Integrate Dynamics CRM and Constant Contact, using CCC from Zero2TenCRM
Dynamics CRM has most of the features you’d think it would need for a complete e-mail marketing solution: integrated e-mail, marketing lists and campaigns, and of course…it contains and manages the customers and potential customers you’d want to market to.

If you’re new to Dynamics CRM – or new to e-mail marketing, for that matter – it might be hard to put your finger on exactly what the gaps are. But if you’ve struggled as long as I have trying to get your e-mail marketing money’s worth from the Dynamics CRM out-of-the-box feature set, you will know very well what’s missing:

The biggest problem is its weak treatment of campaign responses. For example, you can distribute a campaign e-mail to all the members of a marketing list, but the only way you can automatically tie a response to the e-mail is if the recipient happens to reply directly to the e-mail. (And according to the documentation, even this only works if you have the hideous “tracking token” turned on!)

If you really want to know what happens when you send a marketing e-mail, you may already be familiar with companies like Exact Target (http://email.exacttarget.com/) and Constant Contact (www.constantcontact.com ). Companies like these offer hosted e-mail marketing solutions, and in addition to using their own e-mail servers to get your message out, they’ll give you LOTS more information about what happens to your e-mails: who opens them, which of your included links get clicked, who opts out, and so forth. Once you see responses like this happen in real-time as soon as you send an e-mail blast out, you will never want to go back to flying blind.

But once you start sending e-mail to your CRM customers from a separate e-mail service, here’s what you’ll experience:

• You’ll have to create and maintain marketing lists in two separate applications, importing, exporting and trying to keep in synch.
• You’ll have lots of great statistics on what happens when you send e-mails out…but if you want those statistics as campaign responses in your CRM, you’ll have to figure out how to export and import them as well.

If, on the other hand, you had integrated CRM and e-mail marketing, you could accomplish a number of worthwhile objectives at once:

• keep your customers where they belong, right there in your Dynamics CRM
• send your e-mails from an externally hosted, number-crunching e-mail server
• synch everything back and forth without you having to do any extra work.

That’s why I picked on Exact Target and Constant Contact: both have integrations with Dynamics CRM.

I’ve been hearing about Exact Target’s integration for years — I think they were one of the first to market, back in the days of yore and Dynamics CRM 3.0. And I was just about to become an Exact Target customer…when I learned they only integrate with the on-premise option of Dynamics CRM. Ouch! I had to stop right there. On premise is great for some organizations, but I’m committed to the cloud and sworn never to host another server, so I had to keep looking.

About a month ago I saw an article on the Dynamics CRM Online team blog about a product CCC (”c-cubed”) from a company called Zero2TenCRM. Well, one thing led to another and I’m up and running. So far, only for a day, so I can’t provide much detail. But it looks promising. Check out these sweet statistics that get automatically synched back to my Dynamics CRM after executing an e-mail marketing campaign in Constant Contact:

I’ll provide a more detailed treatment after I’ve had more experience; in the meantime, I recorded the meeting I had with Ryan of Zero2Ten, who walked me through the setup and integration. Here’s a link to the recording.

And here’s a link where you can subscribe to my Dynamics CRM News You Can Use e-mail newsletter, all about building value on the Dynamics CRM platform, and henceforth generated so much more easily and automatically than I was ever able to do before!

In life, many-to-many relationships are recipes for pandemics. In Dynamics CRM they aren’t quite as bad, but they can be confusing until you get used to them. This article is about the Dynamics CRM variety, but if you want to read a chilling description of the real-life kind, here’s a link to Larry Brilliant’s article, The Age of Pandemics.

Background: One-to-Many Relationships

The most frequently encountered relationships between Dynamics CRM records are “one-to-many”, often referred to in shorthand as “1:N”. On any Dynamics CRM form, these are exposed as the links you see on the left-hand side. Basically, every link you see there is a record type to which the record on the form has a 1:N relationship. For example, the following figure shows an account form with the Contacts link selected. This displays all of the contact records which are related (via the “Parent Customer” lookup field on the Contact form) to the current account record

.

