October 2007 - Posts
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Darren Liu, Microsoft Dynamics CRM MVP
Crowe Chizek and Company LLC
October 15th, 2007
http://www.crowecrm.com
In its short history, we used different terminologies to talk about custom assemblies extending Microsoft CRM. In version 1.x and 3.0, they are known as callouts. In CRM version 1.x, callouts were built as a COM component and in CRM version 3.0, we build callouts using .Net framework v1.1 and it’s always synchronous. In CRM version 4.0, Microsoft completely re-designed the callouts and the callouts are now known as plug-ins. The Plug-In is .Net v2.0 based, a synchronous or asynchronous model with improvement in development, deployment, administration and reliability.
Since there’s synchronous and asynchronous plug-ins for CRM 4.0, when should we use synchronous and asynchronous? Synchronous plug-ins always wait for a response back from the system and it will happen immediately. Therefore, I would suggest using synchronous plug-ins anytime you need an operation to happen immediately (e.g. validation, auto-numbering, retrieve data from other systems, etc…), you need to provide feedback to the user to prevent an action or you want the user to wait for an operation to finish. Asynchronous plug-ins work a little different. The way they work is similar to workflow since workflow is always asynchronous. If you can use workflow to accomplish what you need to do, consider using workflow over asynchronous plug-ins. If you get to a point that you need to do something that is not supported by workflow, then an asynchronous plug-in may be a better choice for you. Microsoft has indicated that asynchronous plug-ins will use less system resources than a workflow process.
Since plug-ins are .Net framework 2.0 based, we can now use Visual Studio 2005 to build it. Yeah!!! Also there’s an offline SDK, which means plug-ins (callouts) can execute offline (Outlook Client for Laptops) now. During deployment, the deployment tool will give you an option to deploy the assembly to Disk or Database. If you want a plug-in to work offline or would prefer easier functionality syncing, you need to select the database option during your deployment so the assembly can synchronize down to client laptops for offline use. The disk deployment option is best used for debugging purpose and when you use this deployment option, you need to do an IISRESET to update the DLL.
Anyway, there are many new features in the CRM SDK and I am very excited! I am still digging into the new SDK to see what it can do.
Oh, I forgot to mention that all of the callouts that you did for CRM 3.0 (when done in a supported fashion) are upgradeable to CRM 4.0 Plug-Ins.
Darren Liu, is a Senior Consultant and CRM specialist at Crowe Chizek in Chicago. Darren is also a Microsoft CRM MVP and enjoys working with both existing and new clients to leverage the benefits that CRM can provide. Additionally, Darren is very active in the Chinese and English CRM online communities.
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Jeremy Hofmann
Crowe Chizek and Company LLC
October 10th, 2007
http://www.crowecrm.com
Summary: Jeremy gives us a look at the various relationships that can be defined within CRM 4.0 through an example of adding multiple users lookups to an opportunity form.
Several key enhancements will be released with CRM 4.0 “Titan”. One area that Microsoft has blown the lid off and has opened up a whole new realm of possibility for configuration is in the area of system to system relationship definition. No longer are you restricted to creating one-to-many or many-to-one relationships between system entities and your custom entities only. Now you can create full blown one-to-many, many-to-one, and even many-to-many relationships between system entities, custom entities, or any combination thereof.
Wow. What this basically means is that you can enable several key scenarios that (before Titan) required writing some pretty tricky JavaScript code to get working. One such scenario is trying to associate multiple internal users to an opportunity, for example. Let’s say you have several key people working internally to win an opportunity, and that you wish to associate each of these internal users to the opportunity. Prior to Titan, you would have had to “create” your own multiple-user lookup buttons on the opportunity form, and inject a bit of JavaScript magic to get the lookup dialogs to work properly for each user that you want to track. Not exactly supported, not exactly pretty.
With Titan, you can now define a one-to-many relationship between the Opportunity entity and the System User entity, and then add as many users to the opportunity as you wish. Or, if you wanted to track more specifically which roles those users play on the opportunity, then you could add multiple Opportunity to System User relationships and give each one a different name. What ends up showing up in the form is the following:
Pretty nifty! And no JavaScript developers were harmed in the making of this customization – great!
You can do the same with the other entities as well. For example, you may want to track who the Finance person, main Sales person, and main Customer Service person is at each Account. Or, you may want to track the main Product that a Lead is interested in.
Now you can do these and other scenarios with pure configuration, saving you time, dollars, ensuring you system data integrity stays intact, and making your end users happy (which, let’s face it, means just about EVERYTHING when it comes to CRM bliss).
Jeremy Hofmann is a Manager and CRM specialist at Crowe Chizek in the Chicago (Oakbrook) office.
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Melissa Schulte
Crowe Chizek and Company LLC
October 5th, 2007
http://www.crowecrm.com
Summary: Melissa gives us a taste of the new duplicate detection functionality within Microsoft Dynamics CRM “Titan”.
