Nurture Marketing

• Traditional marketing was essentially a 1:N model, with nurture, the goal is to create a personal, 1:1 relationship with a client.
• Traditional marketing was event-based, with every activity essentially an independent event. In contrast, nurture marketing is relationship-based, with activities part of an ongoing conversation, each activity making use of information gathered from all the others.
• Traditional marketing was targeted at a demographic, at best. With Nurture marketing the goal is to create a tailored set of activities, specifically crafted for an individual.

• Drip marketing is where a pre-determined set of emails go out, one after the other…drip…drip…In this context, a good example would be the confirmation email you get when you register for a seminar; then the day-before reminder, then the post-event email with a link to a session evaluation. Another drip marketing scenario was described in a ClickDimensions blog post from last year.
• Trigger marketing is more adaptive – where specific marketing activities depend on a customer’s behavior. You could inject a trigger component into the webinar example by sending a different post-event email depending on whether somebody attends or doesn’t. I showed a different application of trigger marketing in Dynamics CRM in my demo, using CD as the foundation, combining it with a custom Dynamics CRM workflow.

• I send out my monthly email newsletter using CD. If I send an email and it bounces, an automatic workflow creates a Bounce Followup task for the record owner.
• If it doesn’t bounce, we wait to see what happens
• If nothing happens for a certain number of days, we send another email – maybe with a reworded subject line
• But if before then we get an open we take a different path: wait for a click and if we get one create a Click Followup task for the record owner.

• The first one tests for a click-through, and creates a click followup task if appropriate.
• Next, if an email bounces we create the bounce followup task, and as a best practice I go straight to LinkedIn when that happens.
• And if neither of those two things happens, we sit and wait for 5 days, eventually sending a second email, generally with a re-worded subject line so as not to be tedious.

Surveys

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.

Here are a couple of Microsoft links on R7:

• Microsoft Dynamics CRM: The Road Ahead
• Release Preview Guide for the Q4 2011 Dynamics CRM 2011 Service Update

And here’s my take on what’s most important:

Enhancements to Dialogs and Workflows

I’ve been referring to my book — Building Business Processes in Dynamics CRM 2011 — as “forthcoming” for so long, any frequent Trick Bag reader will be forgiven for being a little skeptical about it. I’d like to say I delayed its release on purpose, so I could include coverage of the important new features available in R7…but that wouldn’t be true in the least. In fact, I’ve just been too busy to complete it as yet. It worked out for the best, though, since now I’ll be able to include coverage of these important new features:

Enhancements to Dialog Processes

Two important limitations in dialog processes are getting fixed:

• Lookups. Pre-R7, if you wanted to give a user a list of values to select from in a dialog, you were limited to Option Sets. So for example, to provide a list of contacts for selection, you could build a query on contacts and use that query to supply the values to an option set. Sometimes that works fine, but sometimes, not so much. For example, option sets (pick-lists) aren’t as good for interacting with large data sets as are lookups. R7 adds lookups to our bag of tricks in dialog design, so users will be able interact with large data sets, enter text to search for and we’ll be able to build much more usable dialog processes.
• Dates. Until now, the only data types available for holding a user’s response were Text, Integer and Float. Not being able to work with dates was a significant limitation which will be fixed in R7. For example, now when users want a Create Opportunity dialog that prompts for the estimated close date and stores the response in, say, the Est. Close Date field on the created opportunity record, you won’t have to try to convince them it’s not a good idea. (Just kidding. I know you’d never do that.)

Dynamically generated record URLs

Another long-wanted feature is being added as well, this one applying to both workflows and dialogs: a “Record URL” field available as a dynamic value. If you’re not a Dynamics CRM business process geek you’re forgiven for thinking this sounds like a geeky topic, but it’s important, honest! Basically, we’ve never been able to easily insert the URL of a record into a record created by a workflow or dialog process. Since every form in Dynamics CRM can be accessed by navigating directly to its unique URL, it always just seemed like you should be able to easily insert a link to a record, let a user click it and pop open the form. Use cases like this are obvious ones:

• Automatic workflow sends an e-mail to the owner of a new lead/contact/account record. In the body of the email there’s a link they can click and open the form for the record.
• Marketing manager wants to periodically notify the sales team of new sales literature they can send to their clients, and wants a workflow to automatically send an e-mail with a clickable link to a new piece of sales literature when published.
• When an opportunity gets to a certain stage in the sales process, it requires review or approval, and you want an automatic workflow to create a task for the reviewer/approver with a link to the record.

