Launch IE with your Favorite Groups of Sites

In another article I discussed a commonly used trick that lets you navigate directly to certain Dynamics CRM windows, and showed how to combine that with IE tab sets to build an efficient, dashboard-style user experience for Dynamics CRM.

In that article I used my organization’s Dynamics CRM Online to illustrate. The technique is identical whether you’re using CRM Online or on-premise, but it might be more useful in Dynamics CRM Online, because more functionality is exposed through this direct navigation technique. For example, the November 2009 Service Update added the sweet new home-page dashboard with customizable charts, so I now use a URL like this one — https://imginc.crm.dynamics.com/Home/Homepage/TTV_Home.aspx — to navigate directly to a page like this one:

When you’ve got a hammer…

…everything looks like a nail, right? So of course, I created a bunch of tab sets for the various groupings of web sites I tend to go to on a regular basis. A few minutes later, I’d created four tab sets (which are really just IE favorites folders), with four or five sites in each. This was a useful exercise, as it made me think about how the different web sites I use work together to support the activities I’m doing. Here’s a shot of what my favorites folders/tab sets look like, with a summary of how to use them:

Use Windows Script Host to open in different IE Windows

As soon as I started using them, however, the tabs quickly got out of hand. For example, if I open my Dynamics CRM tab set that’s four tabs, then I open my blogs and add six more tabs…and it’s just as easy to lose track of things as ever.

What I really needed was to launch IE and have it open a single tab set in a separate window. After hunting around a little bit, I found this nice summary of how to use COM automation to do this, using the Windows Scripting Host to automate Internet Explorer: http://blogs.msdn.com/tonyschr/archive/2007/01/19/ie-automation-amp-tabs.aspx

I’ve never done much with Windows Scripting, but it was exactly what I needed to solve this problem. If you run wscript.exe from the command line it doesn’t really do anything; the key is to provide a .js file as a command line argument. Here’s the file I created (copying Tony’s example from the article above) that opens up all of the pages in my Dynamics CRM dashboard, each on a different tab in the same window. The following script is in a text file I called “crmsites.js”:

var navOpenInBackgroundTab = 0×1000;

var oIE = new ActiveXObject(“InternetExplorer.Application”);

oIE.Navigate2(“https://imginc.crm.dynamics.com/loader.aspx”);

oIE.Navigate2(“https://imginc.crm.dynamics.com/Home/Homepage/TTV_Home.aspx#”, navOpenInBackgroundTab);

oIE.Navigate2(“https://internetleadcapture.dynamics.com/Home/Dashboard.aspx?dl1prm=%3fuflcid%3den-US%26DLExternalIdValue%3dhttp%3a%2f%2fimginc.crm.dynamics.com&wa=wsignin1.0″, navOpenInBackgroundTab);

oIE.Visible = true;

I thought this was pretty cool, anyway. The variable oIE points to an instance of IE, and you just make calls to the “Navigate2″ method, passing in the URLs you want to open on the tabs. Then set the Visible property to “true”.

So how do you run an application like that? I wanted shortcuts from my desktop, so I started off by creating a shortcut to run wscript.exe:

1. Right-click your desktop, click New, then Shortcut.
2. Enter “wscript.exe” in the Type the location of the item box, click Next, then Finish.
3. Right-click the new shortcut (it should have the Windows Scripting icon attached to automatically) and click Properties. It should look like this:

Notice that in mine the “Start in” parameter is “windir” – this is the folder where Windows sits; conventionally that’s c:\Windows, so that’s where the Windows Scripting Host will look for parameters by default. So as long as I save my crmsites.js file into the c:\Windows folder, all I need to do is supply the file name in the Target field, like this:

So finally, after making copies of the js file, substituting in the right URLs and creating wscript.exe shortcuts pointing to each one, I can just double-click any of my shortcuts and open up a new IE window with each page on its own tab.

