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Coming Soon: Microsoft Dynamics CRM 2011

PowerObjects - Doug — Mon, 12 Jul 2010 18:55:12 +0000

Today, at the Microsoft Worldwide Partner Coference in Washington D.C, Microsoft officially unveiled and announced the next and greatest version of their popular Dynamics CRM software. Code-named ‘CRM5′, Microsoft Dynamics CRM 2011 is poised to deliver the ‘Power of Productivity’ through familiar, intelligent and connected experiences for people inside and outside an organization.

You can read the official press release here but here are a few highlights:

- Dynamics CRM 2011 will be available to the public in September 2010 as a Beta

- Role Tailored Design: Role-based forms and views ensure business professionals have fast access to the relevant information that they need and are prevented from seeing data that they are not authorized to view

- Inline Data Visualizations: Business professionals using Microsoft Dynamics CRM 2011 can quickly create and share inline charts with drill-down intelligence to visually navigate data and uncover new insights

- Real-Time Dashboards: Businesses can rapidly configure multiple real-time dashboards to actively monitor business performance and improve decision-making

- Flexible Goal Management: Businesses can define key performance and business health indicators to track and measure progress against any organizational goal or metric

- Cloud Development: Developers can develop and deploy custom code for Microsoft Dynamics CRM Online using powerful tools, such as Microsoft Visual Studio. Powered by .NET Framework 4, they can also incorporate Microsoft Silverlight, Windows Communication Foundation and Language Integrated Query into their cloud solutions.

- Advanced User Personalization: Customers can create personal views, add commonly used records and design personal dashboards to measure performance.

Plus a ton more!!

Stay tuned to the PowerObjects blog for all the latest and greatest Dynamics CRM 2011 info!

Microsoft Dynamics CRM leads because of xRM development!

JoeCRM — Fri, 09 Jul 2010 02:32:46 +0000

Well Forrester just came out with their latest wave study – Looks great for Microsoft Dynamics CRM! I’m always curious to the complete thought process that goes into this studies, but I’ve come to some of my own conclusions that’s I’d like to share.

CRM has evolved from something that lives in the sales organization – to a tool that has the ability to touch every department in a company. Microsoft has done the best job on making its “CRM” extensible – the term that has been developed in the partner channel is xRM – really just anything relationship management. If you think about it that is what it will really take to be one of the successful players in the CRM world. So once the sales process is in the system – the whole leads to cash thing – then what happens? Maybe you need to have an online customer portal made as a crm portal – Maybe you need a custom CRM screen developed to view the status of all orders being placed – maybe you need reports for CRM exposed in a portal – these are small examples of xrm development.

So at PowerObjects it is not surprising that Microsoft ranks so high on reports like this – Microsoft Dynamics CRM goes way beyond CRM.

PowerLog Video

JoeCRM — Mon, 14 Jun 2010 19:59:53 +0000

Hey there – just a quick follow up post from an earlier one. We get people asking us all the time how they can track who is using the system and what they are doing when they do use it. We scratched our heads as it is not as easy as it would sound! We came up with a solution that we think is pretty slick – it works with both on-prem and IFD deployments and puts almost no load on the system.

Take a look at the short video we put together to get an idea of what PowerLog does.

Happy CRM’ing

One View in Microsoft Dynamics CRM

PowerObjects - Dean Jones — Wed, 03 Feb 2010 18:36:33 +0000

PowerObjects is always building new and cool features to add value to Microsoft Dynamics CRM. Whether you are implementing Sales Force Automation or building a custom xRM application we want to give the users the most efficient interface for working with the system. A while back I started designing an interface to create one view of all communication with a Lead or Account or Contact. Of course the process is slightly different for Leads as apposed to Accounts and Contacts, but the concept is the same: I want to see one view off all communication. Seemed like an easy challenge, but what we learned was we needed to develop some xRM framework before we could build our new Lead entity One View. We needed custom xRM filter controls, Toolbar, Grid, JumpBar and of course a cool Reading Pane. Each of these elements took time to develop, but allow PowerObjects team to develop new robust custom CRM and xRM screens better and faster than the competition. Our xRM solutions run on-premise as well as in PowerObjects
Hosted CRM.

