Archive for category: Microsoft Dynamics 365

1. User Experience

Microsoft Dynamics CRM 2013 introduces an entirely new user experience with a brand new user interface. Say goodbye to those irritating and frustrating pop-ups windows. Get everything that needs on one screen with no flipping and less scroll.

Navigation:

A new horizontal menu bar eases user navigation & frees up screen space by replacing the CRM left menu and ribbon navigation, results in less scrolling and more focus on customer information for the user.

All modules are accessible under main navigation header and their related sub-modules can be accessed by clicking on the Arrow. From Module to Entity to Records to Related Records, flat structured links help the user to navigate between module and records without any hassles or confusion of where the required record can be accessed. Recently visited records also can be accessed easily by clicking on the arrow button on the right side of the button for the respective entity.

Look-up:

Selecting a record requires a click on the search icon. For creating a new record and attaching it, no need to open the Lookup view as “+New” button is available in the same in down-left most corner of this view.

Header:

Record Headers highlights key information i.g. lead source, status, rating, record owner to grab the user attention.

Ribbon:

Microsoft Dynamics CRM 2013 replaces the cluttered ribbon with simplified design by displaying the most used buttons on it and make the others available through a drop down.

2. Data Entry

Auto Save:

Any of the updated forms, now have autosave enabled by default. With autosave enabled there is no Save button displayed in the command bar on the form. Records that have changed data are automatically saved every 30 seconds or when people navigate to a new record. The autosave behavior can be disabled at the organization level in System Settings under General Tab or at the form level through code.

Quick Create:

In an attempt to create a record while working on another, leaving the present screen, going to the correct module, opening and scrolling through the large form in search of the important fields has been very painful for users. Quick Create Button would happen to be one of the best features of MSCRM 2013. One button “Create” on the top pane will allow the user to create a new record of an entity without requiring to leave the present screen and task. A user will be able to create the record on the layer screen that appears on the main screen and contains the only prominent fields defined in the “quick create view”. A user can save the record and start working on the previous task.  The entity (both custom and system) whose records which can be created through quickly create button can be configured on customization page.

Activity Creation:

One of the major drawbacks of earlier versions was that, in attempt to capture Phone Call, Appointment or any activity details regarding any record, the user would require to open a form for it, create the Activity and come back to the main record form. Microsoft has addressed this pain point with giving an ability to the user to create an activity from the record form itself. For example, User can click on the “Create Phone Call” option and enter the call details in the small form that appears on the record form and create the activity without navigating anywhere else.

Quick View:

With Quick View Feature, User can see the key information of any Look-up record on the main form itself. For example, if the user wants to see Parent Account’s only 3 key details i.e.  Name, Phone and Email, One quick form with these 3 fields form can be created for the account entity and configured in the Contact form for the Parent Account Lookup Field. When any record is selected in the Parent Account look-up, its details will be displayed in this embedded Account Quick View Form on the Contact Form itself.

Inline Editable Grids:

Now, the product line items on the Opportunity, Quote, Invoice and Order Form can be edited quickly without opening the product record. With inline editable grids, Product details can such as price, discount and quantity can be entered in the grid line itself.

3. Business Processes

This feature makes the system a more process-centric, outcome-oriented and guided experience. The Business Processes let the admin define various guided processes for the users with different security roles. Each stage of a process is clearly outlined, identifying the recommended steps to completion. Users can move forward and backward in a process, and as they do, they will be presented with a new suggested list of steps. Business Process can be spanned on up to 5 entities and can be configured with more than one security roles. More than one Business Processes can be assigned to a Security Profile for an entity, thus one user can be assigned more than one Business Processes. A user can switch among the assigned Business Processes while working on a task. With this, Users always know what has been completed, where he is in the process, and what still remains to be done.

4. Record Image

Image of Customer or Product on the form may help the user in recognizing the record at the first sight without reading too many details from the form and saving her valuable time. An image can be displayed on an entity form, which has been configured to store it. The image attribute can be set up on the entity configuration setting page for any entity.

5. Access Team

Any business assignment, be it solving customer issue or following-up a Corporate Opportunity, may require the collaboration of a unique set of people. With a record-based Access Team, you can add a user to the record and give them access.  The Access Team is a new type of team that doesn’t own records, but, has access to records. You can create one or more Access Teams to work on the same record and add team members with different Security Roles, to it. Also, you can define Access Team Templates which define the security access rights and create Access Teams quickly.