These are all things that traditionally have taken a lot of work to get done but will be a snap with the new feature in R7.

Enhancements to the Chart Designer

The first version of the Dynamics CRM 2011 chart designer had several limitations. The most important was the inability to create charts with more than one data series. The second most important was the limited number of chart types available. Both of these limitations are going away in R7, so it looks as if we won’t all have to become experts at the manual creation of .NET charts after all!

And as we wait for R7, if you have a great Dynamics CRM application for doughnut and radar charts, by all means let me know.

Improved SharePoint Integration

In addition to having a very long product name, the SharePoint 2010 List Component for Dynamics CRM 2011 also provides a simple yet serviceable integration between Dynamics CRM and SharePoint. Essentially, it lets a user automatically create folders in a designated SharePoint document library for specific records in Dynamics CRM. As I said, it’s a simple integration, but I have one client that needs exactly this functionality, the alternative being the ongoing manual creation of SharePoint document locations corresponding to every single one of a frequently created CRM record type, often several dozen daily.

So, since the client in question bought into Microsoft’s twin visions of a) cloud computing, and b) SharePoint/CRM integration, they eagerly awaited the release of SharePoint 2010 in its (cloud) Office 365 incarnation.

So imagine our disappointment when Office 365 shipped without support for the list component, meaning that its “showcase” integration with Dynamics CRM was effectively the same as that of, say, Google Docs! (To this day, any time I see somebody referring to this video as a good example of how Microsoft is integrating Dynamics CRM Online and Office 365, it makes me want to scratch my eyes out!)

So what we’re hearing now is that support for the list component – and the CRM-driven automatic folder creation it enables – is coming soon. Maybe not in R7 itself, since it’s really an Office 365 feature, but soon thereafter.

Federation of Active Directory and Windows Live Authentication

Dynamics CRM on-premise authenticates users against an Active Direct account. Dynamics CRM Online authenticates users against windows Live accounts. To date, never the twain shall meet, which has been a big problem for organizations relying on AD for their single version of the user-account truth. The long-awaited federation of AD and Windows Live is now official (officially announced, at any rate), and while will be a “throttled” release, at least enterprises where this has been the biggest problem can begin to see light at the end of the tunnel.

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!

Thanks to web analytics being available right where they belong (in my production Dynamics CRM of course), I can track which pages on the Trick Bag are getting the most views. (In CRM geek-speak, we’ve got a custom entity, Page, with a 1:N relationship to another custom entity, Page View. A little bit of tracking code on the blog adds a record to page views every time a page is viewed.) Anyway, here’s the Top Ten Pages ranked by page views, for the last thirty days:

Here’s the same list, with the order flipped, a little more detail, and a link to the page:

1. Home Page
2. Useful Form Scripts #1
3. CRM 2011 Category Page
4. Sending Emails with Workflows (the enduring popularity of this article pleasantly surprises me, fwiw) 
5. Re-usable Jscript Libraries in Dynamics CRM 2011 
6. CRM 2011 UI Tips & Tricks
7. Web Analytics in Dynamics CRM 2011 
8. Taking the Covers off Dynamics CRM 2011
9. Dynamics CRM 2011 Essentials
10. Goal Management Charts in Dynamics CRM 2011

Honorable mention goes to Dynamics CRM Jeopardy, one of my personal favorites even if it didn’t make the top ten.

Cheers!

(In order to read articles at MSDynamicsWorld, you need to create an account and sign in. And you probably won’t be surprised that I recommend you do just that!)

Here’s an executive summary, starting with the listing of the top five:

1. The official Microsoft Dynamics Team Blog
2. The Customer Effective Blog
3. A CRM Riff by Jim Glass
4. Richard Knudson’s Dynamics CRM Trick Bag (this one)
5. The PowerObjects Blog

To give you a feel for how the rankings were done, here’s a screenshot of their summaries of numbers three and four:

I’m flattered to be right next to Jim Glass, one of my favorite writers and whose blog is second on my personal top ten list only to #1 on this list (the official MS Dynamics Team Blog).

And in Other News…

Another item in my “good news on a dreary late February Chicago afternoon” category: Bridget’s basketball team (the 6^th-grade Sacred heart Vikings) finished their season with a 27-2 record. And the really good news is that softball is only a few weeks away!