Before moving on to many-to-many relationships, let’s examine 1:N’s from a different perspective. Look at the next figure. It shows the flip side of the 1:N from account to contact. That is, it shows an N:1 from contact to account:

This shows how it looks from the standpoint of the “child” record. In this example, there can be multiple contact records associated with one account record, so on the contact form the account (”Parent Customer”) is selected with a lookup, from which only one account record can be selected. If you wanted one contact to be able to have multiple parent accounts, the simple 1:N from account to contact won’t let you do that. That’s an example of where you’d need a “many-to-many”.

Many-to-Many Relationships

One-to-many (1:N) relationships are common, but there are plenty of situations that require a many-to-many (”N:N”) relationship. For example, a single contact might attend one or more events; and a single event might have multiple attendees. In my experience, N:N relationships are more common than you might at first think, and there are some subtleties about how they’re implemented in Dynamics CRM. Let’s look at a few examples.

A commonly requested customization is to make the relationship between records and “Owners” more flexible. Most records in Dynamics CRM are so-called “user owned” records, which simply means that each one is associated with a single user — the “Owner” you can see an example of in the following screenshot of an Opportunity form:

Comparing this to the previous figure, you can see there’s an N:1 relationship from Opportunity to User (referred to as “Owner” on the form), which is equivalent to saying there’s a 1:N from User to Opportunity.

In this scenario, the request might be to associate more than one user with an opportunity. For example, you might have an account manager, an executive sponsor, and a sales engineer, each with certain required tasks in the sales process. Suppose you knew for sure that those three roles were the only ones you needed. In that case, you could create two new custom 1:N relationships from User to Opportunity, and add the associated lookup fields to the opportunity form:

I only had to add two, since the “Owner” was already there, and I just changed the label on the form to “Account Manager”. This works fine, but it’s hard-wired to only three users per record. What if you don’t know how many different users might need to be associated with a record? That’s a job for a true N:N relationship. The following figure shows how this can look. I’ve created a custom N:N relationship between Opportunity and User, and I referred to it as “Stakeholder”. The screenshot shows an opportunity form open with the “Stakeholders” link selected.

This looks similar to the very first screenshot in the section on 1:N’s, but it’s different in an important respect: with an N:N relationship both sides of the relationship behave exactly the same. In this example, that means that if you open a user record you can see all the opportunities for which the user is a stakeholder:

So, not only can each opportunity be associated with lots of stakeholders, each stakeholder (a.k.a. “User”) can be associated with lots of opportunities: a true N:N relationship.

To create an N:N like the one I just illustrated, assuming you’ve got System Administrator privileges, follow these steps:

1. Open the Opportunity form’s customization UI, by clicking Settings, Customization, Customize Entities, and then double-clicking Opportunities in the list.
2. Click N:N Relationships, then click the New Many-to-Many Relationship button on the toolbar.
3. Select User in the “Other Entity” section, and configure the other properties like this:

   

Then click Save and Close twice, then publish and test your customizations.

Just remember: the value in the “label” field is how the entity in each section will be referred to from the form for the other entity. This can be confusing, and it’s probably easiest to start by using the default “Use Plural Name” option in the Display Option drop-down.

Limitations and Subtleties of “Native” N:N Relationships

The approach I just described is often referred to as a “native” many-to-many relationship. It’s a new feature in the current version of Dynamics CRM, and can be used instead of the alternative, the so-called “manual” approach. The manual approach is not new, by the way, and simply consists of two 1:N relationships. For example, I implement N:N relationships between contacts and events by creating 1:N relationships from each of those two to a third entity, “registration”. A 1:N from contact to registration, and a 1:N from event to registration gives me an N:N between contact and event.

