Microsoft Dynamics CRM and Marketing

 Ted Ohlsson  Stratiteq  About the Blog and the Author

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Hiding sections with business rules

Since the 2011 versions of Microsoft Dynamics CRM it has been possible to hide fields, sections and tabs with JavaScript by using the following 3 commands:

Field Xrm.Page.getControl("FieldName").setVisible(false);

Section Xrm.Page.ui.tabs.get("TabName").sections.get("SectionName").setVisible(false);

Tab Xrm.Page.ui.tabs.get("TabName").setVisible(false);

By using business rules, which came in the Microsoft Dynamics 2013 version, we are able to hide fields without creating code.

This is done by going into the form customizer and creating a new Business rule.

This is however quite well known…

What isn’t so known is that you can hide a whole section and its label with business rules as well. 

This is done by setting all fields in the second to not visible with business rules.

The mistake that many people make is that they set all fields in a section to not be visible by default and then they use the business roles to show the fields. By doing like this the label will still be visible, but no fields will be visible.

If you instead let all the fields be visible by default, and in the business rule define them to not be visible except in the specific case where you want it to be visible, the label will not show. This is done by using the “does not equal to” or “does not contain data” operator.

This does however not work for the tabs so you still have to use JavaScript for them.

Over and out

/Ted

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Changing large amount of data with workflows

In my previous post Bulk Editing Records I described how we can edit a large amount of data in one action. In this post we will focus on how we can do this with workflows, and how to do this on an even bigger scale than 250 records in a row.

The standard way (Max 250 records in a row)

In the standard way of executing workflows we can, just as we cold with the bulk edit functions in the last post, only execute a workflow over 250 records in a row. The differences between doing a bulk edit and execution a workflow over several records, is that we can set conations in workflows and we can also do more advanced edits in workflows.

To use the standard functionality we first need to create a workflow and then set the workflow as an “on-demand” process.

It’s also easier if we make your workflow a synchronous/real time workflow. This is done by pressing the button “Convert to real-time workflow”

To be able to execute it, make sure that the workflow is activated

To execute the workflow you need to go to a view that contains records of the entity type that you created your workflow for. When you are in the view you need to mark the records that you would like to execute the workflow on.

Press the dots in the ribbon and choose Run Workflow

Select the workflow that you would like to execute and press “add”

Just as we described in the bulk edit post you can mark all records in the same view and expand your view to a maximum of 250 records. To get info about how to change the view to 250 records read the Bulk Edit Post.

The Bulk Workflow tool (Unlimited records in a row)

In both the standard way of executing workflows and in the standard bulk edit functionality we have had a limit of doing changes/executing records on a maximum of 250 records in a row. This works fine when the amount of records that you would like to change is less than somewhere around 2000 records. If we have more records it can get both boring and time consuming doing it over and over again.

Then we have the bulk workflow tool to the rescue. In the Bulk workflow tool we can execute a workflow on unlimited amount of records in a row.

The criteria’s for what records that the workflow should execute on, we define in view. The view can be either a system view or a personal view.

Let’s start by creating a personal view!

This is done by going into advanced search Create a filter that fits your search criteria’s Press “Save as”

Give the view a name and press save.

Now we need to download the Bulk workflow tool, that we can do by clicking here

First we need to extract the zip file

Then open the “CRM2011BulkWorkflowTool” application by clicking on it

Give your environment a nickname of your choice

Fill in the discovery server Name

The discovery server name we can find in the Microsoft Dynamics CRM system by clicking Settings –Customizations – Developer Resources:

If you can’t copy the text, click on it and copy the URL

Remove the http or https from the url and remove everything after the .com

The URL should look something like this:

“disco.crm4.dynamics.com”

Fill in the org name

The Org name we can find on the same page as the Discovery Service. (Organization Unique Name)

If you managed to log in it should look like this:

Now we just got to select the workflow that we would like to execute, and the view containing the right filters with the records that you would like to execute the workflow on.

Then we press the Execute Workflow Button.

And there we got it!

In the right window we can see how the workflows are getting triggered. Do not turn the Bulk Workflow application down before you see in the right window that it is done.

Over and out

/Ted

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Changing Default Charts

In this post we will have a look at how we change the default chart for a specific entity in Microsoft Dynamics CRM. Changing the default chart isn’t as straight forward and as easy as you would think it is….

What is a default chart?

First of all we need to define what we mean with a default chart.  One clarification that needs to be said is that it does not have anything to do with the dashboards or what is displayed in the dashboards.

If we access an entity like opportunity as an example, and stand within the view you have a chart tab to the right.

If you press it, it will expand and the default chart will show. By pressing the name of the chart you of course change what chart you see, but the next time you access the system, the default chart will be displayed as he first choice again.

How to change it

You would think that the default chart would be something that you would just click to set as standard just as it is with both dashboards and views but it’s not.

First of all we need to see what chart that is the current default chart, this is done from the view as mentioned above.

Then we need to go to Settings – Customizations – Customize the System

Find the entity that you would like to change the default chart for and click charts.

Mark the default chart and click More Actions and Export Chart

Save the chart somewhere on your computer and the open the file in notepad

Scroll down to the bottom where you will find a tag that looks like this:

<isdefault>true</isdefault>

Change it to

<isdefault>false</isdefault>

Then save the file

Now we need to import the chart the chart again This is done by doing as we did when you exported the chart but this time you click import chart instead. 