I’ve been spending a lot of quality time getting to know the new features in CRM 2011…the only problem is there are so many of them I don’t have the quantity of time it’d take to drill down on all of them. My What’s New in CRM 2011 webinar series will survey the most important; recordings and accompanying articles are up for sessions 1-3, and in session 4 (Nov. 18, noon CST) I’m going to dive into Dialogs, the important new addition to the world of workflows. (Links to recordings, register for upcoming sessions here: http://www.dynamicscrmtrickbag.com/dynamics-crm-essentials/whats-new-2011/ )

My guess is that Microsoft has been taking CRM market share from salesforce.com for some time now, and the new features will if anything accelerate the trend. Here’s a market share article I wrote some time ago, which I think is still valid as far as the overall trend goes.

And now, a special offer $34/user/month price for CRM Online? Apparently so, although I must admit I haven’t actually seen the official Microsoft offer. This InfoWorld article is the best short piece I’ve seen and it has the ring of authority to it…but I’d still like to see the official Microsoft announcement.

Anwyay, it looks like the $34/seat offer will be available starting in Q1 of 2011, more or less coincident with the launch of CRM 2011. The most comparable salesforce.com version is the Enterprise edition, which costs $125/user. We’ll see what salesforce.com does in response, but as I pointed out in High Noon for Salesforce and Dynamics CRM, early market leaders ignore Microsoft at their own peril.

I love lists. Rolling Stone’s list of the Beatles Top 100 songs, baseball statistics like the Top 100 Hitting Charts, Bridget’s list of things to know, biggest cities, top 10 towns named after elements, lists of lists (those would be meta-lists, I believe)…they’re just so much fun to read, memorize, forget, and use as fodder for cocktail party conversation.

Building lists, on the other hand, can be a lot of work. So I’m always grateful when somebody else takes the time to create a good one. And better yet when it’s about a CRM topic. For example, Lauren Carlson of the Software Advice Blog recently published an excellent article containing a list, Microsoft Dynamics CRM Industry Solutions: Our  Favorites

I provide a summary version next, but you should read Lauren’s article. She actually researched the industries, surveyed CRM ISVs to find out who had developed CRM add-ons for each vertical, and wrote excellent summaries of the ones she included.

If you or your firm provides services around Dynamics CRM, you’re probably aware that Microsoft’s current big push is to “verticalize” its partner community. Lauren’s research is timely in this regard. At the risk of sounding like a cheesy Convergence pickup line, what’s your vertical?

Personally, my verticalization is still a work in progress. I want to service a vertical that is fast-growing, enjoys high margins, has not yet widely adopted CRM, and in which there is very little competition. I’m conducting an exhaustive search and I haven’t yet found just the right one. If you’ve already found the perfect vertical and want to share it with me, I promise I won’t tell anybody else. In the meantime, if you’re still searching like I am, here’s my own personally compiled meta-list of my favorite top 5 articles containing lists of the fastest growing industries:

• Kelly Services, Top 25 Fastest Growing Industries for 2010 to 2011
• Career OneStop, Top 50 Fastest Growing Industries
• Daily Finance, Nine for the ’10s: Fast-Growing Industries for the Next Decade
• Bureau of Labor Statistics, Fastest Growing…and Fastest Declining
• Fortune Magazine, Top 52 Fastest Growing Industries (Profits)

Another is that I can write an article like this one, with objectives like these:

• Provides readers with data on what other people are reading, a kind of quantitative reader’s guide to the Trick Bag. (I included links so you can go right to an article that seems interesting)
• Provides me with data on what people are reading, so I can write more of the stuff that is of the most interest.

I dropped the CoreMotives tracking script on the Trick Bag on March 12 of 2010. The blog itself launched in its present WordPress incarnation in February of 2009, so these are only a subset of the data. That being said, it’s almost 4 months and about 20,000 page views, so it’s a significant enough subset to be interesting. (to me, anyway!)

Most Popular Article Categories

In the Trick Bag’s sidebar, there’s a drop-down list labeled “Article Categories” that lets you view all of the articles in specific categories. Here are the counts, since March 12, of the page views of each category page.

Top Ten Articles Overall

Here are the top ten articles across all categories:

The top article – Dynamics CRM Form Script and Useful JavaScript Snippets – was posted a little over a month ago, and has well over double the views of most of the other top ten articles. The number ten article – Useful Form Scripts, Part 2 – has 335 views since it was posted on June 3.

OK: More articles on useful form scripts, coming up!

