Surviving CRM

Working with Microsoft Dynamics 365, day in day out

Your Essential Toolkit for Microsoft Dynamics CRM

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Your Essential Toolkit for Microsoft Dynamics CRM

You can do a lot with the configuration and customization toolkit that Microsoft Dynamics CRM offers. With the SDK and some lines of custom code, you can do almost anything. There in between lies the territory where the Dynamics CRM community is helping its members manage some of the commonly required tasks without the need for .NET developer resources. This is done through a wealth of wonderful, free tools that make it easier for anyone working with Dynamics CRM to access the power of the platform without getting their hands dirty in tweaking XML files or learning the right SDK calls.

Many of the tools listed here are a permanent fixture I take along with me to any consulting gig, while some are new entrants to the list. If you’ve been actively reading up the posts on various popular CRM blogs, you may well recognize most of them. However, while I personally spend far too much time on social media channels, I realize that not everyone in the industry has the luxury for such a lifestyle and may have therefore missed out on some tools that could have saved them hours worth of work. Therefore, I decided to compile a “Best Of” post to highlight the 10 tools no CRM consultant should be without. (For anyone wanting to stay on top of the latest tools and solutions I come across, you can either subscribe to my Dynamics CRM Links RSS feed or follow the Surviving CRM page on Google+.)

CRM 2011 User Settings Utility

Download from CodePlex.

When setting up new user accounts in your Dynamics CRM organization, wouldn’t it be nice if the system administrator could set their personal settings to match the policies of the organization as well as the likely preferences of the user in question? Things like Time Zone, Records per Page, Advanced Find mode, default home page etc. can be easily configured for users in bulk with the CRM 2011 User Settings Utility by Amreek Singh.

CRM2011_User_Settings_Utility

One particular pet peeve of mine related to the default configuration of Dynamics CRM is that new contact records are automatically created from tracked email sender or recipient addresses not found in the database. Well, with this tool you can stop the users from unintentionally populating your database with partially filled contact records not associated to their proper parent accounts by simply configuring the setting to “No” for all users. Beats having to send everyone instructions by email on how to check their CRM profile settings, doesn’t it?

Universal Settings

Download from Sonoma Partners website.

It’s not only the user settings that may require you to pop the hood open on your CRM instance. There is a number of Organization Settings as well as Deployment Settings that can be used to either overcome limitations or alter the default behavior of Dynamics CRM. For example, if you’d like to be able to export all of your contacts records from CRM to Excel and not just the first 10,000 then you’ll be happy to know that changing the MaxRecordsForExportToExcel parameter is a breeze with Universal Settings, no matter if you have an on-premises or CRM Online environment.

UniversalSettings

Another handy limit you can adjust with the tool is AggregateQueryRecordLimit, which will allow your charts to summarize more than 50,000 records at a time, instead of seeing “the maximum record limit is exceeded” errors. Also very handy if you wish to work with more than 50,000 marketing list members in your campaign target group. Unfortunately this tweak is not available for CRM Online, though, as the setting resides in the deployment table rather than the organization table, which is the only one you can update in the cloud.

XrmToolbox

Download from CodePlex.

We’re now stepping into the world of “Mr. CRM Tools” himself, a.k.a. Tanguy Touzard. His awesome Toolbox for Dynamics CRM 2011 is a collection of the various tools developed over the years to help make Dynamics CRM administration and customization more efficient and enjoyable. By downloading the Toolbox you’ll get a number of great tools, but just to ensure you understand why you need them, let me give a quick intro to my favorite ones.

Sitemap editor

Adjusting the CRM main page navigation (a.k.a. sitemap) is something that you should always perform after you’ve determined what are the entities your different user groups (sales, marketing, etc.) will need to access and what is the logical arrangement of them in the navigation. Trust me, the right answer is not “the order in which the entities were created” nor “alphabetical”. There’s a number of free sitemap editor tools out there, but since XrmToolbox is such a powerhouse, it makes a lot of sense to use the the same tool that you’ll be using for other tasks in the same organization, as you’ll only need to configure the connection parameters once.

Sitemap_editor

Re-arrange, add, hide, group, rename, do basically whatever you want with the CRM menus with this editor without ever seeing a trace of the solution XML file contents.