When you get the Duplicate found dialog box, press Replace.

Now you need to do the same thing for the chart that you would like to have as the new default chart, but this time you change the <isdefault>true</isdefault> from false to true instead of the other way around as we did before.

Once you are done press save and publish, close down all your web browsers and the next time you access the system you will have the default chart of your choice.

You can have one default chart per entity and it works the same for all entities.

 Over and out

/Ted

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Navigating to related child records

It recently came to my attention that one of those things that we that that work as developers in Microsoft Dynamics CRM take for granted that everyone knows wasn’t as clear for end users as I thought. Therefore I am going to dedicate this post to create some awareness of it and explain how it works!

End user training

The most of you might know that if you click on the arrow after “sales” in the navigation bar you will see the sales module entities:

Some of you might also be aware of that if you click on the arrow besides an entity name (such as “account” for an example) you will be able to see all recently viewed records for that entity.

But what I discovered that very few of you end users were aware of was that you can get a list of all related child records to a record without having it on the form, so here is how it works:

First of all need to be within the record, once you are in a record the records name and a new arrow will are in the navigation bar, then you just click the arrow beside the records name. 

If I now as an example click on the Opportunity I will see all opportunities related to that record.

What you need to be aware of is that it is only records that’s connected though child dependencies or many to many dependencies that can be displayed here. A parent record can never be displayed here.

As an example a parent account for a contact or an opportunity can never be displayed in this list (if you are in a contact or opportunity record) as long as they do not have another relationship.

But if a contact is set as a primary contact on several accounts you can display all accounts that the contact is the primary contact on.

Filters and aggregation

As you might see you also have two filters to this view, “Filter on” and “Include”.

“Filter on” filters the records regarding what status a record has so that isn’t very special, however “Include” has a nice filter option called Related Regarding Records.

As you might have seen on my earlier pictures I have based them on a company called “Mega Store USA” which had two opportunities. “Mega Store USA” has a parent account called “Mega Store North America” which contains two child accounts, “Mega Store USA” (as mentioned before) and “Mega Store Canada”.

If we now would access the same opportunity view that we had a look at before, but form “Mega Store North America” this time, and use the Related Regarding Records future we can see some cool stuff. 

The Related Regarding Records aggregates up all the child accounts opportunities for us to the parent record so that we now can see all opportunities that we have regarding “Mega Store North America” even if the opportunities are connected to the child accounts.

This can be adopted to any related parent child record type.

Adding and removing related entities in the navigation bar

Some of you might be missing some related entities or even feel that you do not want to see all of the related entities to the record. What related entities that can be seen through the above mentioned navigation path can of course be configured.

What related entities that are shown is configured for each entity and for each form. To configure this you first of all need to have the system administrator or system customizer role.

If you have the right roles you simply go into the form editor for the form where you would like to change what related entities that are displayed.

Click on the navigation button and then remove or add items on the navigation bar to the left.

The Items that are shown in the navigation bar to the left are the once that will be shown in the navigation bar in the system ones you click in the arrow after the records name as discussed earlier in this post.

Over and out

/Ted

[swedenfordynamics]

Lead Generation, bringing strategy and systems together

When talking about processes and especially lead processes as we will be focusing on in this blog post, they of course never look the same. However, we will in this post focus on the main lead process that is used when talking about the lead process in general terms. Another reason for us to focus on the main lead process in this post is that it many cases has been the starting point for companies when they formed their own custom lead processes.

The processes

When we look at the lead processes from a strategic angel we offend divided it into two processes running parallel, “The Purchase process” and “The Sales process”. The Purchase process is the process that the buyer is going though, containing all the steps from the buyers’ awareness of a need, to the closing purchase. The Sales process is the process that the selling company is going through, not as an individual salesperson or as a sales department, but as a whole company. These processes are used (in general terms as mentioned before) both fore B2B and B2C companies.

The fundamentals of Lead Generations existents

If we start with having a look at the purchase process, we can see that due to the new information society, where people in a very easy way can get access to whatever data they need, customers tend to do much more research by themselves now than before.

Ten years ago people would buy a vacuum cleaner from a door salesman but today no one would do that sins they first would like to go online read about the product and compare it to other products.

This is where Lead Generation comes in, since its no longer about creating the need for the customer, instead it’s all about identifying the customers that have the needs and providing them with the right information. Lead Generation is the strategic and technical name of the area that contains all techniques for identifying customers with needs, providing them with the right information and leading them towards a purchase.

Due to the fact that the buyer’s way of approaching a purchase has changed, a big effect is that the marketing departments responsibilities cover many more steps in the purchase process then it did before and the Sales departments/Salesmen comes into the purchase much later in the process then before. The consequence of this is that the marketing department’s gets more responsibility’s and needs to be more effective, and this is where Lead Generation comes into the picture.

Lead Generation Techniques

When working with lead generation we often talk about 3 techniques:

Lead scoring Lead scoring is assignment of points based on behaviour, demographics, grading etc from several channels.

Lead Nurturing Lead Nurturing is activities performed, either triggered automatically or manually, to move leads through the purchasing process to become more qualified.

Lead Routing Lead Routing the process of routing a lead to sales, marketing or others dependant of scoring. 

