Comments & Responses

1. Daniel Cai Said,
   

   October 7, 2011 @ 8:59 am · Edit
   

   Nice summary, thanks Richard.
   

   It may be worth noting that role-tailored dashboard is available in Q4 release.
   

2. Metaphorix Said,
   

   October 7, 2011 @ 9:08 am · Edit
   

   Excellent blog post. Microsoft are really putting some effort into CRM and it is getting better all the time.
   

3. AdamV Said,
   

   October 9, 2011 @ 12:32 am · Edit
   

   “Record URL” field available as a dynamic value. – Hooray! At long last I can stop explaining to clients why this thing that takes 20 seconds to request in a planning meeting adds so much work to the project (”Just send an email about the closed case to the account manager with a link to it…oh, and do that too for opportunities, tasks, appointments…..”)
   

   Multiple series charts will be great, even if only used for simple things like a stacked bar chart of some metric, broken down by territory or account manager (if there are only a few of those), or maybe something like live cases by priority/severity (bar per day of when they were opened). Line charts for sales by total and by profit margin work too but only in fairly high-margin businesses otherwise the lower line is almost flattened out by the axis scaling.
   

   Nobody has a good use case for doughnut charts, period. In or out of CRM. Radar charts have a very tiny number of use cases, and most of the times they are used they are not the best choice, and often a simple bar is a better propsition.
   

   I would also like to see all 3-D effects banned, or better still actually deprecated and removed from the application, especially those using perspective, shadows and gradient fills. Pyramids – useless. 3D pie chart or doughnut – dreadful.
   

   Personally I hate funnel charts too. I get that people love the metaphor, but unfortunately as a visualisation they are appalling, since the stuff at the narrow end always looks disproportionately smaller than it should. Cover up either side of a central strip and you have a stacked bar chart in all the correct proportions. Everything in the triangular areas to either side is just misleading decoration, like a huge fibreglass body kit and spoilers on an under-powered car.
   

4. Marc Said,
   

   October 13, 2011 @ 7:46 am · Edit
   

   Good news about multi-series support in the R7 Chart Designer. Will R7 also provide multi-category support in the Chart Designer?
   

5. Bob H. Said,
   

   October 14, 2011 @ 2:28 pm · Edit
   

   Richard, thanks as always. Any idea of a release date? I have two clients that will probably benefit.
   

Thanks for the comments all! Responses to each:

Daniel: I don’t think I saw role-tailored dashboards in the demo I looked at. I hope you’re right — that would be a good thing.

Metaphorix: thanks!

Adam: Your comment was on the verge of an article. Thanks for that. J I’m always looking for good content so if you ever want to pen a guest article just let me know!

I once did a PRM (perp-relationship manager) for the local police precinct and they were all over the doughnut chart. Other than that, I agree with you. As for radar charts, I’d love to come up with a compelling use of these, but as you indicate, it’s not that easy. For example, this view of my pipeline doesn’t exactly scream intuition:

Funnel charts are misleading, you’re right, since everybody assumes the narrowing funnel indicates smaller aggregates, which it doesn’t. But people still seem to like them.

Marc: I believe multiple categories will be supported also, not 100% sure.

Bob: my guess is late this month. Let’s keep our fingers crossed!

Activity Feeds

I did not include this potentially important new feature in the earlier article, but after a session at the Chicago chapter meeting of CRMUG earlier this week I got to thinking about it. The R7 Preview Guide is worth reading on this topic, and here’s a visual Microsoft uses to describe a suggested taxonomy for the online communities made possible by social media.

• Internal: think employee Intranets.
• Managed: think partner/customer portals, Facebook pages, forums, blogs.
• Independent: the rest of the socialsphere; anything out there not managed by a company or organization.

This seems to me a reasonable taxonomy and a good way to organize your thinking around social CRM generally. But the main use of the “three communities model” in the preview guide is to scope the Activity Feeds feature:

The Q4 2011 service update will deliver the first of several waves of social innovation for Microsoft Dynamics CRM. This release will deliver Activity Feeds which simplify business insight and collaboration across internal communities.

From the demo I saw at Extreme, it looks like this will be a configurable “wall” for activity feeds having to do with the various Dynamics CRM records you’re interested in, or following. For example:

To me, it looked like these activity feeds are driven by a customizable record type – something like Post, if I recall correctly – which could make it interesting from a customization standpoint. At first it seemed somewhat limited in the “first wave” since it only applies to internal communities. But I thought about it more after Paul Cielinski of Broadlook’s presentation at the CRMUG meeting last week. One of the cool apps Broadlook has is Profiler. And one of the things Profiler can do is bring individual fields from public LinkedIn profiles into your Dynamics CRM. Paul also showed a feature where you can apparently schedule regular imports of information updated on a LinkedIn profile you’ve connected to a contact.