For example, I double-click “My fave blogs”:

And in a few seconds, the six blogs with which I start my Dynamics CRM day all show up in one window:

Combine these for an Efficient, CRM-Centric User Experience

Dynamics CRM has a trick referred to as “URL-addressable forms”, which is a fancy way of saying that certain forms can be navigated to directly and opened in their own Internet Explorer window, bypassing the underlying UI within which they are normally contained. This can be handy in lots of situations. Here are a couple:

• Suppose you want to add value to or extend a separate application with related information contained within CRM. For example, think of a SharePoint library containing proposals or other documents pertaining to accounts. A column in the SharePoint document library could contain a clickable link that would pop open the Dynamics CRM form for the account.
• Certain areas within Dynamics CRM are a little bit crowded when contained within the full UI. If you can navigate to one of these directly you can free up some screen real estate and create a more productive user experience.

The second one is the topic of this article, and it’s one I’ve written about before, in the context of the Dynamics CRM service calendar. It’s easy to see the advantages of direct navigation by comparing the following two screen-shots. The first one shows my company’s service calendar contained within the standard Dynamics CRM UI; the second shows it being accessed directly.

The two most important takeaways are the additional room you free up with the direct navigation approach, and the way you do it. You can navigate directly to your service calendar by taking the standard URL you use to navigate to your Dynamics CRM, dropping the “/loader.aspx” bit, and adding “/sm/home_apptbook.aspx”.

Don’t look for any intuition here, just do it. J

Why does this Matter and What’s it got to do with IE Tab Sets?

It matters because the more things that are exposed directly, the more you can take advantage of this direct navigation technique. (I’ll get to tab sets in a sec)

In Dynamics CRM Online, more things are exposed in this way than in the on-premise edition, especially after the November 2009 Service Update. Here are two of my favorites:

• Navigate directly to your sweet brand-new home page dashboard by substituting “/Home/Homepage/TTV_Home.aspx” for “/loader.aspx”
• Navigate directly to your Internet Marketing dashboard with the more cryptic “https://internetleadcapture.dynamics.com/Home/Dashboard.aspx?uflcid=en-US&DLExternalIdValue=http://<organization name>.crm.dynamics.com” (e.g., for me, it’s imginc in place of the <organization name>, and remember these last two are Online only features for now!)

Now you could navigate to all these pages separately, but it’s a lot more convenient if you bundle them all up in an Internet Explorer “Tab Set”, like the following screen-shot illustrates:

To summarize, there are two big advantages of this approach:

1. Navigating directly to one of these areas (service calendar, Internet Marketing dashboard, home page dashboard…) gives me more room. This is more useful than ever with the charts we can expose on the home page dashboard post November 2009 Service Update.
2. Bundling them together in a single IE tab set means I don’t have to remember URLs and I can open them all at once, every time I want to live my so-called Dynamics CRM life!

I put together a Captivate recording to show how to bundle several windows up into a single tab set. Let me know what you think!

Cheers,

Richard

Certification Prep Test Answers Explained!

There’s absolutely no doubt about it. That is my most cryptic article headline ever. I guess it’s what you get for trying to write snappy copy about practice tests for certification exams.

But I always try to write for my audience, and if you need to get certified on Dynamics CRM 4.0, you may be interested in the latest addition to my library of certification test-prep content.

First, though, if you want a good backgrounder on the core certifications for Microsoft Dynamics CRM 4.0, here’s a general article I wrote on the topic. Plus you can always visit the certification category on the Trick Bag: www.DynamicsCRMTrickBag.com/category/certification.

Anyway, a big part of what I do is help people prepare for the Dynamics CRM 4.0 certification exams. As part of that, I’ve authored libraries of practice test content for the three core exams. I’ve got 15-question sample tests available for free on this page, and if you’re a registered user on our brand new web site (www.IMGinc.net ) you get all the practice test questions (plus a complete set of recorded training sessions and some other goodies).