The Gap between Strategy and Systems

When working with Lead Generation there are several marketing automation systems such as Adobe campaign, Maketo, SiteCore DMS and of course Microsoft Dynamics Marketing that provides functionality to perform the Lead Generation techniques. Parts of the techniques can even be performed within a dynamic CRM system such as Microsoft Dynamics CRM. However the best practise way of working with lead generation is to combine a Marketing Automation system and a CRM system.

So if we want to use the best practise way of doing lead generation a lead often starts on our web where we identify it wish then sends it to the marketing automation tool.  The Marketing automation tool then starts scoring it, and ones it reaches a certain score it ends up in the CRM system where we at last can close the lead/opportunity as won. So far the strategies and systems are still working together.

If we now instead take a look at the Sales process (which is the process that we as a company work though to get the customer to buy our product) what isn’t clear is what stages in the sales process that should be handled in what system and how we as a company could keep track of were in the sales process a lead/customer is.

Conclusion

After going through the definitions of what actions that should be done at each stage and by how it should be performed we came to the following conclusion:

Lead In the lead stage we still don’t have any name or any contact information on the lead.  This stage is mainly about giving the person on the web the right content to get him or her to fill in some contact information, therefore the main system for this is our website.

Marketing Qualified Lead In the Marketing Qualified stage we start providing the lead with campaign material etc. to increase the customer’s interest. These actions are preformed within a marketing automation tool.

Sales Accepted Lead In the Sales Accepted Lead stage our job is to get the lead to come up into a lead score that is so high that it’s worth involving a salesman with it. Sins this is still performed by the marketing department though marketing material we are still working within the marketing automation tool.

Sales Qualified Lead When starting the Sales Qualified Lead stage the salesman takes over the lead to verify if the lead is an opportunity worth starting to work with or not. When a lead goes into the Sales Qualified Lead stage it gets created as a lead in the CRM system sins it’s now the sales department that should handle the lead and the CRM system is the sales departments system.

Opportunity Management If the salesman in the Sales Qualified Lead stage feel that the lead is an opportunity worth working with and want to verify it he or she converts it to an opportunity. So the Opportunity Management stage starts in the CRM system as a new qualified opportunity. The stage also contains classic CRM opportunity action’s such as scoping the opportunity and getting detailed values (estimated close date, estimated revenue etc.)

Close The close stage is all about closing the deal. It contains checklists of things to do before closing. This stage is also performed within the opportunity entity in the CRM system.

Visualizing the stages

Now that we know what stages that should be performed in what systems we might want to visualize the stages for the user as well. Since this blog is all about the Microsoft Dynamics product stack I’m going to show how doing this from Microsoft Dynamics Marketing as a Marketing automation tool and Microsoft Dynamics CRM as a CRM tool.

Microsoft Dynamics Marketing To visualize the first lead stages in Microsoft Dynamics Marketing we just simply connect the stages that are preformed within the Marketing automation tool, with our lead scoring module as done in the picture below:

To learn more about scoring modules in Microsoft dynamics Marketing view this post

Microsoft Dynamics CRM To visualize the stages within Microsoft Dynamics CRM we can simply set up a business process flow that contains the stages from our lead process as in the picture below:

Over and out

/Ted

[swedenfordynamics]

What’s new in Microsoft Dynamics CRM 2015 Spring Release aka Carina

In thispost we will focus on the new main functions that applies to the Microsoft CRM2015 Spring Release also known as the Carina Release.

For thoseof you that are not familiar with the improvements that came with the firstMicrosoft Dynamics CRM 2015 upgrade I recommend you to first read my postregarding that upgrade here.

In thispost we will first go thought all Functional enhancements which I know is whatthe most of you end users out there are looking for, then we will go thoughsome of the Technical enhancements that might interest developers a bit more.

Functional Enhancements

Set your own Colour Theme

One of themain improvements and focus areas in this upgrade is to be able to design andpersonalize the system to you companies brand, so that the users feel that it’stheir system and not Microsofts System.  Oneof the main features towards achieving this is that you can set up and customizethe colour theme for the whole system to match your companies colourers.

Set your Company logo

Another featurein the aria design and brand personalization it that you are in this releaseable to add your company’s logo into the navigation bar

New features in the navigation bar

There isnow a new button to click on to get to see the navigation area.

There isalso a “Recent” button that you can click to see and access all the recent records that you have accessed lately. This gives you a faster and more efficient way of accessing the data that you use the most and it prevents you from spending a lot of time searching in the navigation and the views.

New Navigation/Site Map

With the release of Microsoft Dynamics CRM 2013 a new Site Map was released to fit the new design. But as many of you might have experienced that Site Map created a lot of scrolling to access the objects or entities you were looking for.

This is all fixed in this release were the smooth Site Map from Microsoft Dynamics Marketing have been adapted into Microsoft Dynamics CRM.

Below you can see the new look:

Tab Navigation in forms

Those of you that have been in the Microsoft Dynamics CRM world a while might remember and miss the tab navigation that we had in Microsoft Dynamics CRM 2011 where you were able jump to any tab in the form directly from the top:

Well its back! This time it’s also more discreet and not so space consuming as the old one was.

Business Process Flow Improvements

In the older versions of the business process flow you were able to jump from one stage to another, without having filled in all required process flow fields, if the process stages were not in the same entity. Like for example if you had a business process flow containing the Lead and Opportunity entities, that contained required fields in the lead process steps, you were still able to qualify the lead without having filled in the required field. This is however corrected in this release.

Another new business process enhancement is that when moving to a previous stage you can jump directly to the stage that you want to set as active by clicking on the process stage and then pressing “Set Active”.