I haven’t used Profiler yet, and R7 isn’t out yet, so this is pure speculation. But to me it seems that the Broadlook LinkedIn integration, combined with an activity feed on contacts, might extend the social integration out past the internal communities only restriction even in wave 1. I guess we’ll find out soon enough!

Social CRM

And by the way, on the general topic of social CRM, I’m way overdue for an update on this topic and will write a more complete article shortly; a few thoughts in the meantime:

A year ago social CRM was for the most part a topic bloggers and CRM geeks (not to mention social CRM geeks) were interested in. My impression is that in the last 6 months it’s become mainstream. That is, now actual customers are interested in it, especially in how to integrate LinkedIn and CRM. Anyway, here’s a quick & dirty roundup of the efforts I’m aware of to integrate social media with Dynamics CRM, categorized according to a highly non-scientific organizational scheme I just made up:

Prospecting and Sales Intelligence-centric

• InsideView. I’m an InsideView user and fan.
• Broadlook. I’m a Broadlook fan, not yet a user. Hopefully soon.

E-Mail Marketing-centric

• CoreMotives. Now apparently has InsideView bundled or built in.
• ClickDimensions. As far as I know, nothing bundled with ClickDimensions yet.

Dynamics CRM-centric

• Vibe from Sonoma Partners
• Pulse from Neudesic
• Parrot from Webfortis

Of the CRM-centric approaches, the only one I’ve used is Parrot. I haven’t used it enough to form an educated opinion about it, but I’ll say this much: the free trial managed solution they’ve used to package the solution imports successfully. J

Both Webfortis and Sonoma Partners have trial versions you can download from the Dynamics Marketplace as managed solutions and see how they work. Neudesic may have a free trial but my cursory search didn’t locate it.

Dear Richard Knudson,

Congratulations! We are pleased to present you with the 2011 Microsoft® MVP Award! This award is given to exceptional technical community leaders who actively share their high quality, real world expertise with others. We appreciate your outstanding contributions in Dynamics CRM technical communities during the past year…

I’d been nominated a few months back and this was my official notification. Yay, me! (It’s hard to write self-congratulatory copy, but what the heck: somebody’s gotta do it!)

I spent some time over the weekend getting up to speed on the MVP web site, and here are a few links I thought you might find interesting:

• The MVP program web site.
• My profile page, including the required 78×100 pixel jpg photo centered on my face.
• My friend Toby Richard’s recorded interview on the MVP value proposition.
• All 49 Dynamics CRM MVPs in the whole world.
• All 2 Dynamics CRM MVPs with “Training” as their technical competency.
• All 4 Dynamics CRM MVPs from Australia.
• The independent site, MVPs.org.
• Ken (”The Hawk”) Harrelson’s Wikipedia page.
• Ichiro Suzuki’s statistics and history page.

Anyway, I’m honored by the award, and really looking forward to deepening my level of engagement with the worldwide Dynamics CRM community!

Lovely day in Springfield. Cecil Renshaw, proprietor of http://www.sharepointbiz.com/Pages/default.aspx, put on an excellent show today at Erin’s Pavilion (http://www.microsoftsharepoint.info/MSEvent2011.htm). Cecil talked me into giving three presentations, and since I knew I wouldn’t remember anything I talked about, I figured I better record as much as I could.

My session 2 was a drill-down on a couple of techniques to integrate Dynamics CRM 2011 and SharePoint 2010. I’m a CRM guy for the most part, so these are definitely of the CRM-centric variety. Here’s what’s in the demo I recorded:

• The first part is about setting up and using the Dynamics CRM 2011 List Component for SharePoint 2010. (and that’s the short version of the product name!). This is brand-new functionality, and requires CRM 2011 and SP 2010 with the List Component installed.
• The second part is about contextual search of a SharePoint site from a Dynamics CRM record (e.g., account). This approach has been around a while: use an IFrame on a CRM form, and use form script to update the source of the IFrame with a SharePoint search URL. What’s new and interesting about this piece is the new Xrm.Page object model you need to use in CRM 2011 form script. The code’s kind of hard to read in the video, so here it is (on the change event of an option set field), with the base URL for the SharePoint site hardwired in this case to my company’s site. (After the code, the video)

function DisplayWebSiteInIFrame()
{
 if (Xrm.Page.getAttribute("rgk_website").getSelectedOption().text != null) {

   var selectedwebsite = Xrm.Page.getAttribute("rgk_website").getSelectedOption().text;

   var IFrame = Xrm.Page.ui.controls.get("IFRAME_selectedwebsite");

   var Address = Xrm.Page.getAttribute("address1_line1").getValue();
   Address = Address + " " + Xrm.Page.getAttribute("address1_city").getValue();
   Address = Address + " " + Xrm.Page.getAttribute("address1_stateorprovince").getValue();    

   switch(selectedwebsite)
   {
      case "SharePoint" :
         IFrame.setSrc("https://sp.magenium.com/search/Pages/Results.aspx?k=" + Xrm.Page.getAttribute("name").getValue() );
         break;

      case "Bing Maps" :
         IFrame.setSrc("http://www.bing.com/maps/?q=" + Address);
         break;
   }
 }
}

