Jukka Niiranen

Tag: UX

  • The Long Road to Unified Interface in Dynamics 365

    The Long Road to Unified Interface in Dynamics 365

    On June 20th Microsoft started taking the cover off its next major release of Dynamics 365 Customer Engagement (formerly known as CRM): v9.0. The biggest announcements in the first day of the Dynamics 365 Preview Executive Briefing were around the client story. With the new Unified Interface (sometimes also referred to as “UCI” for Unified Client Interface/Infrastructure) the plan is to bring a single client technology to cover all the different UI’s across devices. Web, Outlook, Mobile, Tablet.

    This is very exciting news, but there’s a lot of details and footnotes that people in the Dynamics ecosystem need to be aware of. Let’s dive right in!

    The Client Fragmentation of Dynamics CRM

    Most of you will have probably been around when the previous big UX refresh took place with CRM 2013. We then received the MoCA Framework based tablet app with Windows 8 style tile UI and later saw this framework being used in many other places. We even received a brand new client to be used on the (desktop) web, the Interactive Service Hub (ISH). In fact, one year ago it almost looked like MoCA would be eating the world:

    The only problem with this strategy seemed to be that all of these individual parts never formed a sensible whole. Instead, there were so many “seams” visible everywhere you looked in the Dynamics CRM client landscape that many times you just wanted to keep your focus on the traditional web client and wait for things to clear up in these newer areas of the platform. A few examples:

    • Knowledge Articles were introduced only on ISH, but at the same time ISH was too limited/buggy to be used in most of the existing customer service scenarios with customizations in place.
    • Visual Controls were introduced in the phone and tablet, but the main web app forms just kept getting more and more white with nothing but text fields.
    • Dashboards with filters were made available on ISH, but much of the entities (i.e. sales) that typically are analyzed with dashboards were not allowed on the ISH side.

    MoCA was born for the mobile first era of touch UI and understandably it didn’t have all of the traditional capabilities from the web client. However, there were plenty of gaps that didn’t make it ideal for mobile use either. One of the biggest issues I had with MoCA was the “configure once, deploy everywhere” principle, which tried to force the same full CRM configuration onto the mobile device screens. MoCA brought the CRM into your pocket, but most of the time what a user would need in their pocket is a simplified app focused on a limited set of tasks. The limitations with MoCA meant that Microsoft had to rely on a Resco based client for their Field Service app in which the use cases are primarily mobile only.

    This Time It’s Different

    The promise of Unified Interface is that the era of web vs. mobile is over and now we’ll see a UI that’ll both adapt to the device or screen in use, as well as offer the same customization options in each of them. Content will be presented in a way that will reflow into different states of the control as the space available to it changes.

    Unlike with MoCA, this time there can be multiple different apps also accessed on a mobile device. Also web-only features like form switching are now available on all devices which makes it far less challenging for the system customizer to design a solution when all the exceptions and limitations of specific client types are (in theory) no longer in the way. It’s important to set the expectations on a realistic level, though, since I’m quite sure we’ll need to make some more compromises on the web side of the house with this new Unified Interface, but hopefully it’ll be a price worth paying for true mobility of Dynamics 365 business apps.

    For an even more customized experience, the Custom Control Framework that has been gradually introduced as part of the application (like the Editable Grid, for example) is going to introduce a design surface for developers to extend Dynamics 365 Customer Engagement apps in exciting new ways. Not only that, the existing ASPX based UI controls that have been in the core CRM application since forever are now also being transformed into Custom Controls. This is a part of the larger application/platform separation initiative that’s a whole topic of its own. On a high level, the developers should soon have access to basically the same tools for building new UI controls as what Microsoft is using to build their business apps.

    All of this should help in removing many of the gaps that have currently stopped the rolling out of the individual application features in earlier releases for real life business scenarios. There are plenty of promises that MS is making on performance improvements of this new client technology, too. That’s an important aspect to keep in mind and realistically evaluate as the Unified Interface becomes available, since all of the eye candy in the world won’t be of much value if the actual user experience of working with the application isn’t meeting the ever growing expectations of fluid interaction with the data stored in and managed via Dynamics 365.

    Are We There Yet?

    So, all of this looks great – now can we have it by tomorrow, please? The short answer is “no” and the expanded one is “it depends”. As mentioned in my earlier blog post, much of the new features in Dynamics 365 will now be rolled out via Private Previews and Preview programs before general availability. Hopping on to the preview train will shorten the time it takes for gaining hands on experience with the new UI. However, there’s more to it.

