PowerObjects » Dynamics CRM in the News

Where are users logging in from into Microsoft Dynamics CRM?

JoeCRM — Fri, 09 Jul 2010 18:59:30 +0000

We recently began logging in a central database the ip address and correlated location of the ip address for all successful and failed logins. Using report builder 3.0 we then quickly created a parameterized report where we can easily search by user login, success/failed logins, and last x number of days. We can easily set this up for hosted Microsoft crm clients or ISV’s that we are doing their xRM hosting.

This is really neat as we can easily query where logins are coming in for a certain user or all failed logins during x number of days. Here is a screen shot of all unique locations that I have logged into crm during the past 30 days.�

Going a step further we then created a second report to graphically plot where all logins for a certain server are coming from. This too, is using an out of the box map wizard that is part of Report Builder 3.0. or we can create other types of CRM reporting with this data.

Next week we’ll have a step by step blog on creating one of these map reports plotting a count of customer accounts in a crm system in a map of the USA.

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.

PowerObjects Microsoft Dynamics CRM Newsletter – May 2010

JoeCRM — Tue, 25 May 2010 19:44:37 +0000

Hey there – Joe CRM here with a quick link to our latest CRM newsletter. I know there are a ton of people that follow the blog, but not everyone gets our newsletter – so here you go – take a quick read and let us know what you think. PowerObjects May 2010 Newsletter

Of course we send this out with Microsoft Dynamics CRM and track open and click through as all good marketing departments should J

See past newsletters or signup to get the new ones! Signup

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.

Dynamics CRM Update Rollup 7: Known Issues

PowerObjects - Doug — Thu, 05 Nov 2009 16:40:28 +0000

There are some siginificant issues with the latest Update Rollup (7) for Microsoft Dynamics CRM. While thankfully, none seem to be of the ‘show stopper’ variety, I would certainly classify them as annoyances.

While there are some fairly significant performance and stability improvements in this rollup, CRM users and administrators will need to evaluate the costs/benefits of their particular scenario before deciding to update now or waiting for a possible “version 2.0″ of the rollup.

Please see the following KB article for information about the bugs you may see: http://support.microsoft.com/kb/976539/en-us

PowerObjects Field trip to Microsoft

JoeCRM — Tue, 19 May 2009 21:36:20 +0000

Our team had an awesome filed trip to the Microsoft Fargo campus on Monday. We can’t thank our Partner enough for rolling out the red carpet for our team – the office today is just buzzing with all the great things we learned. Here is a blow by blow of the event:

Sunday – We all meet at the office to start the 3.5 hour journey to North Dakota…don’t ya know. Once we got there we all got checked into the hotel and headed over to the campus. Once we got there we were ushered into a great cocktail and dinner reception by the site leader in Fargo, Don Morton. Talk about a great dinner – we had some great conversation with the MS folks and then headed back to our hotel to rest up for the big day…..but of course the new Star Trek movie was playing across the street – total geek magnet – so we went to the 9:30 show and just opted for more coffee in the morning!

Monday – It went by so fast – we had our PAM aka ‘Mom’, Alayne taking care of us for the day. We all started out together with a large group from Fargo and were joined by some folks out of Redmond, Craig Unger and Barry Givens. Microsoft pulled together people from all the teams on campus that touch CRM – they have an amazing team of support engineers as well as pre-sales! We did a little education about PowerObjects and what makes us tick, and then we got to learn from them! About midway through the day we split the sales/marketing team and the technical teams apart and followed separate tracks. The tech folks got to work hand in hand with Craig, Barry, and the support engineers to answer questions we had – as well as talk a little about CRM 5 and what’s coming down the pipe. The sales team had a great preview of the upcoming accelerators! Then we got an hour with Eddie Marshall learning about what PowerObjects can do to improve our business and better align our strategies with Microsoft. We also had a deep dive into presales and it was all more than worth the time.

The day ended with a fast drive back down 94!

Once again I can’t thank all those involved enough – we always get partner surveys asking what we think about the partnership with Microsoft – well PowerObjects thinks the partnership rocks and can’t think of another publisher that cares more about the channel!

Thanks Microsoft – you rock!