Enjoy:

• Last year was the “cloud + social” Convergence. (If you care for a ride on the way-back machine, here’s my Convergence 2010 summary.) This year there was plenty of talk about the cloud, and plenty about social’s impact on and inclusion in Dynamics CRM, but not in the same proportion as last year. Partly this is because cloud and social are no longer the new-new thing, but more importantly because Dynamics CRM 2011 is the new-new thing, and you can only have so many sessions!

   

• The CRM session topics provide a pretty good summary of the most important new features of the new version (and a few soon-to-be-new features, such as integration with cloud SharePoint in Office 365):
  • Harnessing Cloud Technologies with CRM 2011. Building solutions on Azure+Office 365+Dynamics CRM 2011
  • What’s New in CRM 2011
  • Harnessing Social Technologies with CRM 2011. how, and why, to integrate Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn into CRM solutions.
  • Complex Business Process Management in CRM 2011: one of my favorites, on workflows and the new dialog processes, plus how to custom workflows on the .NET/WWF framework.
  • Behind the Cloud: How Microsoft Runs Dynamics CRM 2011 Online. That is: how does Microsoft manage the massive scale required by its CRM Online. I didn’t go to this one but I wanted to. In Kiril Tatarinov’s keynote we learned that there’ve been 40,000 30-day free trials since CRM 2011 Online launched in February. I personally account for .001% of them, so I find this topic interesting!
  • Boost your Sales and Marketing Productivity with CRM 2011. This was about productivity, user-adoption, the new UI and the Outlook client.
  • Customer Care Accelerator R2 for CRM 2011. Yes, the Accelerators live, and apparently have made the transition to CRM 2011!
  • MS Dynamics Labs presents Graduating from Accelerators to Solutions. I didn’t get to this one either, but it sounds important. Any of these accelerators available yet as managed solutions downloadable from the Dynamics Marketplace?
  • Solutions Management in CRM 2011: Drill Down. This made my top three list. Anusha Shankar was the most upbeat presenter I saw. She absolutely loves those solutions! Especially the managed ones, I think.
  • Analytics Made Simple with CRM 2011. Eric Boocock’s presentation was very good, but it was 100-level, so I didn’t get as much out of it as I did Barry Givens’ session. See next.
  • Advanced Analytics for CRM 2011. Barry Givens’ presentation was definitely the best one I attended. I even considered attending the repeat session he gave! Custom charts and dashboards, contextual dashboards (e.g., turn the account form into an account dashboard), good perspective on analytical uses of Web Resources, the best short presentation on FetchXML and SSRS reports for CRM online I’ve seen. I always figure if I attend at least one presentation as good as this one, it makes the show a worthwhile thing.

  And by the way, I’ll cover a lot of topics similar to to what Barry did in my upcoming “Super-Mega Dashboard and Reporting Blowout” session (the April session of my monthly CRM Essentials for Customizers). Find out more and register here…

  • Then there were a passel of industry and vertical sessions focusing on the xRM thing: oil & gas, manufacturing, a few others. Sadly, no legal unless I missed it somehow.
  • xRM in the public sector and education was a mini-theme all its own. I attended two sessions on this and they were very good.

     

• The best line I heard was from John Leonard, a Microsoft public sector SSP. John was introducing a mini case-study discussion about an xRM application the IL Dept. of Corrections implemented to improve its ability to track and manage the 45,000 inmates in its 27 facilities. The first line of his intro: “Like all good stories, this one starts in prison”.
  