    Earlier I mentioned the previous UI refresh of CRM 2013 release (“Orion”), but some of you might still remember the intermediate release of “Polaris” (whereas the official name December 2012 Service Update isn’t something even I remembered anymore). That was perhaps the first Online-only release that Microsoft developed, with a target of not even trying to upgrade all of the application features into the new UI concept but instead just a selected few entities (“COLAC”) received the refreshed forms and Business Process Flow. You could build a simple CRM demo for a new customer with it, but trying to upgrade existing systems into Polaris or building anything with more customization requirements was a no-no. They had to wait until the full CRM 2013 release became available.

    The reason I’m bringing up this is that initially the Unified Interface is likely to be a bit like Polaris. It’s going to be made available only to brand new instances with the Business Edition licensing, or for new Apps that are either built by Microsoft (Customer Service Hub, a.k.a. ISH v2) or by the customer. It will also be available on the Phone and Tablet apps as well as in the lightweight Dynamics 365 App for Outlook (which officially replaces Outlook Client that’s now deprecated). Everywhere else, though, it’s not going to be the time for Unified Interface yet, but instead a refresh of the web client that’ll look something like this:

    Starting to get confused? I don’t blame you! There’s a hint of irony in the fact that the “Unified” Interface will initially be yet another interface variation for the Dynamics 365 application. I’m sure it’s not the way Microsoft would prefer to have these things introduced but reality is usually a bit more messy than PowerPoint presentations. The new client technology simply represents such a major shift in how Dynamics 365 works that upgrading all the complex customizations of existing Enterprise customers into it in one go would not be a smart move. Remember that “everyone’s an enterprise customer” until the Business Edition finally is out the door.

    To truly understand the client strategy that Microsoft is pursuing, you simply have to look at the Business Edition now, regardless of your deployment’s size. It is the dreamy wonderland in which MS can cut back on unnecessary complexity of application features and not worry about breaking any existing deployments, since there is hardly any legacy there. A fresh start that doesn’t need to carry all of the overlapping functionality (like Contracts vs. Entitlements) or provide all the admin options necessary for hybrid environments. It’s not all pure bliss in the sense that all of this will eventually have to live in harmony with the more complex custom UI’s and business logic of big corporations with “non-simplified” CRM systems running on the Dynamics platform. Still, right now we’re seeing a move from “cloud first” to “Business Edition first” when it comes to client innovation.

    Just because the Business Edition is targeting the lower end of the product licensing fees doesn’t mean you should dismiss the functionality that is being introduced in it. If the Sales app mainly streamlines many of the unnecessary complexities of current opportunity management in Dynamics 365 Enterprise, then the Marketing app will bring advanced logic like Customer Journey management that many existing larger customers would surely love to get their hands on. Unified Interface is the big story here that’s driving the release policy. I suspect that it’s the primary reason why the new XRM based Marketing app is only available for Business Edition customers initially, since features like integration with Customer Insights based segmentation and scoring mechanisms are not a feature anyone would build solely with the SMB segment in mind.

    It will all make sense in the end (hopefully), but in the near future both the customers as well as Microsoft will have some work ahead of them before the new promised land of Unification is reached. This is of course not all that different from what other business application platforms with a long market presence must go through every once in a while. Some may claim that Microsoft is following the Salesforce Lightning UI concept here with their Unified Interface and the similarities are surely there to be found. In fact, what I wrote about this the last time when Salesforce was following Microsoft’s lead is still pretty relevant when it comes to user experience evolution, so why not revisit that blog post for some perspective: The Irresistible Force of Great User Experience in CRM Applications.

  • My CRM User Experience Presentation at eXtremeCRM 2016 Warsaw

    My CRM User Experience Presentation at eXtremeCRM 2016 Warsaw

    If you’re a Microsoft Dynamics CRM partner in EMEA then eXtremeCRM is definitely an event you don’t want to miss. This spring the event was arranged in Warsaw, Poland, and I had the pleasure of not only attending but also contributing to some of the content at the conference. Together with 8 other CRM MVPs, we all presented in our own sessions, did a joint “ask the MVPs” showcase and also got the chance to talk with many of the awesome Dynamics CRM community members at our Team eXtreme Pitcrew booth. Thanks to everyone who came around to compete in a lap of Forza 6 with the MVPs!

    eXtremeCRM2016Warsaw_Team_eXtreme_Pitcrew

    It was the first eXtremeCRM event where I was not only attending the breakout sessions but also speaking at one session of my own. The topic that I ended up covering was something that has been touched upon also in this blog a few times: user experience of CRM systems. In addition, the focus of my presentation was specifically on the no-code configuration possibilities and how they can impact the solution UX, in good and bad. (It seems to be a common misconception among the MVP’s that I would know something about writing custom code, when in fact I’m almost illiterate when it comes to the CRM SDK. But anyway…). You can find my presentation slides below, or access them via this direct link to Docs.com.

