to document the process via screenshots and make it available on SlideShare for anyone else wanting to complete the same task.

Expanding Add Activity Options on CRM 2013 Forms

(Article link)

In the course of the UI refresh performed in CRM 2013, the number of menu options visible to the end users were optimized to cover only a single way to perform many of the options that previously might have had alternative route options. While the intention was noble, this did create a few situations where the navigation path required to perform an action may have not been the optimal one.

The great thing about Dynamics CRM is that it’s a customizable platform that allows you to adjust the data model, forms and also the menu options to the specific use cases required by the customer organization – as long as you know how. With awesome community contributed tools like the Ribbon Workbench these tasks can be completed with a few clicks of a mouse, which is what I illustrated in this post where I added a new flyout menu onto the CRM 2013 Command Bar to access standard as well as custom activity records, and even launching a dialog process directly from the menu.

November 13, 2014
Don’t Merge Your Forms in CRM 2013

If you have been using Dynamics CRM before the 2013 version was released, you may have something in your system called “information forms”. This is not a very descriptive term for them, since of course all the entity forms are about presenting “information” to the end user. These forms actually date back to a time in the Dynamics CRM platform history when there was only a single form available per entity. Times have changed quite a lot since then, as entities can now have role based forms, mobile forms, quick create forms and quick view forms.

Although not a specific form type in itself, CRM 2013 introduced a whole new layout for the default entity forms as a part of the UI refresh. Instead of the traditional & boring two column layout, the new CRM 2013 forms are made up of three columns that can consist of not just entity fields but also related entity subgrids, the social pane, Bing Maps component and other exciting new features. Whereas the old default forms were called “Information”, the names of these new forms follow the entity names. So, the account entity will have a new form labelled “Account”, as an example. (By the way: check this tip for optimizing your form naming convention.)

Merge Forms Feature

Since the new forms are designed to make better use of the new navigation paradigm of CRM 2013 as well as present the data in a much richer way than the old “ERP style” forms of past CRM versions, customers who are upgrading their Dynamics CRM deployment to the latest version are advised to migrate into using these new forms. In fact, Microsoft has stated that the next major version (CRM 2015) would no longer support the use of the old “information forms”.

To make this transition easier, Microsoft has provided a feature called “Merge Forms”. This new button available on the form editor in the CRM customization UI (which still utilizes the old CRM 2011 style layout even in CRM 2015, by the way) is intended to be used for bringing the tabs, sections and fields from your old forms onto the new forms with as little clicks as possible.

The process is described in the article “Update your forms to Microsoft Dynamics CRM 2013 or Microsoft Dynamics CRM Online Fall ’13”. Even more detailed steps can be found from the PDF document “How to Prepare for the CRM Online Fall ’13 Service Update”. Basically what the feature does is bring in the contents of the old form to the end of the currently open form, with the intention of making it faster to rearrange your customized fields and sections to align with the new default form’s content and layout.

Sounds like a handy feature, right? There’s only one slight problem with it: it doesn’t work.

Conflicting ID Values

“What do you mean it doesn’t work? I have used the button to bring in my custom fields and it did just what I expected.” Well, maybe I should rather say that it works partially. If you never export your CRM customizations into a solution file and move it to a different environment, you may not notice that anything is wrong with your forms. However, if you do want to move the customizations between development, test and production organizations, you might run into the below error message during the solution import process.

After the error, if you download the log file and open it, you’ll see a message like this:

Error code 0x8004F658. The label ‘E-mail 2′, id: ’87dc7c9c-94c1-3953-e490-11413b31d0ad’ already exists. Supply unique labelid values.

What the system is telling us is that we’re trying to insert an item into the customization metadata that has a non-unique ID. Depending on the scenario, the item could be a field or section label. But how did the ID end up being a duplicate? After all, we don’t assign these GUID values in the customization UI, rather the CRM platform generates them. What could have caused the system to violate its own rules?

