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Gentlemen Prefer Solutions: The Expanding Dynamics CRM Footprint

Jukka Niiranen January 16, 2016 6 Comments

Gentlemen Prefer Solutions: The Expanding Dynamics CRM Footprint

If you haven’t worked with CRM Online using Office 365 Global Admin rights recently, you might have missed the new delivery mechanism that Microsoft has created for additional CRM functionality not included in a new Online org by default: preferred solutions. Unlike the traditional solution import mechanism under the CRM application’s Settings area, these preferred solutions are both installed as well as updated (upgraded) via a miniature “CRM app store” controlled by and reserved for Microsoft exclusively. To access these preferred solutions you need to go to the O365 Admin Portal, open the CRM Online Administration Center, choose an instance and click the edit icon next to “Solutions”. You’ll be presented with a list like this one:

Preferred_solutions_manage

OK, maybe not exactly like this one, unless you work in the United States. You see, these preferred solutions are also targeted to preferred customers, meaning in practice CRM Online customers who use a tenant located in North America. Let me point this preferred region out to you from the Office 365 and CRM Online datacenter map:

O365_datacenter_map

The current availability of the preferred solutions is as follows:

  • Insights for Microsoft Dynamics CRM Online: powered by InsideView, this service is free for CRM Online US customers only. Presumably due to the fact that their database wouldn’t have very good coverage of companies in other parts of the world. You could of course buy the service from InsideView directly if you really must have it.
  • FantasySalesTeam: acquired by MS in August 2015, this gamification solution is built on the concept of fantasy sports that’s apparently a huge industry in the US but less familiar in most other regions. Sales people all around the world surely are a competitive species but no one turns the competition into entertainment quite like the Americans do. Expanded availability of the preview is coming any day now.
  • Voice of the Customer: built in the UK and acquired by MS in March, the solution formerly known as Mojo Surveys has been launched in preview mode for US customers only. Ouch. Well, don’t worry, this feedback management solution will surely come to other geos quite quickly (or MS will need to deal with some customer feedback of their own…)
  • Office 365 Groups: not acquired from anywhere but rather an original Redmond design, this solution became available already back in CRM 2015 Update 1 (v7.1) time frame as a preview globally (yay!)and is now available in full production support mode to all CRM Online customers.
  • FieldOne Sky: only the sky’s the limit for this solution that’s available to CRM Online users with Professional licenses, no matter where your field service personnel may roam. Acquired in July 2015, FieldOne is running mostly on Microsoft’s XRM platform, but the mobile client still relies on Resco and allows only access to a subset of CRM default entities, so for broader mobile use you’ll still need to buy a separate Resco license.

Although not a CRM solution in technical terms, it’s also worth mentioning that the CRM App for Outlook which was released as US only preview last summer is now available to all CRM Online users who are on CRM 2016 version. I haven’t seen any upgrade time slots being scheduled for existing CRM Online customers yet, so currently mostly newly provisioned orgs can access the Settings – CRM App for Outlook menu to enable users for this lightweight successor to the “heavyweight” Outlook client of the past. [Read more…]

Filed Under: Configuration Tagged With: add-on, Adxstudio, CEM, CRM 2016, customization, entities, FantasySalesTeam, FieldOne, Groups, online, solution, Voice of the Customer

Access Option Set Labels in Dynamics CRM OData Feeds via Power Query

Jukka Niiranen August 12, 2014 13 Comments

Access Option Set Labels in Dynamics CRM OData Feeds via Power Query

If you’re using Dynamics CRM Online without direct access to the underlying SQL Server database, there may have been a few occasions when you’ve wished for more flexible options for reporting and customer data analytics than what is possible via configuring CRM charts or developing Fetch XML based reports in Visual Studio. Late last year Microsoft enabled support for accessing the secured OData feeds from CRM Online via the Excel Power Query tool, which opened up some interesting options for building modern BI solutions on top of the CRM data up in the Microsoft cloud.

CRM_OData_Excel

For a non-developer who hasn’t leveraged OData before it might come as a bit of a surprise that not all of the business data is necessarily readily available via the feeds when examining a particular CRM entity. One crucial thing that’s missing is the option set values. More specifically, it’s the label values that are not accessible via the entity tables retrieved via the OData feed, as all we have access to are the numerical values representing the labels (1, 2, 3, 4… 10001), but not the human readable versions.

CRM_OptionSet_Value_Label

From a reporting perspective, it’s very likely that any chart or table that you wish to build is going to leverage one or more option set fields. Formerly known as picklists, these are basically the dropdown fields on CRM entity forms that allow the user to select one value from a list of predefined values. Much more convenient for reporting purposes than free text fields, as I’m sure you’d agree.

So, what are our options then? We could of course manually create new tables into the Excel workbook that store the mapping of ID values and labels, but that just doesn’t sound like a fun exercise at all. More importantly, that would only give us a static list of option set values that couldn’t adapt to the changes in CRM customizations. Nope, not a good approach from report maintenance perspective, so let’s not go there.

As a bit more efficient workaround we could be adventurous and import a copy of the CRM solution file containing the entity customizations as an XML data source into Power Query and then pick out the necessary mappings from there. Due to the power of Power Query, this would actually technically work, and we could even set it to reference a file location from where the latest customizations would dynamically be imported upon workbook refresh. Still, that would leave us the burden of setting up an automated export system that would produce the customizations.xml file to reflect the latest changes.

