Tag: Office 15

Windows 8, Office 2013 and Dynamics CRM 2011 Outlook client

Windows 8 is done. The bits will become available for download to MSDN, Technet, Software Assurance etc. subscribers in mid-August. Woo-hoo! The biggest OS update since Windows 95 will soon be at our hands and we can start to think who it will change our lives for better (new touch-optimized Metro apps) and for worse (clumsy desktop experience sans the familiar Start button).

Office 2013 is not quite done yet, but the preview version is available for anyone to download and experiment with. Although we don’t get an actual Metro Office with 2013, there’s plenty of reasons to get excited about the updates to this suite of business applications, which promises to deliver a seamless experience across PC’s, servers and especially public cloud.

With all these shiny new MS apps getting released and the Dynamics CRM updates getting postponed to Q4, it’s a good opportunity to test how we can mix the old with the new. In other words, how does Microsoft Dynamics CRM 2011 work with Outlook 2013 on a Windows 8 machine?

Before we begin with the experiment, it’s important to note that neither Windows 8, Office 2013 or even Internet Explorer 10 have officially been announced as compatible with Dynamics CRM 2011. As the development roadmap slide from WPC 2012 showed, the Office 2013 compatibility will be delivered in the Fall 2012 (Q4 2012) update. Anyone who’s tried CRM on IE10 also knows that there are still some minor quirks there, and since the big cross-browser update for Dynamics CRM has been re-scheduled to Q4, these may not be resolved before that time frame either. So, it’s better not to deploy this combo into production use quite yet. Remember that unlike with all the other applications in Office 2013, you can’t run the Outlook 2010 and Outlook 2013 versions side by side, but you have to choose one or the other.

The test drive

Does it work then? Given the right circumstances, yes it does, based on my experiment. You can install the Microsoft Dynamics CRM Outlook client onto a Windows 8 Release Preview machine with Office 2013 Preview. Below is a screenshot that proves it. I used the CRM Outlook client installer package with Update Rollup 6 and then applied the Update Rollup 8 hotfixes (check current UR status here: http://bit.ly/crmurinfo).

You’ll notice the Metro style facelift has flattened the look & feel of Outlook 2013 quite considerably. Colors and icons have been removed from the UI components, so the CRM folders appear as a stripped down textual hierarchy. Also the “wunderbar” that’s been present in both Outlook and web client UI’s in the lower left corner is now a text based horizontal menu at the bottom, listing the CRM organization name alongside Mail, Calendar, People etc. Since the actual CRM add-in has not been updated yet, the icons on the ribbon as well as the related record pane below an email message appear just like they would on Outlook 2010.

If we navigate into the CRM solution, the screen becomes even more familiar looking. Some minor adjustments in the UI chrome inherited from Outlook 2013 as well as Windows 8 can be noticed, but all in all both the icons and layout appear in the 2010 style. How much of the graphics and contrast we’ll lose in the coming Fall 2012 update remains to be seen, but I personally hope Microsoft won’t go all monochrome like they did with Visual Studio 2012 beta (and received tons of feedback as a result, not all positive).

Opening a record form reveals a few glitches in the preview version. Most notably the monetary fields on a form are missing icons. The radio buttons and dropdown menus have a new look, which probably comes mainly from IE10 since we’ve now left the Outlook chrome behind when navigating to a pop-up window. One annoyance I encountered was the vertical scroll bar. Can you spot from the bar the location we’re in on the page right now? Yeah, neither could I, since the shades of grey used there were practically identical. Some adjustments ahead, I’m sure. Apart from the graphics, all the usual functionality of the Outlook client appears to be working as expected based on my quick test drive.

