Jukka Niiranen

Tag: crm2011

  • CRM Hindsight Is 20/20 – My Blogging Retrospective

    CRM Hindsight Is 20/20 – My Blogging Retrospective

    It’s the end of another year, which means the blogosphere is filling up with “looking back” type of articles that examine the various topics discussed during the year. Analyzing past actions is activity that we all should probably spend time on a bit more frequently, although one day out of 365 is a good start. Following this pattern, I also ended up having a look back at some of my earlier writings during the Xmas break.

    Conan_2010_appsSo, how was 2015 for Dynamics CRM? Beats me, because that’s not where I was looking at! Via a seemingly random navigation path that started with me exploring the brand new PowerApps announced by Microsoft a few weeks ago, I actually ended up reading some of my Surviving CRM writings from the year 2010. I’ll perhaps describe the events behind this abrupt jump back in time in a post covering the future of mobile business apps and CRM, but for now that’s not on the agenda. No, instead I found plenty of interesting material covering quite a wide spectrum of CRM related topics that in many ways are as relevant today as they were five years ago.

    My journey with Microsoft Dynamics CRM started almost exactly 10 years ago, when the MS CRM 3.0 version with Finnish language support was introduced and my then forward thinking organization decided to adopt this system instead of a proven, industry specific solution tailored for the Nordic markets. I did not start blogging about my experiences right from day one, since back in 2005 that wasn’t how any normal person would behave (today it would be something I’d encourage everyone to consider). As my focus gradually moved away from generic marketing and IT topics into a more tightly defined domain of business applications and the MS ecosystem in particular, more and more material started accumulating on my blog, on Twitter, on SlideShare and so on. By 2010 it looks like I had already sunk pretty deep into these waters, which makes it interesting (at least for myself!) to see how I envisioned the world around Dynamics CRM to evolve.

    I picked out a few topics from my 2010 writings and reflected back on what I thought was going to be their impact vs. what we now know five years later. In (mostly) the order of the original blog posts, the themes ended up being the following:

    • Cloud
    • Mobile
    • Portals
    • MS Office
    • Social
    • Business app development/XRM
    • Outlook
    • SharePoint
    • ISV ecosystem
    • Solution management
    • Charts & dashboards
    • MSFT organization

    Here’s a presentation that contains excerpts from the original blog posts and some notes 5 years later on the topic:

    Luckily I’m not in the habit of making bold, precise predictions like “by year N+2 the market size of technology X will have grown by 300%”, since those are better left for the industry analysts who are paid for such statements. I’m of course completely biased in evaluating how accurately my own writings matched with the future reality, but it’s easy to find a number of observations from there we one could arrogantly say “I told you this was going to happen” and “some things never change, now do they”. What’s not so apparent from looking at past articles are the things that actually did change at a blinding speed.

    Just think about it: only five years ago the big new CRM 2011 release was being developed for an “Internet Explorer only” world and the thought of MS favoring competing OS’s in their own apps over Windows would have been simply ludicrous. Getting new CRM versions released every 6 months instead of a 3 year upgrade cycle sounded like something the customers could never cope with, but here we are with CRM Online. Mastering the whole Dynamics CRM product in 2010 was a perfectly realistic goal for consultants, whereas in 2015 you’re not going to find a person who’s fluent in CRM, MDM, MSE, Parature, FieldOne, Adxstudio and the rest of the current MS product stack in this area. All these changes and more mean that a CRM project starting today may not have much in common at all with the one you were working on in 2010.

    The future isn’t ever exactly what you would think, but that doesn’t mean you wouldn’t benefit from the effort of trying to project the possible paths forward in your mind. I personally find the best way to build up clarity into your vision on where things are going is spending some time on connecting the dots between what information you’ve just recently acquired and what analysis you’ve performed earlier. It’s all too easy to just launch a news app or log into a social feed and start taking in new announcements of what someone else thinks is noteworthy right now, but those bits & pieces are fairly unlikely to carry significance to you in the long term – unless you’re able to put them into context with the knowledge structures built from prior pieces. That’s why it doesn’t hurt to recap the history of how the technologies you’re working with have evolved over time, when thinking about what might be coming next on the road ahead.

  • Activity Feeds in R8: from follow to filter

    One of the functional areas to receive an update in the Dynamics CRM R8 release in Q2 2012 will be the Activity Feeds, which were originally introduced as an optional solution in the previous R7 release. In R8 we’ll get the ability to filter the content of the feed, but what are the implications of this enhancement in practice? Bigger than you might imagine at first.

    While the concept of a wall with an activity feed fits well within a modern business application that must not only provide a method to enter  & query data but also allow users to discover relevant information and comment on it, there was a slight handicap in the initial version of the Dynamics CRM Activity Feeds. This was the requirement that you had to explicitly tag the records you wanted to follow, before anything would show up on your wall. What may initially appear as a convenient way to select the updates you’re interested in seeing on your personal feed can soon become difficult for the users to actively manage.