The Office Group

You can now use the office group within Microsoft Dynamics CRM. A great feature with this is that people that does not have access to your Microsoft Dynamics CRM can still edit the Office documents in your system if they are shared though OneDrive of SharePoint.

One note Integration

As a part of having the office group within the CRM an extended One Note Integration is also included. By using the One Note Integration you can use One Note during meetings and get a full view of what you or your colleagues wrote from within the system.

Conditions for the One Note Integration are:

Each CRM record has its own Notebook

All users share the same notebook for each record

All notes under the same notebook are associated with the CRM record

Tracking emails from mobile applications

The spring release also contains a folder based tracking functionality. What you do is that you set up a connection between an object like an account and one of your email folders. Once this is done all emails that is put into a specific folder should be tracked and set as regarding to a specific account in the Microsoft Dynamics CRM.

This might not be the best of ways to work if you are managers hundreds of accounts but for those of you how are working as key account mangers this is a huge improvement sins this means that you more or less can work directly from your mobile or tablet all the time.

New Mobile application

With this release a new mobile application will also be able. The old mobile application will still be able due to the fact that it contains some features that the new one does not have.

The old application will be renamed in the app stores and be called “Dynamics CRM for Phone – Express”, the new app will just be called “Dynamics CRM for Phone”.

The new application (Dynamics CRM for Phone) has a new design that should fit your daily work better, and it fully supports custom entities. It does however, not support the following standard entities:

Address, Campaign, Campaign Activity, Campaign Response, Contract, Contract Details, Discount, Discount list, Facility, Fax, Invoice Product, Invoices, Letters, Mailbox, Market List, Opportunity Close, Order, Order Product, Price List, Price List Item, Quote Close, Quote Product, Quotes, Service, Service Activities, Subject, Territory,  Unit and Unit Group.

 The old (Dynamics CRM for Phone – Express) application supports all of these

Technical Enhancements

Older then X Causes

There are now some new causes that you can use both in your advanced find queries and in your fetch xml queries. The new causes are using an “Older then x” statement and you can narrow the search down to Minutes, Hours, Days, Weeks, Months and Years depending on your need.

Business rules can now set null values

The business rules are becoming better and better for each release and I n this release one of the main disadvantages with the business roles is eliminated. It is now possible to put a null value into a field / clear a field, which contains data.

New operators for calculated fields

The calculated fields now have two new operators Now() and DiffTime() wish can be very useful especially in combination with rollup fields. If you as an example, what to have a flag on accounts saying whether a customer is an active customer or not based on the criteria that they have bought something the last two years that is possible now without using any custom code.

For more info about calculated fields and rollup fields, click here

Alternate Keys

You can now set up new record keys for entities. As an example you can use the Account number for an account or the email address for a contact as when writing you code instead of using the guid as w have done before.

First you need to define the field that should us as key in the back end and then you can just start using it!

Over and out

/Ted

[swedenfordynamics]

Adding fields in Dynamics Marketing and Mapping them to Dynamics CRM

For thoseof us who are used to Microsoft Dynamics CRMs scalable and flexible dynamicstructure Microsoft Dynamics Marketing’s data structure is a bit of a setback.

Microsoft Dynamics CRM is based on the .Net Entity framework, and in this system it is used to its fullest potential which enables us to create and delete both tables/Entities and Column/Fields. Neither of these 2 options are possible in Microsoft Dynamics Marketing.

But since we have a great standard two way integration between Microsoft Dynamics Marketing and Microsoft Dynamics CRM, the trick is to put as much of the functionality as possible in Dynamics CRM and only create records and change field values in Dynamics Marketing which triggers the logics in Dynamics CRM.

For your help when using this approach you have two Dynamics Marketing features:

Custom fields creation in Dynamics Marketing

Custom Integration mapping

Custom fields creation in Dynamics Marketing

As I wrote above, we are not able to create new columns/fields in the database for Microsoft Dynamics Marketing, however for some of the standard entities in Microsoft Dynamics Marketing that contains pre created fields meant to be used for custom purposes.

The lead entity as an example have 8 text fields, 7 date fields, 6 Category fields and 8 Numeric fields that are meant to and can be customize and use.

To access and manage these fields you need to go up in the Settings module in the navigation bar and click on “Languages” in the Administration area.

The changes need to be done for each language that you are using, for those of you how are only using Microsoft Dynamics Marketing in one langue this is not a problem.

Click on the Language that you would like to make the changes for. 

In the left bar you have all the entities in Dynamics Marketing, when clicking on one of them all the fields of this entity are shown.

You can edit the label for any field in Dynamics Marketing by editing the site label Value which are located in the column to the right.

If you want to find the custom fields you need to type “User” in the Search box, and go to the entity that you want to add a field to.

In some of the entities, like in the case of Contacts these fields do not exist, but for others like Leads, Company’s, Campaigns etc. you have them in several types.

The field type is hard coded and you need to select a field of the type that you want to have. You cannot add more fields of a specific type then the ones that already are there.

To add one of these you just need to add a value into the Site label and press the Save button at the bottom of the page.

The new field will be located in the “Details” Section of the entity form.

If you wish to remove the field that you created just press the arrow to the right and then press save.

Custom Integration mapping

When you set up the standard integration between Microsoft Dynamics Marketing and Microsoft Dynamics CRM you get a standard mapping that you will come pretty far with.