OK, not exactly all the functionality. As a part of the experiment I also wanted to test if it was possible to install the CRM offline components into Outlook 2013. At first I didn’t encounter any issues after clicking the “Go Offline” button for the first time and installing SQL Server 2008 Express on the Windows 8 machine. Going offline appeared to be working as well, with the data synchronization dialog completing without errors, but then the troubles started. Outlook 2013 didn’t seem to grasp the concept that CRM could be operational even without a network connection (the new, handy Airplane mode available in Win8) but rather prompted me to login instead of showing any CRM data. “Ok, I’ll go back online then” I thought, except that I realized there was no way back. Outlook had eaten up the “Go Online” button from the ribbon and didn’t seem to offer me any menu options out of the situation.

I tried a quick registry hack and disable/enable procedures for the client, but then I figured that this was as far as I’d get with my experiment without an uninstall/re-install of the CRM Outlook client. Considering the final bits for Windows 8 would become available in just a couple of weeks, I decided to leave it as it is and return back to the topic once I had an RTM version of the OS.

Mixed identities

Were there any other issues along the way? Yes, there was a big one. With my original Windows 8 user profile I was unable to login to any CRM Online organization. Even though I had manually enabled the Windows Identity Foundation (note: in Windows 8 you don’t install the WIF package, instead you just turn on the feature), no credentials I gave to any organization or user were accepted. Instead I always got the following prompt: “Cannot connect to Microsoft Dynamics CRM server because we cannot authenticate your credentials”. The related knowledge base article KB2666080 suggested this could be caused by the Windows Live ID not being verified, but that wasn’t the case here.

Eventually I decided to do the following: create a new local user for Windows 8 that was using the same Windows Live ID as the CRM user. Surprise: problem solved! Since starting from Windows 8 most users will be signing in to their PCs (or slates) using a Windows Live ID, nowadays known as the Microsoft account, this appears to be currently messing with the authentication mechanism expected by the CRM Outlook client.

On Windows 8 when you open up Internet Explorer, you are by default logged in to your ~~WLID~~ Microsoft account, which means the user has direct access to their ~~Hotmail~~ Outlook.com emails, Windows Store and other Microsoft hosted services. It’s how the world already operates when it comes to iOS, Android or Windows Phone devices, so no big shock there. What this means for anyone who needs to work with multiple Windows Live… sorry, Microsoft accounts remains to be seen. If you’re supporting customers in multiple CRM Online environments, you’re already familiar with the agony related to switching between different accounts. While the intention of building a seamless experience for the end user is of course admirable, I hope the admin/developer experience won’t degrade further as a result of pursuing this goal.

In a corporate environment you’d login to your Windows 8 PC with a domain account instead of a Microsoft account, but there’s the option to connect a Microsoft account to you domain account (unless a group policy is blocking this). Although on Outlook.com (the webmail previously known as Hotmail) you can choose to manage linked accounts and access several inboxes across different identities, this doesn’t appear to affect any authentication related services, so linking more than one Microsoft account onto a domain account doesn’t seem to be possible.

Now that new CRM Online organizations are created by signing in with Microsoft Online Services accounts instead of WLID, it’s good to note that a MOP account on Office 365 is not the same as a Microsoft account. However, you can create a new Microsoft account using your MOP account’s email address, but then you don’t get a new Outlook.com email address. Also, it looks like this doesn’t help in getting past the CRM Outlook client authentication issue, even if you’d sign in to your Windows 8 PC with a user@company.onmicrosoft.com type of an address. So, some more work is still needed on the authentication front to make all the latest desktop software and cloud services from Microsoft play nice with each other. I’ve read that with an on-premises Dynamics CRM server connecting with Outlook 2013 is already working today with the preview releases, so don’t let this put you off from getting your hands dirty on the Office 2013 preview.

Update 2013-01-13: I’ve written a part 2 of the article where I test configuring Microsoft Dynamics CRM 2011 UR11 organizations to connect with the RTM versions of Windows 8 and Outlook 2013. Read it here.

