The question of “how to integrate Microsoft Dynamics CRM with LinkedIn” has been making the rounds in various forums for as long as I’ve been involved with the product. Now that you’ve potentially arrived here in search for an answer (thanks, Google!), I thought I’d collect a few pieces of information and personal thoughts on the subject. If you have any experiences to share regarding using Dynamics CRM in the social selling scenarios, please do leave a comment in the box below.

The Quick Way

As always with information systems, there’s integration and then there’s “integration”. If you can meet the requirement by just surfacing a bit of content from LinkedIn inside a Dynamics CRM form, then here’s a great article from Salesmetrix that shows you the steps to integrate the LinkedIn Member Profile badge onto a CRM contact form. By adding a simple web resource and signing up for a LinkedIn API key you can show the contact’s job title and picture from LinkedIn alongside your CRM data, like this:

Why is this not the perfect solution? Well, did you notice the step require for copy-pasting the URL to the contact’s LinkedIn profile field before the profile badge is shown? Yeah, that’s the bit that your sales people are most likely not going to perform. Getting them to even enter the minimum required details on their leads and opportunities into a CRM system can be a major struggle, so introducing a complex operation like this into the process is going to require plenty of sales skills from the implementation consultant to convince the users that there’s a tangible benefit for them in filling in all the blanks on the contact form.

That’s of course not anything that couldn’t be overcome with a little bit of further development. One example for performing the profile search dynamically based on name fields on the CRM records can be found from Nicolae Tarla’s blog. Coincidentally, Nicolae has also recently released the Microsoft Dynamics CRM 2011 Scripting Cookbook that contains a few examples of lightweight social network integrations in the final chapter. Building proper social profile discovery services will require more than mere Javascript, but for showing LinkedIn Member Profile Plugin and Company Insider Plugin in the CRM UI you probably don’t need to invest a whole lot of time in developing a working solution.

You could choose an even more simplified approach and just add a button on the contact form’s ribbon to open LinkedIn search page with pre-filled values. A URL like http://www.linkedin.com/vsearch/p?firstName=Jukka&lastName=Niiranen&company=CodeBakers will get you onto my LinkedIn profile faster than manually entering the same search terms. You can study the LinkedIn URL Query Parameters to see the kinds of variables that could be used. There’s also a post on the old CRM Online Team blog that shows you how the button would have been added back in the CRM 4.0 days. (While building your URL’s, do remember to handle special characters and spaces in contact and account names.)

The problem with all these type of solutions is that if you’re not paying for them (on a continuous basis), you can’t expect them to remain working forever. Several variations of the LinkedIn and Dynamics CRM integration techniques have come and gone, such as Marco Amoedo’s CRM 4.0 LinkedIn Company Insider Widget hover link and Leon Tribe’s & Matt Wittemann’s Five-Minute Integration Between Dynamics CRM and LinkedIn. All fine solutions in their time, but as the API’s and applications keep changing, the need for re-developing solutions to the same problem remains.

The Official Way

A company like LinkedIn surely wouldn’t have missed the chance for monetizing the data they’ve accumulated into their network by selling it to B2B sales people who are using a system like Microsoft Dynamics CRM, now would they? Of course not, which means “there’s an app for that”: LinkedIn for Microsoft Dynamics CRM.

The product requires a Sales Plus or Sales Executive subscription for LinkedIn, which start from €28.95 per user per month. If you’re like me, you probably receive frequent “special offers” for a free month of LinkedIn Premium. This time I decided to activate the offer and use it for test driving the Dynamics CRM solution. The deployment process was quite straightforward for a CRM Online environment as no further configuration was needed apart from installing the solution file. After that, this is how you’ll see LinkedIn company profile and people data on the account form:

On the contact form we have tabs for both Company Profile and individual Member Profile.

For some reason the lead form doesn’t get any LinkedIn components added on it, so you’ll need to qualify the lead to an account and contact before being able to leverage the integration.

Not every CRM user needs to have the subscription, but unless they do, they’ll not be able to see the premium content on the account or contact forms. Therefore you’ll probably need to manage role based forms for different user groups by creating a specific LinkedIn security role for those who have the Sales Plus subscription.

Unfortunately the solution from LinkedIn hasn’t yet been updated to be compatible with the cross-browser world of Polaris / Update Rollup 12, so using it on Chrome, Firefox or Safari isn’t supported. Also Internet Explorer 10 fails to render any content in the iFrame and LinkedIn recommends downgrading to IE9, so if you’re running Windows 8 you’ll need to run Dynamics CRM in IE7 Compatibility View to make use of the solution. No release schedules for an updated solutions were available when I asked about this from LinkedIn support. Needless to say, running CRM Online with the new Polaris process forms isn’t supported with the LinkedIn add-on.

The Ultimate Way?

What if we are really determined to get the most out of this wonderful source of “free” information that is LinkedIn? Wouldn’t we want to pour all the data into our own CRM database and preferably also synchronize it with the latest updates available from different online directories?

The LinkedIn solution for Microsoft Dynamics CRM doesn’t allow you to physically retrieve any data from LinkedIn into the CRM database. It’s all just a UI level integration that presents the additional details in an iFrame. Why do they stop there? Well, the answer is quite simple: LinkedIn is all about the user profile data and they don’t want you to simply just retrieve this into your own database and skip their service altogether in the process. The terms of the LinkedIn API are quite clear about this:

“The first rule of LinkedIn API is: You do not store data from LinkedIn. The second rule of LinkedIn API is: You do not store any data you receive from LinkedIn, except for the member ID.”

Surely many companies have tempted with the idea of breaking the rules, but nothing good has ever come from such foolish attempts. There are no free lunches, even in a seemingly free service, so just don’t go there.

There is of course a variety of B2B database service providers out there whose business model has been designed specifically for selling contact details to companies wishing to upload them into their own CRM systems. You’ll likely find such services from your local markets and they may even have a solution available for Dynamics CRM integration.

As an example, the solution from InsideView does allow you to import new contacts or leads as well as synchronize the existing records with updated information from their database, assuming you are connected on LinkedIn.

Oh, and it works on Polaris forms and cross-browser, too:

If you’re serious about enabling your sales team with the latest & greatest in social selling tools, then investing in a service like this is probably a good idea. Just ensure that the data you get from them covers the actual markets where you need to be reaching the contacts in.