The answer can be found from this thread on the MSDN forums: CRM 2013 Solution Import. A Microsoft support engineer has confirmed that the error is caused by a design mistake in the Merge Forms feature. Apparently in the process of merging form content from the old form onto the new one there is more data carried over than is needed. Not only do you get the form components exactly the way they are configured in the original form, but you also get the same ID’s. Now, since the old form also exists in the system, this will cause an error message when you try to import your solution file from the source system to the target environment, like from development to test environment, for example.

The Workaround

The system where I ran into this problem was running Dynamics CRM 2013 Service Pack 1 (6.1.0.581) with no Update Rollups (see this earlier blog post for help on understanding the different updates and version numbering). The forum thread above does not indicate that a hotfix for the form merge bug would have been included in one of the released updates so far, so I’m assuming that all CRM 2013 environments are affected by it during the time of writing.

The suggested workaround in the forum discussion was basically “start all over”, meaning removing the merged content from the form and re-adding the components back there one by one. In the environment I was working on this would have required many hours of work with using the form editor on a number of entities , which I wasn’t too keen on spending there. I had just migrated a copy of the CRM 2011 production organization database onto a CRM 2013 test server and was in the process of testing the upgrade steps before the final go-live, so re-doing the customizations at this stage just sounded like both a schedule challenge as well as a potential source for new issues.

I extracted the CRM solution zip file and poked around the customization.xml file for a while, trying to think of a way out of this situation. After I realized that trying to edit the XML manually would only land me into a deeper hole, it occurred to me that there was another feature in CRM that performed something similar than the broken Merge Forms: the “Save As” button. Copying entity forms to create new variations was something that I had used many times with no issues, so perhaps I could rely on it here as well?

I proceeded with creating a copy of each of the entity forms where I had used the Merge Forms feature. Since the new form versions created via “Save As” are able to co-exist with the original forms without causing any conflicts, this must mean that the CRM platform assigns the required new ID’s to the form components. Based on this reasoning, I therefore assumed that once I deleted the original merged form and renamed the new copy (as well as configured the form order and security roles), I would have a clean solution file with unique ID values. After testing the solution import I was extremely glad to see that this was in fact the case, as no more error messages appeared during the import. Saved by the “Save As”!

Don’t Just Merge – Design

So, with the above workaround and a potential upcoming hotfix, is there any reason not to use the Merge Forms feature? In my humble opinion, the merge process is not a best practice but rather just a quick’n dirty way of getting the custom fields to appear on the entity forms. If you don’t in practice know how to customize your Dynamics CRM environment but need to cope with the updated UI of the new version, then the merge will technically make it possible to keep using your CRM data. What it will not do is produce a system that your end users will enjoy.

The merge will bring over a lot of duplicate content (all the default fields) that you may forget to clean away from the new form. It will also create very confusing components for the system administrators, such as the old “What’s New” section vs. the new Social Pane, which require a deeper understanding of the Dynamics CRM platform evolution to really figure out. The biggest risk is that the form content designed for the old version UI will end up living alongside the content that is specifically made for the post CRM 2013 world, creating a disconnected and illogical application that works differently depending on the area where the user navigates to.

Instead of taking the shortcut and doing a quick content merge, I recommend investing a bit more time and effort in planning what’s the best way to present the data and how to make it as easy as possible for the users to interact with it through the UI. If you need some ideas for improving the user experience of your Microsoft Dynamics CRM environment, take a look at my previous post that listed 10 tips for designing a great user experience in Dynamics CRM.

October 12, 2014
10 Tips for Designing a Great User Experience in Dynamics CRM

Last week I had the privilege to talk at the Dynamics CRM Finland User Group meeting in Helsinki (quick recap available in Finnish here). When planning on what topic to choose for my presentation, I tried to think of something that would appeal to a wide audience of CRM users – both experienced consultants as well as key users who might still be relatively new to the product.

The common denominator for the group was, as the name suggest, that we’re all CRM users in one way or another. In this role we interact with the software in a variety of different ways, most likely several times during the course of a typical working day. As information workers, systems like CRM are our tools to get the job done. How effectively we succeed in this is largely affected by how much cognitive effort is needed to use these tools to shape the expected output.