These native N:N relationships are easy to create, but have at least one important limitation, and some subtleties that can be confusing at first. I’ll cover those here.

• Limitation #1: All you know is whether a relationship exists – you don’t know anything about the relationship. The easiest way to understand this is to think about the manual N:N I just described. With that approach, the third entity – often referred to as the “junction” or “intersection” entity – can contain useful information. If I want to know the status of a registration, or what the registration fee was, then the manual approach works better.
• Limitation #2: While you can use Advanced Find to query for which records are involved in an N:N relationship, you cannot add columns from the opposite side. Basically, the problem here is that Advanced Find doesn’t really work for native N:N relationships. The way I think of it is that with Advanced Find, you start at the level of the child (or “N”) record, and work your way back up. So if I want to do a query on opportunities and return in the result set lots of information from account records, I have to start with opportunities. But if two entities are related with a native N:N relationship, there is no parent or child entity, both entities being peers, and without a 1:N relationship, Advanced Find doesn’t work!

Limitation #2 is actually more general than the Advanced Find example I illustrated with. What else in Dynamics CRM depends on 1:N relationships and makes you start at the child record and work your way back up? Correct: Workflows!

Hence the following question from a very patient TrickBag reader:

I recently created a custom entity (Network Event)that has a N:N relationship to Contact. What I’m trying to do is identify Network Events at which I meet contacts (new and existing).  So for any Network Event there may be several Contacts, and for any Contact there may be several Network Events.  I used the native N:N relationship, and it works just as I want it to.

What I am having a problem with is creating a Workflow that will update two custom fields on the Contact record to show the date of the event and the name of the event.  I’m just trying to indicate the last activity with my Contacts.  I’ve been successful in creating workflows for Tasks, E-mail, Appointments, etc. that update the two custom fields on the Contact record.

When I try to create A Workflow from the Network Event that will update the Contact record, the Contact is not an option as a Related Entity.  What am I missing?

Stephen, I’m sorry it took me so long to answer, and I’m sure you know this by now, but the answer is you aren’t missing anything except that intersection entity I mentioned above. Neither Advanced Find nor Workflows gives you a handle to columns from entities on the other side of a native N:N relationship. That’s why you could do it for your Task, E-Mail and Appointment activities: they all have N:1 relationships to contacts. But the way you modeled your contacts and networking events won’t work for that. Try creating a third entity, “Networking Event Attendance”, and give it fields for the date and name of the event. Then, when you write your workflow on the Networking Event Attendance entity, it will work fine.

And in Conclusion…

Well, this article certainly turned out longer than I thought it was going to be when I started it. I guess if you’ve read this far, you’re really committed, so I’ll make two more observations:

1. Although Advanced Find doesn’t work with the native N:N approach, the Report Wizard does work. In the opportunity to user/stakeholder N:N example I used, you can create a report with Opportunities as the parent record type and “Stakeholders” as the related record type, and you can group on opportunity, displaying within each group one row for every stakeholder.
2. Another good example of where an N:N relationship comes in handy has to do with synchronizing records to the Dynamics CRM Outlook client. Suppose you and your users want to synchronize records locally (Local Data Groups, in the Outlook client), and you can’t come up with any convenient criteria to use. You might put a checkbox on a form that’s a Yes/No to synchronize…but the problem with that is if it’s selected and used to synchronize…it synchs for everybody! A good solution here is to create a native N:N between the entity in question and the User entity. Call it “Synching Users” or something like that, and let users add themselves as a “synching user” for any record they need to synch. It works great.

If you read this far I’m eternally grateful, not to mention impressed with your dedication. Thank you very much, and good luck with all your relationships, Dynamics CRM and otherwise.

P.S., if you liked this article, you will positively adore my upcoming Dynamics CRM Essentials sessions, especially the ones on Customization. I hope to see you in an upcoming session!

