CRM Blog : Business Solutions

CRM Activity Usage Report

Danny Varghese — Mon, 19 Oct 2009 23:22:00 GMT

My colleague Jeremy Hofmann has been busy at one of our clients providing them valuable solutions to meet their business needs. Below is another great example of how Jeremy has harnessed the customizability of CRM!

Business Problem:

Do your clients need a way to monitor activity usage as a means to track user adoption?

Solution:

Below is a CRM report we created that looks at activities created or modified over six periods of time, starting with the current date. It can help spot overall trends for individual users or business units.

Technical Notes:

This is just a standard SRS report. While I’m not a huge fan of the courier font on reports it was the client standard at the time so feel free to change it. Also it is currently grouped by branch, which is a custom field. You would likely need to change it to another grouping level such as business unit, depending on your clients needs.

User Story or Screenshot:

Launch the report from the CRM reports area. With pre-filtering, you can select specific users to monitor.

Look for the up/down arrows and then drill into specific business units. Schedule follow up calls with the users’ managers to understand why usage has dropped, stayed at zero, or increased. Solicit feedback on the application in order to improve specific functionality or determine unmet needs and re-engage Crowe to fill those needs.

CRM Custom Browse Folder

Danny Varghese — Sat, 17 Oct 2009 16:14:00 GMT

My colleague Jeremy Hofmann has been busy at one of our clients providing them valuable solutions to meet their business needs. Below is a great example of how Jeremy has harnessed the customizability of CRM!

Business Problem:

We’ve given the client a way to add a documents I_FRAME on a contact record, however there was no easy way for their users to browse the folders – they have to type in a path manually.

Solution:

Provide a way for them to browse to a folder. SharePoint is not currently an option.

Technical Notes:

While IE provides a file browse dialog, there is simply no way to browse folders by themselves. So you have to write your own ActiveX scripting and html output to provide the functionality.

User Story or Screenshot:

Now the user can click a browse button next to the path field on the contact form which will launch the dialog box below. Here they can browse to the folder they want and click ok, which will populate the path field on the contact record and update the documents I_FRAME.

Notice it looks very much like Vista so it fits in nicely with their desktop look and feel.

CRM Developer Ramp-Up Kit

Danny Varghese — Tue, 13 Oct 2009 13:16:00 GMT

Microsoft has a great article containing tools to help a CRM developer ramp up. The article includes presentations and labs that will help complement a developer's .NET skills to help build on top of the CRM 4.0 platform.

The article contains links to the following:

Introduction to concepts for developing with Microsoft CRM 4.0
New relationship types
Web services, authentication methods for each installation, multi-tenancy and CRM online
Integrating custom pages into the user interface, SiteMap customization, IFRAME's, and JavaScript
Developing plug-ins which can help extend product functionality with custom code, triggered either before or after an event
Explanations of the new workflow features
Features of the SDK for working offline
New reporting features
Analytics & Business Intelligence
Explanations on how to write new API for making changes to the metadata
E-mail setup and new deployment features
Performance
Labs to help developers tune their skills

This link can be found here: http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/dd393296.aspx

Rules To Better Microsoft CRM & SSRS

Danny Varghese — Sat, 21 Feb 2009 23:07:00 GMT

Below are some very useful links on standards for Microsoft CRM and SQL Server Reporting Services:

http://www.ssw.com.au/ssw/Standards/Rules/RulestoBetterMicrosoftCRM.aspx

http://www.ssw.com.au/ssw/Standards/Rules/RulesToBetterSQLReportingServices.aspx

Enjoy!

Using CRM Workflow To Create Audit Trail

Danny Varghese — Tue, 20 Jan 2009 13:29:00 GMT

There's an excellent post on the MSDN CRM blog on how to create an audit trail using the CRM 4.0 workflow. I've had numerous customer requests for an audit trail of entities when a field changes. Clients want to know when certain fields change, and who made the change.

The MSDN post gives a great example of using out of the box CRM workflow functionality to meet their needs: http://blogs.msdn.com/crm/archive/2008/04/10/using-workflow-to-maintain-an-audit-log.aspx.

