Side effects of the Polaris UI

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Posted on 25th February 2013 by Jukka Niiranen in Annoyances

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Here are some of the gotchas you can expect after switching to the new UI that is introduced in December 2012 Service Update, known by the friendly name “Polaris” release. I previously compiled a summary of the changes in the new UI and publish it as the “What’s New in Polaris” slides, but I thought I should highlight a few situations that may come as a surprise when trying to adapt your existing CRM processes onto the updated user experience of Polaris.

Relationship attribute inheritance

As I’ve written earlier, the new forms don’t work all too well with the concept of adding child records from the parent record’s form. Previously in CRM 2011 the ribbon provided a rich, extensible set of actions you could perform on a view of related records or a form subgrid, say contacts related to the parent account or quotes related to the opportunity. While the new Command Bar is about to take the ribbon’s place as the menu of available actions for the main entity form, there’s nothing yet in place to provide similar functionality for related records. Given that CRM by nature is all about managing relationships between different objects, this currently presents quite a severe limitation on the application’s ability to fulfill its purpose.

“Hey, don’t we have those new plus signs on the subgrids that we can use for adding related records?” Unfortunately the answer is not quite as simple, because the actions the button offers are unconfigurable and in most cases suboptimal. Here’s a take from the CRM Online Resource Center article on customizing the forms in the new sales process:

You may add sub-grids to the new process forms as you would with existing entity forms. Note that the behavior of the “+” sign in the new sub-grid will vary, depending upon which controls you have in place on the form. Note that sub-grids cannot be customized to display charts.

  • Add Existing and Add New, both. If both are present, the “+” sign control will function as Add Existing.
  • Add New only. The “+” sign will open a new record form.
  • Add Existing only. The “+” sign will open the classic lookup dialog box.

In most cases we have both options available, which means that instead of the new record form we’re given the Add Existing dialog. Imagine the most basic CRM scenario of them all: adding new contacts for an existing account. Here’s what you get from the form subgrid when clicking the plus sign:

Polaris_add_related_contact

Ok, so it’s not exactly as nice and clean as getting a new contact form right away (the classic experience), but guess we could live with that, since there’s a “New” button available there anyway. However, this reveals one of the hidden but nasty side effects of Polaris: the relationship mappings that you’ve defined in your 1:N Parent Customer relationship between the account and contact entity are not respected when using the New button in the Add Existing dialog. This means that your new contact record will not inherit any values from the account you currently have open, including common fields like address and telephone information. Even the Parent Customer field will be empty, as the system no longer understands the context in which you are adding the new record into the database.

This shortcoming of Polaris renders many common use cases unnecessarily cumbersome. For example, try sending an email from the web UI to a contact record using the new process forms. Although a user who’s completely new to Dynamics CRM might accept the fact that he or she needs to always navigate back to the main window and choose the type of record to create, then fill out all the lookup fields and other non-inherited values, selling this to an existing user of the system would be very tough.

Opportunity products

The new process form for the opportunity entity does not show the opportunity products or quotes subgrids/sections by default, you’ll need to enable the visibility in form customization to menu to show them. Once you do, the layout is not very attractive, so you may want to do some clean-up on the form sections. After this exercise you can start to leverage the familiar functionality of adding line items on the opportunity record. No, inline editing of the opportunity products still isn’t possible, but maybe it will one day be in a future release.

As we add more product lines on the opportunity we start to notice that the total amounts are no longer up to date with the latest additions. In the previous UI we would have reached out to the ribbon to click the Recalculate button to force the system to update the record. The new Command Bar doesn’t offer such an option, however. We can’t click the save button either, as there’s nothing to be saved on the actual parent opportunity itself. Our only options to get the totals updated are to A) close and reopen the opportunity form, or B) update any arbitrary field on the opportunity form. In fact, we might as well create a new checkbox field on the form called “switch to update”, to be changed each time we want to perform the calculation. The new auto save feature will then (in no more than 30 seconds) retrieve the updated value, without even flashing the form.

Polaris_opportunity_products_small

Recalculation is not the only issue here, however. Referring to the relationship attribute inheritance problem that the Polaris UI suffers from, this manifests itself also in the further steps of the sales process. Suppose you’ve added a subgrid for quotes on the opportunity form (or rather made it visible), to allow you to proceed with preparing an offer document to the customer. Clicking on the plus sign works nicely here for a change, since there’s no Add Existing option available for opportunity quotes, so we’re presented with the quote record containing the right header level sums and discounts we entered on the quote. We then click save and… WHAT?!? Where did all my monetary values disappear?!  Why is the quote empty now?

Polaris_quote_products_missing

The reason this happens is that the quote products were never created. The lack of inheritance doesn’t only limit itself to actions the user performs on the UI, but apparently some of the platform functionality also gets broken when using the Polaris forms. The Add New relationship does carry over the total values from the opportunity form onto the quote form, but none of the line items on the opportunity get added onto the quote. This means that the moment you click save and an update form is opened, the recalculation of the quote level fields takes place, thus deleting the values that existed while we were still on the create form. Sure, you could retrieve the products from the parent opportunity by using the Get Products button on the quote ribbon (as this entity still has the classic experience), but you probably wouldn’t be very happy with this workaround, knowing how it used to work before.