So, I decided to talk about the many ways how we can sharpen our saws when it comes to Dynamics CRM. While every CRM environment is ultimately different from one another, due to the business processes we manage with it, the systems it integrates to, the user groups working with the application and so on, I believe there are still general design guidelines that apply to basically any organization using Microsoft Dynamics CRM. My presentation, “10 Tips for Designing a Great User Experience in Dynamics CRM“, introduces many of these guidelines that I personally try to follow when designing CRM solutions for customers. You can view the embedded presentation below, or if the content is not showing, then go and have a look at it on SlideShare.

10 Tips for Designing a Great User Experience in Microsoft Dynamics CRM from Jukka Niiranen

While UX has always been an important piece of the puzzle when trying to convince business users that using a CRM system can actually deliver tangible benefits to them, rather than just serve as a management tool for keeping track of what the employees are doing, the launch of the Dynamics CRM 2013 version has really heightened the importance of designing solutions with a polished user experience. This is due to the fact that the refreshed user interface and new customization points available in the UI can be leveraged to deliver a much more usable business application than the CRM systems of the past. But: you also need to plan the flow of user interactions with much more attention to detail, because sloppy customizations will now stick out like a sore thumb.

The good news is that many of the new details in CRM 2013 (and CRM 2015, too) are easy to configure once you know the role of each platform component. You can do so much these days without writing a single line of custom code that the system customizer can easily have his or her plate full of CRM enhancement ideas to implement without ever consulting a .NET developer. That’s why it’s also good to think in advance how to prioritize the areas into which you invest your efforts. This Top 10 list of mine provides one example of such a tool, to help in identifying the low hanging fruit when it comes to making your CRM users happier and more productive with the system. If you have any topics on your mind that I forgot to include on my list, be sure to leave a comment below!

Oh, one more thing: if you’re a Microsoft Dynamics CRM user in Finland and would be interested in networking with other fellow CRM professionals, I’m glad to announce that there’s now a new Yammer network available for you: Dynamics CRM Finland User Group. Whether you’re from a customer or partner organization, please feel free to sign up for this network and come join the planning for future events and other ways to share Dynamics CRM knowledge and experiences with peers. Tervetuloa!

September 30, 2014
Time Travel with Workflows: Accessing “Before” and “After” Values
Dynamics CRM has had a built-in auditing feature since the 2011 version, which provides a really handy tool for situations where someone needs to investigate the changes that have taken place on field values of a specific record. By default auditing is not enabled, but I recommend you to seriously consider enabling it for all business critical entities like accounts and contacts, since without it there’s not much to go by if you ever need to track down any intentional or unintentional updates made to your CRM data.

Auditing is a great tool for capturing the “fire hose” of data updates that are taking place in CRM. However, since the audit data is not stored in actual CRM records but rather in a denormalized state inside the audit database tables, it’s not accessible for any type of reporting or business process logic. If you know what record to look for, the related Audit menu will give you the information. If you are an administrator and have access to the Audit Summary View, you can also use filters to narrow down the audit data stream and hunt down the events that are relevant to your investigation. Very useful for resolving issues in the data, but not so practical for simply staying informed about updates that are of interest to your role in the organization.

Workflow processes can also be used for tracking specific changes made on the CRM records, just by setting the workflow to start when a particular field or a set of fields change. You can then perform any notification action you see appropriate, such as sending an email, creating an Activity Feed post, adding a note, appending a description field etc. Almost like auditing, but on a much more granular level, and also something that you can report on if necessary. One limitation compared to auditing, though, is that you can only see the new value of each field but not the previous one. So, you can’t produce a similar view that auditing provides, with the old and new values side by side.

Or can you? With the launch of the CRM 2013 version we gained a whole new category of workflow processes, called real-time workflows. These behave much in the same way as custom plugins, as they are executed synchronously as part of the event pipeline of the CRM platform rather than via the asynchronous service that the traditional workflows use. The extra benefit we gain from this, aside from the fact that the workflow logic is executed immediately, is that we now also have the ability to choose whether the real-time workflow should be started before or after the event. This allows us to actually read the data that was in a field before the update took place. Sounds like a cool little feature? Well why don’t we take it our for a spin then and see what we can achieve with it.

