Turn the flat Dynamics CRM 2011 charts into 3D

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Posted on 22nd October 2010 by Jukka Niiranen in Features

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“We’ve got charts and dashboards!” Yes, ok, so that’s the common initial reaction to one of the most visible new features of Microsoft Dynamics CRM 2011. After playing around with the OOB charts in CRM 2011 Beta and building a few of your own personal charts with the simplified editor that’s available right in the end-user UI, the next reaction is likely to be “I wish I could do more with these charts“.

The good news is: you absolutely can! The bad news? It requires a bit of XML editing. Now don’t go running away all scared, because it doesn’t take a .NET developer to perform some basic tweaks into the CRM 2011 charts. Heck, even I was able to figure it out after an hour of surfing around the documentation and blog posts on Microsoft Chart Controls for .NET 4.

In this quick example I will take the a custom chart I built in the solution customization UI for CRM 2011 and inject some more parameters into it to enhance the presentation. The first thing we’ll need to do is select the chart you want to modify in CRM and click Export Chart to grab the XML definition for the chart.

Open the XML file in the editor of your choice and have a look at the structure. Inside the <presentationdescription> tag you’ll find details about the <Chart> in question. What we’ll want to do in this example is insert more attributes inside the <ChartArea> tags. From MSDN Library we can find the following piece of information:

The Chart control supports 3D charts. To use 3D charts, set the respective chart area’s Area3DStyle.Enable3D property to True.

So, we know we’ll want to have the <Area3DStyle> tag in there with some parameters. In my chart we can apply the following addition into the chart definition XML:

<ChartAreas>
<ChartArea BorderColor=”White” BorderDashStyle=”Solid”>
<AxisY IsLabelAutoFit=”False” TitleForeColor=”59, 59, 59″ TitleFont=”{0}, 10.5px” LineColor=”165, 172, 181″ IsReversed=”False”>
<MajorGrid LineColor=”239, 242, 246″ />
<LabelStyle Font=”{0}, 10.5px” ForeColor=”59, 59, 59″ />
</AxisY>
<AxisX IsLabelAutoFit=”False” TitleForeColor=”59, 59, 59″ TitleFont=”{0}, 10.5px” LineColor=”165, 172, 181″ IsReversed=”False”>
<MajorGrid Enabled=”False” />
<MajorTickMark Enabled=”False” />
<LabelStyle Font=”{0}, 10.5px” ForeColor=”59, 59, 59″ />
</AxisX>
<Area3DStyle Enable3D=”True” LightStyle=”Realistic” WallWidth=”5″ IsRightAngleAxes=”true” />
</ChartArea>

Once we save the XML file and import it into a new CRM chart, the results will be the following:

There you go, that’s all there’s to it. Or more specifically, that’s just the beginning of what the visualizations in Dynamics CRM 2011 are capable of. Have a look at the MSDN Library for Visual Studio 2010 on articles about using Chart Controls or browse the Chart Controls for .NET Framework forum for questions and answers on how to work with the charts available in CRM 2011. Downloading the Sample Environment for Microsoft Chart Controls might also be a good place to start.

Dynamics CRM 2011 Walkthrough: new features in 74 slides

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Posted on 12th October 2010 by Jukka Niiranen in Features

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There’s no shortage of great blog posts that give you samples of the new functionality unveiled in Dynamics CRM 2011 Beta, as the buzz around the new version in the CRM blogosphere is just incredible right now (cheers to everyone who’s contributing to it). The problem is that this information is quite fragmented and simply all over the place for a person wanting to understand “what’s new and what does it look like?“. CRM 2011 videos and webcast recordings are also widely available already, but I often find this form of media quite difficult to consume effectively, as browsing and skipping through the long introductions and monologues can get tedious.

What’s my answer then? Well, I’m a PowerPoint guy who likes to present his thoughts in slides, so this was the obvious format for me to start compiling my introductory materials to the brave new world that awaits for us when Microsof Dynamics CRM 2011 becomes available in a few months time. Slides are great for capturing screenshots of the UI and annotating them with callouts, so that’s been my main focus in the presentation; giving a clear view of the new features in a logical order.

Microsoft Dynamics CRM 2011 Walkthrough Part 1

These 74 slides are actually just Part 1 of the deck I’ve been building. There’s simply way too much great new stuff (or limitations to be aware of) in Dynamics CRM 2011 to make a very brief introduction, so please bear with me while I walk you through the application.

Part 1 is titled “end-user tools and features” and it’s split into the following topics:

  • End-user tools and UI enhancements
  • Outlook client
  • Form customization options
  • Auditing
  • Connections
  • SharePoint integration
  • Visualizations
  • Goals

As you may have guessed already, the second part of the CRM 2011 Walkthrough (that’s still in the making) is going to focus more on behind the scenes changes that will be of interest to consultants and developers who are managing and building CRM/XRM solutions on top of the platform. The planned contents for part 2 is:

  • Customization menus
  • UI customization options
  • Solution management
  • Web resources
  • Processes (workflows)
  • Custom activities
  • Queue enhancements
  • Multiple forms per entity
  • Security features

Stay tuned for updates and let me know if there’s any specific features in CRM 2011 that you would like to see in my slides.