At the December meeting of the Dynamics CRM User Group, I announced and encouraged members to fill out an online survey. It was a pretty simple survey, with questions on where members are located, what job roles they hold, what kind of organizations they work for, and the like. I also wanted to use the survey to get some guidance on what kinds of session topics were more (or less) popular.

The survey questions were pretty simple, but I thought the results were interesting. In the month after the session, we got 23 respondents, and I will report the aggregated results in this article.

From a Dynamics CRM perspective, the interesting thing about the survey is that I implemented it within Dynamics CRM. The step-by-step how-to of implementing a survey in Dynamics CRM is actually quite interesting, and absolutely worth a separate article.

For now, the actual survey results will have to suffice, so here you go!

What Certifications Do We Have?

We are definitely a well-certified group. I asked which of the Dynamics CRM 4.0 core certification exams people had passed, and here are the results:

70% of us have passed the Applications exam, 48% the Customization exam and 39% Installation/Deployment. The Applications exam was by far my favorite, too: In fact, I liked it so much I took it twice!

Where Do We Live?

Wow. 17% of us are from Europe or Asia-Pacific., and a bare plurality from my home time zone.

Who Do We Work For?

That’s a good mix: two-thirds of us almost equally split between end-customers and MS partners with the rest from ISVs, non-MS partner consulting firms and the “other” category.

What Do We Do?

Not surprising that a majority of our members are IT Professionals, but I was pleasantly surprised with how well sales, marketing and management are represented.

What Kinds of Presentations Do We Want?

These are averages of all responses. The three options were each ranked on a 1-5 scale, 1 being “Most preferred”, 5 least. No doubt Edward Tufte would object to my graphical display of the quantitative information in question, and he’d be right. But I wasn’t thinking that far ahead. So just remind yourself that the average of “2″ for Technical sessions indicates a higher preference than the “2.95″ for Introductory.

E-mail has come to be one of the most commonly used communications vehicles, and it’s certainly an activity many organizations use to communicate with customers. It’s hard to imagine a customer-relationship management system without integrated e-mail management, and Dynamics CRM has an excellent implementation in this area. Some of the most important aspects of E-mail integration within Dynamics CRM are:

• The Outlook client makes “doing CRM” a simple extension of the Outlook experience, and as I’ve written elsewhere, if something’s easy enough to do, people will do more of it. When it comes to tracking an organization’s interactions with its customers, this is usually a good thing!
• The E-Mail Router provides centralized management of E-Mail integration, such as the ability for a marketing manager to send out campaign e-mails on behalf of other Dynamics CRM users. And it integrates with any POP3 E-mail server. (And now it even works with BPOS!)
• Third parties and ISVs can extend the core feature set with supported APIs and web services. For example, if you use Exact Target or Constant Contact to manage and track your e-mail marketing efforts, there are add-ons you can use to bolt those right into Dynamics CRM, relieving you from the tedious tasks of exporting from CRM, importing to your hosted e-mail and tracking results in two different places.

How do e-mails and workflows interact in Dynamics CRM? Here’s how I think about it:

• Workflows can send e-mails. “Send E-mail” is one of seven actions a Dynamics CRM workflow can perform, and it’s definitely one of the first activities many organizations attempt to automate with workflows.
• E-mails can trigger workflows. In addition to being a very useful and commonly used method of communicating with people, E-mails are also customizable entities (in Dynamics CRM-speak). An implication of that is that a workflow can be triggered whenever a new e-mail record is created in Dynamics CRM. For sales or service organizations that want to respond appropriately when customers send certain kinds of e-mails, this gives you an important integration point!
  

In this article I will focus primarily on the first of these – sending e-mail messages from a Dynamics CRM workflow. I’ll give you some of the most common scenarios I encounter, plus some tips and tricks.  Before we dive in, it’s worth reviewing who can receive e-mails from Dynamics CRM. Whether sent manually or from a workflow, Dynamics CRM e-mails can be sent to:

• A Dynamics CRM User
• An Account, Contact or Lead record
• A Dynamics CRM Queue

When to Send E-mails from Dynamics CRM Workflows?

