Last week I had the privilege to talk at the Dynamics CRM Finland User Group meeting in Helsinki (quick recap available in Finnish here). When planning on what topic to choose for my presentation, I tried to think of something that would appeal to a wide audience of CRM users – both experienced consultants as […]
CRM 2013 and the Platform Evolution: Webcast Recording and Slides
Last week I presented in a webcast for MSDynamicsWorld.com on the topic of “Microsoft Dynamics CRM 2013 Customization and the Platform Evolution”. If you weren’t able to attend this live event, then have no fear, because it has all been recorded and documented for future generations. First off, below are the slides that set the […]
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 […]
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 […]
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 […]
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 […]
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 […]