The Future Way

Now that Microsoft has acquired companies focusing on social technologies, namely Yammer and NetBreeze, can we expect a LinkedIn integration to be included in a future release of Microsoft Dynamics CRM? Recently we’ve already seen the new Office 365 address books in the Exchange Online 2013 version gain a “connect your networks” feature:

However, this is more in the territory of Outlook Social Connector or the LinkedIn account sync found on every Windows Phone. It’s all just personal address books rather than a corporate CRM database, which means that different rules apply to it. Therefore you shouldn’t expect such a feature to find its way into a product like Dynamics CRM. Of course if the Outlook client integration would be leveraged for tracking the data into CRM contacts then that’s another story, but it’s still all user decisions rather than a central synchronization machine.

So what else is out there? Solutions like Webfortis Parrot already offer the possibility of promoting items from LinkedIn feeds into records in CRM (see this review by Gareth Tucker for details) and there’s a free edition for 2 user licenses available for you to experiment with. While this offers a nice set of tools for anyone tasked with monitoring the social streams for content worth tracking, it’s unlikely to cater for the same audience that is interested in searching decision makers and influencers from LinkedIn.

NetBreeze, once integrated into Dynamics CRM, will probably offer a nice set of listening capabilities for various social channels. Whether these tools will reach beyond the marketing department’s territory is another question. At least Bob Stutz has promised to build social right into the product, bringing it “just there” rather than an add-on service, so let’s hope there will be functionality to support the sales scenarios as well.

The “No Software” Way

Out of curiosity, I checked out how the Customer Company performs on the social front. Salesforce.com offers a feature called Social Accounts, Contacts, and Leads, which “lets you view social network profiles and other social information for your accounts, contacts, and leads, directly in Salesforce.” LinkedIn is included as one of the networks there, but curiously it’s only supported for contacts, leads and “person accounts”, meaning there’s no company profile information available. Nevermind, let’s try it out in practice.

Contact records in Salesforce have a bunch of social network icons below their name and clicking on the LinkedIn logo gives the prompt below. Unfortunately the “tell me more” link is dead, so we can’t learn much about the feature without authorizing the app to use our LinkedIn account. Guess we’ll need to proceed anyway.

Once authorized, we can find a selection of matching profiles to choose from. After clicking on the right one, we have connected the contact in our CRM with a profile in LinkedIn. Great! Except that we don’t really get much else out of it. You see, Salesforce also requires the purchase of a LinkedIn Sales Plus or Sales Executive subscription to see any information inside CRM. Without it, all you can see is the job title of the person as record in their member profile, as well as the profile picture if available.

What’s really the cruel part is that there’s not even a link to open the connected profile on the LinkedIn site, even though the data obviously exists in the CRM database now. Therefore, if you wish to enable your sales team with the social network intelligence tools right inside your CRM application, you’ll have to purchase the same additional subscription as with Microsoft Dynamics CRM. The Salesforce social profiles feature looks actually just like a built-in ad for the LinkedIn for Salesforce premium product.

The Twitter and Facebook profile lookups are functional without an extra subscription. While this does speed up finding the right social network profile, you won’t necessarily find much B2B content from here. Of course it’s nice to be able to see the persons tweets inline on the contact form, but you can’t convert these into any type of records inside your CRM database with this basic service. Presumably you’ll need Social Marketing Cloud (a.k.a. Radian6) subscription for that.

Then, finally, there’s the disclaimer:

“The Social Accounts and Contacts feature uses Facebook, Klout, LinkedIn, Twitter, and YouTube public APIs to display social information in Salesforce. Because these social networks have the option of modifying or terminating access to their APIs at any time, salesforce.com can’t guarantee the future availability of this feature or any of its functionality, including access to the data that is currently provided or to any particular social network as a whole.”

Therein lies the problem of course. These are external services that exist in their current form for the time being, no further guarantees. Twitter in particular has been known for imposing new restrictions on their API and effectively killing most of the developer ecosystem in the process while searching for a business model. Thinking of Klout, do you imagine it will be around long enough to warrant making it an integrated part of your CRM suite?

The post LinkedIn, Dynamics CRM and Social Selling appeared first on Surviving CRM.

After reading this blog post from Jeff Atwood, I couldn’t help but to shop around for an “SSD in your pocket”, meaning a super fast USB flash drive that would have sufficient storage space for hosting a CRM 2011 development server image. I decided to grab the SanDisk SDCZ80-064G-X46 64GB Extreme USB 3.0 Flash Drive from Amazon.co.uk for €60 and test it out as a portable CRM sandbox. 190 MB/s read and 170 MB/s write should provide a nice performance boost compared to my old spinning HDD’s.

Since shrinking my existing VirtualBox image down to the 60Gb available on the flash drive would have meant giving up on a lot of things I had installed there, I decided this was a good moment for building a brand new virtual server. During the fall I had already attempted a few times to deploy CRM 2011 on Windows Server 2012, even though it has been unsupported. Unfortunately none of the workarounds published by Daniel Cai had done the trick for me, so I decided to wait for the official support.

With Update Rollup 13 Microsoft Dynamics CRM 2011 Server finally became officially supported to be run on Windows Server 2012. However, there was one catch: you could only upgrade an existing Windows Server 2008 deployment with CRM 2011 onto Windows Server 2012. For a brand new deployment there was a disclaimer included with UR13 release notes:

The Self-Healing Setup (SHS) that is required to install Update Rollup 13 for Microsoft Dynamics CRM 2011 on Windows Server 2012 will be published on Microsoft Update alongside the update rollup in mid-to-late April, 2013.

Ok, it’s 1st of May now, so where are these SHS files? Well, they are available, but not quite in the kind of format you would expect. You can’t simply download an updated version of the Dynamics CRM Server installer, as the one available on Microsoft Download is still the old version with Update Rollup 6 that was released in January 2012.

There’s a thread over at Dynamics Community CRM Forum that discusses the Windows Server 2012 installation procedure, but I’ll summarize how I managed to get CRM installed on such an environment. There were a few puzzling gotchas that no one else should spend their time on pondering.

Get the update files

The KB article 2434455, “How to obtain the setup updates for Microsoft Dynamics CRM 2011″, gives you the steps you need to follow. Instead of heading to Microsoft Download, you’ll need to visit the Microsoft Update catalog website (which only supports IE, by the way, so don’t click the link on Chrome or anything). From there you’ll be able to obtain a file called Setup Update for Microsoft Dynamics CRM Server 2011. The fun part about this is that the size of the file is 1.5 GB.

Why is the file so huge, with the actual CRM 2011 Server installer being only 120 MB? The reason is that this file contains all 25 language versions for the update file. If you’re installing the English version, you’ll only need the en-server_kb2434455_amd64_1033 cab file. Oh well, the Internet is fast nowadays and hard drives are infinite, so let’s get on with it.

Prepare for installation

The cab file won’t be the installer itself, rather it’s a collection of updates that needs to be references while running the actual server installer. How do you do that then? By creating a config.xml file following the example given in the KB article above and dropping it into the same folder as installer and the cab file.