Microsoft CRM 4.0 and Windows Presentation Foundation

Jeremy Hofmann — Fri, 26 Dec 2008 21:06:00 GMT

Interesting in building a dashboard for CRM 4.0? In this article, I’ll show you how to build your own custom CRM dashboards, using Microsoft’s Windows Presentation Foundation to construct the user interface. This dashboard will run as a standalone Windows application in order to give your user’s the most optimal performance.

Please visit the Microsoft CRM Team blog for the whole article - http://blogs.msdn.com/crm/archive/2009/01/07/building-rich-client-dashboards-for-microsoft-dynamics-crm-with-windows-presentation-foundation.aspx

Enjoy!

CRM Custom RSS Feed in less than 30 minutes

Mitchell Kett — Fri, 11 Jul 2008 20:35:00 GMT

One of the best ways to improve a client's business is to keep users better informed and up-to-date on the information provided by CRM. A workflow could be created (and maintained) to send out an email to the appropriate parties when a specific event happens (create, update, delete of an entity), but what if we could go one step further and provide the same up-to-date information without emails (and maintaining who gets what) or without the need for a user to look in CRM? What about using an RSS feed?

Thanks to a very useful tutorial provided by Jeff at uberasp.net, creating an RSS feed for CRM can be done in a matter of minutes. For a very quick crash course in XML and the syntax for RSS, see http://www.w3schools.com/rss/rss_syntax.asp .

Say I'd like to create an RSS Feed for a specific entity in CRM. Whenever a new record is created for this entity, I want to see it in my RSS Feed. For this example, I created a custom entity in CRM called "new_rssfeed". The only attribute I added to new_rssfeed was an ntext field called "new_description" which will contain text describing the new record. After publishing my new entity type, I opened up Visual Studio 2005 and started a new ASP.Net Web Site. I renamed the Default.aspx file generated by VS to "RSS_Feed.aspx" and changed the code to the following:

//RSS_Feed.aspx

<%@ Page Language="C#" AutoEventWireup="true" CodeFile="RSS_Feed.aspx.cs" Inherits="_Default" EnableViewState="false" %>

<%@ OutputCache Duration="300" VaryByParam="none" %>

Yup, that is all you should see in your .aspx file. No need for any html tags or DOCTYPE declarations. What will happen is that when a user navigates to the RSS_Feed.aspx file, the Page_Load event will generate a stream of XML code which the web browser will interpret as an RSS feed. So there is no need for any HTML.

Within the code-behind file, RSS_Feed.aspx.cs, I added the following code to generate the XML for the feed within the Page_Load event. You can use this code as a template for your own feed.

//RSS_Feed.aspx.cs

protected void Page_Load(object sender, EventArgs e)

{

Response.Clear();

Response.ContentType = "text/xml";

XmlTextWriter objX = new XmlTextWriter(Response.OutputStream, Encoding.UTF8);

objX.WriteStartDocument();

objX.WriteStartElement("rss");

objX.WriteAttributeString("version","2.0");

objX.WriteStartElement("channel");

objX.WriteElementString("title", "Practice CRM RSS Feed");

objX.WriteElementString("link","http://localhost:5555/RSS/RSS_Feed.aspx");

objX.WriteElementString("description","Live, up-to-date information coming from CRM!");

objX.WriteElementString("ttl","5");

SqlConnection objConnection = new SqlConnection(ConfigurationManager.ConnectionStrings["crmConnectionString"].ToString());

objConnection.Open();

string sql = "SELECT TOP 10 new_name, new_description, new_rssfeedid, createdon FROM new_rssfeed ORDER BY createdon DESC";

SqlCommand objCommand = new SqlCommand(sql, objConnection);

SqlDataReader objReader = objCommand.ExecuteReader();

while (objReader.Read())

{

objX.WriteStartElement("item");

objX.WriteElementString("title",objReader.GetString(0));

objX.WriteElementString("description",objReader.GetString(1));

objX.WriteElementString("link", "http://localhost:5555/MicrosoftCRM/userdefined/edit.aspx?id=" + objReader["new_rssfeedid"].ToString() + "&etc=10008");

objX.WriteElementString("pubDate", objReader.GetDateTime(3).ToString("R"));

objX.WriteEndElement();