Overview
Duplicate checking has always been a highly requested utility that Microsoft CRM v3.0 did not have. I have done few implementations where the client does not ask how CRM handles duplicates entered into the system, and unfortunately I have to say “out-of-the-box, it doesn’t”. Sure there are a number of ways that we’ve been able to extend CRM v3.0 to prevent duplicate data from being entered into a client’s CRM system, however these options have either required extensive custom development or the purchase and configuration of a 3rd party product.
With the new Titan (CRM 4.0) release, you will be able to, out-of-the-box (with a few minor configurations), detect duplicates records as they are entered into the system – even during data import!
Below are some further details about Titan’s duplicate detection functionality.
Duplicate Detection Rule Requirements
· Duplicate Detection must be enabled
· At least one rule must exist for the entity being checked
There are four system-wide default scenarios that you can choose from once you’ve enabled duplicate detection:
- On record create or update – users will be automatically prompted before saving or importing potential duplicate records
- When Outlook client goes from offline to online – each person using the Outlook client must set how they want dup detection to work when they synchronize data (by default, duplicates are not checked during synch)
- During data import – Each time a user defines an import, the choice of whether to check for duplicates is available
- By a workflow action
**NOTE: when and how much dup detection should be a decision based on performance tradeoffs since dup checking takes system resources
Considerations When Configuring Rules
- Default Rules are only created for Accounts, Contacts, and Leads
- Case Sensitivity
- Record types can be checked against different record types
ü While creating/updating a record of the Base Record Type, it is checked against the match codes of all existing Matching Entity records.
ü Can have > 1 rule for each record type
- Rules must be published – a match code is created for every record in the matching record type for the rule
Process to Configure Rules
1. Navigate to Settings à Data Management
2. Double-click on “Manage Duplicate Detection Rules”
3. Click New to create a new rule, or double-click on an existing rule
Examples
Here are some ways that Titan’s Duplicate Detection can be configured:
· Lead first name, last name and phone number against all existing contacts
· Check a partial account name against all existing accounts
· Custom “Project” entity can be checked against all existing opportunity based on a custom project attribute, such as “Project ID”
Melissa Schulte, is a Microsoft CRM developer at Crowe Chizek (www.crowecrm.com). Melissa currently focuses on System Implementations on the Microsoft Dynamics CRM 3.0 platform.
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Zahara Hirani, MCAD
Crowe Chizek and Company LLC
October 4th, 2007
http://www.crowecrm.com
Darren was going to provide more detail on showing multiple entity data within a view, but Zahara beat him to the punch…
Did you ever have to create an SRS report because you couldn’t display data across multiple entities using advanced find? With the new Titan (CRM 4.0) release, you will be able to return data from multiple entities to create Advanced Find Views where the entities have a One-to-One or a Many-to-One (you can go from a “child” to a “parent” but not from a “parent” to a “child”) relationship.
Below is an example of how to do an advanced find using Titan to retrieve account and opportunity data for accounts in Indiana having open opportunity with a closing probability of 70 percent or more estimated to close this month.
(all thumbnaill images can be clicked to see a full size image)
1. In IE, navigate to the CRM website.
2. From the Top menu Bar, Click on Advanced Find.
3. This should open a pop- up window of Advanced Find.
4. Enter the criteria for selecting records.
5. Click on the Edit columns button from the top-center menu bar.
6. This should open a pop-up window to select which columns need to be displayed when the advanced find is executed.
7. From the Right Pane, click the Add Columns button.
8. This should open a pop-up window with an entity dropdown list and a grid of columns associated to that entity.
9. Select ‘Opportunity’ from the entity dropdown list and check the estimated revenue owner, potential customer, probability, and topic.
10. Now select ‘Potential Customer’ from the entity dropdown and check the Account Number and City from the data grid.
11. Click Ok.
12. Edit the Column display order to best fit the users need.
13. Click Ok.
14. Click the Save button so as to save the view.
15. Click Find.
16. The results returned should give you Indiana Account with Open Opportunity estimated to close this month with a closing probability of 70 percent or higher.
NOTE: If you try to create the view with the Account as the starting Look up entity, you will not find opportunity as an entity to retrieve data for. This is because the relationship between Account and Opportunity is a One-to-Many and not a Many-to-One or One-to-One.
Zahara Hirani, MCAD is a Microsoft CRM developer at Crowe Chizek (www.crowecrm.com) Zahara currently focuses on .NET / SQL / SRS development on the Microsoft Dynamics CRM 3.0 platform.
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Darren Liu, Microsoft Dynamics CRM MVP
Crowe Chizek and Company LLC
October 3rd, 2007
http://www.crowecrm.com
For CRM Titan, the ability to import data has been improved significantly from the previous version to make it much more robust when importing data into CRM. The Import Data Wizard contains the following new features:
· Ability to import most record types, including custom types, not just the four types (accounts, contacts, leads and campaign responses) that may be imported before.
