The annual festivities of the Microsoft Dynamics Convergence event in the US have now been completed for the year 2014. This means that the outline for upcoming releases in this calendar year have also been presented to the 12K attendees in Atlanta as well as anyone watching the sessions via Virtual Convergence. The following roadmap […]
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 […]
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 […]
CRM 2013 introduced the first big change in the navigation logic of Dynamics CRM since version 3.0 in 2005. We went from a hierarchical, popup window driven UI with many ERP-ish menus to a more modern experience of a single window app with touch optimized navigation bars and a reduced number of menu options visible […]
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 […]
Unfortunately I wasn’t able to attend the eXtremeCRM event in Barcelona this year (“the Woodstock for CRM Rockstars”), but I’ve been keeping an eye on the buzz in Twitter around the #eXtremeCRM hashtag. Although it’s not exactly the same as enjoying live CRM geek talk over some tapas & cerveza, for anyone interested in hearing […]
The user interface of Dynamics CRM has been cleaned up quite a bit in the latest 2013 version. The number of buttons visible to the user has been greatly reduced in the browser client. Another significant change from a usability perspective is that Dynamics CRM now operates like any other web application or website: within […]
CRM 2013 Business Process Flows (BPF) have been designed to support a scenario where the same transactional records (opportunities, cases, custom entities like projects) can follow alternative process steps depending on the business logic required. For example, you can use the same opportunity entity to support the sales processes of two departments that are operating […]
CRM 2013 has introduced many UI features that aim to reduce the number of different windows between which the user needs to navigate while performing everyday actions on records. Since customer relationship management systems are often focused on capturing the various interactions between the company and its customers, activity management is naturally a core feature […]
In case you missed the big news last week, Microsoft has acquired a company called Parature. Similar to the two marketing related service providers MS has bought earlier, Marketing Pilot and Netbreeze, this latest acquisition is intended for expanding the footprint of Dynamics CRM on the customer service side. It’s been no secret that this […]
One of the missing features that is often requested for Dynamics CRM is the ability to automatically assign numeric identifiers to records (see the feature suggestion on MS Connect). Sure, we’ve had the Auto-Numering feature for a limited set of default entities (contracts, cases, articles, quotes, orders, invoices, campaigns) since the early days of CRM […]
A while ago when performing a requirements gathering session for the sales process functionality in a CRM implementation project, my client asked me whether Dynamics CRM was able to show information on the opportunity form about how similar opportunities had performed in the past. Thinking of an analogy from the world of consumer web apps, […]