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 […]
How Would You Change the Dynamics CRM Navigation?
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 […]
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 […]
eXtreme CRM Tool Challenge Winner: Tanguy!
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 […]
Finding Advanced Find in CRM 2013
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 […]
Making Better Use of Business Process Flow Data
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 […]
Expanding “Add Activity” Options on CRM 2013 Forms
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 […]
Auto-Numbering with CRM Workflows: Real-Time vs. Asynchronous
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 […]
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 […]