   

• As I said, the public sector sessions were quite good. One of the highlights was a demonstration by Todd Sharp of Engage, a Microsoft partner focused on developing public sector add-ons on the xRM platform. (Their web site is www.engage2day.com, which Todd pointed out, paying dutiful tribute to Engage’s marketing team, is not just a URL, but also a call to action.) He showed the coolest xRM application I’ve seen in the last few days. It’s called USFederal360, and it mashes up a number of subscription databases in areas like public records, makes them all available to subscribers in a totally xRM UI, refreshes them periodically, but you can associate your own data with them, such as activities and other record types. Anyway, this app is definitely cool, and since I want to keep this article pithy, I definitely won’t describe it any further. Check it out here: http://www.usfederal360.com/

   

• Of course, I made a couple of visits to the conference bookstore, and purchased the brand new, updated edition of Jim Steger’s and Mike Snyder’s Working with Microsoft Dynamics CRM 2011. The 4.0 version (same title, substitute 4.0 for 2011) is a classic of the genre, possibly the best computer book I’ve ever read. (Certainly the one I’ve read the most!) I haven’t read the new one thoroughly yet, but I’ll review it shortly. Anyway, even if it’s not as good as their Working with Microsoft Dynamics CRM 4.0, it probably belongs in your Dynamics CRM library. Here’s an article written by my good friend Jerry Weinstock (who unfortunately I didn’t get a chance to talk to at Convergence), called the Microsoft Dynamics CRM 2011 Book Club. It’s got mini-reviews and links to the books currently out on CRM 2011.

   

• I was disappointed that I did not get to attend sessions by either Julie Yack or Anne Stanton. If you did, you probably understand why I was disappointed that I didn’t. At least I got to see them a few times. And I finally met Jim Glass in person. Jim (perhaps you know him as JaAG?) authors my favorite CRM blog, A CRM Riff. One remarkable fact about JaAG’s blog is that it’s the only one I’m aware of with enough data in the archives to perform time series analysis. Unbelievable! He’s got an unbroken string from Feb. 2005, and has averaged a little over 12 articles a month since then. Here’s the total article count by month, along with a 6-month moving average to make the trend more obvious:

The apparent downward trend since about January 2008 worried me a little at first, until I checked out JaAG’s other blog, http://biskey7.wordpress.com/ , and figured out this was probably some kind of positive indicator for work-life balance. Phew!

•  Last but not least, I ran into my friend Jonathan Lee  of the Riics Corporation as he was heading to the airport, and we had an extremely efficient 5-minute conversation as I walked him to his cab. He just sent me an e-mail and asked me about something I inexcusably forgot to include in the first edition of this article: what are the best card scanners for CRM?  (How could this topic NOT be included in a Convergence summary article?) Here are the two I’ve had personal experience with, and have recommended to clients who’ve had success with them:
  • Cardiris 5 for Windows, from IrisCard: http://www.irislink.com/c2-1690-63/Cardiris-5-for-Windows.aspx 
  • CardScan, from DYMO: http://sites.dymo.com/Solutions/Pages/Seg_cat_lndg.aspx?cat=CardScanCMS(DYMO)&locale=enUS

So there’s my summary of Convergence 2011. Besides missing Julie’s and Anne’s sessions, my only regrets are the other sessions I didn’t get to. Now, if only I can find where the recorded sessions are posted! Anybody know?

On a personal note, I know that Brad is not only an engaging presenter, but that he’s also gracious when somebody barges in late when he’s presenting, as I described in this article, Bridget’s Doodles, from May 13 of last year.

Feb 22, 2011 — Most blogs, mine included, list articles in descending order by date. I wanted to post all of the Brad Wilson Chronicles in one article (nothing personal, Brad!), but it didn’t seem right to do it descending order, for some reason. So, here’s Session 2, which I found even more interesting than the first. In which Brad explains why Dynamics CRM costs one third as much as salesforce.com, and gives the best pithy summary I’ve heard of the benefits of being able to run the same product in the cloud or on-premise:

Feb 23, 2011 — Here’s Session 3 in the Brad Wilson Chronicles, in which Brad addresses the question, “How many customers really want CRM in the cloud?”

Feb 24, 2011 — Session 4: “How can Channel Partners Survive in the Cloud Era?”

Feb 25, 2011 — Session 5: Some Drill-down Detail on the Dynamics Marketplace:

In Part 1 of this series on CoreMotives’ digital marketing suite for Dynamics CRM, I focused on the e-mail marketing functionality. In this article I cover what it does in the area of web analytics, which according to Wikipedia, “…provides data on the number of visits, page views etc. to gauge the popularity of the sites which will help to do the market research.”

The first time I saw a demo of this product, I totally got the benefits of e-mail marketing integrated in Dynamics CRM. It took me longer to appreciate the advantages of having web analytics inside my CRM, after all, like most site owners I already use Google Analytics, and why should I duplicate all that information inside CRM?

Now that I get it, it seems like it should have been obvious from the start:

The main reason it makes sense to have web analytics inside CRM is that all those visits and page views are important customer activities, and if all those data are off in Google disconnected from your customers you’ve got a seriously incomplete view of customer activity. It’s really the same argument for having your e-mail marketing integrated within CRM: if an e-mail response is important enough to attach to a contact record, why isn’t a web page visit?