Spell Check in CRM 4.0

PowerObjects - Doug — Fri, 27 Feb 2009 20:33:18 +0000

Although we’re already knocking at IE8’s door, adding IE7Pro gives you the ability to spell check within CRM. This is particularly useful when sending emails and creating email templates from CRM. One of the most frequently requested featues from our client is to include some type of spell checking ability when creating emails and email templates from the web interface. This small add-in will give you that ability!

IE7Pro is a free extension created for Internet Explorer 7. Please note that is extension is NOT created by Microsoft and the supportability of this product is not guaranteed. That being said, numerous folks around our office have installed it and have had no issues with it thus far.

Spell Checking is not the only feature of IE7Pro. There are a myriad of other features in the extension that are very useful as well:
1. Double click to close tab.
2. Open new tab from address bar.
3. Enable/disable tab browse history manager.
4. Enable/disable crash recovery
5. Move the IE menu bar above the address bar
6. Hide search bar.
7. Modify the maxium number of parallel connections to the web server.
8. Select the external program to view page source
9. Mouse Gesturing: Mouse Gesture allow the user to execute commonly performed tasks (open/close a tab, go back, go forward , print , scrolling page etc.) by drawing a simple symbol on the screen.
10. Crash Recovery: automatically restores all opened pages after a crash happened.

and more!

Please note that this does not work in short data fields; only long text fields, like the body of an email message or other ntext type fields.

Download available here: http://www.ie7pro.com/

Microsoft Dynamics CRM for development

JoeCRM — Mon, 15 Dec 2008 19:38:21 +0000

Hello

I get the CRMlady’s newsletter from time to time – Anne always has great info and great advice! You can signup to recieve her email here http://www.crmlady.com/

We work with clients all the time doing sales and marketing automation projects, but always have a tough time letting people know about the benefits of using CRM and a development platform for line of business applications – We had a post a week or so ago that addressed the same topic http://blog.powerobjects.com/2008/11/06/net-development-powerobjects-things-to-consider/

In Anne’s newletter she gives 5 reasons to use CRM for development that rings true and is worth sharing – here is her text

Five reasons for using the Dynamics CRM framework for development as opposed to just writing it all from scratch.

1. You don’t have to program, design, and write the sophisticated: enterprise and SMB flexible security role system. CRM offers both a Team Security framework and a Business Unit framework.
2. You don’t have to program, design, and write the sophisticated: toolkit for managing the core relationship data including bulk edit, delete vs. deactivate, and convert from prospect to client.
3. You don’t have to program, design, and write the sophisticated: integration solution to Microsoft Outlook, Word, and Excel. CRM has a very sophisticated tie to Outlook, Word and Excel.
4. You can focus all your development effort on the industry specific niche needs of your client.
5. You will have resources and potential funds for extra development effort for seemless integration with other company applications.

Have a great week!

Thx

Jim Sheehan

PowerObjects

CRM Live – Now CRM Online

JoeCRM — Thu, 10 Apr 2008 21:05:45 +0000

This move by Microsoft has been questioned by many partners and the community at large, but we feel it makes sense, given the naming scheme that is taking shape as part of the company’s Software+Services (S+S) push. Microsoft is attempting to categorize its services into one of three categories:

“Live” refers to consumer and very-low-end small-business offerings. Examples: Windows Live Messenger, Office Live Workspace.
“Online” refers to small-/mid-size and enterprise services that are hosted by Microsoft in its own datacenter. Examples: Exchange Online, SharePoint Online and now Dynamics CRM Online.
“Hosted services” refer to Microsoft offerings that are Partner hosted by its integration/reseller partners at the partners’ facilities. Examples: Exchange Hosted Services, CRM Hosted Services, and SharePoint Hosting Services.

Until now, Microsoft has been referring to the Microsoft-hosted version of its Dynamics CRM 4.0 product as Dynamics CRM Live. But given that Microsoft has made it plain that it is going to offer Microsoft-hosted versions of many of its business products to not just large, enterprise customers, but to SMBs, as well, the CRM Live name just didn’t make a lot of sense.

We think the toughest part will be getting people to quite saying CRM Live and start saying CRM Online!

Access CRM power through desktop applications

Jahan — Wed, 09 Jan 2008 22:49:51 +0000

Alan R. Earls has a nice article about the integration of CRM 4.0 with the rest of your Microsoft applications to better leverage your Microsoft investment.

Read it here

http://www.microsoft.com/midsizebusiness/businessvalue/access_crm_power.mspx?Wt.mc_id=crmpower