· Automatic mapping of imported records. (e.g. if you have a pick list contain Value A, B, C and D. It will automatically map the values for you, if it can't find the value, it will automatically add the value to your pick list field – I need to understand this further, as this could be an issue if any user can indirectly add picklist values)
· Ability to reuse data maps (if you have an import process that imports data in a file that contains the same file format (same columns), you don't have to recreate the mappings every time when you do the import. You can create the mapping once and re-use it next time when you import the file with the same data format)
· Email notification when import jobs are done; after the import, there's an option that you can set to have CRM notify you that the import jobs are done
· Duplicate detection tie-in; works with the dup check system in CRM, if a duplicate is detected, it will not import the record
· Improved error handling; if a import job failed, you will able to see why the job fails
Some Screen Shots:
The Data Migration Wizard adds even more ability:
· Relate records from multiple record types
· Create custom entities and attributes automatically during the data migration process.
· Migrate Notes and attached files (I have not tried this myself, still need to verify)
· Records can assign to multiple Microsoft CRM 4.0 users.
The CRM Data Migration tool is a separate install and it didn't install by the default CRM installation. Both Data Migration and Import tool will first go through creating/updating the metadata first, then import the data to CRM.
Some Screen Shots:
There's a lot more you can do with the data import and migration tool now, I am still digging into the tool to understand all that it can do :)
Darren Liu, is a Senior Consultant and CRM specialist at Crowe Chizek in Chicago. Darren is also a Microsoft CRM MVP and enjoys working with both existing and new clients to leverage the benefits that CRM can provide. Additionally, Darren is very active in the Chinese and English CRM online communities.
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Darren Liu, Microsoft Dynamics CRM MVP
Crowe Chizek and Company LLC
October 2nd, 2007
http://www.crowecrm.com
When you trying to create a view or do an advance find in CRM, you are restricted in CRM version 3.0 to only display the fields of the entity you are currently working with. The ability to show related entity data, although often requested, was not possible. With Titan (CRM 4.0), you can now display the fields from the primary entity and related entities. For example, you may want to return opportunity records with columns related to the estimated opportunity amounts and close dates but also see the account name and state in the view (or resulting Excel export), with Titan, this is now possible.
I will provide a more detailed example later this week, but for the moment I wanted to show off a new feature in the next CRM release that I think will make many users (and implementers) very happy. Take a look at the screen shot for a quick preview (click on image thumbnail to get a full size image).
Darren Liu, is a Senior Consultant and CRM specialist at Crowe Chizek in Chicago. Darren is also a Microsoft CRM MVP and enjoys working with both existing and new clients to leverage the benefits that CRM can provide. Additionally, Darren is very active in the Chinese and English CRM online communities.
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Bryan Van Antwerp
Crowe Chizek and Company LLC
October 1st, 2007
http://www.crowecrm.com
Microsoft Dynamics CRM users with the CRM Laptop Client (often referred to as the offline client) installed have the capability to download CRM data locally to their laptop. This is extremely helpful for disconnected users such as people in sales who are routinely travelling with limited connections to the the company network.
Regarding the CRM Laptop Client, a topic I have heard raised several times is the concern over a laptop being stolen with CRM data on the laptop – think of all those clients and prospects, pricelists, etc. that exist in the typical CRM database. If a competitor or an unscrupulous party were to get their hands on your data, how harmful could that be?
The likelihood of a laptop, or other mobile device, being stolen and the data actually being scavenged is low (rather than the hard drive just being reformatted and the device reused). However this does not mean that it should not be of concern. In late June, Microsoft released a whitepaper, Using Encrypting File System to Protect Microsoft Dynamics CRM Data on a V3c Client Running Windows XP Professional , describing how to secure your CRM data (and the general process may be used for other files as well). Many will find the aforementioned article very useful; however, companies may want to research this concept more extensively. I firmly believe that securing CRM data is very important, but what about that client list in Excel, the pricelist in Word, quarterly financial presentations in PowerPoint, etc. that exist on the typical hard drive – are these any less important?
Numerous applications exist today that can be used to encrypt mobile devices and accessories, including hard drives, writeable CD’s, USB devices, etc. These applications will not only protect CRM data, but all other files as well, such as the client list in Excel, the price list in Word, the quarterly financial presentation in PowerPoint and many others. I would strongly recommend reading the Microsoft whitepaper on securing Dynamics CRM data and consider implementing it as well as encourage thought to be put into securing any/all data that would be detrimental if in the wrong hands.
Bryan Van Antwerp, is a Senior Manager at Crowe Chizek (www.crowecrm.com). Bryan currently focuses on CRM Analytics, Business Process Improvement, CRM Tool Selection, and System Implementation including the Microsoft Dynamics CRM 3.0 platform.
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