If you’re using Dynamics CRM Online without direct access to the underlying SQL Server database, there may have been a few occasions when you’ve wished for more flexible options for reporting and customer data analytics than what is possible via configuring CRM charts or developing Fetch XML based reports in Visual Studio. Late last year Microsoft enabled […]
Visualizing Your Progress with CRM Goals
Dynamics CRM is a great tool for making your business processes more quantifiable. Sure, you can maintain a list of your open sales opportunities in an Excel sheet and plan your customer meetings with your Outlook calendar, as many organizations do. You can get a pretty good understanding of the current status with such personal […]
Dynamics CRM Reminder Workflows Done Right
A very frequent requirement that customers present for their CRM system functionality is that they will get automatic reminders from it when an item recorded into the database requires their attention after a specific date is reached. This might be a hard, physical date like a contract expiring or a softer variable such as a […]
Accessing “Special” Activity Data with CRM Report Wizard
Sometimes a data model that is perfectly valid on a logical level does not enable the system end users to actually leverage the data stored in it. One example of such a design is the way Microsoft Dynamics CRM handles the information collected on the standard (uncustomizable) dialog windows used in the case resolution and […]
Configure Outlook Contact Synchronization Settings on Behalf of Your Users
The ability to get your CRM contacts automatically synchronized to your Outlook address book and mobile phone is a very handy feature in Microsoft Dynamics CRM. Why would you ever manually dial the phone numbers of your customers when you can just set them to appear in your smartphone’s list of contacts? Wouldn’t it also […]
Working with Price List Items in Dynamics CRM
Despite of the recently refreshed user interface of Dynamics CRM 2013 that offers a much more fluid user experience than previous versions, there are still areas in the application that are not very user friendly. Many of these revolve around product and price information, regarding how it is presented and what actions are allowed on […]
Spring Cleaning for Your Dynamics CRM System
CRM systems have a tendency to suffer from an increasing amount of entropy as time goes by. Not only does the rate of accurate information available from them decrease as data quality decays over time (especially if no one’s in charge of actively maintaining it), they’re also susceptible to a phenomenon I’d describe as “the […]
Power User Tips for CRM 2013 Navigation
Multitasking isn’t necessarily the most efficient working method for us humans with only a very limited capacity for concurrent threads in our CPU. The reality however is that the days of an information worker are filled with a never ending dance of switching between apps and windows. With large Full-HD monitors (and soon 40 inch 4K […]
Information Overload: Cleaning Up CRM 2013 Forms
Today I was working on upgrading the customizations of a CRM 2011 org to CRM 2013 forms and restructuring the layouts to fit the new UI. This environment had a custom entity called “Travel Information”, which was used for storing details related to event travel for employees. Here’s what the form looked like when opening […]
Dynamics CRM OData Feeds and Power Query: What’s the [Record]?
Now that Power BI has hit the GA milestone (general availability), I decided to spin up a trial subscription for it and get familiar with the tools that it offers. My previous experiment with connecting to CRM Online OData feed with Excel 2013 Power Query seemed to be one of the very few blog posts that […]