CRM Blog : CRM News

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.

CRM Webinar

Bryan Van Antwerp — Wed, 17 Dec 2008 22:00:00 GMT

Crowe is providing a webinar on Microsoft Dynamics CRM on January 8, 2009 from 1:00 - 2:30 PM ET. If you are interested, you can click here for more details:

https://www.crowehorwath.com/crowe/AboutUs/Events/detail.cfm?id=413

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.

Microsoft Dynamics CRM “Titan” (CRM 4.0) Preview: What are CRM 4.0 Plug-Ins

Darren Liu — Mon, 15 Oct 2007 16:28:00 GMT

Darren Liu, Microsoft Dynamics CRM MVP
Crowe Chizek and Company LLC
October 15^th, 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.

Microsoft Dynamics CRM “Titan” (CRM 4.0) Preview: Multiple User Lookups on a Form

Jeremy Hofmann — Wed, 10 Oct 2007 16:34:00 GMT

Jeremy Hofmann
Crowe Chizek and Company LLC
October 10^th, 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.

Microsoft Dynamics CRM “Titan” (CRM 4.0) Preview: Duplicate Detection

Melissa Schulte — Fri, 05 Oct 2007 16:10:00 GMT

Melissa Schulte
Crowe Chizek and Company LLC
October 5^th, 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 3^rd 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.

Multiple Criteria

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.

Microsoft Dynamics CRM “Titan” (CRM 4.0) Preview: Showing Multiple Entity Data within a View Continued

Zahara Hirani — Thu, 04 Oct 2007 16:39:00 GMT

Zahara Hirani, MCAD
Crowe Chizek and Company LLC
October 4^th, 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.

Microsoft Dynamics CRM “Titan” (CRM 4.0) Preview: Import Data Wizard & Data Migration Tool

Darren Liu — Wed, 03 Oct 2007 16:28:00 GMT

Darren Liu, Microsoft Dynamics CRM MVP
Crowe Chizek and Company LLC
October 3^rd, 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 :)

Microsoft Dynamics CRM “Titan” (CRM 4.0) Preview: Showing Multiple Entity Data within a View

Darren Liu — Tue, 02 Oct 2007 16:14:00 GMT

Darren Liu, Microsoft Dynamics CRM MVP
Crowe Chizek and Company LLC
October 2^nd, 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).

Leverage the Power of Windows Workflow Foundation with Microsoft Dynamics CRM 3.0

Jeremy Hofmann — Mon, 24 Sep 2007 16:33:00 GMT

Jeremy Hofmann
Crowe Chizek and Company LLC
September 24^th, 2007
http://www.crowecrm.com

Summary: Jeremy Hofmann writes an article on leveraging Windows Workflow Foundation from CRM 3.0.

Introduction: As Microsoft Dynamics continues to gear up its workflow offering, now is the time to start ramping up your company’s strategy for integrating real-time workflow into your Microsoft Dynamics CRM 3.0 solution.

The Microsoft® .NET Framework 3.0 platform contains the Windows Workflow Foundation (WF), which enables you to build sequential and state-driven workflow capabilities into your existing applications. Along with the Microsoft CRM 3.0 Software Development Kit (SDK), this means you can begin to leverage this robust platform now. This will give you a head start on future releases of products in the Microsoft Dynamics line.

This article will show you how to build a WF sequential workflow to retrieve the next available salesperson and then automatically assign an incoming lead to that salesperson.

Find the rest of the article at http://folio.crowechizek.com/files/PDF/PERF7708_CRM3_Workflow.pdf

Jeremy Hofmann is a Manager and CRM specialist at Crowe Chizek.