Then we can proceed with starting the installation. Only there’s one more catch which isn’t included in the KB article: you’ll need to start the installation process from the command line in order to be able to tell that there’s a config file pointing to a cab file that contains the updates necessary for CRM 2011 to run on Windows Server 2012. You can read through the TechNet article “Use the Command Prompt to Install Microsoft Dynamics CRM 2011″ if you’re interested in the finer details of parameterizing your CRM server deployments, but if you’re like me, you’ll just want to copy-paste the required bits onto the prompt to move on with the process.

1. Put the cab and config.xml in C:\Temp
2. Download the UR6 version of CRM 2011 Server installer and put the CRM2011-Server-ENU-amd64.exe file in the same folder
3. Run the file, point it to extract the files onto the very same C:\Temp directory
4. Cancel any further setup screens that may be launched, as you’ll still need to provide the pointer to the cab file
5. Open the command prompt, go to C:\Temp directory and type: setupserver.exe /config C:\Temp\config.xml

This process will make the installer skip the question of “do you want to download updates from Microsoft Update” and use the SHS cab file directly. This is the whole point of our exercise, as Microsoft Update for one reason or another cannot provide the necessary updates for Windows Server 2012 compatibility for the CRM 2011 Server installer.

After this part, you can follow the standard steps for installing CRM. You may get an error screen saying “Action Microsoft.Crm.Setup.Common.InstallWindowsSearchAction failed. Class not registered (Exception from HRESULT: 0×80040154 (REGDB_E_CLASSNOTREG))”, but just click Ignore on it as that issue is most likely just about the indexing service for the CRM help files.

Validate and update once more

Once you’re done and have rebooted the server, you’ll be able to launch CRM. From those oldskool icons in the Wunderbar area you’ll quickly notice that this deployment is still running a pre-cross-browser era version of Dynamics CRM. The build numbers 5.0.9690.2015 and 5.0.9690.1992 indicate that it is in fact a UR6 organization still. (Hmm, was there ever any need for UR13 to support installation on Windows Server 2012 then?) Before you start working on your environment, download and install Update Rollup 13 to make CRM support the IE10 running on your Windows Server 2012, unless you enjoy using the IE7 Compatibility View.

There we have it. A nice and fast CRM 2011 sandbox image running Windows Server 2012 and SQL Server 2012 in a 36 GB image stored on a very fast thumb drive. I’m sure I’ll be struggling with keeping the image small enough with all the updates, service packs, Office, Visual Studio and other bloat that’s bound to end up there. On the plus side I’ll be able to carry the sandbox on my keychain and plug it into any PC with sufficient memory to run the environment (3.5 GB & 2 CPU reserved for it currently) and enjoy SSD level disk I/O performance. We’ll see if it was worth all the trouble at the end, but hey – don’t we all just enjoy fiddling with the latest software and fastest hardware?

Edit 2013-05-04: For anyone looking to move completely towards developing for Dynamics CRM on top of Windows Server 2012, please note that the Dynamics CRM Outlook client does not support Windows Server 2012 yet. If you try to run the setup, all you will get is the following message: “Cannot install Microsoft Dynamics CRM for Outlook. Install Windows Server 2008 Service Pack 2, and then try again.”

Edit 2013-05-04, Part 2: If you’re interested in the detailed steps for building a Dynamics CRM sandbox, please refer to articles like Creating a MS CRM 2011 VM by Mark Kovalcson or Setting up a CRM demo environment in Windows Azure Virtual Machines by Shan McArthur (unfortunately the images on this post no longer work). It doesn’t really matter on which virtualization platform you’re building your sandbox on. I’m using VirtualBox simply because I have other existing virtual machines on it, but with Windows 8 built-in Hyper-V support you don’t necessarily need any additional software. Also, as you can see from Shan’s post, running these environments in Azure is also a perfectly viable option.

The post Dynamics CRM 2011 on Windows Server 2012 appeared first on Surviving CRM.

Based on these comments and observations, I decided to write down some further thoughts of mine on the potential impact of Orion. After all, it will be a while before the next Dynamics CRM release is officially out the door (notice how it’s almost “light years away” in timeline slide below?), so we’ve got plenty of time to kill.

The Aftermath of Polaris

The Polaris release in January seems to have raised a few concerns among customers and consultants, specifically on these two fronts:

• CRM Online only – is Microsoft going to ignore its on-premises customers?
  
• Lack of support for Javascript on the process forms – will Dynamics CRM cease to be an extensible XRM platform?

If we start from the Online part, Microsoft has made it clear already some time ago that they will proceed with an “Online first” strategy when it comes to updates and new features. While previously the gap between the on-premises and Online environments in terms of feature availability has been fairly small (with many hotfixes still arriving first for on-premises customers), Polaris really shifted this balance by introducing a whole new user interface with the process forms as well as integrations to external services like Bing Maps and Skype.

If you were only casually following the product roadmap announcements from Microsoft last fall, it will have been easy to miss the fine print that said the December 2012 Service Update was for CRM Online customers only. Although Microsoft has basically promised that all of the new features will be introduced also in the on-premises version, with no specific release dates available yet, this message may not have been very comforting to those who were mistaken to expect the new Polaris features for their CRM servers already in December. Many blog posts were later on written to clarify the differences between Update Rollup 12 and Polaris, so clearly there was some room left for improvement in the product roadmap communication strategy for future releases.

Since Orion will be a major version release with synchronized contents for all deployment models, it’s only a matter of time before we’ll return back to the status of feature parity between Online and on-premises. However, it’s also just a matter of time before there’s a further release planned that targets CRM Online customers only. As has been stated, the plan is to have one release per year for on-premises and two for Online, so it’s best to adjust yourself to the idea that the latest innovations will be piloted in the Microsoft cloud. On-premises remains a perfectly viable option (or the only option for some customer groups), but things just won’t move as fast there as they do in the cloud. When dealing with business software, that’s not always such a bad thing actually.

Let Them Eat Jscript

Just like the “Online only” nature of Polaris, the support for scripts or, more precisely, the lack of it wasn’t a widely advertised quality of the new UI. This limitation has understandably caused frustration in different departments. Funnily enough, having the privilege of access to new features doesn’t necessarily make you any happier if you end up feeling that something has been taken away from you at the same time.

For existing CRM Online customers with form scripts already applied, be it for simple conditional logic related to fields and values or more complex calculations, it has meant that the benefits of the new UI can’t be taken into use without cutting back on functionality that exists in the old UI. For new customers who sign up for a CRM Online trial it can come as a surprise that in order to implement the business logic that the organization needs, their Microsoft partner will have to “downgrade” them to a UI that looks very different from the one that got the excited about the product during the 30 day trial.