Easy Translator

Easy_translatorThe latest addition to XrmToolbox is something every CRM admin from a non-English speaking country can surely appreciate. Since most of us still prefer to use the English base language setting in Dynamics CRM due to the awkward terminology of our native language translations in the customization UI (and any potential technical compatibility quirks that come with it), working with the “export/import labels for translation” process is all too familiar to us. Hunting down those strings in the unstructured output file isn’t very pleasant, which is where Easy Translator comes in handy. You’ll get a nicely arranged Excel with just the types of labels you’ve selected for export, which reduces the amount of trial & error in translating fields, values and form labels to the language of your choice. [Read more…]

MVP Award & Why Communities Rock

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MVP Award & Why Communities Rock

Today I received the following email:

MVP_award_email_small

Wow! Quite an honor, I must say. Not so much for the MVP badge itself but for being recognized alongside all of the brilliant minds that have received the Microsoft Dynamics CRM MVP award before me. Thanks especially to fellow MVP Gustaf Westerlund for nominating me for the award! Also, it’s nice to notice that all of the sarcastic remarks I tend to make in my posts while explaining the do’s and don’ts of the Dynamics CRM product have not permanently angered the folks at Microsoft to put me on their blacklist 😉

It’s great to receive recognition from the makers of Dynamics CRM of course, but by far the most important thing is the support from all the other members of the Dynamics CRM community. That means anyone who contributes to the discussions on CRM forums, comments on blog posts, sharing of links on social media and all the other activities that help people like you and me to… you know, survive living with this thing we call CRM. In the spirit of award speeches, let me take this moment to ramble on a bit about why these things matter so much.

All the way back in 2005 when I first got exposed to Microsoft CRM (the pre-Dynamics era) in the role of an ICT specialist evaluating alternative applications to replace an aging yet heavily utilized Lotus Notes based CRM system for my organization, the one thing that stood out in Microsoft’s product was the amount of community contributed material that was already available at the time. Compared to the world we live in today, it was of course a tiny fraction of the vast resources we’ve got now, but compared to the other potential CRM vendors on our short list, it was a significant factor that made me push for choosing Microsoft CRM. Knowing that I would be responsible for administering, supporting and customizing the system further once deployed, I naturally wanted to work with a product that I could find answers from not just the vendor but also other users and consultants who were sharing their expertise so graciously on the Internet.

CommunityAfter having spent some time in learning the ropes and reading through a pile of invaluable blog posts (~100 RSS feeds on my Dynamics CRM daily diet) that had helped me solve the day-to-day problems encountered when trying to mold the CRM system to meet the requirements of the users in a couple of customer organizations, I decided to put up a blog of my own to have a place to share some of the tips I had found useful. Then along came social networks like Twitter, that allowed you to discover even more great experts and content on hashtags like #MSDYNCRM. Eventually I realized there was no way for me to return back to the way things were before becoming an active member of the global online community around Dynamics CRM, so the only thing left to do was to push even further and try to make the most of it – even experiment with it, if you like.

The virtuous cycle of communities is truly a powerful force. In exchange for receiving help from complete strangers with no expectation of monetary remuneration, you start to feel compelled to give back to them in one form or another, to pay it forward. Once you do, you begin to notice that there are others who in turn are benefiting from your actions, which makes the cycle just start to spin faster & faster. All that shared knowledge begins to accumulate into a source for “wisdom of crowds” type of phenomena where you are no longer bound by your own cognitive capabilities, rather you can tap onto the community as an extension of your brain to solve the problems you encounter. It’s no cyberpunk fiction, simply the best strategy for an information worker to stay on top of his game today and develop the skills needed tomorrow.

Most of the things I know about Dynamics CRM I have learned from the community surrounding the product. That is why I personally value the MVP Award, because in essence it’s all about the most important part: the community, not just the application. Therefore, my advise for anyone who’s working with Dynamics CRM and is interested in getting more out of their job, as well as getting better at their job, is to take the plunge and start contributing to the community. You don’t have to be a CRM guru, a superstar developer or even a 24/7 social media geek to be able to add value into this common pool of knowledge and insight that keeps the Dynamics CRM product moving forward and allows all of us to better solve real life business problems with it, thus eventually helping the world outside the community. All you need to do is proceed along these steps, one ladder at a time:

  1. Explore
  2. Learn
  3. Share
  4. Contribute
  5. Rinse & repeat.

Thank you. Let’s keep rockin’ with CRM.