    In my session I covered quite a wide variety of topics. To start with, I wanted to address the business impact of CRM system UX and provide some tools for demonstrating why user experience not just about application usability but really about the organization’s ability to deliver great customer experiences. Then I reviewed some of the basic CRM customization best practices that we all should keep in mind when configuring our solutions (but which are all too easy to forget when dealing with schedule constraints in CRM deployment projects). I then explored the concept of how Dynamics CRM could be made to feel more responsive to the end user’s actions via tools like Business Rules, Quick View Forms and Real-time Workflows. Finally I highlighted the importance of continuously maintaining the UX of a CRM environment when both the platform, the usage patterns as well as the ecosystem around it keep on evolving at an ever increasing pace in the cloud.

    At eXtremeCRM there’s never a shortage of interesting sessions to attend, nor the amount of great new CRM roadmap insights that Jujhar Singh and the other members of Microsoft’s organization are there to share with the community. In an attempt to capture some of the highlights from the event, I compiled them into the following Sway presentation that includes content shared on Twitter via the #eXtremeCRM hashtag.

    That’s all for today, but do check back for the next blog post where I’ll be sharing some of the results from the Voice of the Customer survey that we did for the MVP session at eXtremeCRM.

  • The Irresistible Force of Great User Experience in CRM Applications

    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.

    CRM_Platform_Evolution_2_small

    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:

    Salesforce_Lightning_Opportunity_small

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

    Dynamics_CRM_2015_Opportunity_small

    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.

    Salesforce_Dynamics_clients

    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.

    Salesforce_Lightning_Home

    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.

  • 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.

    CRM_merge_forms

    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.

    CRM_import_solution_error_after_form_merge

    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.

  • 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.

    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!

    10_CRM_UX_tips

    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!

  • CRM 2013 and the Platform Evolution: Webcast Recording and Slides

    Last week I presented in a webcast for MSDynamicsWorld.com on the topic of “Microsoft Dynamics CRM 2013 Customization and the Platform Evolution”. If you weren’t able to attend this live event, then have no fear, because it has all been recorded and documented for future generations.

    First off, below are the slides that set the background for my presentation:

    Next we have the actual audio recording of the presentation on YouTube:

    So, what was the session all about? The key message which I’ve tried to convey here is that the Dynamics CRM platform has entered “the next chapter” with the release of CRM 2013. This will not only impact the end users but also place a lot of demands on the system customizer role to learn new tricks and approach the task of solution design with a different mindset than in traditional CRM implementation projects.

    The presentation includes a comparison of the old world vs. the new and also highlights some key elements in the CRM 2013 platform that you should pay attention to when building your solutions today. If you’ve got any questions or comments on the content, then please don’t hesitate to post them below. And if you attended the live webcast, then thank you very much for tuning in!

    Oh, and in case you’re interested in hearing my thoughts on the very latest CRM Online Spring ’14 release / CRM 2013 SP1, then you can catch me in a Google+ hangout hosted by CRM MVP Donna Edwards on Wednesday, June 4th. Check out more details here.

  • CRM Rocks Podcast: Discussing the New CRM 2013 Features and User Experience

    CRM_rocks_podcastThere’s a large number of great CRM blogs out there, but how many Dynamics CRM podcasts do you know of? Well, here’s one website you should definitely take a look at: CRM Rocks! Markus Erlandsson has started a new podcast series that focuses purely on Microsoft Dynamics CRM topics.

    In the first episode Markus interviewed CRM MVP Gustaf Westerlund on the available tools and best  practices that any Dynamics CRM developer should be aware of. I had the honor of being guest nr. 2 on CRM Rocks and got to share my thoughts and observations on the latest and so far the greatest release, CRM 2013. Click here to access the podcast recording in MP3 format.

    Some of the topics that Markus and me discuss during the podcast include:

    • The new UI: how will the new form design impact the user experience and what requirements does it impose on system customizers.
    • Business Process Flows: how are they different from the other process types and what do they mean in practice for the management of tasks related to business processes such as sales opportunity management.
    • Business Rules and Actions: what are the new options for code-free CRM configuration and where do we still need .NET developer resources.
    • No more ribbon: are we missing out on past functionality or are we actually better off in the end.
    • A world without popup windows: why is CRM now easier to learn for new users.
    • One CRM platform, many CRM applications: what the extended client support for mobile devices means for CRM usage scenarios.
    • Auto save = no more “post buttons”: why you need to be careful when upgrading your custom business logic stored in scripts and plugins.

    I personally enjoyed the discussion a lot and if anyone has 55 minutes to spare on listening to my ramblings on CRM 2013 then I hope you manage to get something out of it, too!