Dynamics CRM 2011 UI Tips & Tricks

In this article I’ll review a few of my favorite Dynamics CRM 2011 UI tips & tricks. Some of them – such as navigating directly to a page or form within Dynamics CRM – aren’t new, actually, but because there are so many interesting new pages to navigate to, I find myself using them more! Others – keyboard shortcuts to show or hide the ribbon, for example – obviously have no analogous functionality in CRM 4.0.

Navigate directly to a page

This is a good place to start, and the ability to navigate directly to most pages and forms in Dynamics CRM – without “drilling through” the overall CRM UI – works similarly in CRM 2011 as it does in CRM 4.0.

For example, you can navigate directly to the service calendar: add “sm/home_apptbook.aspx” to the end of your organization URL. So if you navigate to https://myorg.crm.dynamics.com, go to https://myorg.crm.dynamics.com/sm/home_apptbook.aspx

The service calendar is a good example of a page that’s a lot more useful the more room you have on the screen. An even better example is with dashboards, which I’ll illustrate below.

Navigate to a View

This works slightly differently than it did in CRM 4.0, but more importantly, the same technique is used in other contexts I’ll show later, such as “Recently Visited” and some others.

 

  1. Navigate to any grid and select the view you want.
  2. On the main tab for the record type (e.g., Opportunities), click the Copy a Link drop-down, and select Of Current View. (Click Allow Access if necessary.)
  3. Then open a new browser window or tab, and paste it from the clipboard. You’ll get something like this:

     

    Open Opportunities: <https://img.crm.dynamics.com/main.aspx?etc=3&extraqs=%3fpagemode%3diframe%26sitemappath%3dSFA%257cSFA%257cnav_oppts&pagetype=entitylist&viewid=%7b7DC65622-79BE-DF11-9816-78E7D162CE29%7d&viewtype=1039>

     

  4. The URL is really designed to be e-mailed. So if you try to browse to it directly you’ll get an error. The trick is to delete everything except for the URL, in the example here, like this:

     

    https://img.crm.dynamics.com/main.aspx?etc=3&extraqs=%3fpagemode%3diframe%26sitemappath%3dSFA%257cSFA%257cnav_oppts&pagetype=entitylist&viewid=%7b7DC65622-79BE-DF11-9816-78E7D162CE29%7d&viewtype=1039

     

Dashboards

I really like the implementation of dashboards in Dynamics CRM 2011. In other articles (like this one, for example) I’ve provided a more systematic explanation of how to work with them, but here I want to focus on a few little UI tricks I’ve found helpful when working with them.

Take advantage of Dashboard-specific chart functionality

If you compare the same chart, exposed through a standard data grid or through a dashboard, you’ll find that the dashboard version has more functionality. Here’s an example that illustrates the difference:

 

  1. On the site map, click Sales and then click Opportunities.
  2. Select the Open Opportunities view, and then expand the chart area to the right of the grid.
  3. Select the Sales Pipeline chart from the drop-down list, and you’ll see something like:

Compare that to the Sales Pipeline chart you’ll see on a dashboard. For example, you can navigate to the out of the box “Sales Performance Dashboard”, which includes a sales pipeline chart, or you can create your own custom dashboard and add a sales pipeline chart. Either way, when you interact with a chart on a dashboard, it has two extra controls highlighted here:

The first one (”View the records…”) opens up a new window with whatever data grid is providing the data to the chart. In this example, that would be the opportunities grid with the Open Opportunites view selected (and the chart area expanded.)

 

The second one (”Enlarge the chart”, visible above), is self-explanatory. Click it and the selected chart takes over the UI, so instead of seeing the entire dashboard like this:

You’d see something like this:

 

Click the little “x” to return to the normal dashboard view.

 

Hide the Ribbon for even more dashboard real estate

I like the new Ribbon UI, but sometimes you need all the screen you can get. When viewing a dashboard, try using the Ctrl-Shift-5 keyboard combination. Pretty cool, right? That’s a toggle switch, and if you prefer clicking, you can click the well-hidden “Show the ribbon” button (down-pointing arrow) at the upper right of the UI. The following shot shows the Sales Activity Dashboard with the ribbon hidden:

If you hide the ribbon, it stays hidden until you refresh the browser window, start a new session, or explicitly un-hide it.