In Dynamics CRM, just like in the real world, e-mails can be sent for any number of reasons. Here are three simple examples of how you might send manual e-mails:

• You can send an e-mail from Outlook and (if you’ve got the Outlook client installed) click Track in CRM to have CRM create a record of it and attach it to a contact or account record.
• A marketing manager might distribute an E-mail type campaign activity, and send hundreds of e-mail messages on behalf of the owners of contact records in a marketing list.
• A sales rep might create an Advanced Find view of contact records, and click the Send Direct E-mail button at the top of the contact grid, as the following figure illustrates:

  

Those are all examples of manual e-mails. When and why would you send e-mails from workflows? Here are a few scenarios when sending e-mails from Dynamics CRM workflows is useful:

• Auto-responders. An automatic workflow can run when a new lead record is created, sending an appropriate e-mail when a visitor to your web site fills in a “request information” form. I wrote an article about this, using as an example the auto-responders we send when somebody registers for a Dynamics CRM User Group meeting.
• Event follow-up. If you have more than a few people attend an event, you can save time by using a workflow to automate the e-mail follow-up process. This is also a good example of where an “On Demand” workflow might be the best option, and I’ll show an example of this below.
• Expiration reminders. Suppose your customers have subscriptions with expiration dates, or suppose they’re locked into a competitor’s contract and that has an expiration date. In cases like that, as the clock ticks you get closer and closer to a potential sales opportunity, and a workflow can send appropriate e-mails to your sales team and/or the potential customer.
• Sales and service process notifications. Opportunities have the “Est. Close Date” field, cases have “Follow Up By”. If opportunities don’t get closed or cases don’t get resolved, a workflow can take appropriate action…including sending notification e-mails to various stakeholders.
• Assignment notifications. Workflows can be triggered when the owner of any record type changes, so you could have an automatic workflow notify users they’ve been assigned a new lead, account, or any other kind of record.
• Case-acknowledgement e-mails. We’ve probably all received these at one time or another. [One of my favorite examples was an automatic e-mail I got from Google after committing a mortal Adwords sin. It included the following text, "If you have any questions about your account or the actions we've taken, please do not reply to this email nor attempt to contact us in any way." If
  you're trying to generate fear and loathing this is an excellent approach; otherwise I recommend a more constructive case acknowledgment e-mail style.]

E-mails, E-mail Templates, and Entities

I mentioned above that Dynamics CRM e-mails can only be sent to five kinds of entities: users, customers (accounts and contacts), potential customers (leads), and queues. So, in order to send an e-mail to a customer regarding a case or an opportunity or another kind of record, how do you do it?

I’ll start with what you can do manually, through the Dynamics CRM UI, then I’ll show you the additional flexibility you get if you understand how to send e-mails with workflows.

Even though you can only send an e-mail to those five entity types, you can actually create e-mail templates for many kinds of records, as the following screenshot illustrates:

In addition to the five aforementioned, you can see nine additional ones: Global, Opportunity, Quote, Order, Invoice, Case, Contract, Service Activity and System Job. Although you cannot e-mail these records directly, each of these record types has a so-called “many to one” (”N:1″) relationship to one or more of the five record types that can receive e-mails.

Essentially, the Dynamics CRM design team gave us a shortcut to make it a little easier to send e-mails to contacts or user records, for example, which are related to commonly used records such as opportunities and cases. This is why, even though you can’t send an e-mail directly to a case or an opportunity, you do see the Send Direct E-mail button at the top of the Opportunity grid:

So, when it comes to these built-in (also referred to as “system”) record types, you can either use some of the built-in templates, or create your own custom templates to expose a simple direct e-mail function to users. It’s just that the e-mail doesn’t really get sent to the opportunity (everybody knows opportunities can’t read e-mails!)…it gets sent to the contact, or the owner, or the account, depending on how you create the template.