Top Ten Articles in the Top Two Categories

First, the top ten articles in the Workflow category:

Finally, the top ten articles in the Customization category:

Happy families are all alike; every unhappy family is unhappy in its own way.

The first sentence from Leo Tolstoy’s masterpiece Anna Karenina tells us that many different factors are present in successful marriages, but that missing even one of them can spell failure overall. Some refer to this as the Anna Karenina Principle, meaning an “endeavor in which a deficiency in any one of a number of factors dooms it to failure.”

CRM implementations are like that: they’re complex, and a lot of things have to go right in a successful implementation. But failure in just one area can doom the entire project.

What has to go right in a successful CRM? Here’s a short list, loosely based on an excellent article, CRM Software Implementation Success, on the site www.CRMLandMark.com:

• Obtain executive sponsorship
• Consider corporate culture in software selection
• Align processes of key departments and stakeholders
• Clearly identify software requirements
• Be careful and deliberate in your choice of the CRM software platform
• Clearly define the implementation’s business objectives
• Take a phased implementation approach
• Build in change procedures
• Begin training before implementing
• Recognize that the sales function drives most CRM implementations

In this article I want to talk a little about #6, the importance of defining an implementation’s business objectives. In my experience, a failure to clearly define objectives is one of the most frequent contributors to overall “CRM failure”. Although it’s probably more accurate in this case to refer to it as perceived failure: after all, if you never defined success metrics, then you didn’t define failure metrics either! [You'll find an interesting discussion of this point in the article, The Truth About CRM Success & Failure.]

These issues come up frequently in discussions of low user adoption rates. In order for user adoption to be “too low” or “just right” (could it ever be “too high”?) there must be a quantitative measure of it. So what is it? Well, one way of measuring user adoption is the actual use of the CRM, in terms of how often users sign in and how many records of various kinds they create. Salesforce.com even has an out-of-the-box “Adoption Dashboard” that shows things like this:

Of course, the problem with defining the success of your CRM by the number of times users sign in and the number of activities they create is that those things are measures of effort rather than results. They may contribute to a result, but they aren’t results themselves.

So what might those results be? Higher sales? Higher margin? Faster case resolution? Improved lead effectiveness? Being able to measure the impact of marketing campaigns on sales? Improved customer retention? These kinds of things are obviously going to be quite specific, and different in important ways for every business.

User Adoption v. User Satisfaction

“User adoption” is one of those terms that’s used a lot in a general sense, when it’s actually something else that’s being referred to. For example, I’ve had several conversations with customers lately about low levels of user adoption on the part of sales teams. When I hear a sales team has “poor user adoption”, I assume it means that opportunities aren’t being entered, sales forecasts aren’t up to date, and the sales pipeline reports reflect incomplete information. But it turns out that is often NOT the problem. Opportunities are up to date and reports are correct…but users are dissatisfied because the process of entering and maintaining opportunities is inefficient and overly time-consuming!

A problem like this one ties back in a number of ways to the top-ten list above. For example, “user satisfaction” might be a valid and measurable success metric for a CRM implementation. You can imagine a pre- and post-migration survey, with questions like the following:

How satisfied are you with the process our CRM requires you to go through to enter and maintain your sales opportunity information?

• Extremely dissatisfied
• Somewhat dissatisfied
• About averagely satisfied
• Somewhat satisfied
• Extremely satisfied

You could survey salespeople three months before a migration, and then a month afterwards, and if your survey results looked like the following, you’d probably need to take some corrective action!

The good news is, in situations like this there often is corrective action you can take!

To continue the sales team example, suppose the problem is that the opportunity form is too complex and has too many required fields for some users, but that it’s just right for others. This is actually a pretty common problem. Imagine two users:

• User 1: outside sales rep, a heavy-hitter closer type, just wants to get the basic information entered and close deals; doesn’t want to be “hassled with all the details” in the form of an overly complex opportunity form.
• User 2: inside sales rep, specifically charged with entering all those messy but important details the outside rep doesn’t have time for.

Who should you design the opportunity form for? If your up-front design process is too heavily influenced by the inside sales team (which it’s likely to be, since the outside team is too busy for design meetings, being out talking to customers and closing deals!), you’ll likely end up with a happy inside sales team and an unhappy outside team.

And no corporate family wants an unhappy outside sales team!