If you ask me, I think the problem really is that Polaris wasn’t released as the “iPad client” but rather as the new user interface for all clients. This brought the requirements for the UI onto a whole different level and, unfortunately, at this level Polaris isn’t able to compete with the classic forms yet. If the Flow UX was something that the users themselves could easily switch to, similar to using the “/m” in the CRM URL to access the Mobile Express version, consultants and administrators wouldn’t need to be cautious about enabling this new UX alonside the fully functional Ribbon UI of CRM 2011.

Orion Rising

With Orion we can expect to see the support of form Javascripts to be extended onto the new Process forms, if only for the simple reason that the “classic” forms may not be available anymore in the next release. Alongside this we’ll also see a brand new navigation pattern supported by the global Navigation Bar, as Dynamics CRM will transform from a popup-driven application to a standard web application that can be operated in a single browser window.

On-premises CRM 2011 environments that will be upgraded to Orion (most likely to be called CRM 2013 or CRM 2014, depending on the actual release date) will see quite a significant change on the user interface side. Not only will the Process forms change the standard layout from a vertically scrolling list of fields to a more “widescreen” design with multiple sections side by side on a bright white canvas, also the traditional navigation components of Dynamics CRM UI will be renewed as the graphical Ribbon gets transformed into a text based menu and the left hand side navigation items get moved into the top Navigation Bar.

Concerns over the impact this upcoming change in the UI will have on existing Dynamics CRM implementations, particularly from the XRM end of the spectrum, are quite natural. If you are tasked with building a wealth of custom processes and business logic on top of the underlying platform to make it work according to customer specifications, then it may not be such a huge delight to find out that you’ll soon need to rebuild some of it to fit with the new design of the CRM presentation layer. The fact that you don’t yet have information about the SDK level changes only makes this more stressful.

What does the newly announced focus on applications and the goal of “making users love their CRM” then mean in practice? After introducing all the solution management improvements and more supported form customization techniques in CRM 2011, is Microsoft now about to turn their back on the XRM story and break existing deployments with these announced changes in Polaris and Orion? Aren’t they just ignoring the current customer base and developer ecosystem in an effort to lure in new users by selling them the concept of CRM Online on an iPad touch screen? Why not focus on fixing the existing pain points instead of acquiring more external services like Netbreeze or Marketing Pilot?

One way of looking at this is that we’re just seeing a natural stage where any piece of published software will eventually reach, which is the maintenance of legacy code. I encourage everyone to read the insightful post “Surviving Legacy Code” by Steven Sinofsky (of Office and Windows fame) where he discusses the various challenges encountered by software product development professionals tasked with maintaining and updating a system that existing customers depend on but which must also adapt to new requirements and use cases that arise over time.

I won’t attempt to rewrite Steven’s thorough analysis here, rather I’ll quote a few pieces from it to deliver the key considerations here that are relevant when thinking about the future of Dynamics CRM:

“Assuming we’re not going to just shut down the system, it will change. Some people will like the change and other’s will not. One person’s treasure is another’s trash.”

“Once your system introduces extensibility it becomes a platform. Someone, internal or external, will take advantage of your extensibility in ways you probably didn’t envision. You’ve got an instant legacy, but this legacy is now a dependency to external partners critical to your success.”

Thinking about this legacy dilemma in the XRM context, if the user interface of the platform is going through significant changes every 2-3 years, how can you rely on it to serve as the foundation for your line of business application? Well, I’d turn this question around and rather ask: how well would the LoB application remain relevant to its users over its expected lifecycle if there weren’t any updates introduced to its user experience? The point being, businesses shouldn’t choose Dynamics CRM as their XRM platform just because it provides the right set of plumbing and extensibility at this moment. The fact that someone else (meaning Microsoft) will further develop the platform for you and keep releasing new versions is equally a key benefit of the strategy, when compared to the alternative of building the whole application from scratch.

Embrace The Joys of Upgrading

To be able to reap full benefits from you platform of choice, it’s important to plan for the upgrades well in advance, meaning building your own roadmap of the kinds of investments your XRM solution will require beyond the initial go-live. Even though it’s difficult to guess what the future versions will look like and which current custom/add-on features may get built into core platform, what is relatively easy to predict is the approximate schedule of new releases that you should prepare for. An even easier task is support lifecycle of each version, which Microsoft makes publicly available for anyone to see. For example, the lifecycle of Dynamics CRM 4.0 started in February 2008 and its mainstream support ended last week, on April 9th. That’s over five years of support for the platform, even though a newer version came out two years ago. CRM 2011 on the other hand is scheduled to have around 1000 days of mainstream support by the time Orion is released.

Although running the previous version of CRM is a “luxury” reserved for the on-premises customers, getting stuck on an unsupported version is a trap that should be perfectly avoidable given the information available. Just because Orion is still some 6 months away and the first few Update Rollups for it (again, predictably released every 8 weeks) to iron out any initial bugs are even further still, that doesn’t mean you couldn’t already be formulating your upgrade strategy and planning a possible timeline for the project. For example, how about taking advantage of the Orion “preview version” of Polaris and signing up for a 30-day trial account to understand the direction where Dynamics CRM is heading?

I wrote an article on why Polaris is the Windows 8 of Dynamics CRM a while ago and I’m already starting to think that a sequel along the lines of “is Orion going to be the Windows Blue of CRM” might be in order eventually. Whenever you are serious about moving the cheese, there will be emotions both for and against the change, and you might very well not succeed with your first attempt yet. Playing it safe, however, and holding on to the legacy isn’t a viable option for the solution vendor nor the customer in the long run.

The post Ready Or Not, Orion Is Coming appeared first on Surviving CRM.

• Microsoft Dynamics CRM: Product Recap & Roadmap Primer by Jujhar Singh
• Microsoft Dynamics CRM: Reimagining the User Experience by Michael McCormack

Here’s a few Orion screenshots and some notes on the changes in user interface logic.

The single window paradigm

Polaris managed to reduce the amount of popup dialogs in Dynamics CRM, but apart from some nice transient updates of the form (lead to opportunity, new case to existing case), it didn’t change the fundamental UI logic which dictated that each record form opened in a separate window. Well, Orion does exactly that: all records open in the single CRM window now.

Whether you are on the old main window, meaning looking at a list of records or a dashboard (possibly renamed as workspace?), or opening an individual record form, it all takes place in the same window. The navigation that was previously available only on the main window now follows you wherever you go in CRM. To quote Michael McCormack:

“The whole purpose of Orion is to get rid of that window problem we’ve had for so long.”