Setup and Implementation

Once you’ve got CoreMotives up and running, turning on web analytics is easy: just like with Google Analytics, you take a snippet of JavaScript code (from CoreMotives) and drop it immediately in front of the closing Body tag on any web page you want to track. For my WordPress-based blog (this one, that is: www.DynamicsCRMTrickBag.com ) it took me a few minutes to remember that if I dropped it in footer.php it would track every page in the site, so that’s what I did, at about 9:39 in the morning on March 12, 2010.

How do I know that? Was it that once in a lifetime moment that you always remember forever and ever like your first Led Zeppelin concert or when your kids were born or when the White Sox won the World Series?

No. I mean it was good, just not quite that good. I know it because I just followed these steps:

1. Clicked on Marketing in the site map.
2. Clicked on Web Page Views.
3. Clicked on the View Date column heading, to flip the sort from Ascending to Descending, and saw the following view, with a value of “3/12/2010 9:40 AM” in the first record:

This illustrates another benefit of the approach CoreMotives has taken. They’ve really done a nice job of exposing web analytics in a way that will be immediately familiar to Dynamics CRM users, such as this Web Page Views custom entity, with easy to understand attributes like Traffic Source, Referring URL and IP City. It’s a “regular” custom entity, with all the attendant benefits: you can perform your own customizations on it, write custom reports for it, customize its views, and so forth.

With an entity like Web Page Views you won’t be surprised to find a Web Pages entity, nor to discover there’s a 1:N relationship from Web Page to Web Page View. Here’s my default view of the Web Page entity:

A few of my favorite things about this:

• They’re tracking views of the URL, of course, but they give you the editable “friendly” name attribute.
• You can customize the “Category” picklist to categorize your pages in the way that works for you.
• Like any customizable entity, you can customize the views. For example, I customized the Active Web Pages view so it sorts in descending order on the View Count column. Sweet!

• And of course, you can use Advanced Find to filter and sort, write custom reports with the Report Wizard, export to Excel…and everything else you can do with Dynamics CRM.

Marketing Integration and Customer Association

And of course, it’s not just about web analytics made convenient because they’re in your familiar Dynamics CRM environment – as good as that is, the real ROI’s probably in its integration with your marketing efforts and how your web site traffic is associated with your customers.

For example, here’s a different view of Web Page Views:

This view makes it obvious web page views can be attached to Dynamics CRM campaigns and customers. Here are three ways to do that, each of which can be seen in this view:

1. When you send a CoreMotives Mailing (see the previous article on that topic) you associate it with a campaign. Opens, Clicks, Bounces, and … alas! .. Unsubscribes are all associated with the campaign.
2. You can also attach a querystring to the end of any inbound link (that is: from some other site, to your site) that identifies one of your campaigns. Notice the “Twitter” campaign at the top of that view? Next time you click one of the short little bitly links in one of my tweets maybe you’ll get a warm and fuzzy feeling knowing you’re creating a web-page view record in my Dynamics CRM associated with the Twitter campaign. (Probably not, but if you do, I appreciate that!)
3. The third column isn’t really “Con…”, it’s Contact(I just skinnied it down to obscure peoples’ names.) This very measurable response to a marketing activity and its association with a contact record is probably the single most important reason to integrate digital marketing within your CRM.

Finally, notice the Traffic Source column at the far right. Here’s how my traffic sources break out over the last six weeks:

A “Link” is an internal link (from one page on your web site to another), a “Referral” is a link from an external site, and “Email Marketing” is a link from a (CoreMotives) marketing email. There’s also a value you can use to track “Paid Search” if you’re doing Google, Bing or Yahoo search advertising. And notice the “Social Network” value: this tracks incoming traffic from LinkedIn, Facebook, Twitter and the other social media, and illustrates the important connection between analytics and “social CRM”.

I’ve been using CoreMotives digital marketing suite since a little over two months, and I’ve only started scratching the surface of what it can do. If my experience is typical, organizations will start with a tool like this for the integrated e-mail marketing capabilities, and then realize over time how important it is to have analytics integrated within CRM.

What’s Not to Like?