About a week ago I announced in my e-mail newsletter a special offer, available until the end of the year: for the crazy-low price of $100 you get a 6-month subscription to all of the certification-prep and related content for all three exams, PLUS the online version of my workflow book. Here’s a page with information on why and how to become a registered user.

It’s a pretty good deal and we’ve had good uptake since the e-mail went out. I also had a couple of new registered users ask me why the practice tests don’t contain explanations of the answers. Since I didn’t really have a good answer to that question, I thought I’d better start writing some explanations.

So here’s my first pass: five sample questions with video explanations from the practice test for the Customization and Configuration exam. Let me know what you think, and if you’re a registered user or about to become one, you will soon see a whole lot more of these.

Richard Knudson — richardk@imginc.com

November 2009 Service Update Article #3

In another article, I did a quick write-up and linked to a recorded tutorial on how to use the charts that come built-in to Dynamics CRM Online. Basically, they are available to end-users, who can use them to personalize their home page, with up to four charts across the new horizontal “Chart Pane”.

The only entities that arrive stocked with charts are:

• Accounts
• Activities
• Campaigns
• Cases
• Events
• Leads
• Opportunities

   

For example, Account comes with three charts, providing graphical counts of your accounts across territories, territories and owners. The Case entity ships with fifteen (!), most of which show distributions of cases (using counts, again) across various attributes like origin, priority, type and so forth. Opportunities, on the other hand, are all about sales, and the ten charts built-in for that entity are almost all different cuts of forecasted (open) and historical (closed) sales.

I encourage you to explore these built-in charts and see what’s available, for a couple reasons:

• The charts provide a good guide for what kind of information is commonly tracked in Dynamics CRM, and more importantly, what kind of information your organization should be tracking. For example, if your Accounts by Territory and Accounts by Industry charts show you a single big bar labeled “Blank”, you might consider defining and using meaningful values for those two attributes!
• After you know what’s available, you’ll know what you need to create, which brings us to the topic of this article.

Creating Charts with the Chart Designer

You can add custom charts for either system entities or custom entities. Assuming you’ve got sufficient privileges (by default, contained only in the security roles “System Administrator” and “Customizer”), you add them using a new tool called the “Chart Designer”, which is available through the familiar entity customization UI:

1. In the navigation area, click Settings, then click Customization.
2. Click Customize Entities.
3. Locate the entity to add a chart for, and double-click it to open it.
4. Click Charts, then click New. The Chart Designer opens. Here’s a screen-shot of it on top of the slightly modified customization UI (for Contact, in this example)

The Chart Designer is a self-contained one-window application, which as you can see from the picture, requires you to specify the following properties to build your chart:

• Record Type View. Select from existing system views in the drop-down list. Every chart is based on a view, and the view does the data filtering work. When you create a new chart you may need to create a new view first, although you might be able to use one of the existing views.
• Chart Name is self-explanatory.
• Legend (Series). I’ll refer to this as the “Series”, but whatever you call it, it’s what provides the data for your chart: the height of a bar in a bar chart, or the percentage of the pie a piece takes up. If you select a text field you can only select “COUNT” as the “aggregate”. If you select a numeric field you’ve got a bunch of options (MAX, MIN, SUM, etc.)
• Horizontal (Category). The Category represents the values across which the data will be distributed. So for a bar chart, the height of the bars will display the aggregated data, and you’ll have one bar per category. Two examples:
  • If you want to see the number of accounts in each territory, make a chart based on the Active Accounts view, and select Account Name as the Series and Territory as the Category.
  • If you want to see the total of account annual revenue just for your accounts, distributed across industries, select My Active Accounts as the view, Annual Revenue (Base) as the Series, and Territory as the Category.