Tracking Account Name Changes

Let’s consider a scenario where we would be interested in tracking the changes performed on the account name field. We have decided to leverage the Activity Feeds feature to post a message on the record wall every time an existing account has its name field updated. As a part of this post, we need to provide both the old name and the new name, so that the users can easily associate this particular account as a customer they’ve previously done business with under a different name.

Since we need a place to store the old name of the account for the purposes of formulating the post’s content, first we’ll add a new custom text field for the account entity, called “Old Name”. Then we’ll open up the workflow editor and create a new real-time workflow process for the account entity, called “Account Name Change: Store Old Name”. The important part here is that we’ll set this workflow to be run when “Record fields change” with a box ticked for the “Account Name” field and change the “Start when” value to “Before”. The actual workflow actions only need to do one thing, which is to copy the value of the standard “Account Name” field to the new “Old Name” field. Nothing else.

Next we’ll create a second workflow, called “Account Name Change: Post Old & New Name”. We’ll set it to run in real time for the account entity, just like the first one. We’ll even associate it with the very same event, meaning the change of the “Account Name” field. The difference will be that we’ll run this workflow “After” the event. Again, the actions that the workflow will perform are very simple, as we’ll only need it to create a new Activity Feed post record. Here’s how the message will be configured with the dynamic field values from the account record:

So, we now have two real-time workflows running for the same entity, for the same field change event. Is this a smart thing to do? Will the universe by any chance collapse onto itself as a result of this reckless twin workflow configuration that we’ve built? Well, there’s only one way to find out! Let’s activate these two workflow processes, go to an account record and change it’s name.

After the name is changed, we can click onto the Activity Feed’s auto posts column to refresh the post view. There we discover a post created by our second workflow process, containing both the “before” and “after” names for this account. Success! If we keep feeding further update events to this workflow duo, we can see that the post message is always updated to contain the last two names for this account in search of its true identity.

If our second workflow process would have been an asynchronous process instead of real-time, the results might be different, though. As I’ve experimented in a previous post, “Auto-Numbering with CRM Workflows: Real-Time vs. Asynchronous”, the record data and execution order for traditional background workflow processes may not always be consistent, due to their asynchronous nature. By using a real-time workflow we are guaranteed to receive a ticket to the front row seats of CRM’s event execution pipeline. In practice this means the following:
- “Account Name Change: Store Old Name” – this workflow is executed at the pre-operation stage, which means that it sees the record as it was before the update event took place. Therefore when it reads the account name field it still has the old value stored. Furthermore, because the workflow is completed before the actual platform event for the account update takes place, it can inject a new value into the “Old Name” field and have it committed to the database as a part of the original transaction.
- “Account Name Change: Post Old & New Name” – this workflow is executed at the post-operation stage, meaning after the update has already taken place, but before the transaction is completely over. It receives an image of the account record where the standard “Account Name” field is populated with the new value the user has entered and the “Old Name” contains the value updated by the first workflow in the pre-operation stage.
As this example scenario demonstrates, while a workflow can’t directly compare the “before” and “after” values of a record, there is actually a workaround available where you could pass the old value from the pre-operation workflow to the post-operation workflow. You could then perform a comparison of the values with the tools that the workflow editor offers (or extend it via custom workflow activities) and alter the outcome of the transaction based on the business logic. If needed, you could even cancel the operation and show an error message to the user if the old & new values are violating the rules of your business processes.

To close things off, it’s important to keep in mind that just because you can do something with a workflow instead of custom code, it doesn’t mean it would always be the right tool for the job. Aside from the greater level of flexibility that a plugin will give you for comparing and manipulating the data during the update event, there are also performance considerations you should be aware of before pushing a ton of real-time workflows into your production CRM system. I recommend reading this post by CRM MVP Scott Durow: Real Time Workflow or Plugin?
September 14, 2014
Troubleshooting CRM for Tablets Login Issues with ADFS

All CRM 2013 and CRM Online customers have access to the CRM for Tablets app that’s available for Windows 8, iOS and Android devices. Since it’s an app from the new age of mobile computing, the users can simply download it from the respective app store of the platform provider and install it. Configuring the app to connect with your CRM organization can however prove to be a bit trickier task than this.