Here are a few of the things that go into the “can use some improvement” or “might watch out for” categories:

• Currently the only page views that get resolved to a customer in my CRM (contact or lead records) are direct Email Marketing links, or after someone has filled out a form – everything else is “Anonymous”. I’d like to see more ways of knowing who’s coming in, although I understand this is a challenging problem.
• This is probably obvious, but if you have a lot of web site traffic, you’ll get a lot of data in a hurry! Compared to most sites the Dynamics CRM Trick Bag has fairly low traffic (around 400 page views daily, trending up) but that’s still 12,000 records per month. If you’re getting lots of site traffic you’ll want to do some capacity planning, or maybe consider tracking only a subset of your pages (remember, I implemented the tracking code to track every page on my site, which is by no means a requirement.) For me, this goes into the “nice problem to have” category, and I’m not complaining about site traffic. Bring it on, I’ll figure out how to deal with all the data!
• I’m not crazy about their HTML email template editor. It seems a little brittle, too easy to make mistakes in, and requires you spend too much time tweaking HTML.

Plus, it’s Just Plain Fun

And besides all that serious stuff, it’s really keen to have all these data in Dynamics CRM, since it makes them so much more accessible to Excel Pivot Tables, which I consider to be my data’s True Destiny. For example, here are the last two months of page views broken out by city of origin, for the top twenty cities:

Man, they love me in Highland Park! Istanbul’s giving Chicago a run for its money (thanks Mehmet!). And Bursa is the fourth-largest city in Turkey, the center of its auto-industry, and it became the first major capital city of the Ottoman Empire following its capture from the Byzantines in 1326. Read more about Bursa…

See, I told you it was fun.

Pricing

Finally, the pricing model. Here’s a screenshot from documentation on the CoreMotives web site. And just in case you missed it, there are $0 setup fees and a 15 minute setup:

The $99/month Starter plan might be a good place to start…unless you’re already doing more email marketing than the 2,000 “credits” (one credit per email) that plan buys you. The number of marketing emails you send out per month is something you control. The number of “interactions” you will pay for (see “b” above) is outside your control, as are the “submission of a web page form” and the “tracking a web page view” (”c” and “d”, respectively).

So far, interactions to the emails I send have been running at about 23% (opens) and 9% (clicks). So the email marketing expense is relatively controllable.

The web page view tracking is a different story, however, and especially for organizations who a) have lots of web traffic, and b) are already perfectly happy if they’re getting it free from Google Analytics (or something like that), I’d guess they’d want to keep a sharp eye on the credits they’re burning up tracking anonymous site traffic. But that’s the point of all this, isn’t it? A pricing model like this makes you think hard about things like “what are web analytics worth?”, and “am I getting ROI for what I’m spending?”

My experience so far is that the value of the information I’m getting (and especially the value of having it integrated within my CRM) is considerably higher than what I’m paying. As my site traffic explodes because of the improved content I’m creating because of the information I’m receiving (e.g., maybe I’ll start translating selected articles into Texan, Turkish and German), maybe I’ll reconsider. Time will tell.

In the meantime, there are other add-ons with similar functionality without CoreMotives’ variable-price model. CRMInnovation (developer of the Web2CRM Internet lead capture add-on that I’m a big fan of) recently came out with a digital marketing add-on called…what else? … Email2CRM. I don’t know much about it yet, other than the pricing model being more controllable and that it uses VerticalResponse to create and send the emails. If you’ve got any experience with it, let me know what you think!

Richard Knudson

If you’re coming at this from a CRM-centric mindset (which I am), a good way to think of social CRM is that it considers information in the various social media as meta-data about your customers and potential customers. In Dynamics CRM terms, this very quickly leads to concrete thinking as follows:

• Leads = “potential customers”
• Accounts and Contacts = “customers”

If you’re just getting started with social CRM, it’s best to keep it simple at first, so here I’ll describe possibly the Simplest Ever customization of the Dynamics CRM contact entity that will let you extend your internal CRM information with metadata from LinkedIn. 

Why LinkedIn? Well, it depends on your selling model, but if your customers are businesses and the professionals within those businesses, LinkedIn is probably the best single social source for customer metadata. If you’re selling snowboards, skis or clothes, you might have more luck with Facebook, but let’s start with LinkedIn.

1. Add a custom attribute to the Dynamics CRM contact entity, call it something like “LinkedIn Public Profile”, and give it a data type of “nvarchar” and a format of “URL”. LinkedIn public profile URL’s look like this — http://www.linkedin.com/in/richardknudson – so a maximum length value of 150 should be plenty.
2. I also added a true/false (”bit”) attribute called “First Degree Connection”. LinkedIn uses the “6 degrees of separation” concept, and a first degree connection is the closest and best: where you and another LinkedIn user have agreed to share information and be part of each other’s professional network.
3. Add those attributes as fields on the contact form, and instruct your sales team to start putting their social networking skills to work for the benefit of the organization. (And don’t forget to publish your customizations!)