(click for a full size image)

Putting controls to use in One View allows PowerObjects to pull all activities (open and history) as well as notes into one view. Now instead of having to jump between 3 or more view users can see all communication in One View (this was a hard feature to name). Now from one view we can easily see all communication, add additional Activities or Notes as well as quickly view any data in the reading pane. In the standard interface a user would have to navigate to multiple interfaces and open up multiple windows to view all this data. With the reading pane the user can simply arrow up and down the list of records and view detail in the reading pane instantly. No popup windows, just one view. In addition to the reading pane we added an attachment icon to the list so you can quickly identify if an activity or not has an attachment right from one view.

The last cool feature I have to mention is the reading pane is 100% customizable. From with in CRM you can define what fields in the CRM you want to map to the reading pane items. You can define the Subject, Regarding, as many named pairs of attributes as well as a description and whether or not to append all notes to the end of the description (great when looking at related entities in Accounts and Contacts). To add value to the end user we need to create a consistent look and feel as well as give the user intuitive interface to access and input data. From one view a user can view a record, add records or double click to open the record.

One View is just an example of the value PowerObjects 100% Focus on Microsoft Dynamics CRM brings to its clients. We have a team of experts that are 100% focused on adding value to any Microsoft Dynamics CRM or xRM solution.

Measuring Customer Satisfaction in Microsoft Dynamics CRM

JoeCRM — Fri, 11 Sep 2009 17:17:23 +0000

At PowerObjects we have been busy with a little xRM application to measure our customer satisfaction (CSAT) inside of Dynamics CRM. When we started looking at the issue we first had to decide the timing of our survey and how long they should be — I don’t know about you but I’m not a huge fan of getting these surveys that take 15-30 minutes of my life to fill out after the vendor is done and gone. Maybe my attention span is too short, but I think I’m like most people and if takes much longer than a good tweet — forget it… the phone has rung, an important email popped up, or someone has walked into my office. I also feel like these lengthy surveys are not a two way street. It seems like they are just trying to suck information out of me and before I get to the end, I’ve quit reading the questions closely, and am just hammering in answers to finish because I’ve already got 10 minutes invested.

So with these thoughts in mind we set out to build a better survey tool, and surprise surprise, we just happened to do it in our Microsoft CRM system. Makes sense seeing as how all the people I want to survey are already in CRM and what better place to write reports on the data.

To make sense of the survey we created, I need to introduce the PowerObjects Proven Process. We do one thing and one thing only — we implement kick butt systems in Dynamics CRM. Having done this hundreds of times, we have a process we use and constantly refine to make sure each project is a success. Although there are many little steps in each major step, we have broken it down into five major steps: Evaluation (this is our sales process), Plan for Success (this is our process of hand-off from sales to delivery), Design, Build & Validate (process to deliver the defined implementation), Train & Deploy (I’ll let you guess this step) and Lifecycle (everything that happens after we go live with a project).

We decided the best way to measure satisfaction is at the end of each step in the Proven Process. This way we could ask fewer questions and take up less of the contacts’ time and have questions related to the specific step in the process. This will also give us valuable data about what part of our Proven Process needs work. If we see scores drifting down during a project, we’ll still have time to step in and get everything on course. Make sense? I hope so because now I’ll talk a little bit about how we do it in CRM.

So when you think about a survey in our world, it is comprised of a group of questions that get tied to a specific survey. This survey is tied to a contact in CRM once we decide to send it out. First you must create questions — creating good questions is harder than you think!

We have designed this so we can choose a number of different types of questions. In our surveys I’m just using a one to 10 rating and a comment box. I do this so that everything has a numeric rating with our goal of striving for a 10 on every question. I also like to put a comment box at the end of each survey so people can let you know about other things that aren’t captured in a rating. We did build this with other applications in mind — think of the power of the data you could capture with these types of questions above and beyond a CSAT application —really any survey or questionnaire could be pushed out with the application.

