Recently I ranted a little about my experience in upgrading from Windows XP to Windows 7, specifically about how changes in browser settings impacted my Dynamics CRM experience. One thing I’ve learned about Microsoft program managers is they care enough about their programs to reach out to to ranters like me, and this episode was no exception: I got a call the next day from Matt Hooper, a program manager on the Dynamics CRM Online team, and he was patient enough to set me right. As soon as I got off my call with Matt, I thought I better write down what he told me, so I wouldn’t forget.

Note: Dynamics CRM can be run on any Windows OS later than Windows XP Service Pack 2, and on any version of Internet Explorer 6.0 or later. The steps described here are for Windows 7 and Internet Explorer 8, but they should be the same for IE 8 on any version of Windows.Dynamics CRM Online uses both pop-ups and ActiveX controls to create a richer user experience than pure HTML allows. The user experience is only richer, however, if you can get it to work reliably! Here are step by step instructions to configure the most important Internet Explorer settings, first to allow pop-ups for your Dynamics CRM site(s), and second to allow ActiveX controls by identifying your CRM site(s) as “trusted”:

First, turn off pop-up blocker for Dynamics CRM Online:

1. In Internet Explorer, click the Tools menu, then click Pop-up Blocker, then Pop-up Blocker Settings.
2. OR, click the Tools menu, click Internet Options, click the Privacy tab, then click the Settings button in the Pop-up Blocker section. Either way, you’ll see the Pop-up Blocker Settings dialog.
3. Enter the text “*.crm.dynamics.com” (without the quotes) in the Address of website to allow field, and click the Add button. After you do that, the Pop-up Blocker Settings dialog should look something like Figure 1:   Note: There are lots of options for Pop-up Blocker Settings, but the most important is to add your specific Dynamics CRM organization, or *.crm.dynamics.com as I’ve done here. I added the * in front is because I’m affiliated with lots of CRM organizations. This wildcard entry instructs IE to allow pop-ups for any CRM organization I navigate to.	Figure 1: Allow Pop-ups for *.crm.dynamics.com

Next, identify Dynamics CRM Online AND the Windows Live login site as trusted sites:

I recently upgraded my laptop from Windows XP to Windows 7, and overall my experience has been almost as good as that of the people in the “My Idea” campaign. The task bar, for example, really IS a nice feature. And it takes my laptop about 30 seconds to start up now, down from about 10 minutes at the end of its XP life.

But I’m a CRM guy, and I spend about three quarters of my online time working with Dynamics CRM. And since the native client is Internet Explorer, my real acid test is how well the Dynamics CRM experience is delivered through Internet Explorer. Even more specifically, just in case it matters, here’s what I run:

• Dynamics CRM Online
• Internet Explorer 8

My experience has not been a good one, and being a relatively savvy user of Dynamics CRM, I’m getting a little nervous about supporting clients with this configuration.

Integration scenarios like this are hard to test and hard to troubleshoot, but here’s a summary of the problems I’ve experienced:

• Running IE 8 in Windows 7 is much more annoying than my Windows XP experience, mainly because of the constant nagging about popups. I turn my speakers off on a regular basis but Windows 7 always seems to turn them back on. This problem is more an annoyance than anything else, but still, it would be nice if I could make it go away.
• More serious is that sometimes a difficult to troubleshoot combination of factors renders CRM inaccessible. For example, currently I need to access one of the many Dynamics CRM Online organizations I’m associated with. I’m signed in with my Windows Live ID and get as far as a form like this one:

I can follow instructions as well as the next guy, so I click the Go button. What happens next? You guessed it: I return to the same screen, no matter how many times I click Go. (and today is 2/22, btw, so it’s not the scheduled maintenance. My guess is this has something to do with a combination of settings for Trusted Sites (of which this site is one) and the Popup Blocker (for which this site has it turned off).