Here’s the video version:

The contact customization is straightforward, so I won’t do the step-by-step, but here’s a screenshot of how I’ve made it look in my organization. This shows a contact form open, and I’ve just double-clicked on the link stored in the LinkedIn Public Profile field; you can see Todd Shelton’s (a.k.a. CloudRocket) LinkedIn profile as it popped up in a new browser window.

As I (more or less) make the point in the video, here are a few things I like about an example like this, from the standpoint of somebody who wants to realize organizational value by extending their CRM to incorporate social media:

• It signals the sales team that management takes social seriously, and it puts the emphasis on organizational value.
• It starts to build social into the sales process. This means it can be reported on, measured, and included in sales rep training programs; which in turn make you less dependent on the ad-hoc methods of your sales superstars.
• It can easily be extended in lots of ways. For example, you could have a report that grades out a sales rep’s contact records, by attributes like which ones have LinkedIn profiles and which ones are first degree connections.
• It’s simple.

What do you think? How are you adding the social to your CRM?

First, the Convergence 2010 show could have been called the “Cloud Computing and Social CRM show”, at least as far as I was concerned.

Second, Bob Thompson wrote an excellent article — Will the Real Social CRM Leader Please Stand Up? —  on the site http://www.customerthink.com. Bob’s article plus the ensuing conversation got me thinking even more about it.

Then, as luck would have it, I was fortunate enough to have a customer engagement in the CRM hotbed of Moultrie County. (Sullivan, IL, of course, population 4,400.) If you’ve ever driven from Chicago to Sullivan and back you’ll appreciate that I had a lot of time to think, and not a lot of curves in the road to distract me. I made good use of the time. OK, I made use of the time; you can decide whether it was a good use after you watch the video.  Anyway, here’s an outline of my current thoughts on the topic:

1. To think about what Social CRM means, think about ante-Social CRM (like ante-bellum, as in “before the war”). Back in the olden days 18 months ago, we thought we were doing great if we had one version of the truth — in the form of a single customer record – for each of our customers in our internal CRM. If we had that plus a 360 degree view of our customer interactions — in the form of our emails and appointments, sales and service history and so forth — we thought we were doing great!
2. NOW it’s obvious there’s a lot of important data about our customers and potential customers out there in the socialsphere — Twitter, LinkedIn, Facebook and so forth — and at the very least, our so-called single version of the truth should probably be augmented by our customers’ LinkedIn profiles. And compared to the kinds of activities the socialsphere has data on, our internal CRM 360 degree view of the customer looks pretty paltry!
3. To see the potential of social CRM in a hands-on way, go to any search engine and enter this text in the search box:  site:linkedin.com “dynamics crm”  . You can filter the results down a little by doing something like this: site:linkedin.com “dynamics crm” – groups . Try it — it’s pretty cool!
4. The potential value of all that information is tremendous…the challenge is how to order it, how to pull it into your CRM, how to make it actionable.
5. So far, Dynamics CRM doesn’t really have any out-of-the-box features to leverage the power of the socialsphere, so we’ll have to rely on third-parties and ISVs for now. Fortunately, the xRM platform loves to be customized and extended, and a small army of third-parties and ISVs are doing just that as we speak, filling in the gaps for social CRM. Stay tuned for much more on this topic.

And in the meantime, here’s the video:

Post-Script from May 10, 2010: The Customer Portal Accelerator has been released! I vaguely referred to this in the original version of this Convergence Recap article (see below), so I thought I’d post a short update here now that it’s available. First of all, you can download it from here: http://customerportal.codeplex.com/ Like all the accelerators, it’s free and runs on top of an existing Dynamics CRM organization.

Like NONE of the Accelerators (so far, anyway) this one runs on all deployment models: on-premise, CRM Online, and partner hosted. This is what I was referring to below in my point #2, and it’s a big deal for Dynamics CRM Online in particular and Microsoft’s cloud efforts generally. As has been pointed out more than a few places recently, if Microsoft is really all-in for the cloud, it’s got to start putting its money where its mouth is, and putting the development platform for its cloud apps on par with that for their on-prem counterparts is an important part of that.

Azure support in the new SDK is one of the critically important building blocks, and although I haven’t yet tested the Customer Portal Accelerator on the CRM Online platform, my guess is I’ll need to deploy some Azure-based code to get it running. (If you’ve already done it, feel free to give me any tips based on your experience!)

Welcome to the cloud, Microsoft! My advice: you can accelerate your cloud efforts by reallocating R&D funds to the Dynamics CRM Online team. They’ve set a consistent standard of excellence for the up and running and user experiences, and now (fingers crossed…) it looks like they’re going to push ahead on the developer side. 

