What were the biggest news and announcements from 2018 for the Microsoft Business Applications ecosystem? Here’s my top 3 picks.
Reflecting on Dynamics 365
The past couple of months leading to the Microsoft Dynamics 365 commercial launch have been interesting, to say the least. A lot of things happening, but in a way that hasn’t been all too easy to grasp. I’ve started a lot of draft blog articles around the topic yet I haven’t written that much about […]
Previewing the New Power BI Experience with Dynamics CRM
Around one year ago Microsoft introduced the capability to access CRM Online data via Power Query, one of the client side components of the Power BI suite. More precisely, the capability to authenticate with the already existing CRM OData feeds via Office 365 credentials was introduced into PQ, which then allowed us to use CRM […]
Analyzing Customer Behavior Data with CRM 2015 Rollup Fields
From a system customizer perspective, one of the most intriguing new features in Dynamics CRM 2015 is the addition of two new field types. Alongside the traditional “simple” fields we can now define our custom attributes to be somewhat more “complex”, by choosing to create them as either calculated fields or rollup fields. These new […]
Access Option Set Labels in Dynamics CRM OData Feeds via Power Query
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 […]
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 […]
Similar Opportunity Analytics with CRM 2013 Quick View Forms
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, […]
Connecting to CRM Online OData feed with Excel 2013 Power Query
The latest version of Excel contains a Get External Data menu option for linking the workbook to an OData data feed. Knowing that Dynamics CRM 2011 and 2013 both provide an OData endpoint, this would seem like a great option for retrieving data from a CRM Online based system for reporting purposes, since direct database […]