Note that he didn’t say Windows with a capital W and plural form… In relation to that, the commitment to cross-browser support was emphasized on several occasions, with McCormack saying he doesn’t currently use Dynamics CRM on Internet Explorer at all and neither does most of his team, just to keep everyone honest about never going back to that IE-only mentality.

The Navigation Bar

With just a single menu bar across all of the application, it’s got to be pretty versatile, right? That’s what the Navigation Bar appears to be. Here’s how to access the main navigation areas (Sales, Marketing, Service etc.) when on a record form:

Next stop, going one level down, meaning one step to the right in the new navigation structure, we can see the entities falling under the Sales area:

Even further down, if we click on the opportunity entity on the Navigation Bar, we’ll get the MRU list = most recently used records. A handy feature that used to be either hidden in the top right corner of the sitemap or alternatively buried in the Outlook backstage menus is now placed literally front and center. Pinned items should also be supported, although there doesn’t appear to be a visible pin in this early version of the Orion UI yet.

Working with records

There’s now a default dashboard for each navigation area, which makes quite a lot of sense compared to having them previously only available in the common Workplace (which might be eliminated in Orion by the looks of things). If you’re in a view of records instead, what you get is a nice, widescreen presentation of column information, as there is no longer any left side navigation hogging up space on the screen.

Clicking on a record from the list will not open a new window, you’ll just move onto a record form instead. Want to get back to the previous view? Just use the Back button/gesture of your preferred browser. Crazy, eh? CRM working just like a standard web application and respecting the navigation paradigms everyone’s already familiar with.

So, now that we’re on the record form, how is the Navigation Pane different? Well, it isn’t, which is the whole point. You can (presumably) access any menu of the application from any page of the application through this global top navigation.

Related Records

This was one thing I really hated about Polaris: removing the Ribbon from the new forms effectively made it impossible to add related records for the parent record that you currently had open. Trying to add subgrids on the form to make up for the loss was no help either since the relationship inheritance feature was broken. To add insult to injury, you had a plus sign in the top left corner that allowed you to create a new, blank record of the same type you were currently viewing. When would anyone ever want to do something like that from a record form?

Now we know the answer: in Orion that’s exactly how you would work. Since any window is a main window now, creating new records with the “+” icon is a perfectly valid use case. The left side navigation that was collapsed on the Polaris process forms is now completely removed as well, instead you have the option of viewing the related records menu from the top Navigation Bar. In its current state this looks a bit too hidden for comfort, but let’s see how it turns out in the end.

With those large icons, does it mean that you can only have a limited amount of record relationships visible? No, there can be just as many as before, but only six will be shown at a time and you’ll have to scroll/swipe for more. McCormack referred to this as an intentional design constraint that is meant to force you to prioritize your CRM UI design. Due to the limitations of the human mind and our perception capacity, Orion aims to show you groups of maximum seven things at a time.

Ok, so how do we then complete the process of adding related child records for the currently open parent record? The simple way will be through the Quick Create forms that you can expand from the “+” sign on the menu. Quick Create is not a new concept for Dynamics CRM, but what is new and absolutely essential is that these forms will finally become customizable.

Life After The Ribbon

As we’re already aware, both the Ribbon and the Classic forms will be phased out in Orion. It will be replaced by the far less visual Command Bar with much less features visible by default. In his comparison of the two, McCormack claimed that the Command Bar and the new process form together contain all the functionality that previously was crammed into the Ribbon. While in Polaris that’s not exactly true yet (try running a workflow, dialog, report, add to marketing list etc. on the process form), presumably the updated Orion navigation will preserve all existing functionality.

What’s going to happen to custom ribbon buttons then? The will be migrated to the Command Bar, which basically means that you’ll continue to have some navigation customization capabilities at least. However, with the new limited presentation options (and the whole “show only 7 things at once” principle), Microsoft is encouraging everyone to evaluate whether all the custom menu options are really necessary. If you’re currently basing your app design on Ribbon buttons, it might be a good idea to consider alternative approaches, perhaps through adding web resources on the form or something else.

Whereas Polaris was very restricted on the form customization options (no scripts basically), Orion is once again going to “have the app in it”. Basically the current CRM 2011 customization methods should make a comeback in Orion, although new things like auto save, navigation changes etc. will obviously mean some work for developers to adapt their existing solutions to Orion. “Backward compatibility doesn’t necessarily mean it’s going to be beautiful.”

One thing that McCormack mentioned was the general goal of making Dynamics CRM more configurable as opposed to customizable. What this means is we’ll likely see more options like the Polaris process configurator that are aimed at business users rather that sysadmins and IT folks. Speaking of which, here’s some possible enhancements to the Process Control, which will be available for (almost) any entity in Orion:

Beyond The Browser Client

The new browser UI looks great and will most likely improve Dynamics CRM usability. But what’s the story on other types of clients then?

Support for the Safari browser on iPad was released for CRM Online Polaris in February, but there will be native apps coming for both Windows 8 and iOS tablets in Orion (meaning also on-premises customers). The “native” part will however not be very platform specific, but rather the apps will act as frames for displaying the HTML5 content that’s based on the common backbone of the web UI. To what extent the navigation and other options in that tablet version of Dynamics CRM will be identical to the full UI remains to be seen, but the current understanding appears to be that there won’t be separate mobile forms to configure.

Regardless of the native app, it was stated in Convergence 2013 that the iPad Safari will be among the supported browsers for the new web client UI. This means you’ll no longer be limited to just the lead to opportunity process but can access any entity from the iPad browser client. Although it won’t be as touch optimized as the actual tablet app and won’t have features like data caching for “casual offline” usage, this should extend the use cases of CRM on iPad quite significantly.

As for smartphone clients, they are not included in the Orion release timeframe. How much longer will you need to wait for having something other than Mobile Express to access Dynamics CRM on your iPhone is hard to speculate at this point, but the tablet scenario obviously currently has a higher priority at Microsoft than the “in your pocket” type of mobile CRM. Given how tablets are basically close to a small PC in terms of screen size, catering for this market with the new web UI is surely a lot easier than the mobile phone form factor.

Hmm, wasn’t there one more client type that Dynamics CRM supported? Ah, yes, the Outlook client. How will the Orion release look when used together with the latest Microsoft Office applications? To my knowledge that wasn’t shown at Convergence, but McCormack did give some hints on what to expect. Remember that single window paradigm from the beginning of this post? Well, it’s not actually going to be possible with the Outlook client, as CRM will be constrained by the Outlook UI paradigm. As a result, the traditional sitemap navigation (folders after folders) will remain a part of Dynamics CRM for Outlook even in Orion. The actual record forms themselves have no constraints, so these will likely resemble the screenshots from the web UI.