But if you have custom fields in Dynamics CRM or in Dynamics Marketing (Custom fields in Dynamics marketing are explained above) you might want to do add-ons to the integration mapping.

To do this go to the settings module and click the “Integrations Options” button.

Scroll down to the “Mapping” section and press the pen

From within here you can view how the current mapping looks for different entities.

In the first field you select what entity in Dynamics Marketing you are working with, below it you can see the schema name of the field in Dynamics CRM that integrating with. It is not possible to add new entity connections or change what entities that are integrated with each other.

By using the plus and the trash can, you can add and remove fields that are integrating with each other. It is also possible to add the custom renamed fields (which we talked about in the previous section) to the integration.

Over and out

/Ted

[swedenfordynamics]

Searching in Microsoft Dynamics CRM

There are several ways of doing searches in Microsoft Dynamics CRM, especially after the release of Microsoft Dynamics 2015 when another additional way of Searching was added into the system.

In this post we will go though all of the ways of doing searches in Microsoft Dynamics CRM. I’m going to start off with the easiest ways of searching and then go into the more advanced ways of searching.

Global Search

The Global Search was the new way of searching that was introduced with the Microsoft Dynamics CRM 2015 release. Its main strength is that it can search across several entities in one search, and provide you with all data records that contains your search string or are connected to another object that contains the search string.

The Global Search is always located in the navigation bar no matter where in the system you are.

When you type something in the global search you will get all records that contains that string or has a related record that contain that string.

To access any of the records just click it!

View Searches

By clicking into an entity from the site map you will get the default view containing records that fit the criteria for that view.

If you wish to change the view just click on the arrow beside the view and select another one.

Different views can contain different columns and different filter criteria’s.

Adding filters to views

By clicking on the funnel to the right in views you can filter what records that are shown depending on the data in the columns shown. Just like in excel….

Once you have pressed the funnel arrows will appear in each column.

When pressing the arrow you can either use the standard filters and sorting options or press “Custom Filters”

In the Custom Filters you can set up your own criteria based on the column you have accessed.

You can add criteria’s in several columns to make a more specific search for that view. Keep in mind when using this approach that the view probably already contains filters from the start.

Quick find

The quick find is located at the same place as the views. To access it, just click on the entity that you would like to search within.

To use this functionality just type the string that you would like to search for in Quick find search box. What columns that the system will try to match the string against and the filter criteria’s for the search is defined in the backend and can differ from entity to entity.

Not that the result that is shown does not have anything to do with the view that is shown to left. As said before what columns that will be searched on and be displayed are defined in the backend and has no connection with the current view.

Advanced find

The Advanced find feature is a bit more advanced than the previous explained searching methods, but it’s also by far the most powerful searching option.

It is located in the top bar just to the right of Global Search.

In the Advanced find you first set up what entity you are searching in

Then you need to click “Details” and define your search criteria.

It is possible to define several criteria’s in the same search.

By default an “And” criteria is added in the filter when adding more criteria’s. If you press the arrows to the right and press “Select” for several criteria’s you can press the “OR” button in the bar. Instead of an “And” the criteria will change from ”And” to “OR”.

Once you are done with your filter you need to select what columns that should be shown.

Press “Edit Columns”

If you wish to remove columns just press the column and the remove button

 If you want to add columns, press the “Add Column” button and mark the columns that you would like to add.

  You can also add values from related records. Like for example if you are searching for contacts and want to show the parent accounts city or website address, that is possible.

To do this, change the Record type of the related record and select the fields that you would like to show from that related record.

Once you are done press the “Result” button and you will get the result of your search.

  Saving your Search as a View

If you have created a search with criteria’s and columns that you would like to use again, you can save it as a view. To do this, press “Save As” In the Advanced find:

Give the view a name and save it!

After you have saved it you can find the view among the other views under the “my views” section.

Note: This view will only be shown for you and the ones that you share it to.

High level Advanced find

It is also possible to do filtering in Advanced find depending on related records values.

When you add a new criteria and start scrolling among the fields that you can set a criteria for, you will eventually come to a bold text that says “Related”.

Under the related text you can choose from, all the related lookup fields that you want to filter by.

Ones you have selected one of them you can set up criteria’s depending on the related records values in the same way as you did with the primary records values.

The search can be done on several levels down, you can do a search where you set up criteria’s depending on values to a record that is related to a related record to the object that you are searching for and so on.

Advanced find is an extremely powerful tool and there are even more features than covered in this post you could use it for. If you have any questions regarding the advanced find, don’t hesitate to write me a message on linked in and I will gladly help you!

 Over and out

/Ted

[swedenfordynamics]

Creating a Landing page

In my lastpost regarding Microsoft Dynamics Marketing I explained how to set up a ScoringModels and how you track visitor’s movement on your site. (View that posthere).

The next step in this in the lead generation process is to identify the web visitor. The aim is to connect the visitor data collected from the website to a name and contact method like an email or a phone number.

To do this you need to start with creating a landing page within Microsoft Dynamics Marketing that later on can be Iframed into your website.

To create a landing page, go to Marketing Execution -> Lead Management and click “Landing pages”

Then click the plus

Start with giving the landing page a Page name (this Is an internal name) and then add the url to the site which you are aiming to publish it on. It is also required to fill in a start and end date for the landing page.