    Let’s imagine a scenario where a user is interested in regularly monitoring the activity feed posts around prospect accounts that have open opportunities. How would the Activity Feeds functionality meet this requirement? Before R8 you would have needed to perform Advanced Find queries on the records that match a certain criteria, then select all (max 250 at a time) and click the “Follow” button on the ribbon. Of course if any new records were created or modified after your search, you wouldn’t have seen updates related to them unless you performed the query again and again. The most advanced users could of course have created a workflow rule that adds the follows based on new events in the database, but a process like that would hardly be obvious for the majority of CRM users. Automating this with a centrally managed workflow or plugin to automatically generate follow records for the appropriate audience on the other hand requires the type of top-down information system planning that doesn’t fit well with the whole idea of social business and its empowered end users.

    In R8 all this will change. The system now allows you to define dynamic filters for retrieving posts regarding records that meet the filter criteria. Rather than individually cherry picking records on your follow list, you can now look at the available Activity Feed posts which reference records of a particular type, such as the aforementioned “prospects with open opportunities”.

    In short, you don’t need to follow records anymore. It’s now optional.

    Ok, so anyone can then go and create a filter for exactly the types of records that they want to see posts from, set that as their default posts view and just enjoy the feed, right? Well, unfortunately not quite. Only the system administrator or system customizer can create new system views and promote them to become available filters for Activity Feed posts. So, how do you create a new filter for Activity Feeds then? Here are the steps:

    1. Go to the Customizations menu, open a suitable solution with the entity you wish to create filters for.
    2. Build a new system view and set the filter criteria of the view to match the filter you want to apply on records from which the related Activity Feed posts should be available. Publish your customizations.
    3. Go to the Activity Feeds Configuration menu and open the Post Configuration record for the corresponding entity (if one doesn’t exist, create a new one with the schema name of the entity).
    4. From the Filters subgrid, select your new view and click Show on the ribbon. No need to publish anything, as this is configuration data (not metadata) and the changes will take place  right away.

    It looks like any new Activity Feed filters published will become visible in the selector menu on the wall by default. The user has the option to click “modify this list” and access a view called My Filters. If any of the filters made available to the whole organization are not relevant to them, this is where the users can set to hide them from their Activity Feeds menu. As a little extra touch, the sort order of the filters can be also adjusted.

    While this means that the users have some level of control over the filters visible to them, the same will not be true for the actual system views that need to be created and published for the whole organization to see, in order to make the filters available to the users who may need them. Personal views will not appear as Activity Feed filters, at least not in the R8 release.

    All in all, it may not be the most elegant solution for the problem of filtering Activity Feed posts, but it definitely does make the whole feature considerably more useful. The pain of getting users to go and follow records in CRM is reduced, as is the need for creating workflows or writing plugins that add the follow records automatically based on some business logic. Also, the benefits of the Activity Feed will be much more apparent for a user who is simply browsing the system contents, as he or she will be able to access a list of account related posts with the simple selection of one filter.

    Looking at the rest of the Activity Feed functionality, there is no further automation regarding the creation of auto posts in the R8 update as far as I know. Default entities have Activity Feed Rules available but for custom entities or events not included in the out-of-the-box rules, you’ll need a workflow or plugin to create the post. One thing that’s important to understand is that the Activity Feeds are not about showing all the updates taking place regarding a record. That’s what auditing is for. Unless you have configured yourself an auto post to be added whenever a record X of entity Y is created, nothing will show up on your wall, regardless of the new filtering capabilities.

    In R8 the follow limit in CRM Online will be increased in R8, but there’s still a hard limit of maximum 1000 follows per user. On-premises servers will have the possibility of increasing this limit, but performance impact is to be expected at some point due to the complex nature of the underlying Fetch XML queries used in constructing the result views for the walls. A very welcome new feature is the ability to enable also organization owned entities for Activity Feeds. This means you can add a wall on a competitor entity form, for example, which was previously not possible.

    What we’re still lacking is the ability to perform searches on the content of Activity Feed posts. Even though the underlying data is in a way structured by containing references to the related records, we’re not able to use any keyword in the actual post text content to perform searches on posts. OK, in theory we are able to perform Quick Find searches on the data if we manually add the post entity into the sitemap, but we’re unable to open the post and comments from there, as the post entity does not have any form that could be used for viewing the content outside of the wall (“the walled garden of activity feeds…”).

    Click to vote for the feature enhancement suggestion on Microsoft Connect

    I find the lack of a search feature on the social content stream quite a strange oversight from Microsoft’s part, considering this is already a v2 release of the solution. If any ISV’s are looking for a new product to develop, then how about creating an Activity Feeds Search solution that offers a custom UI to browse the content of the posts? For the others, why not log in to Microsoft Connect and vote for my product suggestion to Allow Activity Feeds post content to be searched. Thanks for your contribution.

    (For any of you wondering where to get the new, updated version of Activity Feeds, you’ll need to wait for the R8 to be officially released, as described in my previous post. The post here is written based on the R8 beta functionality.)