}

objReader.Close();

objConnection.Close();

objX.WriteEndElement();

objX.WriteEndDocument();

objX.Flush();

objX.Close();

Response.End();

}

Notice the bolded text within the code. These are snippets that will differ in your code. For my RSS feed, I gave it the title of "Practice CRM RSS Feed". The link element is for the URL used to get to the aspx file. For my connection to CRM, I simply created a web.config file with a connection string to my CRM DB. Throw in your own custom SQL Query to grab the necessary info to populate the "title", "description", "link", and "pubDate" for the feed <item> element. The above code, in a nut shell, will grab the 10 most recently added New_rssfeed elements and format them for the feed. I built and published the web site project and the last thing to do was configure IIS to make the feed accessible.

In IIS, all that I needed to do was create a new virtual directory with the alias "RSS" under the Microsoft CRM web site and point it to the folder with the compiled web code. It automatically saw the web.config file, so no other adjustments had to be made. Do an IIS reset and navigate to the aspx page. You should see a basic page with the feed title and a description of how to subscribe to the feed. You will also see the feed articles listed below and search options to the right (I used IE7 -- other browsers may render differently or re-direct to an RSS Reader like Google Reader).

Example of RSS Feed rendering in IE7 (click to view larger image)

Just think of what you could use this for! You could integrate workflows and plugins with an RSS feed in order to provide up-to-date info on what's happening in CRM to other users (or anyone within the local network). Inform sales people of new opportunities and leads, give executives updates by the minute as opportunities close and new ones come in. Create one generic feed and register a plugin for multiple actions which could generate a variety of updates to the feed. You could even create multiple feeds/aspx files and give users the option of how much/ little they'd like to get updated on. We could even throw in a couple parameters like entity type and GUID and we've got an RSS feed for one specific record in CRM.

I merely scratched the surface of RSS (you can add images and other content as well), so be creative and think of how you might be able to use this to keep users (and developers) better informed of what's going on in CRM.

Enterprise CRM - What to Look for in a CRM Admin

Jeremy Hofmann — Wed, 04 Jun 2008 15:29:00 GMT

Depending on your company’s size and installed number of users, you may or may not need a dedicated CRM admin. Microsoft Dynamics CRM is a product that lends itself to a power user for day to day maintenance and administration. However, if you have a larger number of users, say greater than 200, and especially if these users are spread out across geographic regions or branches, have independent needs, or a large amount of data to manage, then a full time admin may be your best bet.

But what should you look for in a CRM admin? It can be a challenging position to define. On the one hand, you need someone who can handle the business requirements, managing scope, timelines, and user expectations, but also someone who can deliver much of the work or coordinate the various technical departments in order to maintain and modify the system along with the growing needs of the business.

In essence, you need someone with a 50/50 mix of business and technical skills.

In particular, the ideal CRM admin should be able to:

· Meet with user groups (departments) to understand and define requirements

· Coordinate solutions and resolve differences among the departments

· Schedule resources and maintain timeline and budget

· Be able to perform system configuration work

· Understand what each area of the system offers and a basic understanding of how it works: sales, customer service, and marketing functionality, workflows, duplicate detection, and the Outlook client, to name a few

· Understand the core architecture of CRM and server topology: web servers, SQL server

· Keep up with the latest CRM industry news, Microsoft Dynamics CRM news, and community newsgroups for the latest information and patches

· Be an advocate for CRM within the company

Big bonus points for any candidate that can also:

· Program Microsoft Dynamics CRM using the SDK

· Write SQL Reporting Services Reports

· Write complex and other data mining queries against the system

· Write client-side JavaScript code

So, the next question is – how to find such a person? While this can be a difficult task, it is not impossible. Here are a few suggestions to get you going:

· Hire from Within – Hiring from within means you don’t have to train that person on the core business and begin to use them more immediately. Often times the challenge and visibility that comes from being the CRM “go to” person benefits the employee by increasing their value and security within the organization

· Consult to Hire – If you don’t have the skills on the ground to get going, consider hiring a consultant with the option to hire after a fixed period. This is a great way for both parties to “try each other out” before making a final decision.