August 3, 2012
Dynamics CRM roadmap for Fall 2012 release and beyond (the road to Metro)
After the unfortunate delay announcement of R8 / Q2 2012 Service Update planned functionality into Q4 2012 (cross-browser and mobile, read it all here), we have some more upbeat news regarding the future of Microsoft Dynamics CRM. As of now there is no official document available on this information, but the screenshots from World Partner Conference 2012 (WPC) already give us plenty of new information and reasons to get excited about the road ahead. Without further ado, here’s what the future releases of Dynamics CRM are planned to contain:

Click here for a bigger version of the picture. Now, let’s break this roadmap slide down into pieces so we can better digest the contents.

No more references to “Q4 2012 Service Update”, R9 etc. Instead we now have the functionality placed into Fall 2012, Winter 2013 and Spring 2013 updates. Whether this is the official new naming policy for Dynamics CRM updates remains to be seen.

“Refresh” UI coming to the browser client presumably in Fall 2012 update. These UI changes have now been merged with the cross-browser support, which was delayed from Q2 2012 to Q4 2012. The new UI will have a Metro feel to it, but it won’t be an actual Metro app. Simplified appearance with less colors seems to be the way to go here. If you’ve seen the leaked Office 15 screenshots, that’s probably where CRM is going as well.

Office 15 (Office 2013) compatibility in Fall 2012, enhancements during Winter 2013. Since we don’t have a beta of Office 2013 available, the future functionality is unconfirmed, but I’d imagine CRM to integrate with the Agaves feature, for example. Making the CRM client compatible with Outlook 2013 should be an obvious deliverable here.

Process driven UI, to be launched in Fall 2012 update and developed further in consecutive releases. The demo from WPC shows a persistent process “timeline” graphic on top of the lead form, which visualizes the stage the record is in and he information & actions required in that stage. What’s interesting is that this process in the demo flows seamlessly from a lead record onto an opportunity record. This looks like a highly interesting new feature that will hopefully allow us to make workflow and dialog processes as well as status reason data easier for the CRM user to understand and interact with. Also notice how the lead entity form in the demo presents fields and subgrids in several columns side by side, with the form navigation collapsed.

Metro CRM app preview in Winter 2013, full release in Spring 2013. Yes, the real deal, not just a generic Dynamics app we’ve seen in the keynote demos in Convergence 2012 and now WPC 2012. CRM reimagined.

Application functionality updates. Opportunity management and case management enhancements in Fall 2012, presumably to go alongside the process driven UI. Sales & service hierarchies, sales team enablement in Winter 2013, providing some of the team functionality visible in the Metro demo. Territory and performance management in Spring 2013.

On the platform side there’s plenty of new things lined up. For Fall 2012 we have:
- Service monitoring and analytics (á la Office 365 Trust Center)
- Additional compliance (more certifications for CRM Online?)
- Bulk data load (improved data import wizard?)
- Multi-instance (?)
Winter 2013 promises us:
- Online snapshot (can we download a copy of CRM Online database as self service?)
- Office 365 migration (is this the move from CTP to OSDP, finalizing the “better together” story for existing customers?)
- Server side sync with Exchange (R9 rumor from Convergence now confirmed, no more Outlook client dependency)
- Data enrichment (could be Azure Data Market, InsideView or something similar for filling customer details from external databases & networks)
And finally “custom indexes” for Fall 2013. A lot of questions arise from a single roadmap slide, but that’s what the upcoming Q4 2012 Release Preview Guide will hopefully address once released during the summer.

A big shout out to CRM MVP Mark Smith from Magnetism for sharing the pictures he grabbed during the WPC 2012 sessions. You can find his WPC album on SkyDrive, filled with Metro goodness. I’ll close off with another beautiful scene from the Metro CRM and start counting the days to when I can get my hands on a Windows 8 slate running the preview app.
July 11, 2012
To the eXtreme, part 2: The future of the web caught up with IE and Dynamics CRM

One great thing about Microsoft Dynamics CRM as a business application platform has been that it’s modern enough to have been born into the browser window from day one. With no legacy from the pre-web era, the product has been able to stay relevant with no major disruptions in the client side development and also supported the eventual move of the server side functionality to the data centers in the cloud.