    Update 2012-07-30: even though the updated Activity Feeds functionality in R8 seemed quite polished, it now looks like these new features have also been postponed by 6 months until the Q4 2012 release, alongside cross-browser and mobile support. I find this decision particularly hard to understand, since the only thing you would need for the new Activity Feeds solution to work in an Update Rollup 8 environment would be a few expansions to the database schema, as far as I can see. Could there be some implications from the recent Yammer acquisition that have forced the Dynamics CRM team to halt any updates to their home brew feed functionality, that’s something we’ll probably never know for sure.

  • Cross-browser support implications for CRM developers and users

    Soon the R8 update of Microsoft Dynamics CRM will be upon us and the application will officially open up to browsers other than Internet Explorer. What this means is CRM will also be accessible through different devices than just Windows PC’s: Macs, Linux machines, iPads and other tablets. Exciting times for all CRM geeks around the world, myself included, which is why I already wrote some of my thoughts on the topic after the Q2 2012 Service Update contents was revealed (see the post “To the eXtreme, part 2: The future of the web caught up with IE and Dynamics CRM”).

    More supported browsers & devices will inevitably mean more work for CRM developers, as testing your application on IE alone will no longer be enough. As we get closer to R8 go-live before the end of Q2, the need for more detailed information on the practical implications is surely growing. Luckily XRM Virtual had managed to get Karun Krishna from Microsoft to give a webinar on the topic of cross-browser development on May 1st. The Live Meeting recording is now available for viewing at the XRM Virtual site. Apparently also Karun’s slides were shared during the live session, but since the recording didn’t contain them, I decided to write down a few notes of mine from the contents of the presentation.

    First up is the detailed browser support matrix seen below, which expands the list previously provided in the R8 release preview guide. Included are new yellow boxes for Internet Explorer 10 on Windows 7 and Windows 8, which indicate a “supported but not full fidelity” user experience for Dynamics CRM. Also the Firefox support on Mac OS X appears to have fallen onto this level where some display/functionality bugs will exist.

    Microsoft Dynamics CRM 2011 cross-browser support matrix

    In his presentation, Karun explained that while the CRM team tried to use HTML5 compliant techniques wherever possible, there were still some areas where an alternative approach had to be used in order to replicate the existing Dynamics CRM functionality across non-IE browsers. Any IE specific APIs have been removed, but as the w3C standards are still evolving, there isn’t necessarily always one single right way to implement a specific functionality in the cross-browser world. Therefore a feature detection approach for checking for browser capability differences is recommended over developing for any specific browser version. The webinar included examples and best practices on API’s and XML processing, so be sure to view the recording for details.

    It was announced already earlier that using browsers other than Internet Explorer for the administration and customization menus of Dynamics CRM would not be supported. Sorry guys, you’ll still need to boot into Windows on your MacBook if you intend to do any customization work. Some additional information was now provided on features that will not be supported on other browsers than IE. These include:

    • Workplace calendar
    • Services (scheduling) and service calendar
    • Editors for workflows and dialogs
    • Lync based presence information

    One thing to note is that the old crmForm object API from CRM 4.0 days will continue to work only for Internet Explorer. Therefore if you have any scripts in place that have not been updated to use the Xrm.Page methods, these won’t work for users on Chrome, Safari or Firefox.

    Finally, while iPad 2 support with iOS 5 is provided, it’s important to note that this is simply the support for usage through Safari browser, not a dedicated application optimized for the tablet environment. For the premium UX you’ll need to acquire/subscribe to an add-on app like the Microsoft Dynamics CRM Mobile for iPad, of which you can view screenshots in this post. The browser experience on an iPad 2 will have the following known limitations/issues:

    • No popus. Since Dynamics CRM by default opens a wealth of windows and dialogs, this doesn’t match well with the “flat” UI’s of tablet apps.
    • Touch events compared to mouse events will cause some lack of functionality (no right click, double click)
    • iFrame scroll bars may be missing.
    • Window closing has issues due to a focus related bug in the .close API
    • No Silverlight. Well, no surprise there…

    Edit 9.5.2012: The long awaited R8 release for Microsoft Dynamics CRM 2011 is now available as a beta version! PartnerSource login is required for the beta program sign-up and download (CustomerSource might also work) at http://bit.ly/crmr8beta. If you want to test your Dynamics CRM solutions in a cross-browser environment (Safari, Chrome, Firefox) before the official release of Update Rollup 9, then this is the program for you. Please note that the beta version of R8 will not support an upgrade to the final version of R8, so you should apply it to a dedicated test environment only.

  • Activity view default filter, missing due dates and how to modify the filter

    Certain entities that contain the activity roll-up feature, namely accounts, contacts and opportunities, are also equipped with a date filter that allows you to choose whether you want to see all the activities related to the record or just a selected subset. By default this is “Next 30 days”, but you also can choose between “Overdue” or “Next 12 months”, or just go for “All”. That’s the good news.

    The bad news is that this piece of helpful functionality has remained uncustomizable throughout different Dynamics CRM versions. A lot of users were annoyed with especially the same filter in the associated history view, nowadays known as Closed Activities view in CRM 2011, which used to default to “Last 30 days” and hide away all but the most recent email threads, appointments and other information that you might have been searching for. You always had to change the filter manually to “All” to uncover the historical information about the relationship with the account or contact. However, this has changed now in the latest version and “All” has become the default filter (or should I say the filter is off by default).