After a bit of poking around in the OData feed data source, it turns out the optionset labels are actually included there. The tricky part is that they’re not simply a [Record] link that you can drill into and expose the values from your existing entity data set. Nope, they reside in a specific table of their own, called PicklistMappingSet. In this tutorial I’ll show you how to retrieve the data for a “Leads by Source” chart created with Power View, taken from an OData feed data source pointing to Dynamics CRM Online, using Power Query to pull the data into a data model built with Power Pivot.

1. The Data Source: Power Query

PowerBI_CRM_Odata_1To follow the steps you should have the latest Power Query version installed in your Excel client. I’ve already covered how to access CRM OData feeds from Power Query in a previous article, so please refer to that one if you haven’t done the exercise before. After connecting to the OData feed URL we should select the tables that we want to work with from the data source navigator pane. By minimum you should grab the LeadSet and PicklistMappingSet to build the chart.

The problem with CRM and OData is that by default the feed will pull down each and every record in the table. The query performance is less than stellar with CRM Online and if you have a high number of leads (status doesn’t matter, also the closed ones will get downloaded), you might be waiting for a while before the query is completed. If you want to move on a bit faster then check out this great tip by Andre Margono on how to set up a query filter for the Dynamics CRM OData query (for example, only active leads).

The real beauty of Power Query is in the query steps you can use for manipulating the workbook queries. Before we go there, though, let’s create a duplicate of the PicklistMappingSet query. This will make it easier for us to map the values into our actual leads table later on, as well as preserve the original option set value table available for further queries.

PowerBI_CRM_Odata_2

Open up the new duplicate query you’ve added into the edit mode by double clicking on it, which launches the Power Query query editor (yes, query is the word of the day). The first step we’re going to add for the query involves expanding a column that only shows a green “Record” value by drilling into it from the small icon next to the column label. Do this to the ColumnMappingId column and just load up all the columns found from behind it.

PowerBI_CRM_Odata_3

You’ll see the Record column transformed into three new columns as a result of drilling down into the data. The column we’re interested in is ColumnMappingId.Name, which has the names for all option set fields in our source CRM system. For this example we want to see the LeadSource field, so add a new filter for this value, just as you would in a normal Excel data table.

PowerBI_CRM_Odata_4

By now you might have noticed that the Applied Steps box in the Query Settings pane is collecting all of the actions that we’re performing on the query and storing them as steps. If you make an error in your selection, just click the delete symbol next to the steps to get rid of it. [Read more…]

Filed Under: Tips Tagged With: analytics, cloud, CRM 2013, Excel, OData, online, Power BI, Power Query, Power View, PowerPivot, reports

Jukka Niiranen June 3, 2014 2 Comments

CRM 2013 SP1: Case Creation and Routing – The Details

In my previous post about the new functionality included in CRM 2013 SP1 / Spring ’14 release I laid out the big picture of how case creation and routing rules relate to cases and queues in Dynamics CRM. Now it’s time to take a more detailed look at how you would actually configure these rules to automate your case creation process. There are a few limitations that it’s good to be aware of before you jump into applying these new tools in your service management scenarios.

Case Creation Rules

As illustrated in the big picture of queue and case management in my previous article, Case Creation Rules are specific to a single queue. Also, you can only have one Case Creation Rule per queue – per channel. It is nevertheless a 1:N relationship between queues and rules, since a queue can have a Case Creation Rule both for email and social activities (the latter of which are not yet leveraged in this release). The Command Bar buttons on the updated queue form, labelled “Email To Case Settings” and “Social To Case Settings”, take you to the respective rule record.

CRM2013SP1_queue_settings

The Case Creation Rule form allows you to configure predefined conditions for case creation. Emails from unknown senders can be filtered away from case creation. Also the existence of a valid entitlement for the sender (contact) or the senders company (parent account) can be used as a filter. Finally, email related to an already resolved case can be set to generate a new case record, with a configurable “quarantine” time period. So, if you resolve a case today and the customer replies “thanks for your help”, this probably shouldn’t generate a new case, but a reply sent after 3 days to the same email thread might warrant opening up a whole new case record.

CRM2013SP1_case_creation_rule

That’s all the conditions you can apply for the automatic case creation. There’s an additional entity called Case Creation Rule Item that’s found in the “Specify Case Details” subgrid. What this feature allows you to do is specify a condition on the activity record (email or social activity) and set values for the newly created case’s fields. As an example, if the email subject contains word X, you could populate the case subject lookup field with value Y. So, you can’t use these Rule Items to determine whether a case will be created or not, but you can pass along some variables from the originating activity.

CRM2013SP1_case_creation_rule_item

The entity fields you can access in the Conditions box are limited to those directly related to the email (or social) activity. There is however one welcome exception and that is the Senders Account. This means that when the email is coming from a known contact, there’s a way to reach into the fields of the account related to the contact (related to the activity), to check variables like relationship status, customer category or other important pieces of information in a B2B service scenario. [Read more…]

Filed Under: Features Tagged With: case, CRM 2013, email, Leo, online, queue, releases, service, Service Pack 1, Spring '14

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About me

I'm a Microsoft Business Applications MVP from Finland, having worked with the Dynamics 365/CRM system since 2005 and in the field of customer relationship management for over 15 years now. Whenever I feel like saying a thing or two to about Dynamics 365 Customer Engagement, I may post it here on my blog, tweet it, save it to my XRM links or post it on Google+.





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In the past I’ve written about the History of Microsoft CRM from it’s first 10 years. I’ve also explored how the platform evolution up until Dynamics CRM 2013 had changed the product and how we worked with it. This time I want to focus on specifically the Microsoft Cloud era. I started to think about […]

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