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Getting back at blog content thieves

Blogs are not only a valuable information source, they are also incredibly efficient vehicles for performing content marketing to promote a company or its products. In the line of professional services, many organizations want to use blog content created by experts in their own organization to prove to their potential customers that they are a viable business partner.

Unfortunately there are also companies who don’t possess the required expertise or haven’t assigned proper resources for content creation, but they still wish to drive traffic to their website through articles that contain keywords they expect potential customers to be searching for. As the web is already full of content, why not just grab a suitable piece of it and post it in your own name? Sure, it’s unethical and mostly illegal, but what’s the risk of getting caught on the wild wild west of the Internet?

Microsoft Dynamics CRM community has tons of great experts that choose to share their knowledge with others without asking for any direct monetary compensation for it. Lurking inside this community (or perhaps rather outside at the gates of the community) is a small number of players who are willing to take advantage of all this free content and use it to fill up their own blogs with direct copies of the original posts. Typically the only difference is the lack of reference to the original author of the content, because it wouldn’t look very smart if someone finds out you haven’t actually added any value in the copy-paste process. It’s not content sharing like posting links to articles by others, it is content theft with a very clear intention of benefiting from the works of others.

This week I ran into two cases where the posts from my Surviving CRM blog had been posted on another blog, word by word, without my permission. The first one was a blog by an individual, who apparently was trying to build up his profile as a Dynamics CRM expert. The second one, however, was a Microsoft Dynamics CRM consulting company that’s a listed partner on Microsoft’s Pinpoint service (I won’t post the name of the company, but this is their profile). Looking at their Blogger profile, it was apparent that this company was misusing blogs and stolen content from also many other sources in an effort to gain traffic for their own website.

I spotted that the company in question had hotlinked the article images from my web server, instead of re-posting them on Blogger. That’s of course the easiest way for them to steal content, but it also opened up an opportunity for me to teach them a lesson. See the slide deck below for the results of the little trick I played on them. If you’re interested in viewing the actual page and seeing if the modified images are still there, just open my original article about subgrids and associated views in CRM 2011, copy a sentence from it and paste it into Google to find the unauthorized copy of my article hosted on the company’s blog (tip: it’s the Blogger blog with a dynamics-crm2011 prefix in the URL, the article’s posted in September 2011).

Despite of me getting to have some fun at the expense of the content thief, it is of course a very sad thing to see such practices being utilized in selling services for Microsoft Dynamics CRM. Out of all people, it’s CRM consultants who should understand the importance of building long term business relationships on trust, not short term money grabs from gaming the search engines with keywords to lure in customers. In this light, who in their right mind would consider ripping off content from others as a viable tactic to be used for selling services related to customer relationship management?

The unfortunate fact is that there are many people who work with CRM solutions purely from a technical perspective, without understanding the business problems that these solutions are meant to solve. For a customer looking for experts to guide them through the process of deploying Microsoft Dynamics CRM in their organization, it’s not easy to spot the bad apples and choose the right partner. So many professional organizations working with the Dynamics CRM product still today do not bring out their expertise online but rather just settle for having a brochure website with generic, static content about their products and services. This leaves the door open for unethical marketers to flood the net with their blogs and steal the top spots on search listings. It’s not something we can blame Google for; their tactics work because we allow them to work.

To quote myself (or rather the updated blog post image):

So, as a conclusion, when you’re looking for Dynamics CRM professionals to help you implement & develop your CRM system, do some background checks first. It’s all too easy to steal content from others and build up a web presence to lure in potential customers. Online content is easy to generate, building a reputation requires hard work. Some of us choose to skip that ”hard work” part.

Have you encountered content theft on Dynamics CRM blogs you’ve written, or consulting companies that take advantage of stolen content? Any thoughts or ideas on how the Dynamics CRM community could weed out this unwanted behavior?

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