The last thing that you need to fill in before creating the landing page is what campaign this landing page will be connected to. This is an important choice sins all leads that fill in this landing page will automatically be connected to the campaign defined in this field. You find the Campaign field in the “Behavioral Analysis” section.

Once you have saved your landing page you will get a URL located in the content section. The URL is the address to your landing page and you will need to Iframe in to your website later on.

In the “Form Detail” section you define what fields that should be displayed on the landing page. This is done by marking and unmarking the checkboxes in the display column.  

From a strategic point of view you should try to limit the amount of fields sins users tempt to not fill out the landing page if it contains too many fields. A best practise scenario is to only use Name, Email, Company and maybe a phone number.

If you wish to remove the Audio code Set the CAPTCHA Field to “Never”

If you wish to edit the style of your landing page

You can edit the CSS, under the tab “Layout”

Once you are done with your Landing page you need to Iframe it in on your site. You need to do this strategically so that the user gains something by filling out the form, otherwise users will never fill it for out.

As an example, it could be a requirement to fill it out to be able to download the product list or the product price list.

If you’re using a scenario like this you need to add a URL into the “redirect url” field. The user will then automatically be redirected to a specific page once pressing the submit button.

Over and out

/Ted

[swedenfordynamics]

Making Rollup fields worth it!

With therelease of Microsoft Dynamics CRM 2015 came two new awesome functionalities,called Calculated fields and Rollup field.

Calculatedfields are doing different types of calculations within the entity you are working with, and they are set up within the application (without code). They execute on the server side and they work with more or less every data type.

For more info about calculated fields click here

Rollup fields are summarizing and calculating data from child records. You specify the field and the entity that you would like to summarize up data from to the parent record, you can also add filter criteria’s for the records that you want to summarize. Example of methods that you use a lot are Sum, Count, Min and Max.

As an example you could use the rollup up fields to, on the account see what the total actual revenue the last 3 years is (summarized from the opportunities) or how much the total estimated revenue for the specific account is. And it’s all done without code.

Rollup fields disadvantage

I would say that rollup fields are the most powerful and effort saving function of the two ones mentioned above sins you could use it for functionalise that required a lot of code before. However it has one big disadvantage!

It does not do a re-summarization/ Recalculate directly when a new chilled record is added.

The time until the next recalculation is done, can be configured and be set to a minimum of 1 hour.

Editing Rollup fields settings

To do this go into :

Settings – System jobs

Then change the view to Recurring System jobs.

Click on the calculated rollup field system job record that you would like to change the recalculation time on

Click “Actions” and “Modify Recurrence”

And there you got it!

Another way to get the value faster (in the standard functionality) is to go into the specific records form and press the recalculate button on the field.

However there will be a lot of cases where neither of the above mentioned options are enough to fit the customer’s needs.

Customers expect things to happen directly and will never have the understanding that they need to wait one hour in some cases but not in other cases. End users without developer or super user experience can’t know the difference between the different types of fields and they need to know when they can expect what.

When having this in mind the rollup field’s feels a bit limited…..

Conclusion

To give rollup fields the strength wish it gives the impression of having you need to create a small simple plugin. The plugin needs a trigger on create and save, when the field that you wish to summarize up to the parent is changed.

Same code for coping:

public static void trigger(ITracingService tracingService, IOrganizationService service, String EntityName, Guid ObjectGuid, String NameOfField)        {            CalculateRollupFieldRequest crfr = new CalculateRollupFieldRequest            {                Target = new EntityReference(EntityName, ObjectGuid),                FieldName = NameOfField            };            CalculateRollupFieldResponse response = (CalculateRollupFieldResponse)service.Execute(crfr);        }

By doing this user will get the live interaction that he or she expects and the problem is solved!

Over and out

/Ted

[swedenfordynamics]

Dynamics CRM 2015 Functionalities

Microsoft Dynamics CRMs spring release Carina is coming around the corner. Sins Stratiteq is a Microsoft Dynamics CRM Gould partner we have been provided with a sneak peak of all the changes and new functionalities that comes with this release. Sadly enough I because of legal issues can’t reveal any of these functionality’s jet. But what I can say is that there is a lot of awesome functionalities and the focus is a lot on design and personalizing the system to your Companies design.

According to Microsoft roadmap this version will be realest in the beginning of May and as soon as the version is release I promise to provide you with information about all the new awesome functionalities wish comes with the Carina release!

For all of you end users who are still in a Microsoft Dynamics CRM 2013 or even 2011 version, I below wrote a summary of what the advantages and new functionality’s that comes with the first upgrading to Microsoft Dynamics CRM 2015!

Multiple entity search functionality

You can do a search and get the results from several different entities in the same search. It is also possible to define what entity you would like to search on.

Custom Help

In Microsoft CRM 2015 it’s possible to set up a custom help where you define the help texts by yourself.

Hierarchy Visualizations

The Entity Hierarchies gives you a great visualization of how different records such as accounts are connected to each other. This functionality enables you to, as an example, get a visualization of what account that is the highest parent account, what child account that account has and all the lower levels is hierarchy.

Extended Business process functionality

With the new business processes functionalities you now can set up different paths for your processes. Depending on what you fill-in, in the previous stages you can skip a stage or even get a totally different stage. 

New security module 

The security module is extended so that you can set for users to be able to see and have access to things in other paths then the business unit path, it can as an example be on a management structured path or a totally custom made one designed by your super users.

The Mobile app

The the mobile app has several improved features such as availability to see several dashboards, and improved offline functionality. It also has an new improved design for better usage.