If you’re using CRM Online hosted by Microsoft in their data centers, connecting the tablet app to the CRM server in the cloud is usually a straightforward process. Just enter the URL for your organization, then punch in the credentials and off you go. Well, to be more precise, upon your first connection the organization you’ll be taken to a screen that asks you to hold on tight while the app is being set up. This is because all of the metadata related to your CRM organization’s customizations first needs to be loaded, so that you’ll see your own CRM instead of some generic, hard coded menus and fields. This step can take quite a while to finish, but just hold on tight, it’s worth it.

If you’ve got your own on-premises CRM server or you’re logging to CRM Online via your on-premises Active Directory credentials, you may need to work a bit harder to achieve connectivity between the CRM for Tablets app and the CRM server. This is because in both of these scenarios you will have ADFS (Active Directory Federation Services) sitting there in the middle, processing your login request and validating your user credentials. Of course the same technology is also used behind the pure cloud CRM Online service, but MS has done the configuration work for you, whereas with on-premises components you’ll be in charge of performing this.

Recently I was faced with a situation where a customer had deployed Dynamics CRM 2013 SP1 on-premises and done the Internet Facing Deployment via Windows Server 2008 R2 ADFS 2.0, published via Forefront TMG (Threat Management Gateway) 2010. Accessing CRM via the web client through the IFD address was working as expected, so was the CRM Outlook client. CRM for Phones was connecting without issues and I could even connect to the server via tools like XrmToolBox with no issues. There was just one problem: the CRM for Tablets wouldn’t connect to the server, no matter what. In the process of troubleshooting this particular scenario I learned a thing or two about the tablet app connectivity as well as server configuration tasks, so I thought I’d share my findings here on my blog. I’m by no means an expert on anything surrounding ADFS , but I’m stubborn enough to keep searching for answers until I find some from the great wide web.

RTFM – Read The Friendly Manual(s)

First of all, you’ll need to know your ADFS version, since there’s a few new hoops you’ll need to jump through when working with Windows Server 2012 R2 and the latest ADFS 2.2 (sometimes referred to as ADFS 3.0, since official version numbers seem to have been dropped by MS, in favor of just shipping ADFS together with Windows Server releases). The architecture of ADFS has changed considerably from earlier 2.0 and 2.1 versions, with no more IIS in the background, so the configuration process for CRM IFD also differs from the previous experience.

You’ll find the extra steps listed on this article: Configure Windows Server 2012 R2 for CRM mobile clients. On the ADFS 2.2 server you’ll need to enable forms authentication manually, since it’s not enabled by default, like in previous versions. Then you need to run a Powershell script on the CRM server to configure the OAuth provider. Finally, you should register the CRM for Tablets app ID’s with the ADFS server via another Powershell script.

You may run into an issue with the login process where the user is prompted for their AD credentials via the standard Windows domain dialog window repeatedly. This is because of some incorrect authentication settings that apparently are caused by the CRM IFD configuration process itself. To avoid these issues, you should run a repair installation on the CRM 2013 server with the Web Application Server role deployed, after you’ve done the IFD configuration and before you attempt to log in with the CRM for Tablets app.

Another aspect is the requirements imposed by the new Windows 8.1 version of the tablet app. Because of the changes on the OS layer, it’s no longer possible for Win8 apps to connect to any random server at will, but rather the developer has to specify the URL’s of these servers before publishing the app to the Windows Store. For CRM Online the domains for the service are known in advance, but for an on-premises deployment they could be absolutely anything. To overcome this, you’ll need to add a registry entry onto your device before attempting to connect to your server, otherwise the tablet app will just sit there and do nothing. Go to the page Set up CRM for Tablets, expand the section “what the admin needs to do” and grab the Powershell script from there. Running it on your device will prompt you for the CRM organization URL and create the necessary registry key for you. (more…)

August 28, 2014
Access Option Set Labels in Dynamics CRM OData Feeds via Power Query

If you’re using Dynamics CRM Online without direct access to the underlying SQL Server database, there may have been a few occasions when you’ve wished for more flexible options for reporting and customer data analytics than what is possible via configuring CRM charts or developing Fetch XML based reports in Visual Studio. Late last year Microsoft enabled support for accessing the secured OData feeds from CRM Online via the Excel Power Query tool, which opened up some interesting options for building modern BI solutions on top of the CRM data up in the Microsoft cloud.