Role-Tailored Customizations with Form Scripting and Security Roles

In Dynamics CRM, customizations to the opportunity form – like adding tabs and fields, making fields dependent on one another, making certain fields required – are so-called “entity customizations”, and the Dynamics CRM customization architecture exposes the same set of customizations to every user within a single CRM implementation.

Basically, the problem is that each entity in Dynamics CRM only has one form: form customizations are stored as metadata in the SQL database, and every user who has access to the form will see the same one by default.

But there’s a way around this limitation by using form scripting to create a more role-tailored user experience. Basically, the technique is to check the current user’s security role when a form is opened, and use JavaScript to selectively do things like the following:

• show or hide specific fields, sections or tabs
• change which fields are required
• change default settings for certain fields or enter default values to save data entry time

In order for this to work, you need to use security roles to model the different groups of users who need a tailored user experience. For example, suppose in our example we’ve got custom security roles called “Outside Sales” and “Inside Sales”.

When a user assigned to the Outside Sales role opens an opportunity form, she might see something like this:

Two required fields and user provided revenue. Nice and simple.

Suppose a workflow runs when the record is saved, and the workflow notifies the appropriate member of Inside Sales that a new opportunity’s been created and requires more information and perhaps some research to flesh out the important details. When the Inside Team member opens the form, he sees a more complex version of the form:

Now the Inside Sales rep gets to enter all the detailed information he could possibly want on this nice complex version of the opportunity form.

I’ll provide a more detailed explanation of the technical details behind this approach in a separate, appropriately role-tailored article. But here’s a snippet of code, from the opportunity entity’s OnLoad event, that will give you an idea of how to do something like this:

if (UserHasRole("Outside Sales"))
  {

  //hide the messy detail on tabs or sections they don't need to see:

  crmForm.all.tab2Tab.style.visibility = "hidden";

  crmForm.all.tab1Tab.style.visibility = "hidden";

  HideSection (0, 2, "none");

  //For new records, set other default values to make things simpler and quicker:

  switch (crmForm.FormType)

    {

     case CRM_FORM_TYPE_CREATE:

       var currentdate = new Date();

       //put the current date + 7 in the estimated close date field:

       crmForm.all.estimatedclosedate.DataValue = currentdate.setDate( currentdate.getDate() + 7) ;

       //set default pricing method to user-defined:

       crmForm.all.isrevenuesystemcalculated.DataValue = false;

       break;

     case CRM_FORM_TYPE_UPDATE:

       break;

   }

}

The way I wrote the code to implement this, you can test it by adding or dropping security roles to your own user profile. For example, suppose I’m already assigned to the System Administrator security role. I can test the “Inside Sales” user experience by following these steps:

1. Click Settings, Administration, then Users, and select my user record in the list.
2. Select Manage Roles from the More Actions menu.
3. Check the “Inside Sales” role and un-check “Outside Sales”, then click OK to apply the changes:

   

Then I can flip it back – selecting Outside Sales and deselecting Inside Sales – to see what the less detailed experience looks like.

So, you can actually create a nicely tailored UI for your users, simplifying the experience for people who need it simple, and providing as much detail as you need to the people who need it. Then, after you complete your post-migration three month survey, you’ll see your one big happy corporate family represented in survey results like the following:

Notes & Links

A few comments and references:

• In my example, it’s not important that the two security roles have different security privileges. I customized the “Sales Representative” security role by renaming it to “Inside Sales”, then copied it to create the “Outside Sales” role. This is a slightly different way of thinking about security roles than what they’re usually used for; in this approach the key thing isn’t the specific privileges associated with a security role…it’s whether a user has a particular security role or not.
• I realize the approach isn’t perfect. The JavaScript can get a little messy, and obviously the more complex your role-tailoring requirements the more messy it will need to get. But for lots of organizations, the improved user experience will be worth the effort.
• I mentioned I’ll cover the form scripting details more completely in a separate article. In the meantime, if you look in the code snippet I included you’ll see a call to a UserHasRole function. I took that function and a related one, unchanged, from an article by Jim Wang (http://jianwang.blogspot.com/2008/01/crm-40-check-current-users-security.html ). Jim’s blog (http://jianwang.blogspot.com/ ) is one of my favorite places to go for solid technical details on Dynamics CRM.

In this article I focused on a relatively specific problem – user dissatisfaction – with a relatively specific solution. In future articles I’ll discuss other variants of the Anna Karenina principle’s application to CRM implementations. If you’ve got any good examples, let me know!