Over and out

/Ted

[swedenfordynamics]

User specific Sitemaps

In my previouspost Making Dynamics CRM more eye appealing I explained how to edit the sitemap in the XML code, the 3 different levels of XML categories that the sitemap contains and how to move ore remove these from the sitemap.

In this post I will focus on how to make some modules and Items visible or hidden depending on the user. The aim is that the users should only see what they need to see. One example of this is that regular users should never need to see the Settings module.

Here is how it could look:

To achieve this the first thing you need to do is to create one entity per system module.  If you are working in a standard CRM system that is 4 modules (Sales, Marketing, Service and Settings) and therefore you need to create 4 new entities.

I use to name this entities "SiteMap Sales", " SiteMap Marketing" etc…

Then you need to create one new security role per new entity.

I use to name security roles in the same way I named the entities ("SiteMap Sales", "SiteMap Marketing" etc…)

Go into each of the security roles and make sure that the only privilege it contains is the read privilege for the entity that this security role is connected to.

Now you need to access the sitemaps XML code, how to do this I explained in this post

The trick is now to in each aria add the regarding entities read privilege on all of the subareas within the aria. Like this:

The subareas read privileges in the different areas according to my naming convention will look as follows:

Sales: <Privilege Entity="stq_sitemapsales" Privilege="Read" />

Service <Privilege Entity="stq_sitemapservice" Privilege="Read" />

Marketing <Privilege Entity="stq_sitemapmarketing" Privilege="Read" />

Settings <Privilege Entity="stq_sitemapsettings" Privilege="Read" />

Many of the subareas have end tags within their start tag:

<SubArea Id="nav_comps" DescriptionResourceId="Competitor_SubArea_Description" Entity="competitor"/ >

In these cases you need to remove the “/” in the start tag and add an end tag  “</SubArea>” after the privilege tag

Zip you solution again and import it.

Now all you need to do is to give different users the right security roles and depending on what sitemap security roles the users have they will see different modules.

For more posts about sitemaps click here

Over and out

/Ted

[swedenfordynamics]

Tracking web visitors and setting up a Scoring Models

Tracking Web visitors

In Microsoft Dynamics Marketing you are able to get leads from people surfing on your website. As soon as a person accesses your web site, you start scoring the person as a lead.

To start tracking web visitors you first need to set up a website within Microsoft Dynamics Marketing. To do this click on web sites in the “Marketing Execution” module and then click the plus.

Fill in the form and press “Save”

Once you have saved you will get a Redirecting Script within the form

The script should then be added in the header tag just before the header end tag ( </header> ).

It is recommended to set up one Microsoft Dynamics Marketing website per page on your site sins it gives you more options when setting up your scoring module.

To get quality data out of your website visitors you also need to Iframe in a Microsoft Dynamics Marketing Landing page somewhere in the site containing at least Email and Name.

Then you of course need to get the users to fill in the form/landing page, the strategy of how to get this done is a story of its own and something I will save for another post.

Setting up a Scoring Models

To set up a Lead scoring Model you need to go into the Settings Module and click “Lead Scoring Models”, then click the plus.

Type in the name and press save.

When you have pressed saved you will be able to add rules that will add and subtract scoring on leads

If you add a rule for a website you first need to set what site the rule applies for, then you set how much the score should be updated with, and if/how the lead score should be devaluated over time.

Once you are done with your rules you need to set up your lead stages in the scoring module, and define what scores the different lead stages cover. This is done in the Grades section.

In the Grades section to the right you have a column called Sales Ready Grade. When a lead has reached a lead scoring stage wish is set to Sales Ready Grade “Yes” the lead will be integrated to the crm.

You can change the sales ready grade value by pressing the stairs in the top right corner.

Over and out

/Ted

[swedenfordynamics]

Contacts and Social media connections in Dynamics Marketing

In Microsoft Dynamics Marketing there are three different types of Contacts. Vendor Contacts, Client Contacts and Marketing Contacts.

Sins Microsoft Dynamics Marketing is built to be used by both company’s managing their marketing by themselves and third party marketing vendors, Microsoft has chosen to divide the contacts.

The definition of the different contacts types are:

Client Contacts Clients are contacts you work for that may be invoiced for products and services.

Vendor Contacts Vendors are contacts that do work for you and that you purchase products and services from.

Marketing Contacts Marketing contacts are the end customer contacts that should be placed in marketing lists and that will receive mailings and other campaign interactions. Marketing contacts in Microsoft Dynamics Marketing could be explained as the same thing as customer contact within Microsoft Dynamics CRM.

For more info about the different contact and company definitions within Microsoft Dynamics Marketing click here

To access the contacts within Microsoft Dynamics Marketing click on the “Marketing Execution” module and then click “Marketing Contacts”, “Vendor Contacts” or “Client Contacts”.

If you want to create a new contact in Microsoft Dynamics Marketing you just need to press the plus button.

When you are creating a new contact define what type of contact it is in the group field. If you save or change a contact to a client contact it is NOT possible to change it back to a Marketing contact.

The aim of Microsoft Dynamics Marketing is however not to manually create contacts. Contacts should be added ether by the integration from Microsoft Dynamics CRM or by leads generated from your website.

Contacts in Social media

LinkedIn has without doubt the world’s biggest database with contacts that contains accurate and updated data. However, LinkedIn does not provide any APIs to fetch contact data to other systems.