· Place Ads on All the Major Boards – Be sure to be honest about the skills that are needed. Conduct technical screens on all candidates and find out their mix of business / technical skills.

· Check with Your Implementation Partner - Often times consulting companies and candidates are not a good match due to the high travel commitments required at consulting companies, even though the candidates skill set is ideal for CRM. Check with your implementation partner to see if they can pass along some resumes of candidates who may still be looking for a position. And lastly…

· Don’t Give Up! The right person is out there. It’s just a matter of searching in the right places, being careful about the skill set balance, and integrating that person into your organization.

Leveraging CRM as part of a solution to Page Technical Support in your Company

Zahara Hirani — Mon, 14 Apr 2008 12:42:00 GMT

Recently at a client we had the challenge of developing a solution that would alert technical support when a case that was updated and needed tech support to look into the issue.

At first we thought workflows, but then realized we needed to create a custom entity that would store all of the paging information for the tech support to look at. We also needed to page different lists of people based on the escalation level, escalation frequency, day-night sift as well as the time the tech support were being paged. Oh wait I’m not done – we also needed to store all the levels reached and paging times etc in our custom entity and stop paging if tech support was already looking into the issue. We also had to have the correct lists paged based on what department of the firm the account/case belonged to.

We started off by creating a custom entity that would store the different tech support people.
We then created another entity to store the different escalation levels the tech support people belonged to as well as the day-night shift information.
We then created another custom entity to store the different escalation groups and the department those groups to would be responsible for (more like a profile).
We needed to link the escalation profiles to the account/case since each belonged to different departments as we could have multiple profiles within a department. For this, we created another custom entity that stored the account, the department and the profile.
The last custom entity we created was one that would stored the information regarding the case, account, escalation groups and time when the actual page was sent.

Next we created a create/update post callout method for the case entity that would validate if the user wanted to page tech support. In the callout we had to check if a page had already been sent and if not, not to create a new request. If the page had not been sent, the callout created the custom entity to store all the information regarding the case, account and escalations information like escalation lists, timing etc.

Lastly, we created a windows service that looked for the custom entity that had all the paging information and checked if the page had been sent or needed to be sent as well as if it was already being worked on by the tech support person. If the escalation time was reached, the service would check who was on the next escalation level as well as the day-night shift time and programmatically send an email(page) to the correct list of people and update the custom entity to reflect the most recent page.

Once the tech support person recevies the email and gets ready to work on the case, the tech support person accepts the request and the custom entity gets updated so that no more pages are sent.

Cloning An Entity In CRM

Danny Varghese — Wed, 26 Mar 2008 16:04:00 GMT

Intro

We’ve had requests from our clients to “clone” already created records at the click of a button. The reason is that when users are entering data into numerous records of the same entity every day, where only a few fields may differ, it can be cumbersome. A great example is we created an entity with over 50 fields and users may create 10-15 records of that entity where 90% field values will be the same. I’ll explain the approach we took.

Approach

1. Create a JavaScript function that will open a window to the entity to be cloned to (make the window variable global)

2. Edit the ISV.config.xml to add a button, and in the configuration, reference the JavaScript function created above

3. Inside the JavaScript function (you may create other methods as well), call the function to check the status of the new window

4. When the page is loaded, start mapping from one window to the other as in the second function below

function checkPageState()

{ if (oClonedEntity.document.readyState == 'complete') { cloneEntity(); return; }

setTimeout('checkPageState()',100);

}
function cloneEntity(){

with(oClonedEntity.document.crmForm)       {
    //add fields here that you want to copy from one entity to the newly created one
    new_field1.DataValue = crmForm.all.new_field1.DataValue;                  new_field2.DataValue = crmForm.all.new_field2.DataValue;       }                            //finally, close the dialog
window.close();

}

5. After inserting the above code, test it out. This will be highly beneficial for users, enjoy!

Sorting By Multiple Columns In Microsoft CRM

Danny Varghese — Tue, 25 Mar 2008 22:33:00 GMT

Microsoft CRM views in 3.0 are a great way to view important parts of records in a clear concise manner. The views also offer sorting which is an even greater plus for many users. What may not be known however is that users can sort by multiple columns!