• Even worse, there’s another combination of settings that will cause your sign-in form to call itself repeatedly, endlessly flickering away. The novelty wears off quickly, and when that happens, you also cannot access the Dynamics CRM organization you’re trying to get to. When I first encountered this particular problem I assumed it was because of some egregious mistake I was making (after all, I’d read all the articles saying how great Dynamics CRM was in IE 8!), so I’d tweak a few settings, maybe turn off the popup blocker, reboot, and find my way back in to the CRM org I needed to get to.  But recently I’ve been working on a project with Martin Donnelly, who is way smarter than I am, and he encountered the same issue (he’s running Vista). I felt better about myself after that, but it made me even more nervous about the prospect of supporting customers!

Dynamics CRM Online is a fantastic product; in most ways it sets the standard for how cloud CRM should work. But dependence for its UI on your OS/browser combination has its costs, and the fact that it sometimes doesn’t work and is difficult to troubleshoot when it doesn’t is a big one. If you’ve got the magic bullet IE 8 settings for these issues, please let me know and I’ll add you along with Martin Donnelly to the smarter-than-Richard category and head off some customer-satisfaction issues in the same go!

How do you take the information submitted on a web form and pop it into Dynamics CRM? This feature – sometimes referred to generically as “web-to-CRM”, or “lead-to-CRM” – is not included in Dynamics CRM 4.0 on-premise, but has been added to Dynamics CRM Online. The built-in approach in the cloud version is better than nothing, but there’s a better solution, Web2CRM from CRMInnovation, if you’re willing to spend $495.

The Dynamics CRM Online implementation is a good start, but as I said it’s somewhat limited:

• The only entity a web form can push data into is the Lead entity. 
• Before going into the Lead entity, the data make a stop in a temporary holding place referred to as the “Internet Lead”. And these must be manually imported before they become “real” lead records. This is a big limitation, because it means you can’t have an auto-responder workflow run immediately after a visitor to your web site fills out a form.
• You can only have a maximum of ten lead capture forms.

On the positive side, the forms you can create are beautiful – much better than anything I could ever design, certainly. Here’s an example, the Dynamics CRM User Group February meeting registration form, in all its Emerald glory: https://img.leads.dynamicssite.com/DCRMUG-Registration.aspx

If you need a more flexible web-to-CRM capability, you should consider Web2CRM from CRMInnovation. (www.CRMInnovation.com). This add-on works with both Dynamics CRM Online and on-premise, and overcomes all of the limitations of the Dynamics CRM Online implementation. Here’s an article I wrote about it a while back: http://www.dynamicscrmtrickbag.com/2009/04/23/auto-responders/

Once you have a tool like this, you’ll be surprised at how useful it can be in various scenarios:

• You can use it to create surveys, pushing the survey results into a custom entity in Dynamics CRM. (Here’s one I made for the Dynamics CRM User Group Annual Member Survey)
• You can use it to create information request forms, allowing a visitor to your web site to request information on various products or services you offer. Here’s one I made that lets you select one of a couple CRM customization samples to get e-mailed back to you.  
• You could create a special offer form with a text field for an rsvp code. Send out the rsvp code in an e-mail so only your VIP customers get the rsvp. You’ll be redeeming rsvp’s for your VIPs ASAP! 

And of course, you can simply collect information from people who might be interested in your stuff. Here’s a form that lets you subscribe to the Trick Bag, created with the Web2CRM, humbly submitted for your form-submitting pleasure: http://www.dynamicscrmtrickbag.com/subscribe/

Dynamics CRM is the best place to store your customer information, and track all of your sales, marketing and service interactions with them. Unfortunately, it’s not the best place to perform some of those interactions, such as e-mail. Yes, it’s fine for tracking one-off e-mails (especially if you’re using the Outlook client), but when it comes to e-mail marketing, the out-of-the-box features of Dynamics CRM leave plenty to be desired. What we need is e-mail marketing integrated with Dynamics CRM. There are more options all for this all the time, and in this article I discuss integrations for both Exact Target and Constant Contact, and my recent experience with the Constant Contact integration.