In Microsoft Dynamics Marketing you at least have the ability to do easy and fast research on your contacts in social media such as LinkedIn, Facebook and Twitter.

When you access the contact form, in the top bar you have social media Icons. When pressing one of them you will do a search for the contact within that social media.

Over and out

/Ted

[swedenfordynamics]

Handling Duplicated Records

In olderversions of Microsoft Dynamics CRM the Merging records functionality has only has only been available within the back end (though the duplicate detection Jobs), but in Microsoft Dynamics CRM 2015 it’s available for end users as well.

An end user can now work though his or her duplicated records without being an expert in the system.

If we take contacts as an example, you as an end user would go to the “My Active Contacts” view and press the email column to sort the contacts by their email and get a visualisation of what contacts there is with the same email.

One’s a duplicate is found, you select the two records by pressing the check box to the very right.

Then you press the Merge button in the ribbon

In the dialog that follows you first have to select which of the two records that should be the master for the new merged record.

Ones the master is set, you can select specific fields where you would like to keep a value from the Record which is not the master.

When you are done press “OK”

Over and Out

/Ted

[swedenfordynamics]

Bulk Editing Records

Sometimes you as an end user want to set the same value on several of your records (Contacts, accounts, cases, opportunities etc.). Instead of going into each record which can be a bit time consuming you can do a simple “bulk edit” and changeone or several values for several records at the same time.

What you dois that you get a view that contains all of the records you wish to edit etherfrom one the standard views or by doing an advanced search.

Then mark the records you wish to edit ether by pressing the check symbol to the very right for each of the records that you wish to edit. If you wish to edit all of the records in the view you can press the checkbox on the top and all of the records will be marked on the page that you are currently in.

Then press the “Edit” button in the ribbon

Type in your changes in the form and press “Change”

If you want to change more than 50 records per edit you can change the number of records that are shown per view page to 250.

To do this you need to press the engine symbol in the top to the right and press options

Under the General tab you will find a field called “Records Per Page” change it to “250” and press ”OK”.

Cheers

/Ted

[swedenfordynamics]

Making Dynamics CRM more eye appealing

When you are working as a consultant and meet serval of different end-users you often hear that Microsoft Dynamics CRM is a too big system. This is not true, Microsoft Dynamics CRM can be a very big system used with severalmodules such as Sales, Marketing, Service and even custom XRM modules can beadded on. However, it’s a very scalable system that can be scaled up a down due to the customers changing needs. The problem is that Customers and Consultants spend too little time on the content that is shown in the CRM. Two simple ways of slimming down the content in the CRM are:

Working with the content with in the forms

 Slim your SiteMap

 Working with the content with in the forms

A good starting point is always to work through all the forms and make sure thatall shown fields still serve a purpose. In the most of the forms all other tabsexcept the first Summery tabs can be closed by default as well.

The next step to slim down the forms is analysing what users that use which fields and making sure that users only see fields that they use or need to see. There are 3 ways of doing this.

Add field security to fields, this is however not recommended due to the issue of maintaining such solution.

Make fields or sections visible or hidden with JavaScript by using commands such as: Xrm.Page.ui.tabs.get(“tabname”).sections.get(“sectioname”).setVisible(true); Xrm.Page.ui.controls.get("attributename").setVisible(false);

Use different forms for different security roles. If you create one form per security role you can then make sure that the role only see the forms that are aimed for the specific user by enabling and disabling the securityroles from the form. This is done by pressing the “Enable Security Roles” button in a specific Entities form view

  Press“Display only the selected security roles” and select the security roles thatshould be allowed to see the form.

 When clicking the “Form Order” button you set up the rules for what form that should be displayed if a user is allowed to see several forms.

The best practiseuse of option 2 and 3 is to use option 2 (the JavaScript option) when a field should be hidden or visible depending on the business unit, when a field should be hidden or visible depending on the security role option 3 with different formsis a better solution.

 Slim your sitemap

Thereare several ways of editing your Site Map and this can be done either with a third party products such as the Site Map Editor or by code directly in the XML. Personally I prefer to do it within the code due to some limitations in the editors.

To edit the sitemap by code you first need to create a new solution within the CRM system, then press “Components” in the left navigation bar and the press “Add Existing” and select SiteMap. Make sure that you don’t add any other components or entities in the solution.

Export your solution and unzip it.

Open the “Customizations” file in code or a basic text editor such as notepad, notepad++ or visual studio.

The XML is divided 3 different levels of subcategories: Areas, Groups and SubAreas

The Aria section refers to the Main modules in the Site Map

The Groups refers to the small text dividers within the modules:

The SubArias refers to the entities that you can click on within the Module.

  By deleting or commenting out different parts in the XML you can remove the Areas, Groups and/or SubAreas that are not in use.  Make sure that when you remove or comment out the items you do this with both the start and the end tags so that you do not create invalid XML code.

You can also move Areas, Groups and SubAreas around in the XML code to fit your design. A SubAria however, always needs to have a parent Group and a parent Aria.

Ones you are done with your design save the customizations file and create a new zip file containing the new customizations file together with the old solution file and the old [Content_Types] file and import the new Zipfile as a solution into the CRM system.

If your CRM system rejects the Solution file XML code is probably not valid.

Ones you managed to import your solution file just open the CRM in the window and there you got it.

For more posts about sitemaps click here

Cheers

/Ted