6. Business Rules

Business Rules Deliver tailored, rule-driven actions across devices without the need for a developer. Business Rules provide a simple declarative interface to implement and maintain fast-changing, commonly used business rules that will be applied to CRM forms (Main and Quick Create) for both the web application and CRM for tablets. Set field values, field requirement levels, and show or hide fields, enable or disable fields and validate data and show error messages without writing a line of JavaScript code.

7. Real-Time Workflows

A very powerful feature that can minimize the need for plugin development. Real-Time Workflows are basically synchronous workflows which execute immediately and provides feedback to the user in real-time. Real-time workflows are not queued, as was the case with asynchronous workflows, but execute immediately on-demand or in response to a message being processed by the execution pipeline. Real-time workflows participate in the database transaction and perform similar functionality to plug-ins, yet can be created by a non-developer through the web application workflow designer.

8. Server-Side Synchronization

Server-Side Synchronization capability which enables the server to server sync of email, tasks, appointments, via integration with Exchange Server. This alleviates the need for using the email router (which had to be installed on always connected servers/PC) or Outlook Client to work with emails in CRM.

Exchange Online is supported or alternatively SMTP/POP3 (Gmail / Hotmail / Yahoo / MSN / Live / Outlook.com).

Nelly Furtado once sang “All good things come to end”. While we all love the song, but do we really believe it? Not if we are talking about Softwares where good things only become better, they do not end. However, Microsoft seems to be a big fan of Nelly and they have justified the lyrics by stopping the Lead Internet Capture feature in Microsoft Dynamics CRM Online. The announcement here.

What did the tool really do?

This tool gave you an all-important flexibility to create landing pages for your website, right inside CRM, like Contact Us page for example. The webmaster would then simply embed this page on the website and there you go – visitors filling up this form on a website would be logged into CRM as leads. Amazing, isn’t it?

What are the alternatives?

What is gone is gone, we certainly do not have to lose heart because there is no dearth of choices that we have. There are various add-ons in the marketplace as replacements. While an add-on will do its job in bits and pieces, we recommend a full-fledged marketing automation to deliver not only the above functionality but also a complete end to end marketing solution.

Salesfusion with Microsoft Dynamics CRM Salesfusion is a SaaS model marketing automation software that replicates the above functionality with ease, thanks to it’s out of box integration with MS CRM? Just create your form using a form creation wizard in Salesfusion, drop your MS CRM fields on the form, publish the form on your website using iFrame, and you are through.

Salesfusion provides an iFrame script for every form that you create; iFrames are one way to feature a dialog on your website. This script pushes the data into Salesfusion, from where the data is further pushed into CRM as leads.

It doesn’t end here. You can further do:
1. Bulk, Drip and Trigger-based email campaigns
2. Lead nurturing without making use of CRM workflows
3. Lead scoring and routing
4. Website visitor tracking
5. Social media marketing
6. ROI tracking of your marketing activities.

Salesfusion works with both on-premise and online models of Microsoft Dynamics CRM.

CRM Dynamics is a great platform to build CRM solutions for small business to the enterprise organization. However, to enhance the platform, add-ons from different partners provide a great way to improve the user experience and improve productivity.

Following up on my previous blog, which elaborated on why you must upgrade to Microsoft Dynamics CRM 2011, let us look at different upgrade paths available. What you chose for an upgrade depends on your existing Microsoft CRM deployment and partly on the allocated budget.

Essential Software Requirements Before Upgrade:

Irrespective of the approach you take for an upgrade, you must have the CRM2011 compatible environment in place. Detailing the hardware and software specifications is out of the scope of this blog, for which you can refer http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/library/hh699831. Essentially, software requirements can be addressed with components listed in below table.

Upgrade Paths:

In-Place Upgrade:

Simplest of all, but one that is least recommended. Simply run the CRM 2011 setup where CRM 4.0 is installed, and connect application to the existing CRM 2011 database server.

Upgrade database during install:

Ideal where database server used for CRM 4.0 has supported hardware and software components required for CRM 2011. All you need is a new application server for installing CRM 2011 and connect it to the same database that is used for CRM 4.0. During install, the database is automatically upgraded to CRM 2011.

Upgrade via import:

Setup separate database and application servers (64 bit) where CRM 2011 will be installed. Restore the backup of existing CRM 4 database to newly set-up SQL 2011 server and then import organization using MS CRM2011 Deployment wizard. You may do multiple iterations of testing on this new environment, even as users continue to use the CRM 4.0 installation without any disruption. After you are through with testing, take it to live to the users.