Internet Explorer market share peaked in 2003, when 95% of all Internet usage was on IE. Coincidentally, Microsoft CRM 1.0 was released in January 2003. At the time, providing support for any other browser than your in-house product would have certainly sounded like a requirement you could de-prioritize. Today Internet Explorer commands a market share of less than 40%. There are now more iPads sold than any brand of desktop PCs combined. If that doesn’t signal the move to a post-PC era, I don’t know what does. If you’d be a company manufacturing an IE only product for PCs in the year 2012, you could soon be out of business.

This is a fate Microsoft intends to avoid, which is why the cross-browser support for Microsoft Dynamics CRM was officially announced in the Q2 2012 Service Update release preview guide, released at the beginning of Extreme CRM 2012 conference in Berlin. We had already seen the promise of non-IE browser clients for Dynamics CRM presented in Microsoft’s May 2011 Statement of Direction and now we finally have details about what to expect in Dynamics CRM R8 release exactly one year later. As with my previous post on mobile CRM, I won’t rephrase all the content of the official announcement but I’ll rather try and reflect on the topic with some personal observations and thoughts.

There’s Supported and then there’s “supported”

If you’ve glanced at the table of supported browser and OS combinations, you’ll have noticed that Microsoft does not guarantee support on every browser out there on every operating system. This is not too surprising, as any web application developer surely knows what a nightmare the differences in interpretation of web standards between various browsers can be for application development and testing. In the words of Craig Dewar (Director of Product Management for MSDYNCRM), browser testing is a “gigantic effort” for Microsoft, which is why official support is not all encompassing.

Just because a browser or OS is not listed in Microsoft’s documentation as supported, doesn’t mean Dynamics CRM won’t work on it. So, even though there are no supported options for using Microsoft Dynamics CRM on Linux, you might not notice any problems if you access it with Firefox on Ubuntu. In fact, Craig mentioned in his keynote at Extreme CRM 2012 Berlin that even if you’re using a client that’s not officially supported, Microsoft will allow you to open support tickets on issues that are not specific to the browser/OS combination you’re running. I guess you’ll just want to have at least one Win/IE or Mac/Safari device around to make sure you can reproduce the issue when dealing with Microsoft Support representatives.

“Macbooks for everyone!”

In case you’ve been drooling over the cool Apple hardware that all the opinion leaders seem to carry with them these days, the future does indeed look brighter for people working on/with Dynamics CRM. Before you jump head first into the OSX & iOS world and format all your Windows partitions, it’s important to remember that what Microsoft is talking about here is just the browser client support for CRM end users.

While you can get Microsoft Office for OSX and run Outlook on you Mac, what you can’t do is use the Microsoft Dynamics CRM for Outlook client. This means you can’t track emails to CRM, synchronize your calendar appointments between Outlook and CRM, get CRM task and call reminders from your Outlook, synchronize your contacts from CRM to Outlook to your iPhone, or have any offline support for CRM data and application functionality when your Macbook doesn’t have WiFi or 3G data connectivity. All in all, you lose quite a bit of that seamless productivity tools magic that Dynamics CRM promises to deliver for all Windows users. I haven’t seen any announcements about a CRM Outlook client for Mac, so it’s pretty safe to assume that we won’t see one released for the Outlook 2011 for Mac version currently available.