Loving It?

Alright, that’s all the new Orion UI info I have for now. All in all, quite an exciting new direction for Dynamics CRM that I’m sure will help to address many of the usability issues from previous versions and will also finish what the “preview version” of Polaris started. If CRM 2011 felt like a whole new application after the fairly similar CRM 3.0 and 4.0 UI’s, Orion as the next major version of Dynamics CRM looks to deliver at least as much new innovation on the user experience front.

I’ll pass final judgement once I get to actually play with the Orion UI, but I think overall the most important change we’re seeing is Microsoft truly paying attention to the application usability. Not just adding more features and more menus in an endless effort to deliver productivity enabling features, but also considering what the experience actually feels like for the users who are introduced to Dynamics CRM as a new tool that they’re expected to use. I’ll end with a quote from Michael McCormack’s Convergence session that I think in all it’s honesty is a testament to this shift in thinking:

“The biggest design change from CRM 2011 to Polaris? The iPhone. People expect software to be different now, and that’s what caused it.”

Amen. There would be no Windows 8 or Metro design language without the iPhone. Thinking different is good for you.

The post The Next Dynamics CRM User Experience: Orion appeared first on Surviving CRM.

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:

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.

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?

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.

Lead conversion

A common tip for speeding up the data entry for new accounts & contacts has been to use the lead form to enter all the details on one form, then just convert it to the necessary account, contact and/or opportunity records. Well, now the “or” is gone, as there no longer is a qualify dialog window in Polaris that would present these options to the user when converting a lead. The article KB2808201 says this is by design, so the dialog is unlikely to make a comeback in future versions.

It’s important to note that this doesn’t affect only the Polaris process forms. Also the classic lead form now has two buttons for Qualify and Disqualify, instead of the old one that popped open the dialog window. Once you apply the product updates to your CRM Online organization, you can’t return to the old process. What this means in practice is that users working with the existing “Information” forms that don’t support the concept of creating leads for existing accounts or contacts (like the new one does) may end up creating duplicate records unintentionally.

Sure, the previous experience of having three new windows pop up after the lead conversion was a clear pain point in the system. It was often used to highlight issues with the Dynamics CRM UI logic, so the elimination of separate windows when moving  from lead to opportunity must have been a top priority for the product team. However, with the new design you lose the power of choice that had allowed companies to not always create an opportunity record from a qualified lead record. Also, anyone who’s still working with the classic forms no longer even has the option to open up the newly created records, rather he or she needs to go and search them from the main window.

A related minor issue is outlined in KB2808214, which describes how “a script error occurs during lead qualification or leads cannot be qualified in Microsoft Dynamics CRM”. Adding the missing currency field onto the form should fix this one.

Notes

The new Tab Control that combines the Activity Feed posts, activities and notes into a single section in the middle of the new forms will render as the notes control once viewing the form in Classic mode. However, there are also changes in how the notes are presented on the traditional “Information” forms. Previously both the Created On/By and Modified On/By fields were visible for notes and attachments, but in the new simplified UI there are only the modification fields left. What this means is that you lose information about who originally added the note and when. I can imagine this having been a useful feature when evaluating the validity of such unstructured information entered on customer records.

Even if you’re not in the habit of editing existing notes once they’ve been entered into the system, there’s a fair chance that the original timestamp and creator information will get lost eventually. You see, a modification is not just someone deliberately editing the text of a note description, it can be some related action such as the assignment of the parent record to a new owner that triggers an update on the notes records as well.

What may come as even a bigger surprise is that you don’t need to be performing any updates to the record at all to accidentally overwrite the Modified On/By fields. Simply clicking on the note and performing a copy & paste will be interpreted as a modification in the new auto save world of Polaris. Although auto save can improve the overall user experience, be sure to vote up this item on MS Connect to help get this issue fixed in a future update.

(Edit 2013-03-29: For further reading, why not check out what the user interface in the upcoming Orion release will be like, to better understand what the end goal of the UI re-design started in Polaris is.)

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It’s been a bit rough

The opening keynote by Bob Stutz, corporate vice president of Microsoft Dynamics CRM, was a somewhat unusual appearance compared to the traditional Microsoft way of highlighting their past achievements and future opportunities. From the European viewpoint, the typical US style keynotes often go over the top in building up hype for the success of the products, but Bob came onto the stage with a different kind of a message. Basically he apologized for all the problems that have surrounded Dynamics CRM recently: the delay of cross-browser support, CRM Online performance/reliability issues and the sad saga of recent Update Rollups being pulled.

I think most of the MS partners in the room had shared the pain from these issues, especially when having to explain them on a day-to-day basis while working with customers. In the software business it’s of course nothing unheard of that  such problems may occur, but there’s been an elevated sense of frustration recently with the lack of information given to partners on what’s going on at Microsoft. Communication is the most effective cure in recovering from such events and I bet that it would have been far easier for all parties if there had been more transparent exchange of information on each of these issues earlier on, but it’s good to see the top management acknowledge this now and hopefully do what is necessary to straighten these things out.

One thing that Bob Stutz promised to change was to return the Update Rollups back to pure hotfix packages instead of vehicles for new feature delivery that they’ve turned into after Microsoft adopted the agile release policy for Dynamics CRM shortly after the 2011 version came out. What this means in practice is that MS will need to come up with a new delivery vehicle for introducing the new features into on-premise CRM environments at least once a year. While this can potentially improve the stability of those environments, the gap between CRM Online and on-premise feature release schedule can also grow even larger as a result of this, which could introduce it’s own challenges through an increased platform fragmentation.

The mobility story

This time last year Microsoft made a big announcement of their upcoming “CRM Anywhere” prodcut offering. Following the aforementioned turn of events, the cross-browser support got eventually delayed up until Polaris / Update Rollup 12 while the mobile strategy was gradually revised, scrapping their planned partnership with CWR Mobility and opting to develop in-house mobile apps instead. Individual pieces of news around the mobility offering have become available during the past fall and now at eXtreme CRM 2013 Rome the following mobility roadmap slide was presented:

From this slide and the accompanying presentation I was able to pick out the following pieces of data:

• The iPad Safari web client that was postponed from the actual Polaris rollout is arriving this month for CRM Online customers, on-premise support will be in Orion
• Tablet devices will receive a dedicated app, not only the Windows 8 Sales Workspace but also a similar iPad native app appears to be scheduled for Orion, with further Service and Marketing apps in the horizon
• iPhone and Android support will be limited to the Mobile Express client even after Orion, all the way until Leo
• No details on whether Windows Phone will receive any new features in addition to the WP7 Activity Feeds app that was released a bit over year ago
• Customization options as well as offline data support will be rolled out gradually to these clients

One thing that Bob was emphasizing during the keynote was Microsoft’s decision not to charge additional licenses for access to these mobile and tablet applications. Choosing to take the longer route of build vs. buy in the mobile CRM gives MS a wider range of options to adjust their commercial offering to market needs, but the prolonged period of uncertainty means that many customers will also be postponing their investment decisions on mobile CRM deployment until they have facts available on what level of functionality is going to be baked into the core platform. At the same time ISV’s like Resco and more recently also CWR Mobility are working hard to be able to offer a HTML5 platform for developing customized mobile and tablet apps for Dynamics CRM for those customers who need to equip their mobile workforce with CRM solutions already today.

