CRM 2011 – Adding Activity Feeds to the Dashboard

Posted on August 7, 2012 by JoeCRM

If you haven’t experimented with the Activity Feeds in CRM 2011 yet, they bring the concept of “social CRM” into your workplace.

With activity feeds you can follow various records you are interested in and get updates posted to your wall. Some of the updates can be configured to appear automatically (for example: post an update to the related account wall any time a case is opened). This is a great way for users to stay updated on important activity. The activity feed works a little like Twitter – just follow the records you are interested in and check your personal “wall” for important announcements from your MS CRM system. And just like Twitter, users can unfollow records when they no longer need updates.

The Microsoft Dynamics CRM default homepage is set to dashboards. Since dashboards are meant to give you a 360 degree view of your workday, this makes a lot of sense. With activity feeds there is a new item added to the navigation bar under My Work called “What’s New”. This is your personal wall, where any updates to records you follow will be posted. Now we just need to marry dashboards and activity feeds to get the best possible visibility into the records we care about.

The first step is to edit the dashboard where you want your wall to be displayed.

Adding Activity Feeds to CRM 2011

Once in Edit mode click on the web resource icon in the empty area where you want to add the wall.

Adding Activity Feeds to CRM 2011

If you are adding it to the bottom of an existing dashboard instead of to an empty frame on your dashboard, click on the web resource icon in the ribbon.

Adding Activity Feeds to CRM 2011

In the Add Web Resource dialog window, press the lookup icon to search for the pre-defined web resource. Enter “personal wall” into the lookup screen and select the resulting record.

Adding activity feed to crm 2011

Press OK on the Add Web Resource dialog to add this component to the dashboard, then press the Save and Close button on the dashboard ribbon to view the results.

add activity feed crm 2011

Please note: Users who are not following any records will only have “What’s New” and the box to enter new posts. Until records are followed and updates made to those records, the posts area will be blank.

Happy “Social” CRM’ing!

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JoeCRM

Microsoft Dynamics CRM Expert at PowerObjects
Joe CRM is a CRM superhero who runs on pure Microsoft Dynamics CRM adrenaline. As the face of PowerObjects, Joe CRM’s mission is to reveal innovative ways to use Dynamics CRM and bring the application to more business and organizations around the world.
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  • Sincerely

    Calling activity feeds “Social CRM” is a bit of a misuse of that term (actually, many would argue it’s a complete misappropriation). Social CRM is not putting a news feed in a traditional CRM application, it’s moving outside of the traditional application to understand where customers congregate and how to engage with them using tools that by definition don’t live behind a firewall.
    Activity feeds would fall more into the category of “Social Enterprise”, which mimics the general web innovations that transformed online interaction in the last several years to enhance communication inside an organization.