   

Here are a few tips, tricks and gotchas, based on my admittedly limited experience with the tool:

• Views must be published before they can be selected (to base a chart on), and charts must be published before they can be selected (in the dashboard). Notice the Publish button in the customization UI.
• Within the Chart Designer, the “preview” that’s displayed is real data and it displays in real time. You can use this as a kind of a what-if visualization tool, seeing how your data are distributed across different attributes for the Category value, for example.
• It took me a while to figure out how the “Sales Funnel” chart type worked. I thought there was some behind the scenes magic dependent on having a staged workflow for opportunities, and that it only worked for opportunities, or something arcane like that. But if you want to figure out the “Sales Funnel”, try this:

1. Open up the Opportunity entity’s customization UI, and click Charts.
2. Double-click the out of the box Sales Pipeline chart. Depending on … you may see an inherently uninteresting funnel with one data point, as I did the first time I tried it:

   

    

3. That’s because the out of the box version uses Pipeline Phase as the category attribute. If it doesn’t contain any data every category in the sales pipeline funnel goes into the “blank” category. So just change the category to something that contains data, and you can get a nice pipeline funnel. For example, my organization uses a different attribute to represent our sales pipeline: the system picklist, “Sales Stage” (attribute name “salesstagecode”). Here’s what the pipeline funnel looks like if all I do is change the Category to a field with data:

   

    

   Apparently what the sales funnel chart type does is to “display values as progressively decreasing proportions” (from the online help). You can see in the screenshot that in this case it works as expected. I’ve experimented with different attributes for the category and got different results, however, such as the aggregates for the category values not appearing in “progressively decreasing proportions”. There are definitely some nuances I don’t understand about this chart type yet, so if you’ve got it nailed, please let me know!

Summary, What’s Missing

After a custom chart is created and published, it will be available for use by any user (with sufficient privileges) on their homepage dashboard. I haven’t yet figured out a way to create a chart and then make it available to all users, so the (apparent) fact that each user must go through the steps required to personalize their home page dashboard in order to consume these charts…well, it seems like a bit of a limitation. These must be exposed somehow, but like I said, I haven’t figured that one out yet, so if you have, please let me know!

So at least as far as I’ve been able to tell so far, custom charts can be created by a user with sufficient security privileges and then consumed by users as a personal configuration only. It would be nice if you could create a shared dashboard page that exposed the same charts to multiple users, but like I said…I haven’t figured that one out yet.

In the meantime, here’s something that’s better than nothing: if you add “/Home/Homepage/TTV_Home.aspx” immediately after the “dynamics.com” part of the URL you use to get to Dynamics CRM Online, at least you can get a nice personal dashboard that displays bigger charts without the baggage of the rest of the UI. For example, if I navigate to https://imginc.crm.dynamics.com/Home/Homepage/TTV_Home.aspx, here’s what I see:

Cheers –

Richard Knudson – richardk@imginc.com
new web site: www.IMGinc.net

Dynamics CRM Online November Service Update Article #2

If you’re a Dynamics CRM Online user, you might have noticed a few differences today. For one thing, if you tried to go to the old Getting Started page, you might have been surprised to see a brand-new Home page with three charts laid our horizontally. If those happened to be exactly the charts you wanted, excellent! Otherwise, you’ll be interested in the step-by-step tutorial I recorded on how to customize your home page.

Here’s the key thing: configuring your home page dashboard as I show in the tutorial is something any user can do. You can also create new charts — using another new tool called the Chart Designer — but that’s actually an entity customization, and I’ll cover that in a separate article.

For now, here’s a tutorial on how to configure your very own home page dashboard.

And by the way: the tutorial is a different style than I normally do. In particular, there are captions but no audio, so don’t bother adjusting the volume on your speakers like a few Trick Bag readers have told me they’ve done! :-)

 Introduction

Dynamics CRM Online – the cloud version of Microsoft’s flagship customer relationship management application – is an excellent product. The “November 2009 Service Update” gets rolled out to current customers on November 9, and in my view the term “service update” doesn’t do it justice. There are too many improvements and brand-new features to cover in one article, so I’ll cover only one of them in detail here: the up and running experience. But first, I can’t resist a quick list of some of the most important enhancements and new features:

• A new Home page with a customizable dashboard.
• A new Chart Designer you can use to create custom charts for that dashboard
• New and improved data import wizard that will replace the Data Migration Manager
• Improvements to Internet Marketing
• Out of the box support for mobile clients

The “Up and Running Experience”

With on-premise software, we expect installation to require technical expertise. IT professionals handle the installation/configuration heavy-lifting, non-technical folks are spared the gory details. Cloud computing is different: one of its biggest selling points is the promise of doing away with on-premise IT requirements. An organization might choose to outsource its IT infrastructure by migrating to hosted software options. On the other hand, for plenty of small organizations without dedicated IT staff (mine, for example) it’s a requirement rather than a choice.

In any case, the cloud version of installation – what I call the “up and running experience” – is a lot more likely to be performed by a non-technical type, like a manager or a power-user or a CEO. So it better be good, and it better be accessible.

The November 2009 Service Update of Dynamics CRM Online takes what was a good up and running experience, and turns it into a great one. The new process can be performed in less than five minutes, and it’s so easy a cave-person could do it, provided he or she has an e-mail address that’s associated with a Windows Live account.

I’ll provide a step-by-step walkthrough next. Just make sure first that you have an e-mail address associated with a Windows Live account.

Up and Running, Step by Step

1. Navigate to http://crm.dynamics.com and click the “Get Started” button. Here’s what “Step 1″ of the process looks like:

   

   Notice that it says “Sign Up for a Free Trial”. The way it works, is, everybody essentially gets a 30-day free trial. As I’ll describe below, this approach is one of the things that makes it so easy. Also, I was already signed in with my Windows Live ID (which for me is the same as me e-mail); if you aren’t signed in, you’ll need to enter an e-mail in Step 1, and create a Windows Live account if you don’t have one yet.

2. Click Next. The worst thing about Step 2 is the “captcha” text Microsoft uses. (It’s the best disguised captcha text I’ve ever seen, and I literally couldn’t figure it out the first couple tries. Fortunately there’s an option to play audio and type along.) Accept the terms and conditions:

   

 3. In Step 3, you choose the name of your organization. This will be in the URL you and your fellow CRM Online users navigate to, so you should use something short. Also, it must be unique, so you might have to try a couple different options. For example, the URL of my company’s production CRM is https://imginc.crm.dynamics.com . The “imginc” part of that is our organization name.

In Step 3, you also need to specify the base currency for your organization. Neither the organization name nor the base currency can be changed after your site is created. (Dynamics CRM has great multi-currency support; the “base” currency is simply defined as the one currency whose exchange rate is always 1.00000000 – all other currencies’ exchange rates are defined with respect to the base currency.)

Here’s what step 3 looks like:

That’s it. Click Finish and after about 30 seconds you’ll something like the following:

You can get started right away by clicking the link to the web application. If you look carefully at the previous screenshot and the next one you’ll see that the organization I created for my free trial is “23daves”. So even if you already have a production system you can create a new organization for your 30-day free trial!

And by the way, if you’re an existing CRM Online customer (like me), you’ll have to wait until November 9 to see the new features in the service update. But if you created a new organization any time after November 1, you got the new features first!

Getting Started

Once you’re up and running, IF you’re familiar with the pre-November Service Update feature set, things start to look different (in a good way!). I’ll write plenty of articles about the new features; for now I’ll just mention three of the most obvious, all of which you can see on the following screenshot:

1. The Getting Started page has been renamed “Home”, but more importantly, notice the dashboard presentation of charts. You can have up to four charts across your home page, with a list immediately beneath, and the charts are configurable: you can select from a whole bunch of built-in charts for system entities. Plus, you can create your own custom charts, both for system entities and custom entities. All of these charts support drill-down.
2. There’s a sample data set that now comes pre-installed with a new system, so you can kick the tires without having to enter bogus data yourself. You can uninstall it whenever you’re ready (Settings/Data Management/Sample Data), and if you uninstall it and then change your mind, you can reinstall it again.
3. Activate Your Subscription. This is how they implemented the “everybody gets a free 30-day trial” feature: the “trial” is really just an “inactive” subscription. If’s fully functional, but if you don’t activate it, it goes away after 30 days. In the previous approach, you had to whip out your credit card and pay an activation fee ($79, I believe). So in the new approach, the free trial really is free, so you can get in there and get your feet wet and your hands dirty.