    That’s definitely a step towards the right direction. It’s not exactly what the response on Microsoft Connect suggests, which claims that “we’ve allowed a user to change the default filter for associated views in CRM 2011”. I’ve yet run into such a setting and neither has The Great Internet, unless Google is hiding such instructions or blog posts. It would be useful to be able to configure or remove filters that the end users don’t want to deal with, without having to resort to unsupported customizations.

    Open vs. closed activities

    History is one thing but it’s the future actions that matter the most. Until very recently, I’d say up until Update Rollup 2 of CRM 2011 the filter functionality in the open activities associated views used to be such that the default “Next 30 days” would also show any activity that was missing a due date. By default the due dates are not a required field and sometimes they are not that practical for the CRM users, as many things in the daily life of a modern information worker don’t have strict deadlines. Also, there’s no out-of-the-box functionality in Dynamics CRM to set default values for date fields either, so setting the exact due date for every task or phone call you enter on your task list may feel too bureaucratic. An activity with a missing date should be considered as “do this as soon as you can, given all the surrounding factors”, in my personal opinion.

    In the current version of Update Rollup 5 the “Filter on” value is applied in such a way that it by default hides away all activities that don’t meet the “Next 30 days” criteria. If the due date is blank, the activities won’t show under the account/contact/opportunity. This may seem quite confusing to the user, since any new activity that he or she creates for the record will appear to “vanish” into thin air after clicking “Save and close”. In the My Activities view they will still appear on the top of the list, as null values in the Due Date column are sorted on top.

    What’s even more confusing is that CRM 2011 introduces two different ways for users to navigate to related activities on the account form: the familiar associated view and the new subgrid. If you’ve been reading my blog, you’ll know that subgrids ain’t exactly what associated views used to be. They don’t contain the activity roll-up feature, so you won’t see those activities that are set regarding a child record of an account (for example, opportunities) instead of the account record directly. Just like another filter, except you can’t even change it.

    How to change the default filter value

    There’s been numerous blog posts written on the topic of setting the filter defaults on CRM 4.0, but I was initially a bit surprised I couldn’t find a working piece of Javascript to achieve this on CRM 2011. Examples like this, this or this didn’t seem to be working for me, but luckily I ran into this post on the Microsoft Dynamics CRM German forum by Andreas Buchinger. To save you the trouble of Google Translate (well, it’s not much trouble at all when using Chrome’s built-in translation toolbar), here’s a walk through of the steps needed.

    (more…)

  • First preview of Dynamics CRM Q4 2011 Service Update (and more)

    There’s an immense amount of product news coming up from the WPC 2011 conference, due to the sheer size of Microsoft’s portfolio of different product lines. Luckily also Dynamics CRM had its 15 minutes on the WPC keynote stage and we saw a few bits and pieces of what lies ahead in the upcoming Q4 2011 Service Update that will become available to both CRM Online and CRM 2011 on-premise later this year. I already wrote a post in Finnish about the CRM news from WPC, but I thought I’d also share a few screenshots here to those who haven’t seen the keynote video.

    Social business remains a hot topic and Microsoft will add some of the much needed social aspects into the next release of Dynamics CRM. Activity feeds á la Twitter, Facebook, Yammer, Chatter and the likes will be integrated also into Dynamics CRM, as can be seen in the demo dashboard below.

    In addition to allowing status updates from colleagues, the functionality we saw earlier in CRM 4.0 as the Business Productivity Newsfeed Accelerator (though merely a report) and then later on implemented through 3rd party add-ons like Vibe from Sonoma Partners, now looks to become a core part of Dynamics CRM platform. I’d imagine these automatic feed items are still posted as a result of record updates triggering workflow process rules, like in the aforementioned examples.

    Office 365 will become the new home of CRM Online in Q4 as it integrates into the same infrastructure. In addition to subscription management and authentication provider improvements, there’s some interesting benefits for CRM in the Lync integration provided from the Office 365 cloud. No longer will you be limited to only have chats and video conferencing with your colleagues. If the customer contacts in your CRM database are also users of Office 365, their presence information can be federated across organizations (if they choose to, I’m sure) and presented right inside the CRM forms, allowing you to reach out to them through Lync with one click.

    Azure Data Market is now being marketed as the “one-stop shop for premium data and applications”. The Dynamics CRM demo included a custom button called Azure Enrich, which went out into the Data Market, opened up D&B’s company database and provided the missing address information for the Contoso account. I guess the big news here isn’t how you can retrieve company data through the API, but rather what the existence of a central marketplace can actually do in making data available to a whole new scale of potential customers, from a variety of global players. The cloud is not only for apps anymore.

    In the WPC keynote demo we saw again a Windows Phone 7 client for Dynamics CRM. This time there was also one new screen included, which presents the same activity feed information (labeled as “records feed”). It doesn’t quite compete with the other flashy WP7 Mango demos presented later on in the session, but definitely a useful way for mobile workers to keep an eye on what’s going on in the CRM database while outside the office.

