#microsoftdynamicscrmendusers

[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]

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]

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]

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