For a non-developer who hasn’t leveraged OData before it might come as a bit of a surprise that not all of the business data is necessarily readily available via the feeds when examining a particular CRM entity. One crucial thing that’s missing is the option set values. More specifically, it’s the label values that are not accessible via the entity tables retrieved via the OData feed, as all we have access to are the numerical values representing the labels (1, 2, 3, 4… 10001), but not the human readable versions.

From a reporting perspective, it’s very likely that any chart or table that you wish to build is going to leverage one or more option set fields. Formerly known as picklists, these are basically the dropdown fields on CRM entity forms that allow the user to select one value from a list of predefined values. Much more convenient for reporting purposes than free text fields, as I’m sure you’d agree.

So, what are our options then? We could of course manually create new tables into the Excel workbook that store the mapping of ID values and labels, but that just doesn’t sound like a fun exercise at all. More importantly, that would only give us a static list of option set values that couldn’t adapt to the changes in CRM customizations. Nope, not a good approach from report maintenance perspective, so let’s not go there.

As a bit more efficient workaround we could be adventurous and import a copy of the CRM solution file containing the entity customizations as an XML data source into Power Query and then pick out the necessary mappings from there. Due to the power of Power Query, this would actually technically work, and we could even set it to reference a file location from where the latest customizations would dynamically be imported upon workbook refresh. Still, that would leave us the burden of setting up an automated export system that would produce the customizations.xml file to reflect the latest changes.

After a bit of poking around in the OData feed data source, it turns out the optionset labels are actually included there. The tricky part is that they’re not simply a [Record] link that you can drill into and expose the values from your existing entity data set. Nope, they reside in a specific table of their own, called PicklistMappingSet. In this tutorial I’ll show you how to retrieve the data for a “Leads by Source” chart created with Power View, taken from an OData feed data source pointing to Dynamics CRM Online, using Power Query to pull the data into a data model built with Power Pivot.

1. The Data Source: Power Query

To follow the steps you should have the latest Power Query version installed in your Excel client. I’ve already covered how to access CRM OData feeds from Power Query in a previous article, so please refer to that one if you haven’t done the exercise before. After connecting to the OData feed URL we should select the tables that we want to work with from the data source navigator pane. By minimum you should grab the LeadSet and PicklistMappingSet to build the chart.

The problem with CRM and OData is that by default the feed will pull down each and every record in the table. The query performance is less than stellar with CRM Online and if you have a high number of leads (status doesn’t matter, also the closed ones will get downloaded), you might be waiting for a while before the query is completed. If you want to move on a bit faster then check out this great tip by Andre Margono on how to set up a query filter for the Dynamics CRM OData query (for example, only active leads).

The real beauty of Power Query is in the query steps you can use for manipulating the workbook queries. Before we go there, though, let’s create a duplicate of the PicklistMappingSet query. This will make it easier for us to map the values into our actual leads table later on, as well as preserve the original option set value table available for further queries.

Open up the new duplicate query you’ve added into the edit mode by double clicking on it, which launches the Power Query query editor (yes, query is the word of the day). The first step we’re going to add for the query involves expanding a column that only shows a green “Record” value by drilling into it from the small icon next to the column label. Do this to the ColumnMappingId column and just load up all the columns found from behind it.

You’ll see the Record column transformed into three new columns as a result of drilling down into the data. The column we’re interested in is ColumnMappingId.Name, which has the names for all option set fields in our source CRM system. For this example we want to see the LeadSource field, so add a new filter for this value, just as you would in a normal Excel data table.

By now you might have noticed that the Applied Steps box in the Query Settings pane is collecting all of the actions that we’re performing on the query and storing them as steps. If you make an error in your selection, just click the delete symbol next to the steps to get rid of it. (more…)

August 12, 2014
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.

How 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.
July 21, 2014