So let’s talk about the survey we sent after the first step of our Proven Process, the Evaluation Process. Below you’ll see the survey questions we came up with.

Evaluation Process:

How well do you feel your account executive understood your business?
How would you rate the solutions demonstration we provided?
How would you rate the proposal that was presented?
How would you rate PowerObjects ability to meet your needs?
Please provide any other comments you would like (this is my text box question)

Next I need to create the survey in CRM

And then I need to assign questions to the survey

This pretty much lays the ground work for the survey. The next step is where a little of the programming magic comes in to play. What we do is create an email template inside of CRM that is specific to a certain survey. When we are at the end of a step in the PowerObjects Proven Process, we select the individuals in an account to receive the email. They get a short email asking them to take the survey. A link is provided that is unique to them and when they click it, it takes them to a webpage to collect the survey.

One of the many neat things we’ve added is the ability to specify what it says for the low and high value — this helps give context to your question. You can also add a ‘N/A’ for an option.

Once a contact submits the survey they can’t submit it again. You can see above that this should take no more than a minute to fill out.

Well that our two cents on measuring CSAT in Dynamics CRM — if you have questions or comments please post!

Happy CRM’ing

Looking to hire a CRM Project Manager

JoeCRM — Mon, 27 Jul 2009 23:57:53 +0000

Well I’ve never used our blog to post a job opening – but I figure there is someone out there following us that is looking or knows someone that is looking. I would also guess if you are interested enough to follow our blog you are probably the kind of person that could be a good addition to our team.

Basically we live and breathe CRM and xRM. We have a core focus on this product and have a practice that continues to grow every month. We are interested in folks that share our passion for CRM and like to work with a dynamics team of nearly 40 people delivering some of the best solutions on the market.

If this sounds interesting please drop me your resume at jim.sheehan@powerobjects.com – please no placement firms and no one just looking for a cotract.

Thx
Jim

Export Microsoft Dynamics CRM Entities to Excel

PowerObjects - Dean Jones — Tue, 09 Jun 2009 13:55:43 +0000

There have been many ways to document the entities in Microsoft Dynamics CRM. Often our team is building a data map that allows us to define entities and attributes and how they map to other systems. As we do this we are constantly grabbing the information from CRM on given entities and attributes as well as relationships and pulling it into Excel.

I had my team write an application that connects to CRM allows you to select an organization and list all the entities. You can then select the entities you want information on and specify what information you want. Then click a button to generate a spread sheet with each selected entity on its own tab.

There are several utilities you can find on the web, but most of them do not work with IFD, or they require you to export the customization and then import the customization into Excel. PowerObjects hosts Microsoft Dynamics CRM and all of our solutions have to run in a hosted environment. If you work with IFD and want to connect and pull your entities into Excel, contact us and we will send you the application. It’s free!

Jump to our web site, fill in a “Contact Us” form and request the FREE Excel utility. Let me know if there are additional features you would like added to the utility. Are there other utilities that would help manage your CRM environment?

Looking for a partner to host your CRM application? PowerObjects can help. Performance, features and support are just a few of the reasons to host your CRM with PowerObjects. Contact us today.

Update Rollup #4: ” An installation package for the product Microsoft Dynamics CRM 4.0 for Microsoft Office Outlook cannot be found”

PowerObjects - Doug — Mon, 01 Jun 2009 20:36:02 +0000

Last weekend we made Update Rollup #4 available for download for our hosted clients. Shortly after rolling out this update reports began to trickle in from users experiencing an error message which was causing the installation of the Update Rollup to fail. This message was asking users for the location of a very elusive ‘client.msi’ file. After combing through countless forums and blogs it became very clear that this was a wide-spread issue and one not limited to PowerObjects and our customers. We filed an escalated support ticket with Microsoft in hopes of getting the Update Rollup distributing and installing properly.

After working with Microsoft for the better part of a week we received news from their CRM Support Team that:
1. There are NO plans to release a revised version of Update Rollup #4 that corrects the installation issue.
2. There is NO workaround at the present time and NO workaround will be developed.
3. The issue will be resolved with Update Rollup #5 which is scheduled to be released in early July.