First, why do we need integration with a third-party application? Here’s a quick summary of the limitations of a 100%-pure Dynamics CRM e-mail marketing approach:

• The e-mail editor is weak, and creating nicely formatted e-mail templates is difficult. It’s true you can use Word mail-merge, but that’s a bit clunky, and only really works well if you’re using the Outlook client.
• If you do send out an e-mail blast to hundreds or thousands of recipients, all of those e-mails will be sent out directly from your e-mail server, a fact that will neither endear you with the spam police nor get you a very high delivey rate.
• Finally, you will have no statistics on what happens to all those e-mails: How many are delivered, how many are opened, how many links get clicked and who clicks them?

All of these limitations can be overcome if you use a hosted e-mail marketing service, like Exact Target or Constant Contact. Once you get used to their features you’ll never want to do e-mail marketing any other way. That is, until you get tired of the hassle of continually exporting your contacts from CRM, importing into the e-mail marketing platform, and maintaining opt-outs in two different places!

Until Microsoft includes these important features into the core product, what we need is integrated e-mail marketing. This is available for some of the e-mail marketing platforms, including Exact Target and Constant Contact, with the following features:

Exact Target provides a direct integration of its e-mail marketing features with Dynamics CRM. I’ve never used it but have many customers who use it and like it. It’s been out for a long time, and apparently includes an “Exact Target” option in the marketing campaign “Channel” list, which if selected allows an elegant direct integration, so you can simply distribute an e-mail activity from you campaign and have Exact Target deliver it, track responses and synch them back to your Dynamics CRM. Two problems with Exact Target:

• It’s quite expensive.
• Worse (from my standpoint, this was the deal-killer), it only works with the on-premise edition of Dynamics CRM. My production CRM is in the cloud, so I can’t use it.

Constant Contact does not integrate directly, but a third-party, Zero2TenCRM, has created a solution. It’s called CRM to Constant Contact, CCC (pronounced C-cubed) for short. I’ve been using this solution lately, and while it isn’t quite as tight as the Exact Target approach, I like it. Basically, it allows you to flag a marketing list to “Synch with the E-mail provider”, in which case the members of the list get pushed automatically to Constant Contact (CC) as a “contact list”. In CC, contact lists are what you execute your e-mail campaigns against, so this automatic synching relieves the pain of exporting, importing and all that. Even better, after you send your CC e-mail, all of those great statistics (opens, clicks, etc.) display like normal in CC, but also get synched back to your Dynamics CRM. Plus, it meets my runs-in-the-cloud criterion, working as it does with both the on-premise and Online versions of Dynamics CRM.

The following figure shows one of the product’s customizations to my Dynamics CRM:

Notice the “Synch to e-mail provider” button at the bottom of my marketing list form. Select it, save the list, and the next time you go to your Constant Contact, you’ll have what CC refers to as a “Contact List” (essentially the same thing as a Dynamics CRM marketing list) automatically created and synchronized with the CRM list.

As I mentioned above, having my marketing lists synchronized between Dynamics CRM and Constant Contact is a nice feature and saves me a lot of importing, exporting and double list maintenance hassle. But it gets even better after I send out a marketing e-mail from CC. Here’s what I’m used to seeing, in CC:

With this integration, here’s what I can now see in Dynamics CRM:

This is the corresponding summary information for the “E-Mail Marketing” campaign that the CCC application automatically creates in Dynamics CRM when a Constant Contact e-mail is sent to a synchronized marketing list. Now, all the great response data I used to have locked up separately in Constant Contact is now available where I need it and where I can do something with it: right in my Dynamics CRM where it belongs.

No product is perfect, and here are a couple areas where this one needs-improvement:

• Synching is (quite!) asynchronous and there’s no manual synch capability. If you’re as impatient as I am to see all those opens and click-throughs, this is a bummer.
• In the CCC approach, the e-mail IS the campaign. Every CC e-mail creates an “E-Mail Marketing Campaign” in your Dynamics CRM. This is a little less flexible than the standard CRM marketing campaign, which can have multiple campaign activities (e-mails, letters, phone calls, etc.)

These are minor, however, compared to the time this product saves me and the valuable campaign response data I now get automatically synched to my Dynamics CRM, where it belongs. A representative from Zero2TenCRM will be presenting at the February 11 meeting of the Dynamics CRM User Group, so if you want to check this tool out, please join us! Attendance at the meeting is free, and you should go here to register if you’d like to attend.