Simply hold down the SHIFT key, and viola! This can be especially helpful for views that have columns with data that have similar values. A prime example is in CRM, if there are hundreds, or even thousands of Contact records, and the view might have first and last name columns. The likely hood of having duplicate first names is high. So if a user wants to sort by first and last names, he/she can hold down the SHIFT key, and click on the first name and last name column.

Hope this helps!

Upgrading to Microsoft Dynamics CRM 4.0 – The Tortoise and the Hare

Jeremy Cox — Thu, 14 Feb 2008 18:50:00 GMT

As a father of a 2 ½ and 7 month old, I spend A LOT of time reading to my kids. As you’ll recall from the story, the hare was speedy and boasted about being the fastest in the forest. The tortoise finally tired of hearing all of the hare’s boasting challenged the hare to a race, and as the story goes the speedy but overly confident hare lost to the slow and steady tortoise. When I thought about the “life example” this story tells, it only seemed appropriate to use the classic fable as a metaphor for the approach you should consider when upgrading a CRM deployment.

The Hare

Looking at the upgrade as a quick and easy software update (providing new bells and whistles) in more cases than not will work from the perspective of updating software bits. While Microsoft has invested tremendous resources to ensure organizations will have as few issues as possible with the upgrade, at the end of the day this is still software, and no two environments are the same. A quick Google search such as, “Upgrade to Microsoft CRM 4.0 or Upgrading Microsoft CRM” will return a number of articles revealing all those hares who have been fast to perform upgrades. Many of these articles are related to either technical issues or functionality related questions resulting as part of their upgrade process. Hopefully most of them performed the upgrade in a test environment and not their production CRM environment – if you don’t already have a test environment, this is your justification and reason for having one.

However, how does this approach impact your users? Customers? Would new features and functionality available in version 4.0 create greater business value for the organization? Increase productivity of users? Impact the organization’s CRM Investment and ROI as a whole? How will you know if you never talk to the users?

The Tortoise

The tortoise of course sees the upgrade as an opportunity to re-engage with users and to determine how the organization can get more value out of the organization’s CRM investment. Isn’t that what winning this race is really about?

This is the time to sit down as an organization and review the business and technical (software and infrastructure) considerations that may impact your organization’s CRM upgrade. The following questions are examples taken from Crowe’s Microsoft Dynamics CRM 4.0 Upgrade Readiness & Planning document which I believe organizations should be asking as part of the overall upgrade approach:

What are the top challenges our organization has had with the current implementation of Microsoft CRM?

Have users fully adopted the CRM application and corresponding processes? If not, what are the barriers?

Have there been any modifications to the baseline CRM databases and application files?

How will the upgrade impact integration with any external data source(s) or applications?

Does our existing application and database hardware meet software and hardware guidelines and recommendations?

Taking time on the front-end to carefully consider answers to some questions like above should not only help mitigate any risk associated with the upgrade, but provide a CRM implementation more fully aligned with your organization’s business.

Closing Thoughts

Having spent the last 5 years as a CRM consultant (specifically implementing Microsoft CRM), one thing I have learned over time, is that an organization’s CRM deployment never really ends, nor should it. Your users, customers and their needs are constantly evolving, and so your use of technology to support your customer relationship management strategy must also continue to change and evolve. There is no better time than with an application upgrade. So the question is, are you be the hare or the tortoise?

CRM as a Platform (Part 1)

Bryan Van Antwerp — Wed, 30 Jan 2008 15:26:00 GMT

Opinions differ on whether CRM is, can be, or should be an application platform. The points of contention are typically terminology and technology. Rather than focus on semantics, I want to focus on the possibilities the MS CRM application provides – based on my past experience.