(Update: you can now find the part 2 slides in the following blog post: Dynamics CRM 2011 Walkthrough Part 2: another 100+ slides of new features)

Outlook 2007 with Dynamics CRM 2011: will it blend?

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Posted on 16th September 2010 by Jukka Niiranen in Features

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Perhaps the most visible improvement in Microsoft Dynamics CRM 2011 for the end user is the completely revamped Outlook client. Instead of merely wrapping the CRM web client UI inside the Outlook frame with stripped navigation and giving you the all important tracking buttons, the new Outlook client promises additional usability features over the web client. In the demos we’ve seen, things certainly do look pretty with Outlook 2010, but one question remains: will it blend with the previous versions of Outlook?

Here’s a reminder of what Dynamics CRM 2011 Outlook client delivers with Outlook 2010:

Many organizations have only recently gone through the trouble of upgrading to the “ribbonized” Office 2007 and training their staff to locate the familiar commands from the new ribbon icons and sections (or alternatively just shown how you can re-enable the old style menus in 2007). After all this effort, they may not feel like moving on to Office 2010 would really be the next priority item on the software upgrade list. Therefore it will be quite a probable path for companies to first upgrade to CRM 2011 before thinking about their Outlook clients. After all, CRM 2011 has backward compatibility all the way up till Outlook 2003, so why bother? Well, that’s exactly what I was curious to find out after receiving an invitation to CRM 2011 Online beta. I couldn’t risk my primary Outlook at work, so I decided to try this with my home laptop running 32-bit Office 2007 Enterprise on top of Windows 7 x64.

(Personal confession time: yesterday I was faced with a PC that had Office 2003 installed. Upon trying to start making a few PowerPoint slides to create some very basic graphics, I was completely lost and decide to give up altogether after staring at the screen for half a minute feeling helpless, as I couldn’t figure out which menus to click. So there, that’s how quickly we can all unlearn the skills we used to once possess.)

Getting started

Microsoft Dynamics CRM Online will prompt the new users accessing the server through Internet Explorer with a friendly reminder that there is also an Outlook client available. I clicked on the link and received a nice little 5.5 MB installer, so off we go.

Firing up Outlook after the installer gives a prompt to enter the CRM Online URL. Windows Live ID is verified and after that you’re connected to your CRM organization. Or should I say one of them, as the new Outlook client now supports having multiple organizations accessible through the same client UI. A very nice addition for all the XRM scenarios, but of course it comes with one major caveat: activities can only be synchronized with a single organization. So, you can only truly leverage the traditional Outlook capabilities with a single CRM organization. Maybe one day we’ll have the choice of a global “regarding” field from any server. (more…)

Dynamics CRM 2011 in all its (beta) glory

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Posted on 11th September 2010 by Jukka Niiranen in Features |News and events

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The truth is now out there, as Microsoft Dynamics CRM 2011 beta was released for the public on Thursday, September 9th. As a result, the NDA for the Early Adopter Program is no longer stopping me from sharing some of my thoughts and experiences on the latest and greatest version of CRM. Instead of trying to cover each and every new feature in a bullet list, I’ll focus on the topics which have caught my attention the most.

The Ribbon

Some love it, some hate it, but here it is anyway! In an application like CRM where the actions one can perform on a record tend to keep on growing over time as more and more customizations and integrations are applied to the system, the context sensitive ribbon with it’s graphical icons is much more important than in traditional Office apps. While not everyone is happy that CRM 2011 has lost form its tabs after the entity form was changed into one long page with sections, the tabs have infact found a new home on the ribbon. With this UI shift in mind, it’s easy to see why having two alternative levels of tabs was not really an option from usability perspective. In this new fluid ‘n flat world of CRM 2011 the custom tabs on the ribbon will offer a great customization point to insert shortcuts and custom actions that will help the user navigate inside the application.

There are already many nice shortcuts included in the default UI to reduce the number of clicks, which has previously been a common complaint from Dynamics CRM users. One convenient new feature is the Recently Visited button on the CRM main window, which shows a list of previously opened items and lets you pin down the favourite links that are most frequently accessed.

The ease of customization

Usability is a big factor not just for the system end users but also administrators, developers and any type of consultant that needs to spend a significant share of his working day interacting with the application. Back in the previous versions of CRM the number of clicking you were required to do in modifying customizations and various system settings was infuriating at times. I’m very glad to see that the UI enhancements in CRM 2011 have also been extended to the “engine room”. (more…)

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