Original article:    

The recent Microsoft Convergence conference was a good show. From my CRM-centric perspective I’ll fondly remember it as the “cloud computing and social CRM Convergence”. (Speaking of social, here’s a history of the real-time Twitter conversation on Convergence 2010. Here’s a preview of Convergence 2011!)  

Anyway…my Convergence 2010 recap:

Microsoft is all-in when it comes to cloud computing. (Did I already say that?) Putting it up there with the move to the GUI and the emergence of the web definitely drives home the point.

The poster-child Dynamics cloud app is Dynamics CRM Online. My personal view is that the CRM Online team has set the standard for how business cloud computing should be done.  There was of course lots of discussion around Dynamics CRM Online, but I was surprised by how little there was about cloud versions of the ERP apps. On the other hand, I’m so focused on CRM I might have missed that discussion…The two most important things I learned about CRM/CRM Online at the show were:

1.  May 2010 Service Update. When you’re a CRM geek and your and most of your clients’ production platforms are CRM Online, these service updates are like Christmas coming twice a year. The most important features seem to be multiple language support (which “shipped” early, by the way; I started using it on April 28), and the new eService portal/accelerator (which unless I’m mistaken is somehow related to the ADX Studio technology, but I need to learn more about this.).
2. The new SDK release, also set for May. What I’ve heard about this sounds like it will be important, and the most important new stuff sounds like the built-in Azure support. I don’t know how this will be implemented yet (although it sounds like there will be Azure web services exposed as part of it), but it will likely be especially important for CRM Online, which has been crippled compared to on-premise because of its lack of support for plug-ins, ASPX extensions and custom RS reports    

Besides the Cloud, the most important theme discussed at Convergence was Social CRM. That’s too big a topic to do justice to in a recap, so I’ll cover it in its very own article. I talked about it a little bit in my introduction to the Dynamics CRM User Group’s April meeting. Fortunately I remembered to press the “record” button in Camtasia before I started talking, so here’s the video, Enjoy!

I’ll write a more comprehensive article on Convergence overall, since it was a very good conference and featured a lot of thought-provoking sessions and conversation on slightly more specific topics (most notably, the rise of Social CRM).

But for now, I wanted to comment on just one of those more specific topics: the May 2010 service update for Dynamics CRM Online. I’m all in for cloud computing as well, and have been a very happy user of Dynamics CRM Online for almost two years. At first I didn’t appreciate the importance of these more-or-less every six month service updates (I’m a little slow on the uptake), but after a few of them it dawned on me that they really prove out the cloud experience: in the cloud, new features just happen! Nothing to install, no hotfixes or patches or cumulative rollups. You just read about the new features and one day they show up.

And sometimes, they show up sooner than you expect! For example, it’s April 29 as I write this, and already I’ve taken advantage of one of the important new features from the May 2010 service update: multiple language support is now available!

If you are a system admin in your CRM Online organization, you can see how multi-language support works by following these steps:

1. Click Settings, then Administration, and you’ll see a new link for Languages.
   
2. Click Languages and you’ll see the following dialog. I’ve selected the Spanish checkbox to “enable” it. French and Portuguese are also now available, many others coming soon.
   

    

   
   

         
    

After a system admin enables a language, any user can then toggle back and forth between the base language (English for my organization) and one of the enabled languages as a Personal Option. To do this, click Tools on the menu bar, then select Options. Click the Languages tab and use the User Interface Language drop-down to select one of the enabled languages. (If you install and enable a language pack for Dynamics CRM 4.0 on-premise, you can toggle the language for both the UI and Help. Currently, for Spanish in CRM Online the only option available is for the UI. I’d assume that ultimately the functionality will be the same for online as for on-premise, but for now it’s apparently UI only.)

After selecting Spanish…BOOM!

Welcome to the first installment of the Dynamics CRM Online May 2010 Service Update! Two more things, for those of you who actually need to fully support a multi-lingual user population:

• If you’re using the Outlook client and want an option for a 100% Spanish (e.g.) experience, you’d also need to be running the Spanish version of Outlook. This is probably obvious but worth pointing out.
  
• Perhaps less obvious is the issue of custom entities and attributes. You can tell from the previous screenshot that customizations are not somehow magically translated (look at the column headings for Segment, CRM Platform and LeadSource). If you want to also have your customizations available in something other than the base language, that’s what the “Export Labels for Translation” and “Import Labels for Translation” links on the Customization page are for.
  

   

I’ll discuss that topic in more detail in another article. For now, I have to click the Herramientas drop-down menu, select Opciones, then click on the Idiomas tab to change my Idioma de interfaz de usario from Espanol to Ingles, then click Acceptar. Ciao!

Richard Knudson