    Oh, and of course there was the tablet app built for running Dynamics CRM on a Windows 7 slate. With all the Metro UI goodness, I’m wondering what the out-of-the-box experience could actually become like once we reach Windows 8…

  • Office 365 launches without Dynamics CRM integration for document management

    Office 365 launches without Dynamics CRM integration for document management

    Today was finally the big day when Microsoft’s cloud productivity platform BPOS was replaced with Office 365, which is now available for subscription. Having played with the beta version for a while now, I’m overall quite impressed with how close the SharePoint Online environment now is to its on-premises counterpart. While the limitations are still somewhat more visible than when comparing CRM Online vs. CRM 2011 on-premises versions, I think it’s already close enough to enable a significant part of traditional business requirements for SharePoint to be fulfilled with the cloud platform.

    Microsoft confirmed already last fall that also Dynamics CRM Online will eventually be migrated onto the same Online Services Delivery Platform as Office 365. In addition to being a natural fit with SharePoint and Exchange, CRM Online should also gain benefits into both its subscription management as well as authentication options as a result of  this migration. However, there’s no official timeline or feature set communicated yet, so we’ll have to keep waiting possibly until Q4/2011, when the next update for Dynamics CRM has been scheduled to become available, as announced in the latest Statement of Direction document.

    Ever since Dynamics CRM 2011 was launched with built-in SharePoint document library integration, there’s been a bit of anxiety on when this functionality could be leveraged with the cloud versions of CRM and SharePoint. Since BPOS was built on SharePoint 2007, it wasn’t possible to utilize the Microsoft Dynamics CRM 2011 List Component for Microsoft SharePoint Server 2010 in the Online environment. This meant that setting up a document management enabled trial environment with CRM Online required an on-premises SharePoint server, which wasn’t too convenient. Nor was it for any customer looking to go “all in” with their MS applications. Oh well, but now that Office 365 is available, that’s all a thing of the past, isn’t it?

    Wrong! Despite of the better together marketing message surrounding Office 365 and CRM Online, there’s actually still no way to integrate the SharePoint document libraries with the CRM List Component. Sure, you can upload the solution file into a SharePoint Online site and publish it. What you cannot do in the Online version is to take care of the second part of the installation steps, which involves the AllowHtcExtn.ps1 PowerShell script,used for enabling .htc file extensions to be served from SharePoint.

    Why is this important? Because without the .htc support, you can’t actually do anything with the document library. The folder creation can be configured and it flows through as it should when accessing the Documents menu for a new record, such as an account. However, after that you are presented with the following prompt:

    “The action buttons are disabled because the SharePoint server that you are using does not allow HTC component files. To enable the buttons, contact your system administrator.” What this means is that the document library will be rendered nicely inside the CRM entity form, but you can’t upload any documents to it. Clicking on the buttons does nothing, as they’re all disabled.

    How about on the SharePoint side of things then? We can see that the entity specific document libraries are created and also the corresponding folders for each record where the document location has been defined. We can also of course use the native SharePoint UI to upload documents into the library.

    Then when you access the corresponding record through CRM, you can see that the document does appear in the library. But with all the controls disabled, you again cannot do anything with it, like open the document, for example. How nice…

    How did we end up in this situation where the latest and greatest cloud offerings from Microsoft are not working together like they obviously were inteded to? That’s a very good question. The problem with Office 365 SharePoint Online limitations and their implications to Dynamics CRM document management functionality has been a known issue throughout the whole beta phase of Office 365. There are several threads on the Office 365 community forums regarding this. Yet the response from Microsoft has been that this cannot be resolved by GA (general availability) of Office 365 (as in “today”), but rather we’ll have to wait for the first service update, probably. Come on! How can 6 months not be enough to allow one .htc file to perform its work and provide the document integration between CRM and SharePoint? I find it extremely strange that the product management behind Office 365 has allowed such a flaw to be included in the initial release version.

    Of course eventually this issue will be solved and we’ll be able to experience the full document management process flow with Microsoft’s cloud applications.

  • CRM 2011 subgrids ain’t what associated views used to be

    Back in the days before we had Microsoft Dynamics CRM 2011 available, it was a commonplace customization to show entities related to the parent entity directly on the parent’s form by utilizing an iFrame. Making information such as latest history items (nowadays called closed activities) quickly visible to any user opening the form is often justified, as one key functions of a CRM system is to share information about what interaction has taken place with the customer. Referencing the URL of the related view on the iFrame was not exactly supported, but it was a relatively safe customization to apply nonetheless.

    Due to popular demand, Microsoft introduced an official method for achieving this UI customization in CRM 2011 through the use of the form sub-grid element. As a part of the entity forms redesign, the subgrids have now become an out-of-the-box feature on several default entities, such as accounts, contacts and opportunities.