Update 2013-02-16: Microsoft partners can now download the Microsoft Dynamics CRM Mobility Roadmap slide deck from PartnerSource (login required).

From Polaris to Orion via Gemini

The new “Flow” UI of Dynamics CRM has been rolled out to existing CRM Online customers. This has caused both a lot of excitement as well as anxiety, since the new design and integrations (Bing Maps, Yammer etc.) are very tempting to be demonstrated as the next generation user experience, but the feature set of Polaris takes away many of the standard customization options that rely on form event scripting. I’ve covered the Polaris new features & gotchas in a previous post, in case you haven’t had a chance to dig deeper into the updated CRM Online version yet. Just to repeat once more what I’ve been trying to emphasize ever since latest Statement of Direction document was released: on-premise customers won’t get the new UI with Update Rollup 12, it arrives in the Orion release.

With that in mind, let’s get the big news out of the way before digging any deeper: Orion is not an Update Rollup or even Service Update type of a release, it is the next major version of Dynamics CRM. In his closing keynote Bill Patterson pretty much confirmed that it would be called “Microsoft Dynamics CRM 2013″ (or 2014) for the on-premise customers. Not a whole lot of other details were shared, apart from the fact that the target release date is in Q3 2013. Although Bob Stutz was hesitant on giving any dates in his speech, July was mentioned more than once, but whether that refers to general availability or CRM Online is anybody’s guess as of now.

Before that, we’ll have time for another star in the spring sky: Gemini. Yes, it looks like there will be even more frequent releases for CRM Online than previously communicated. Gemini arrives in Q2 2013 and will focus on bringing the Marketing Pilot features acquired last October available to Dynamics CRM users. The feature set was shown in a very brief run through of slides, since the network issues that plagued the whole eXtreme CRM 2013 Rome event held at Marriott Park Hotel forced Bill to skip the live demo and resort to screenshots instead. Not much can be said about what to expect from Marketing Pilot at this stage, but here are some facts I picked up:

• Separate application that will be integrated with Dynamics CRM
• Available for CRM Online in Gemini, on-premise in Orion
• Contains marketing management functionality comparable to Aprimo
• Free tier available for Dynamics CRM customers, additional services will cost extra
• Aims to become a pluggable platform that connects to other Dynamics CRM ISV products
• UI has been given the “Metro” treatment after MS acquired the product (see below)
• Will not be the last acquisition by the Dynamics team, more to come

Farewell, Ribbon

Already back in WPC 2012 Bill Patterson told that the Ribbon UI introduced in CRM 2011 would eventually be replaced with a more simple menu structure. Polaris has given us the new Command Bar on the process forms, but the option of “Switch to Classic” still enables the user to access the old style of forms with the full Ribbon. Starting from Orion, things are about to change, as there will be no classic forms available at all.

Apart from a few default entities that may not yet get upgraded in Orion, all the other ones and also custom entities will get automatically migrated into using the new process forms. This is different from Polaris, where an additional form was introduced alongside the existing ones and the customer had to re-customize the form fields and layout to match their business processes. Deploying the Orion upgrade will not require this step, since presumably every existing form will open in the process mode. The details are not yet clear, but presumably adding all the new form components introduced in Polaris (Tab Control etc.) onto existing forms should also become possible.

From an ISV point of view the question of “where do we display our custom buttons in Orion” of course immediately comes to mind. Starting from Orion the Command Bar will be customizable and this will in fact be done using the familiar Ribbon XML. Compared to the overly simplified version we have in Polaris, presumably there will be a way to access additional core platform functionality (run dialogs, workflows, reports etc.) and also custom actions, but the real estate given to these will likely shrink considerably.

Subgrid ribbon functionality is something that I suspect will be reduced, as this has been one of the greatest sources of confusion when training users to work the CRM 2011 UI. The new subgrids in Polaris forms offer just a basic add new/existing functionality (which is broken in many ways, but that’s a topic for another post), which might be the direction that MS will push the Orion UI. On a related note, when the question of editable subgrids was presented to the Dynamics CRM product team members, the answer was that this is something every Program Manger in the team would want to see, but it might get pushed back further than Orion, so don’t get your hopes up just yet.

From platform to applications

Bob Stutz restated the message that MS has outlined in their latest statement of direction: Dynamics CRM future development will emphasize applications over platform functionality. In his words, when they analyzed the current state of the Dynamics CRM product, he concluded it to be “a platform & toolkit with little applications”. This approach has not always matched with the customer expectations of what a CRM product should deliver and has in practice made it difficult for MS to deliver a great user experience out of the box. Apps are what the user interacts with and ultimately finds useful and enjoyable. No one really loves a platform (except a few customizers and developers perhaps) but many of us have apps on our smartphones and tablets that we get addicted to using. That’s the position the Dynamics CRM product team is aiming at with their redesign efforts.

So, is XRM dead then? Probably not, but no longer in the center of Microsoft’s attention. Although Polaris imposed severe limitations on form customizability, the intention in Orion is to support all existing form scripts, as long as they use the CRM 2011 SDK (4.0 script support will be removed). The form Process Control does not replace existing workflow-based sales processes, rather it works alonside them if the system customizer designs the solution that way. The Process Control can be minimized, form components can be hidden, custom web resources can be added etc., so the core platform functionality for XRM apps should still be there.

Cloud first

Many partners and on-premise customers dislike the fact that the new Polaris functionality cannot be developed for or tested in local dev machines or servers. This is the first time in 2 years that the different deployment models have such a big gap in available functionality. If you ask Microsoft’s opinion on this, they don’t see it as a problem but rather an advantage. The ability to deploy new features into the cloud environments that they control brings a higher level of agility that MS is determined to fully leverage in their future product releases.

According to the Dynamics CRM product team members, upgrading CRM Online with the new features first gives MS a better chance to detect the last critical bugs that have plagued many of the recent Update Rollups. It also serves in building confidence towards the new version for on-premise customers, since MS has already deployed the same update into their own servers in the cloud before the customer is faced with the decision of deploying the same update.