Don’t Forget to Designate Your Partner

Finally, don’t forget to follow these steps as soon as you’re up and running:

1. In the left navigation, click Resource Center.
2. In the slightly revamped Resource Center, click Highlights.
3. In the Connect with Us section at the right side of the window, click Designate a partner.
4. Search for “The Information Management Group” (Oak Brook, IL).
5. Once you find us, designate us as your partner.

But you don’t have to memorize the steps in this section. If you prefer, just add me as a user in your organization, assign me to the “system administrator” security role, and I can do it for you. J

That is actually what my clients do, by the way, in order for me to perform customizations and configurations for their Dynamics CRM Online organizations. So if you’re reading this and you think you might need some help in customizing after you have the super-easy up and running experience, please let me know!

Regards,

Richard Knudson

Corporate: www.IMGinc.net
Blogs: www.DynamicsCRMTrickBag.com
User Group: www.DynamicsCRMUserGroup.com
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At the October meeting of the Dynamics CRM User Group, I followed a presentation by C360 on their Core Productivity Pack with a session of my own on the BI Analytics add-on. I consider myself an “educated layman” when it comes to BI, which made me all the more impressed with how much business intelligence I could glean from using BI Analytics with only about five hours of learning time. (Impressed with the tool, that is!)

I recorded the session, and here’s a link to it: http://www.imginc.net/images/stories/videos/dcrmug/Richards_BI_Analytics_Demo.wmv

This is a non-trivial add-on: it’s powerful, complex and justifies a much more comprehensive write-up than I have time to do now. On the other hand, I’ve been asked by a couple of attendees to get the recording posted, and I hate to post a recording with no context, so here’s my executive summary on C360’s BI Analytics add-on for Dynamics CRM:

• I think this application is excellent, and I wish I could run it on my production system. (It only works currently with the on-premise edition of Dynamics CRM 4.0, and my production system is Dynamics CRM Online.) 
• BI Analytics is developed by a firm called Strategy Companion. Their flagship product is the “Analyzer”, which is a general purpose Business Intelligence application that can integrate information from lots of different data sources. BI Analytics runs on top of the Analyzer, and is specifically designed as an add-on for Dynamics CRM 4.0. C360 is the exclusive reseller of the CRM-specfiic BI Analytics.
• The installation process is relatively complicated and should not be performed solo by an ”educated layman”. I had to run through it a few times to get it to work, and required the help of the folks at Strategy Companion.
• Once installed, using the application can be done without heavy-duty BI or technical expertise. As I mentioned above, I spent about five hours familiarizing myself with it. Strategy Companion has some video tutorials on their web site that are helpful.
• In my view, the two barriers that will prevent some organizations from using BI Analytics are:
  • Availability. I already mentioned that it’s currently only for on-premise. I wish they’d come out with it for Online!
  • Price. The license fee is $4,000. My understanding is that gets you a license for one “designer” — that being a single person who has the ability to create reports. Users who consume the reports can do so for free. More designer licenses each cost an additional $4k up to five of them, after which the per-designer fee drops somewhat.       

A note on price, which is a general one that could fairly be made about any add-on that a) saves you time, and b) costs money: If you need the kind of functionality BI Analytics contains, trade off the time it takes you to implement it from scratch, against the $4,000 license fee. My guess is that very few organizations can implement the functionality available in BI Analytics with anything nearly as small as $4,000 worth of effort. And a large organization with lots of potential report consumers will be able to justify the investment a lot easier than a smaller one. If you’ve got 100 users, a $40/user one-time might not seem too high, compared to the BI value you’ll realize.