    Different navigation points, different views

    It’s important to note that subgrids don’t use the entity associated view definition, which is applied when traditionally navigating to the view by using left side menu items on an entity form. Instead they allow you to separately choose a filter to “view only related records”, in combination with any of the system views available for the entity in question (but not the associated views, as those are “special” views). 9 times out of 10 you’ll want to keep the filter on, as showing non-related records on the entity’s form would under normal circumstances defy the standard UI logic of how Dynamics CRM presents records in different windows.

    OK, fair enough, so that’s why the columns in a subgrid aren’t updated after you edit the entity related view, like you used to do in CRM 4.0 and previous versions. We can live with that. In order to provide a consistent user experience, I would recommend that these two views are set up so that they have identical contents. This is because an “oldskool” CRM user may navigate through the left side menu by habbit, whereas a person new to Dynamics CRM will probably prefer to just scroll through the form. Sadly there’s no “save as” functionality available on the entity related view, and you can’t promote a normal view to become a related view (since there’s only one of them). This means you have to manually configure the two views to be indentical in terms of attributes, column order, width, sorting and (in some cases) filters.

    Rolling up the records

    Another thing that may surprise a seasoned Dynamics CRM consultant until he learns the tricks of the latest version is that the aforementioned feature has further implications specific to accounts and opportunities in particular. As we’ve come to know, these entities have special capabilities enabled in the activity views: the roll-up functionality. Instead of being restricted to only activities directly related to a record, we can actually see a bit further. Let’s take a simple example of an account and it’s open activity associated view:

    It’s that “Include Related Regarding Records” selection above the grid which allows us to view activities not only related to the account itself but also the ones regarding a contact of the account and an opportunity related to it. Pretty neat, as it’s often the people working at an account that we associate communication and activities to, such as emails and appointments.

    Now, let’s take advatage of the new CRM 2011 functionalities and look at the activity subgrid that’s conveniently available in the out-of-the-box configuration of an account form:

    Huh? Where did my activities go? They’re still there, but this particular navigation path will not allow you to view them, since you’re on a subgrid and, as we previously concluded, subgrids can’t show the entity associated view. This means there’s no way for you to apply the “Including Related Regarding Records” functionality over here.

    I’ll be the first to admit I’ve fallen for this trap in customer demos more than once. The menu anchor for accessing the Notes & Activities subgrid is just too tempting to click, when what you really intended to do was to view the fully featured activity associated view and access a complete list of the related activities. If the difference between view columns was a minor inconvenience, then this is downright misleading to many users I’m sure.

    The quick solution for this would be to just remove the activity subgrids from the account and opportunity entity forms where the results can be contradicting, thus forcing the user to navigate through the old fashioned menus into the related activities views. Another option would be to perform the old iFrame trick and just embed this view onto a form iFrame, which does sound a bit 4.0-ish. The last option is to go and vote on Dynamics 365 Ideas site, requesting MS to include the full roll-up functionality for subgrid views in a future version of Dynamics CRM. (more…)

  • Upgrade gotchas: Outlook client for Dynamics CRM 2011

    Last weekend I finally did my first installation of the RTM versio of CRM 2011 Outlook client onto a machine with Outlook 2010. I had previously only worked with the Outlook 2007 client version, which is lacking a few nice features in the UI, as described in my earlier post.

    I came across a few issues that might cause problems in the installation process, so I decided to link the relevant KB articles and other related content into this blog post to help you save some time when upgrading to the latest version of Microsoft Dynamics CRM on your client machine. I’m using CRM Online here, so some things may differ from the on-premises client version, which no longer has a separate client version, but of course the authentication methods do differ.

    Before you begin: go with 32-bit

    Yeah, I’m sure most of the new business laptops nowadays come with a 64-bit (a.k.a. x64) version of Windows 7. Nevertheless, you should treat 64-bit applications with caution. Why? Well, it’s a bit like with IPv4 vs. IPv6. Everyone knows the old world as we know it is coming to an end, but there simply isn’t a concrete enough reason for developers or companies to go “all in” with the 64-bit apps.

    With Microsoft Dynamics CRM 4.0 the situation was quite nasty, as there was not and there will not be support for the 64-bit versio of Microsoft Office. You simply had to tell the users to “downgrade” their Office, which is not the most optimal starting point for getting someone to adopt a new application such as Dynamics CRM. Now with the arrival of Dynamics CRM 2011 we do in fact have an x64 client for Outlook, so everything should be in order, right? In theory, it is, but if you’re planning to install any fancy RIA apps from the Dynamics Marketplace into your CRM 2011, you should read this blog post from Customer Effective. That’s right, Microsoft hasn’t releases a 64-bit version of the Silverlight add-on for Internet Explorer, which leads us into the following situation:

    KB2500373: Microsoft Silverlight web resources cannot be viewed in the 64-bit version of the Microsoft Dynamics CRM Client for Microsoft Office Outlook

    It’s a fact of life: the world is not 64-bit just yet. With the Office applications there’s not likely to be a significant performance boost from using the x64 version, so take the easy way out and just install the 32-bit Office 2010. Let’s revisit the topic when we all have Windows 8 and Office 2013, shall we?