Navigate Directly to the Dashboard Page, or to a Specific Dashboard

Navigate directly to the dashboards page by adding “/workplace/home_dashboards.aspx” to the end of the URL for your CRM: https://myorg.crm.dynamics.com/workplace/home_dashboards.aspx

You can also navigate to a specific dashboard, but you have to work a little harder to get its URL, since there’s no “Copy a Link” command on the dashboard ribbon. Here are a couple ways to do it:

 

Option 1: Use the Dashboards “fly-out” menu to copy and tweak the URL:

  1. On the site map, click Workplace, then click Dashboards.
  2. Click the arrow to the right of Dashboards, and then right-click the dashboard you want to access the context menu.
  3. Click Copy a Link, and then Allow Access if necessary.
  4. The URL will be in the same format described above in the Navigate to a View section, so delete the extra stuff on the URL and you can navigate directly to your specific dashboard of choice.

Option 2: Use the fly-out menu to E-Mail a Link:

This is a permutation on the previous approach, but instead of selecting Copy a Link, select E-Mail a Link… from the context menu. When you do this you’ll understand why that link format has all the extra stuff on it: it’s really designed to be e-mailed:

Notice the value in the URL after the “dashboardid=” and between the two “%7″ values. That’s the 38-character GUID that uniquely identifies records in Dynamics CRM.

Take Advantage of Recently Visited Pages and Views

Wherever you happen to be in CRM 2011 (assuming a form doesn’t have the current focus), use the Ctrl-Shift-7 keyboard combo to display the “Recently Visited Pages and Views”:

Pages and forms are on the left, views on the right. Dynamics CRM 2011 populates these lists on a first-in first-out basis, with the most recently visited destinations at the top. What this means is that you’re never more than two clicks away from forms and views you’ve recently interacted with, and if you right-click an item here you can “pin” it – you can see I’ve pinned the Open Opportunities and Active Accounts views in the previous figure.

Experiment with this & see what you think. I’ve been using it more and more and it really does make navigating easier. The maximum number of stored items in Recently Viewed is 40 for pages & forms, 10 for views.

My reading of the documentation on this feature indicates that if you pin something it should stay pinned across sessions. But I seem to have to keep pinning these things repeatedly, and I’m not quite sure whether to chalk that up to beta behavior, deleting my IE history, or something else.

Use the Shortcut Menu for Views and Records

Suppose I’m working with one record type and I want to quickly navigate to another. For example, I’m working in the Goals grid and I want to do something with Accounts, such as make a change to a record I’d just made some other changes to. In CRM 4.0 I’d have to do something like the following:

  1. Click on Accounts on the site map, then wait for the default view to load.
  2. Locate the record I need to update.
  3. Open its form, make and save the changes, close the form.
  4. Navigate back to Goals and continue working

In CRM 2011, I can do this, all without leaving the Goals grid:

  1. Hover over Accounts on the site map.
  2. Click the flyout menu to the right of Accounts.
  3. Click the recently changed record to open its form, make and save the changes, close it and pick up where I left off.

Once you get used to this it really saves some time. I think the biggest timesaver is from not having to wait for the default view to load – at first you have to force yourself NOT to click the record type you want to work with, but you get used to it after a bit.

Here’s a shot of the shortcut menu for accounts; I’m about to open a form to make some changes and I never have to load the accounts grid:

Drag and Drop Links to Create a “Links Dashboard” in a Folder

The trick here is to expose the address box in Internet Explorer. As long as you can do that, you can drag the icon to the left of the URL and drop it onto your desktop, or into a folder with other frequently used links. This is an “IE thing” rather than a “CRM thing”, but I find it particularly useful for Dynamics CRM…and especially so with CRM 2011 dashboards now in the mix. You can use the techniques I described in this article to create a simple “links dashboard”, containing links to CRM records, pages, views, dashboards, and so forth. Here’s one that includes examples of all of these:

Use Links List in SharePoint to Provide Easy Access to CRM 2011 Pages, Views, and Dashboards

Organizations with widespread use of SharePoint might want to consider exposing Dynamics CRM from within SharePoint. If people are used to going into SharePoint it can be a way of promoting CRM and giving it greater visibility. There are complicated ways of doing it, and easy ones…here’s I’ll suggest an easy one: create a “links list” consisting of links to pages, views and dashboards in Dynamics CRM 2011.

This might seem like a different version of the “folder” approach I just discussed, but one important difference is that the SharePoint approach can be centrally managed and deployed, so it doesn’t require each user to create his or her own folder of links. For example, here’s what the top page of my CRM practice SharePoint site looks like:

With this approach, any visitor to this page has one-click access to the CRM pages, views and dashboards I want to drive internal traffic to.

January 2, 2011 · Filed under CRM 2011, Tips, Tricks, Q&A

Leave a Comment