In addition to the term Application Platform, I have also heard Solution Platform, Development Platform, Application Framework, Solution Framework and Development Framework. I’m sure there are many more. We could debate why one term is more appropriate than another, but to me the objective is not the “term of the month”, but the ability of the tool; the ability of the tool to quickly and easily solve a business need. I realize quickly and easily are relative, but this blog is based on my opinion – from many years of developing, architecting and implementing custom solutions compared to designing and extending CRM.

Rather than create another feature list of what CRM as a platform can provide, I will describe the possibilities through examples. Let’s start with a very simplistic example. Our example business need is for a “Suggestion Mailbox” application; a means to allow employees to record recommendations on how to improve the business and submit them to management for review.

Five business requirements for this application are:

Managers should be able to see all suggestions, users should only see suggestions they created.
A suggestion needs to be related to a department, beginning with 3 options (HR, Finance & IT), however the ability to add more departments needs to be incorporated.
When a suggestion is created, the manager from the department selected needs to be sent an email.
Managers need to be able to set the status of a suggestion (New, In Review, Approved and Denied).
When a manager changes the status of a suggestion to Approved or Denied, the user that created the suggestion should receive an email notifying them of the outcome.

These 5 business requirements imply many technology requirements including a robust security model, data management (including a database to store the information), workflow (to trigger and send emails), forms to view lists of records (users, departments, statuses, suggestions), forms to create and update records and more. The intent here is not to list every requirement in detail but rather highlight that a basic application still requires a lot of foundational functionality to exist in order to complete the application.

This is where CRM as a platform steps in to give us a hand. CRM provides all of these foundational needs out of the box – meaning that time is spent on configuration of the business requirements and not on technical development. The configuration becomes defining the metadata to make up our new entity, security and processes. This consists of:

Construct what a “Suggestion” is – what do we call it and what are its attributes (fields).
Define security specifically for a “Suggestion”.
Workflow needs to be configured to send the emails based on the requirements defined.

All of these can be completed through the standard configuration tools.

To custom develop a working prototype of the “Suggestion Mailbox” ready for users to experiment with and test would take an experienced developer a few days to create (this is also assuming some reuse of existing code). However, creating this within CRM would take an experienced CRM admin or power user a couple of hours (including testing). These are just ballpark estimates for a very simplistic example, but the purpose is to show that CRM provides a lot more benefit out of the box than just Customer Relationship Management. It can become a platform for related and extended business processes.

As I wrap this post up, I would like to throw out some caveats. Do I think CRM should become the platform for all development and therefore companies should go out and purchase CRM for this purpose – no. Custom Development will always have its place and for some requirements it is the better choice. However, if you have MS CRM or are considering MS CRM I think you should consider and evaluate the business solutions it can provide from your Customer Relationship Management investment. In other words, if you have a development platform (or whatever term you prefer) that comes along with your CRM investment, why not take advantage of it.

In subsequent posts, I will discuss some real world examples to show more insight on the possibilities.

Welcome Back to the Crowe CRM Blog

Bryan Van Antwerp — Tue, 22 Jan 2008 14:48:00 GMT

We are back with a much improved blog! CRM 4.0 is out now which brings a lot of fodder for posts. Expect to see several new posts by members of the Crowe CRM Team on such topics as 3^rd Party Add-ins/Applications, upgrading CRM 3.0 to 4.0, new 4.0 features, vertical CRM solutions and user adoption. Keep your eyes open for these posts.

During our down time, I reviewed all of our previous blog posts and realized that we were light on the business side. When we began this blog, our intent was to provide a well rounded blog with not only technical posts but also posts on the business aspect of CRM. I intend to correct this lack of balance starting with a series of posts discussing "CRM as a Platform". There are ranging opinions on whether CRM is or can be an application platform. These points of contention are based around terminology and the technical aspects of this. Rather than focus on semantics, I want to focus on the possibilities the CRM application provides - based on my actual experience.

Thank you for visting our blog and please come back often. Also, as always, please feel free to comment or contact us.

Securing Microsoft Dynamics CRM Data for a Laptop User

Bryan Van Antwerp — Mon, 01 Oct 2007 15:50:00 GMT

Bryan Van Antwerp
Crowe Chizek and Company LLC
October 1^st, 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.