    Favorite folders no more

    KB2494600: There is no option to add Microsoft Dynamics CRM entities to favorites in Microsoft Office Outlook 2010

    The Solutions Module is a new feature that has become available in Outlook 2010, as described here in the MSDN library article. It allows developers to integrate their applications directly into the Outlook navigation pane, which is what Dynamics CRM 2011 Outlook client is doing to achieve the seamless integration into the native Outlook navigation items.

    What’s the downside? Unfortunately the add-on solution folders cannot be added to the Outlook favorite folders group. Bummer. This was one of the first things I always instructed people to do when training them on how to use Dynamics CRM. There’s no better way to drive CRM adoption that getting the list of the company’s accounts and contacts to be available right below the Outlook inbox folder, where most people start their day at the (MS) office. Even though the CRM folders are now more visual and available under the CRM navigation pane tab, there’s still likely to be tens of entities visible for most CRM users, out of which they typically access just 3-4 most popular ones. I, for one, hate navigating through hierarchical folders that require you to expand them to see the what’s hidden on the next level, so always visible one-click navigation is how I prefer to arrange my working environment, be it SharePoint workspaces or CRM menus in Outlook.

    Following the instructions in the KB article, you can achieve the old favorite folders functionality also in Outlook 2010, but this will require you to disable the Solutions Module. Which, if I’ve understood correctly, will again turn the flashy CRM folder icons into the generic folders that we see in Outlook 2007 or Outlook 2003. Guess we’ll just have to figure out which is a bigger loss for the end user experience and make a choice, until there is a feature enhancement available for the Outlook 2010 Solutions Module (I hope there’s no technical limitation on why this couldn’t be implemented in a future service pack).

    Clashes with Windows Live Essentials

    KB2498892: Unable to Configure the Microsoft Dynamics CRM Client for Outlook against Dynamics CRM Online

    Seems like the Windows Live ID authentication in CRM Online has some issues with the “consumer products” for Windows Live. This might not be a big issue in big corporate environments with locked-down client machine configurations that don’t allow using consumer targeted services such as Hotmail or Skydrive. However, as Dynamics CRM Online is clearly making the former enterprise level applications like Customer Relationship Management suites available to even the smallest organizations with its low monthly cost per user and ease of deployment, there’s likely to be more and more users who’ll be transitioning from Microsoft’s consumer product lines to the new cloud-based business product lines, such as CRM Online and Office 365.

    Basically you’ll need to run a repari install on the Windows Live ID Sign-in assistant or Windows Live Essentials 2011 to make it compatible with the Outlook client for CRM Online, which is also using Windows Live ID to connect you to the CRM server. That should do the trick.

    But wait, isn’t Dynamics CRM Online a business product? Why is it using the WLID authentication method meant for the consumer products? For comparison, here’s an aswer from Allen_MSFT on the Office 365 FAQ to a question regarding weather using Office 365 will require WLID.

    “Re Windows Live ID, you don’t need a Windows Live ID to use Office 365 or to use your Windows Phone 7 with Office 365.  Windows Live services are for consumers, so they are not linked within the Office 365 portal.”

    Indeed. I’m waiting for the day when also Dynamics CRM Online will be migrated over to the new Microsoft Online Services Delivery Platform, which will hopefully give us better tools for managing CRM user accounts and authentication.

    Missing Outlook ribbon after CRM client installation

    KB2494581: The Outlook and CRM ribbons disappear from Microsoft Outlook when you use the Microsoft Dynamics CRM Client for Microsoft Office Outlook

    I had this one happen to myself, since I had been using a previous beta version of the CRM 2011 client on my machine. I had uninstalled both Office and CRM, but there still remained a few lines in the registry that needed to be removed to get the Outlook ribbon to reappear.

    I have to tell you, Outlook 2010 really looks naked when the ribbon is gone (not just hidden). I’m not sure if there even was a way to do any basic Outlook operations like sending emails with the ribbon completely blank, so I started googling around immediately and came up with the instrcutions that pointed to the following steps required to restore the ribbon:

    • Run Regedit.exe
    • Locate the HKEY_CLASSES_ROOT\TypeLib\{2DF8D04C-5BFA-101B-BDE5-00AA0044DE52} key
    • Delete the 2.4 key that’s found under it. It’s not needed anymore, there should only be 2.5
    Update Nov 9th 2011: Since this appears to be quite a popular post on my blog, I decided to append this information here. Today I was creating a new Windows user profile on a PC that already had the CRM 2011 Outlook client installed on a different user profile. When launching Outlook for the first time as this user, the ribbon was missing from the CRM menus (not the whole Outlook as in the aforementioned case), even though everything was working fine for the previously configured user account. In this particular occasion the client was linked to a CRM Online organization which had received the R7 update (a.k.a. Q4 2011 Service Update), but the Outlook client was still on Update Rollup 3 level. After I deployed Update Rollup 5 on the machine and rebooted, the ribbon was restored for this new user profile. So, be sure to check that the client and server hotfix levels match if you encounter a ribbon display problem.