Migrating Customizations:

The upgrade process ports most of the customizations to CRM 2011 that was done in CRM 4.0. However, depending on the complexity of customizations there can still be few miscreants like:

• Unsupported Javascript
• Unsupported plug-ins
• Most importantly, unexpected errors

Besides, it is important to evaluate the new capabilities introduced in Microsoft Dynamics CRM 2011. You may have made design choices because the capabilities you needed were not available in Microsoft Dynamics CRM 4.0 that are now available. All these can become extremely time consuming and stressful without expertise. Take help from partners who can guide you through this and ensure a smooth transition.

CRM Dynamics is great platform to build CRM solutions for small business to enterprise organization. However to enhance the platform, add-ons from different partners provide a great way to improve the user experience and improve productivity.

I know that everybody has been eagerly waiting for the “CRM Anywhere” release. The experience of using CRM from anywhere (any smart device) or any browser (especially for MAC users) is going to turn the tables for the present offerings from Microsoft CRM!!!

Hold your horse people as this feature has been moved to Q4 release.

Well, this postponement is going to come as a slight setback for users who were eagerly waiting to use CRM from their MAC or Smart devices. (and yes also for Partners like us who had promised the same to their customers)…however, I don’t see this as a huge impact because most of our Customers are still using CRM from their Outlook… but I do agree that we were slightly disappointed.

Last month we had tested our deployments for Multi-Browser compatibility with the beta edition of this release and found the scripts breaking at the number of places. Even though the Custom Validation tool released by Microsoft helped us a lot, we still felt that more time was needed to smoothen out the migration to the new release. Hence even though the release has been scheduled for Q4, we would highly suggest Microsoft release the new Beta during Q3 so that we have enough time to ensure nothing breaks.

The other important feature (that is going to be released this month: July 2012) that I personally have been looking forward to is:

a. SQL Server 2012: With this update, CRM 2011 will be ready to work with SQL Server 2012 which offers high scalability, super performance and enhance BI capability

b. Custom Workflows for CRM Online: Previously if we had to bring external data into CRM, do some custom actions or Integrations then the only option available to CRM online customers was to host the functionality into a separate cloud (using Windows Azure Services). However, with this release, it would be possible to perform all these actions within the CRM online platform.

To learn more about the details on these new capabilities check the release preview guide

Steps Ahead?

• Q2 2012 – New Delivery Schedule
• Learn more about Microsoft Dynamics CRM
• IOTAP’s CRM Service offerings
• Contact Us

One may ask “Why is it necessary to do targeted marketing, when I can target every Tom, Dick, Harry with what I have to offer?”. I could easily assume that longer my target list, more are the conversions…Right?. Well, does it really work that way? Marketing Gurus do not agree. It is a widely accepted fact that Target Marketing helps you reduce marketing expenditures and increase response rates as your products are pitched only to customers who are likely to buy.

Some of the benefits of Target Marketing are:

• Higher response rate that is encouraging for marketing executives.
• Respect for the brand and positive marketer-customer relationship as disinterested/irrelevant customers are not constantly bombarded with your offerings.
• Better use of your most valuable resources i.e. time and money to generate additional revenue.
• You can easily drill down to the features and benefits of your services and products that are most important to your target market. For example, as a Banking service provider, everyone who wants to perform financial transactions can benefit from your services. But the benefits and features most important to someone wanting a loan versus someone wanting a facility for international wire transfer will be very different.

How can MS CRM help you do Target Marketing?

Microsoft CRM provides marketing professionals with the ability to perform segmentation with the use of Marketing Lists. These marketing lists are of two types:

a. Static: Here we need to add the customers manually.

b. Dynamic: Here we need to define rules and then CRM automatically adds the customers to the list whenever the criteria is met. So when a new or an existing customer matches these set criteria, CRM will auto-update the marketing list with this customer. Isn’t that awesome. No more manual addition needed!!!

The above snapshot shows a Dynamic Marketing List which segments customer’s whose Correspondence City is “Dubai” and Net Worth is more than $1,000,000.

This way Microsoft CRM makes it very easy to slice huge lists of data into segments based on various aspects like Demographic details,  Geographic locations, behavioral patterns or any other custom criteria.

Now you can run highly Targeted Marketing Campaigns against these Marketing lists 

CRM Dynamics is a great platform to build CRM solutions for small business to the enterprise organization. However, to enhance the platform, add-ons from different partners provide a great way to improve the user experience and improve productivity.