OK, so how about the support of Apple’s mobile devices then? It says Dynamics CRM will run on iPad 2 with iOS 5.x, so that should at least deliver the full flavor of the browser experience on a tablet, right? Well, the problem is you might get more than you bargained for in that deal, since (as far as I’m aware of) the browser client will look and work exactly the same on all supported platforms and devices. If you’ve ever tried running the Dynamics CRM web client on a Windows 7 tablet, you’ll know that simply replacing the mouse cursor with your index finger will not magically “touchify” the user experience. What works nicely on a 24″ screen with mouse & keyboard input may not scale/transform into the tablet environment of 10″ screens and touch UI. If you’ve used a remote desktop app on your iPad, then I’d imagine this is pretty much what you can expect from a browser client on an iPad. Unless you go for the $30 per month subscription of Microsoft Dynamics CRM Mobile app or purchase a perpetual license from CWR Mobility, TenDigits or other ISV’s that develop mobile clients optimized specifically for the touch UI. The same goes for Android tablets, only with the exception that the browser client falls into the “not officially supported” territory.

Finally, if you’re not only using Dynamics CRM but also administering or customizing it, I’ve read that you’ll still need Internet Explorer in order to access these areas in the web client.

‘Reimagining’ Windows, should we also reimagine Dynamics CRM?

It’s important to note that the web client coming out in Q2 2012 is not a HTML5 product, rather it’s a trimmed version of the previous IE only client with removed dependencies on Microsoft’s proprietary extensions that only IE supports (.htc files etc.). The future is not here yet, but there is little doubt on the direction Microsoft is heading towards, with the upcoming WinRT framework and the big push for HTML, Javascript and CSS as the foundation for future Windows apps.

Which brings us to Silverlight. It’s been widely speculated that Silverlight 5 released at the end of 2011 will be the last of it’s kind, the end of the road. Porting existing Silverlight apps to run on Win RT is said to be easy, which should naturally be in the interest of Microsoft to ensure. As I’m not a developer, I’m looking at the discussion more from the point of view of someone who needs to examine all the available technologies out there, evaluate how they fit together and build a working business solution out of them. From this perspective, there are some concerns regarding Silverlight that very much affect Dynamics CRM users as well.

While Dynamics CRM might work on a browser/OS combination that is not officially supported, the game is different if you’re using Silverlight web parts in your CRM. If a Silverlight plugin is not available for the client, it will not work, period. This includes combinations such as Chrome/OSX, any machine running Linux and most notably the iPad. Ok, so what about making the same UI with a different technology, like HTML, Javascript and CSS? In theory everything should work on every platform in this case. You’re free to draw your conclusions on which approach is better for starting your next Dynamics CRM add-on project.

Looking further ahead to Windows 8, we’ve already received the announcement that there will actually be a completely different edition of the operating system, called Windows On ARM (WOA), that will the basis for building always on, always connected, low power consumption devices to rival the iPad. The Internet Explorer 10 browser on WOA will not allow any plug-ins whatsoever, be it Flash or Silverlight. Furthermore, the Office 15 package that is available for WOA tablets will include only Word, Excel, PowerPoint and OneNote, but not Outlook. By now you should have figured out that the Microsoft Dynamics CRM experience on WOA will need to be quite different from what we have on Windows 7 today.

If there will not be Outlook on the “real” Windows tablets, what does the future hold for the CRM Outlook client? I previously wrote about the legacy of Outlook and how it will be increasingly more difficult to carry all that legacy when moving to the Post-PC era of iPad-esque devices for every knowledge worker. By the looks of things, Outlook could possibly get split into Metro Mail, Contacts and Calendar apps. If this happens, then it’s easy to envision a separate Dynamics CRM Metro app sitting alongside them, integrating into all the other installed apps through a simple share contract. After all, isn’t that the way it should really be? Link contacts/friends/followers from any social network app to CRM contacts, track any type of status update/post/tweet from the same app as a custom activity type into your CRM database. There’s no reason why customer relationship management tasks should be any more complex or inflexible than that.

It’s great to have Dynamics CRM available soon on (almost) any browser. Still, if Microsoft truly is reimagining Windows the way they claim to be and if their business customers buy into their new story, perhaps running Dynamics CRM on Safari won’t seem all that exciting anymore this time next year.

February 12, 2012