Dynamics CRM Online November 2009 Service Update: An Excellent Product Improves

 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
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