As a part of the CRM Online Polaris update and the on-premise Update Rollup 12, new functionality has been added to the Activity Feeds solution. In fact, it’s no longer a separate solution but rather converted into a part of the Default Solution during the upgrade to Polaris / UR12 (see this YouTube video for details). Yeah, I know you were thinking that Activity Feeds are on their way out as the Yammer integration arrives, but the reality is that the auto posts functionality will still remain a CRM platform component, although the data itself may be presented through the common Yammer UI.
We’ll see how it goes in practice once the Yammer integration arrives in February (hopefully for on-prem, too, although no official info on that yet), but we’re already free to explore the enhancements of the updated Activity Feeds. In addition to the great new feature of being able to filter the records from where posts are shown in your feed instead of having to go and follow each and every interesting record, there’s also another important addition: the support for organization owned entities. Previously you couldn’t add the Record Wall onto entities like competitor but now such limitations have been lifted.
Another interesting entity that could well benefit from the Activity Feeds style of presenting the latest updates is the queue entity. Although queues themselves are a useful feature for process automation and routing tasks between users, their usability in the out-of-the-box configuration of Dynamics CRM is fairly poor. Unless you’re a full time service rep working on queues, it’s not a very intuitive way for monitoring work to be done and who’s working on what, let alone getting notified of something added into a queue that you should do something about.
Enter Activity Feeds. With the ability of having the actions in queue item updates being reflected in a timeline that allows people to also comment on the progress of these items, all of a sudden the whole queue concept can become a lot more accessible to casual CRM users. Following the relevant queues you want to receive updates from is as easy as following your teams’ accounts, and with the new filters in Polaris/UR12 update there’s even more possibilities for creating views of only specific types of queue items.
There are no standard post configuration rules available for the queue or queue item entity, so you’ll have to build the auto post rules by using workflow processes. Although the users will prefer to follow queues and not queue items, what you as a system administrator or customizer will want to do is create workflow rules for queue items and reference the related queue as a regarding object. This will allow users to see Activity Feed posts when new items are added into queues they are following, when their “worked by” information changes etc.
With the new social dashboards introduced in Polaris, it’s ever more likely that users will encounter the What’s New section when logging into CRM. Why not make the most of this and configure a few new rules for creating auto posts that surface relevant and interesting information to the users on what’s happening with the various processes that Dynamics CRM is used for managing?
Let’s assume that we have a CRM deployment with multiple BU’s that form a hierarchy of a single parent (the top level BU) and multiple child business units. In our example the child level is represented by two country specific BU’s: Finland and France. There’s a user called Jukka in Finland and another user by the name of Teppo in France (OK, not exactly a typical French name, but we’re actually dealing with a Finnish expat here in this case). They are both using CRM to manage accounts and opportunities in their own business units but do not have visibility to any other BU’s data. Nevertheless, we’d like to leverage the Dynamics CRM Activity Feeds as a channel for sharing insights and connecting across BU borders, to make the most of the human capital and knowledge available within our global organization.
Let’s start with the updates coming in the very near future. The next release is codenamed “Polaris” will be out in Q4 2012, so this is the “Fall 2012” release we saw on an 
The release after Polaris carries the codename “Orion” and is scheduled for Q2 2013. 
Twitter allows the users to click on hashtags turned into hyperlinks, thus enabling them to view all recent posts containing the same hashtag. Although Dynamics CRM is a flexible platform for LoB application development, tweaking the default Activity Feeds solution web resources to support this kind of filter functionality wouldn’t be exactly a walk in the park. However, we can certainly explore the concept and see what else the platform might have available for us that could make the Activity Feeds more intelligent. Hmm, how about workflows?
It’s been nine months since Microsoft Dynamics CRM 2011 was released. Given the large number of new features and functionality included in the new version, I’m sure many organizations have been able to keep themselves busy with thinking about how to leverage all of them. Anyway, the time is now upon us when we see the first true deliverable from the new agile development path that the Dynamics CRM product development team has adopted. The “Q4 2011 Service Update”, “November Service Update” or “CRM Online R7”, however you like to call it, gives a taste of things to come, as new features and improvements are now introduced bi-annually instead of a big bang release every 2-3 years.