Here is a bit of insight from Mike Brown of the Microsoft CRM Team Blog:

This is the same issue for both the normal and the Auto Update scenario[client.msi]. In UR4, the CRM Sustained Engineering Team made a performance fix that required adding a few additional files. Because the new files were added to the package the Windows Installer thinks it needs to install them regardless on if they need to be or not. The most common scenario for this happening is when trying to update the desktop client. The issue is resolved in our upcoming UR5 release.

We will keep an eye on this developing situation should any new information surface but at this time it does not look like there will be any client side updates until after the 4th of July. Rest assured we will provide news when Update Rollup #5 becomes available!

We appreciate everyone’s patience with this issue!

Troubleshooting the Outlook CRM Client

PowerObjects - Doug — Mon, 01 Jun 2009 16:48:46 +0000

The Outlook CRM Client is one of the most intriguing features in the Microsoft Dynamics CRM 4.0. Rather than having users ‘go somewhere else’ to use CRM, the Outlook CRM client provides in integration to Outlook — allowing end users easy access to CRM from where they do most of their day to day work.

Due to the sheer number of components the Outlook CRM client leverages, troubleshooting problems related to it could best be described as an adventure.

The fine folks at the CRM Team Blog recently posted a great article about how to troubleshoot and isolate common Outlook CRM Client issues. This a top notch post and should be a go-to reference for those experiencing issues. Don’t forget to run that Diagnostic Tool first!

http://blogs.msdn.com/crm/archive/2009/05/29/troubleshooting-the-microsoft-dynamics-crm-client-for-outlook.aspx

Internet Explorer 8 & MS CRM 4.0: A Match Made in Heaven

PowerObjects - Doug — Wed, 25 Mar 2009 14:45:40 +0000

Last Thursday Microsoft officially released the long awaited Internet Explorer 8. In addition to improving on security features, accelerators and general peformance, there are a number of features which the Dynamics CRM 4.0 community will embrace with open arms.

First, there is no need to worry about compatability between CRM and this newest incarnation of IE: the functionality between the two was rigorously tested by Microsoft and other Microsoft Partners during the 12 month beta period.

Secondly, this may be the most secure web browser available on the market. Testing conducted by the independent NSS Labs found that IE8 provided signifigantly better malware blocking capabilities than Mozilla Firefox, Opera, Google Chrome and Apple Safari. NSS Labs reported that IE, with its new SmartScreen filtering, was able to catch 69% of malware while Firefox 3.07 only caught 37%. From beta testers, Microsoft has found malware to be a common occurrence during browsing – “one IE8 user in 40 has gotten a malware block, while 1 million users per month are prevented from browsing to phishing sites.”

((source: http://www.informationweek.com/news/internet/browsers/showArticle.jhtml?articleID=215901126&subSection=Browsers))

While the security improvements in IE8 certainly come as great news, there are some other features that will come as great news specifically for CRM users. A feature I know a lot of users will clamor for is Color coded tabs. This is a major usability enhancement for Dynamics CRM. Dynamics CRM (at times) can have a lot of different tabs in use at the same time. These new color coded tabs will allow users to keep track of the different tabs in a more efficient manner.

Finally, this version of IE includes a feature I know a lot of us developers around the office will appreciate: Built In Development Tools! In the past, when we were interested in using nav elements and other things in Javascript, we were limited with the features of IE in exposing this information. This will now be a thing of the past with the new Development Tools. This is an EXTREMELY useful feature and one that I am sure will get a lot of use around this office!

Overall, IE8 is an amazing package and one that needs to be experienced to be truly appreciated. We at Powerobjects are confident that you will find IE8 leading you to a superior CRM experience.

IE8 Can Be Downloaded Here: http://www.microsoft.com/windows/internet-explorer/default.aspx

For more information about IE8 and Dynamics CRM check out CRM MVP Joel Lindstrom’s blog entry over at the official; Microsoft CRM Team Blog: http://blogs.msdn.com/crm/archive/2009/03/24/three-reasons-why-any-microsoft-dynamics-crm-4-0-user-should-love-ie-8.aspx