As a part of the Polaris update, the default value of the Revenue field has been changed from “System calculated” to “User provided” in Polaris, as outlined in article KB2806842. I think that sends a clear signal: if you’re working with line items in your sales process, you’d be better off not enabling the new process forms. In which case, don’t forget to go and set the default back to “System calculated” after the update if that’s how you build your opportunities. (more…)

Dynamics Marketplace vs. Microsoft Pinpoint: where are all the CRM apps?

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Posted on 3rd October 2012 by Jukka Niiranen in Annoyances |Tips

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When Microsoft released the 2011 version of Dynamics CRM and introduced the solution management functionality they also introduced the Dynamics Marketplace: an app store for CRM solutions, integrated right into the CRM user interface. Here’s an excerpt from the blog post Driving Success with the New Microsoft Dynamics Marketplace:

The Microsoft Dynamics Marketplace is a new online service – based on Microsoft Pinpoint — that helps our customers maximize the relevancy and value of their Microsoft Dynamics investments by connecting them with valuable, high-quality applications and professional services from our worldwide Microsoft Partner Network (MPN).   At launch, the Marketplace has more than 1,400 solution listings, including over 700 application listings and over 700 professional services listing forboth CRM and ERP

So, if you want to find the best listing of CRM solutions and other related applications, Dynamics Marketplace must be the place to go, right? Umm, actually not. You’re better of going to Microsoft Pinpoint to perform your search. Let me demonstrate this to you through a real life example.

Today I saw an announcement from Sonoma Partners, one of the most high profile companies in Dynamics CRM consulting business, about a new, free solution called Universal Search. As I followed the link on the press release onto “Microsoft Dynamics Marketplace”, I actually found myself at Pinpoint instead. It’s not a huge difference in the user experience, as Dynamics Marketplace is a subset of the Pinpoint platform. However, on this occasion I paid attention to the fact that the solution had actually already been published there on August 30th. Hmm, how come I didn’t notice it when scanning the Marketplace listings just last week?

I decided to do a little side-by-side test and opened up the US versions of both Dynamics Marketplace and Microsoft Pinpoint, narrowed down my search to applications only, selected Microsoft Dynamics CRM 2011 and sorted the list by release date. Here are the results:

  • Dynamics Marketplace: 197 applications
  • Microsoft Pinpoint: 584 applications

Wow! A search on the generic Pinpoint site gives you three times more CRM 2011 apps than the dedicated Marketplace. Click the image below to see an example of search results that you’d be missing out on if you only use Dynamics Marketplace. 4 out of the 6 latest CRM applications listed on Pinpoint are not available on the Marketplace search.

Why is this happening? Ignoring the chance of technical errors in the search indexing, the difference is caused by the more strict requirements imposed on submissions to the Dynamics Marketplace. If you read the blog post I mentioned earlier, you’ll find the following summary information:

A Microsoft partner needs to have either the CRM or ERP competency in order to get listed on the marketplace.  For solution listings, partners must be an authorized reseller of Microsoft Dynamics solution or have a solution that is verified as Microsoft Platform-Ready. Additionally, there is an optional Certified for Microsoft Dynamics (CfMD) designation available for an additional fee.

That’s a perfectly valid explanation to the difference and the intentions behind the verification processes are surely good. Some customers may well decide to minimize the risk of causing harm to the operation of their business critical CRM systems by only choosing add-ons that are CfMD. Of course, if even solution vendors like Sonoma Partners are releasing products outside of the Marketplace criteria, one might ask if that is a sensible guideline for customer organizations to follow or not.

For anyone who wants to keep track of the useful ISV add-ons released for Microsoft Dynamics CRM, they’ll get a much better experience browsing Microsoft Pinpoint rather than Dynamics Marketplace. I myself fall into this category and also try to do my share in promoting the ISV offerings by maintaining a list of Dynamics CRM Links to interesting apps I come across. Another result of the Marketplace limitations is that the majority of the valuable, free tools for CRM developers and customizers are published on CodePlex. So, in effect, we have three separate “app stores” from Microsoft. Or perhaps the term store is inaccurate in this case, as none of these three have cashiers in place, so maybe they should rather be called “app galleries”.

We haven’t seen much development on the Marketplace front since its release, which is quite a shame as we could really use some help from Microsoft in building a more vibrant ISV ecosystem around the Dynamics CRM product. There’s just so much more potential in the app store model, as illustrated by this awesome vision of a better Dynamics Marketplace that Neil Benson & Matt Wittemann. With the nearing commercial launch of Windows 8 and the accompanying Windows Store, the expectation levels of customers and developers alike have surely grown beyond the basic application listing that Dynamics Marketplace currently offers.

Getting back at blog content thieves

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Posted on 22nd September 2012 by Jukka Niiranen in Annoyances

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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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