    Reading pane always shows the contact layout

    Dynamics CRM Deployment Forum: CRM 2011 reading pane error in Outlook 2010

    Unfortunately this one doesn’t have a knowledge base article or a fix yet. I encountered this issue briefly when installing the Beta version of CRM 2011 Outlook client. Back then, all it needed was a reboot and the reading panes and icons were restored. With the RTM version of CRM 2011 client, the issue is more persistent. Each and every CRM entity appears as if it was a contact, presented in a business card layout that only contains the entity primary field (name) and not any other data. Click the image below to see an example of the account record shown as a business card with the contact icon.

    Update Nov 10th 2011: Thanks to Wimco’s post on Dynamics CRM Forums, I was finally able to fix the reading pane layout problem on my PC. I simply uninstalled the Office 2007 Primary Interop Assemblies, after which I also applied the latest Update Rollup package and voilá: the reading pane now shows the fields specific to each entity.

    Further update, March 23th 2012: The EMEA Dynamics CRM Support has published an article, where they suggest another fix for the Outlook client preview pane problem. Apparently an existing DisableFormRegions registry key can cause the contact form to be shown instead of the correct entity form.

  • Dynamics CRM 2011 Walkthrough Part 2: another 100+ slides of new features

    Four weeks ago I released the Part 1 of my Microsoft Dynamics CRM 2011 Walkthrough slides and now it’s time for Part 2: Solution & System Management. Thank you all for the positive feedback from the first part, much appreciated. 🙂

    While the first slide deck was focused on how the new CRM 2011 features look like from the system end-user perspective, this time I have taken a look at the toolset available for system customizer, administrator or solution developer. Since I’m not a programmer, I’ll gladly skip the detailed discussion about CRM 2011 platform SDK enhancements (like WCF, OData, REST, LINQ and other hot acronyms) and leave them to the experts. Instead I’ve tried to cover featues that will have an effect on how to design and plan your CRM implementation or custom solution. Just like before, there are plenty of screenshots included, so that also users without access to a CRM 2011 Beta environment can preview how the features appear in the UI.

    Microsoft Dynamics CRM 2011 Walkthrough Part 2

    The topics included in my presentation are as follows:

    • Customization menus
    • UI customization options
    • Solution management
    • Web resources
    • Processes (workflows and Dialogs)
    • Custom activities
    • Queue enhancements
    • Multiple forms per entity
    • Security features
    • Cloud services (CRM Online, Dynamics Marketplace, Azure AppFabric)
    • Upgrading from CRM 4.0
    • What’s not there in CRM 2011

    To summarize my core message after giving this presentation, the following would be my key takeaways from the slides:

    • Solutions and web resources will challenge both how you’ve built your CRM enhancements and how you have managed them, so invest time in planning your own processes before rushing into the operational tasks
    • Process automation / work management functionality is becoming an increasingly integrated part of the Dynamics CRM story and 2011 offers great improvements on that front, but remember that it’s still a work in progress area in many ways
    • You can’t escape the cloud, no matter which deployment model you or your customers are currently using, so at least familiarise yourself with what’s out there
    • Despite of the 500 new features in CRM 2011, there’s still plenty of room for add-ons and tweaks. The more the platform expands, the more we’ll demand from it

    That’s all the slides I have for now, but I’m sure there will continue to be lots of interesting features discovered and news items to discuss before Dynamics CRM 2011 comes out in January (RTW) / March (RTM) next year. I recommend you to keep an eye on the #CRM2011 hashtag on Twitter to follow the community buzz around the upcoming release.

  • Cloud XRM presentation from PDC 2010

    Andrew Bybee and Girish Raja had a pre-recorded session released on the PDC10 site, called Building Business Applications in the Cloud with Dynamics CRM Online. Not surprisingly, this presentation was revolving heavily around Microsoft Dynamics CRM 2011 and how it’s new features can help developers build XRM applications on top of Microsoft’s cloud architecture: Windows Azure, SQL Azure, AppFabric and, last but not least, CRM Online. You can view the full session here, below are a few takeaways from that session for the CRM crowd.

    The concept of XRM is probably pretty clear to most of us by know, but since PDC is not a Microsoft Dynamics event, an introduction was of course presented. The example used by Andrew here was the familiar HR scenario for processing job applications.

    In the next slide the MS pieces of the puzzle are laid over the solution components.

    With the native support for SharePoint integration in CRM 2011 (limited but extendable through SDK), drawing the document management box inside the XRM platform is already perfectly valid. ERP in the cloud is not a scenario actively promoted yet, but that’s where AppFabric and CRM 2011’s Azure aware plug-ins come into play, allowing the cloud apps to exchange data with on-premises apps. The whole Azure side of things is of course presented in less detail, as these are more of generic services rather than the XRM framework which Dynamics CRM 2011 tries to deliver us. Anyway, compared to the first application development platform talks around Dynamics CRM, it’s safe to assume that Microsoft’s cloud message will become inseparable from the XRM story and form a single Cloud XRM concept. In order to challenge SFDC and Force.com, the hybrid model and power of choice will of course remain in the marketing materials, but I’m sure no one wants to build a non-cloud demo for these kind of conferences anymore.

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