OK, so far so good, but what happens if you need to send an e-mail regarding something other than one of those built-in record types? For example, I use a custom entity (”Registration”) to record registrations at events (another custom entity). How well I remember my horror the first time I realized there was no Send Direct E-mail button at the top of the registration grid for an event:

The screenshot shows the “Associated View” of registrations – that is, registrations associated with the selected event. I’ve got the grid toolbar highlighted in yellow in the figure – that’s where you’d need the Send Direct E-mail button to be. It’s easy to get this confused, since there’s also the Send E-mail button I have highlighted in black. That’s lets you send an e-mail regarding the Event – not what I want to do here, which is to send a nice follow-up e-mail to every person who attended the event.

So how do you do it? Here are some options:

• The first time you see this, you might try to create an e-mail template for “Registration”. But you cannot create e-mail templates for custom entities, so although that would be nice, we’ll need to wait for Dynamics CRM 5.0 for that.
• You can actually create a mail merge template for custom entities, but working with mail merges can be a little kludgy. Plus, there’s no easy way to attach a file to an e-mail sent via mail merge, a limitation which can be solved if you use a workflow.
• You could send e-mails out one at a time. I created a 1:N relationship from Contact to Registration (along with another 1:N from Event to Registration), so I can click on the contact name in the registration list, access the contact record, and e-mail away. But that takes too long.

The best way to accomplish this is with a workflow. Here’s how you do it:

1. Create a workflow on the Registration entity. You could make this an automatic workflow but I like On Demand for this kind of workflow. Here’s what my workflow’s properties look like:

    

   

2. This workflow has one action – you can see the Send e-mail action highlighted in yellow. I use Create New Message, although there’s also a Use Template option. Since I’ve got a 1:N relationship from Contact to Registration, I could use a contact e-mail template here. That would let me send an e-mail to the right contact, but…it would not let me attach a file to the e-mail! When I’m sending follow-up e-mails for my events I usually attach the slide deck, so I need to use the Create New Message action.
   
3. Next I click the Set Properties button to configure the e-mail. The following figure shows how to configure the e-mail. The most important part is the To line. Notice I’ve got the Look for drop-down highlighted, and I’ve selected one of the Related Entities. In this case since I want to send the e-mail to the Contact, that’s the one I select: the workflow design environment knows there’s a 1:N from Contact to Registration, which is why this works!

   

4. Finally, notice there’s a tab for Attachments, even in the workflow design environment. That’s what lets you do something like you see in the following figure:

   

    

That’s pretty much it. Once the workflow is published and I’m ready to send my follow-ups, all I need to do is open up the event form, click on Registrations, select them, and the Run Workflow button will be available. The following figure shows what it looks like after I click the Run Workflow button, just before I execute the workflow to send out the e-mails:

Summing Up

OK, that article was longer than I thought it was going to be, but I hope it was worth your time. I tend to write about things that initially confused me, partly because it forces me to remember what the solution was, and partly because I figure if they confused me, they may confuse somebody else. Here are the main two points to remember:

1. Workflows can still only send e-mails to Users, Accounts, Contacts, Leads or Queues…but the workflow UI gives you a handle to related records, so as long as the thing you want to send an e-mail for has an N:1 relationship to one of the Big Five e-mailable entities, you’re in good shape.
2. If you want to e-mail attachments, use the Send E-mail Message action, rather than Use Template.     

And by the way, if you like this article you will positively adore my Dynamics CRM Workflow Essentials session! The Essentials are one-day live online events, and in the Workflows session I’ll show you the most important things you need to know about Dynamics CRM workflows in one action-packed fun-filled day.

And don’t forget my book, Building Workflows in Dynamics CRM 4.0. It’s available on Lulu and Amazon, and if you buy it you can use the $50 purchase price as a credit against the $200 registration for any of the Essentials events.