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.

 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!

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

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

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Background: Our Move to the Cloud

There’s a lot to like about Microsoft’s SaaS version of CRM, Dynamics CRM Online (http://crm.dynamics.com ). In a recent article, I provided an overview of my company’s experience over the last year as we migrated all of our mission-critical IT functions from a traditional on-premise infrastructure to hosted services. Whatever you call it – SaaS, cloud computing, hosted – the most important benefit of migrating is that you don’t have to worry about the purely technical aspects of hosting: they become the job of whoever’s doing the hosting.

The IT functions we migrated to the cloud included E-mail, our web site, my blog, our CRM, and our Intranet site for document management and collaboration. Of all of these, our CRM migration – from the on-premise Microsoft Dynamics CRM 4.0 Enterprise version to the hosted Dynamics CRM Online – was far and away the best experience. It fulfilled the promise of cloud computing in many important ways, so I thought I’d recount them, in the form of a top five list.

So, without further ado, the…

Top Five Reasons to Like Dynamics CRM Online

1. Great up and running experience. The process of getting up and running is flawless. In my opinion, most businesses will be able to sign up, add users, and be up and running in a day, without requiring dedicated IT staff or any previous CRM experience. This seems to be the whole point of cloud computing, and not everybody gets it right. (BPOS, for example, is Microsoft’s cloud combination of Exchange E-mail, SharePoint and Live Meeting. The BPOS on-boarding experience is time-consuming, complex and will for most organizations require the assistance of experienced specialists. )

   What I’m describing as the “up and running” experience for Dynamics CRM Online is the alternative to the installation process for the on-premise version. The on-premise version is installed on your own servers, and must be installed on top of an already-solid platform consisting of Windows Server 2003 or 2008, SQL Server 2005 or 2008, the correct version of the .NET Framework, the latest hot fixes and security patches, and some other things. After going through your “pre-installation checklist”, the installation of Dynamics CRM isn’t too bad…but still, it’s a multi-step process that takes some experience to really feel comfortable with, and it really should be done by an IT professional. 

   Contrast the on-premise installation process with the Dynamics CRM Online up and running experience: Choose a name for your organization. Pay for at least five users ($44/month per user, Microsoft will charge your credit card after each month). Add the users with the (what else?) New Users wizard. That’s it: nothing to install, Microsoft does the heavy lifting for you.

    

2. No (unplanned) downtime. Starting in March of 2008, I’ve either had a demonstration organization or our production version running on Dynamics CRM Online, and as far as I know we’ve never had any unplanned downtime. Periodically we are notified, well in advance of planned downtime for server maintenance or upgrades performed in the Big Data Center in the Cloud. It’s usually on a weekend night and it’s usually for about 4 hours.

    

3. No server maintenance. Not only do we have 100% planned up-time, but we don’t have to perform backups, install patches or hot fixes, do performance tuning, etc. I’m still not sure what the precise argument was in the famous article by Nicholas Carr, IT Doesn’t Matter, but I do know this: if by “IT” we mean installing and maintaining server software, maintaining connectivity and providing bandwidth, then all that matters to me is whether it works, not who actually does it.
4. Two deployment options, one platform architecture. Microsoft is nearly unique in having both an on-premise and an online option, and as far as I know entirely unique in having the same architecture for both options. What this means is that you can migrate data and customizations either way: from on-premise to online, or from online to on-premise. There are lots of scenarios this single-architecture supports. Here are three examples:

• I can prototype customizations in an on-premise organization, demo them to a client running Dynamics CRM Online, and then export them from the on-premise organization to the client’s production online system when ready.
• An organization might start with the online platform, and then migrate to on-premise if its user-count grows enough to justify the IT investment.
• The flip-side is just as easy: an organization currently running on-premise can migrate everything to the online platform.

  I should add a caveat to this last point: there are some customization techniques supported for on-premise that are not supported for online (see below). If your organization relies on some of these, a migration from on-premise to online will be more difficult.

5. In the Cloud, new features just happen! This is something it took me a while to fully appreciate. If you’re running the on-premise version, you don’t get new features until the next product version ships. If you’re running online, you get new features every time Microsoft does a “service update”. According to my count, there have been two service updates so far for Dynamics CRM Online, and each one has added very important new functionality in an area of special interest to me, Internet Marketing. There’s another one coming in a month or so that will feature some more cool new features.

So if you’re running Dynamics CRM Online now, you’re getting a sneak preview of features the on-premise product won’t see until Dynamics CRM 4.0 comes out! For example, some important new features will be in the November 2009 service update. Here’s a preview.

What’s not to Like?

Nothing’s perfect, including Dynamics CRM Online. Here are a few areas where the online experience suffers in comparison to on-premise:

• Some limitations on ability to extend. While the customization architecture is the same, there are some limitations on how you can extend the product in its online version. Basically, the customizations you can perform are either ones that use the built-in tools, or ones that extend the platform using web services and the methods they expose. This includes a LOT of customizations…but not everything you might want to do. Here’s a quick summary of all of the customizations tactics available in the on-premise version, and the subset of those available in online, ca. October 2009:

   

• Many add-on products not yet available for online version. This is actually a corollary of the previous point: since many of the ISVs who have developed add-ons for Dynamics CRM have exploited the extension techniques that aren’t yet available for online, some of their extensions aren’t yet available. I won’t provide a long list here, but suffice it to say that the ISVs who have versions of their products available for online as well as on-premise now are more the exception than the rule.

• No “multi-tenancy” for online. Multi-tenancy is available only in the (on-premise) CRM 4.0 Enterprise Edition, and means you can create multiple “organizations” within a single deployment. Since data and customizations live at the organization level, multiple organizations give you LOTS of important benefits, such as support for separate development, test, and production organizations. I use them all the time to implement prototype and demo organizations I can show a customer, before migrating customizations to a production system.

  Anyway, this feature isn’t available for online, so unless you’re fortunate enough to also have an on-premise Enterprise Edition, it means prototyping and testing must happen in your production environment.

All these Tradeoffs!

Like I said, nothing’s perfect, and the fact that Dynamics CRM Online has a few limitations compared to the on-premise version shouldn’t be too surprising. For many small-medium sized organizations, the advantages of cloud computing – wonderfully realized in the online version of Dynamics CRM – are going to be compelling reasons to consider the platform.

A couple years ago, we regularly saw clients decide to go with Salesforce for the simple reason that it was the only option. These were obviously organizations that had already seen the advantages to cloud computing and were sympathetic to the “no software” pitch.

Now, things have changed a little. Salesforce isn’t the only option anymore, and must now win deals based on good old-fashioned dimensions such as features, price and value. Judging by Microsoft’s recent revenue and revenue-share growth, the CRM marketplace seems to think Dynamics CRM stacks up pretty well!