Looking at the new features and integrations that have been announced recently, even strategic acquisitions like Skype and Yammer are not being rushed into the hands of on-premise customers. Instead they are held in a “CRM Online only” status for ~6 months prior to being made available to large enterprise customers who are mostly still in the on-prem world. It’s part of the “all in the cloud” story, of course. Instead of large upgrade projects and selling software maintenance, Microsoft would prefer everyone to move into a world where updates and features are gradually yet continuously rolled out to all customers, who in turn generate a recurring revenue stream from CRM Online & Office 365 subscriptions.

Speaking of which, CRM Online’s migration to and integration with Office 365 has resulted in several nasty gaps in the user experience of signing up for a trial organization. If the past Windows Live ID based implementation was somewhat tricky, the Office 365 experience can be downright incomprehensible for potential customers who simply want to see what Dynamics CRM looks like in practice. Bob Stutz told that this issue is being taken care of and a new sign-up experience for CRM Online should arrive in a couple of months time. Combine this with the updated UX coming up for all Microsoft online services and working with multiple MS cloud apps might become a bit easier in the near future.

Thank you, #extremecrm!

I think that’s enough typing for one blog post. Next it’s time for me to start going through the slides from the various expert sessions, to ensure I can hold on to my newly awarded title “certified smart as*”. Hope to see many of you next year again at eXtreme CRM 2014!

The post eXtreme CRM 2013 Rome takeaways appeared first on Surviving CRM.

We’ll see how it goes in practice once the Yammer integration arrives in February (hopefully for on-prem, too, although no official info on that yet), but we’re already free to explore the enhancements of the updated Activity Feeds. In addition to the great new feature of being able to filter the records from where posts are shown in your feed instead of having to go and follow each and every interesting record, there’s also another important addition: the support for organization owned entities. Previously you couldn’t add the Record Wall onto entities like competitor but now such limitations have been lifted.

Another interesting entity that could well benefit from the Activity Feeds style of presenting the latest updates is the queue entity. Although queues themselves are a useful feature for process automation and routing tasks between users, their usability in the out-of-the-box configuration of Dynamics CRM is fairly poor. Unless you’re a full time service rep working on queues, it’s not a very intuitive way for monitoring work to be done and who’s working on what, let alone getting notified of something added into a queue that you should do something about.

Enter Activity Feeds. With the ability of having the actions in queue item updates being reflected in a timeline that allows people to also comment on the progress of these items, all of a sudden the whole queue concept can become a lot more accessible to casual CRM users. Following the relevant queues you want to receive updates from is as easy as following your teams’ accounts, and with the new filters in Polaris/UR12 update there’s even more possibilities for creating views of only specific types of queue items.

There are no standard post configuration rules available for the queue or queue item entity, so you’ll have to build the auto post rules by using workflow processes. Although the users will prefer to follow queues and not queue items, what you as a system administrator or customizer will want to do is create workflow rules for queue items and reference the related queue as a regarding object. This will allow users to see Activity Feed posts when new items are added into queues they are following, when their “worked by” information changes etc.

With the new social dashboards introduced in Polaris, it’s ever more likely that users will encounter the What’s New section when logging into CRM. Why not make the most of this and configure a few new rules for creating auto posts that surface relevant and interesting information to the users on what’s happening with the various processes that Dynamics CRM is used for managing?

The post Using the updated Activity Feeds to monitor Queues appeared first on Surviving CRM.

The absolutely best way to get familiar with the future UI of Dynamics CRM is to get a 30 day trial organization for yourself and play around with the demo data. In fact for a large share of the existing customers this will be the only possible way, since there will be no on-premise version of Polaris. You’ll get the cross-browser support, API updates, and, contrary to previous information, the updated Activity Feeds solution when installing Update Rollup 12 for your CRM server (currently not yet available for download after having been pulled). Sorry, you’ll have to wait for the Orion release that’s coming out sometime later in the year 2013.

Since I know many of you must be busy with deploying, supporting, developing and actually using  the current on-prem version of CRM 2011, I’ve created a summary of the new features  in the December 2012 Service Update just for you. No, not just a list of the bullet points that Microsoft has already communicated, but rather a hands-on exploration of how the new version works differently from the old CRM 2011. You’ll find it on SlideShare available for download or you can view it below (although the image quality in the streamed version is a bit crappy).

The 34 slides cover those features I personally found noteworthy when getting to know the Polaris release. It’s not an exhaustive list by any means, but I’ve tried to highlight the changes and gotchas that a system customizer or administrator familiar with the previous versions should be aware of. The topics include:

• Sitemap changes
• Activity Feeds filters (see this earlier post for more details)
• New process form structure and components (previously known as the “Flow UI”)
• Swithing between new and Classic forms
• Updated subgrids and limitations on working with related records in general
• Extended case management functionality
• Support for creating leads for existing accounts
• + Many more!

With this release Microsoft has done an excellent job with publishing a plethora of training videos on the Dynamics CRM December 2012 Service Update on the Microsoft Dynamics YouTube channel for anyone to watch, with no login required to access the materials on Customer/PartnerSource, so do take advantage of them. Unfortunately I haven’t yet found an official MS index page to these videos, so I suggest you refer to this post by Donna Edwards with the video links, because the video titles are impractically long when browsed on YouTube (hmm, wonder if this says anything about Microsoft’s product naming convention… probably not )

And that’s not all, folks! By browsing through the updated Resource Center content online you can access detailed help articles on topics such as installing product updates, turn on the new sales and service process forms or customizing the forms in the new sales process. There’s so much more to this release than just the cross-browser support (although that’s bound to keep people busy as CRM 4.0 scripts start to break) that I urge you to have a look, even if you’re not working on a CRM Online environment. By starting early you’ll have a better understanding of how to prepare for the next on-premise release, what comes out of the box in Polaris and what type of customizations are sensible to make when knowing the upcoming form architecture and user experience that will arrive in the Orion release.

The post What’s New in Microsoft Dynamics CRM Polaris Release: The Slides appeared first on Surviving CRM.

Connecting to CRM Online with WLID

Our official work setup is still on Windows 7 / Office 2010 level, but being the kind of eager early adopter that I am, my home PC’s have moved to the brave new world of Windows 8 some time ago already. I installed Office Professional Plus 2013 on a Windows 8 64-bit laptop that’s not joined to a domain, so my login credentials to Windows are linked to my Microsoft Account (previously known as Windows Live ID). In my first tests in August this was a blocker for using a CRM Online organization where the user’s WLID / Microsoft Account was different in CRM and on the local machine.

Update Rollup 11 removed the need to manually enable Windows Identity Foundation (WIF) on Windows 8, but out of old habits I checked that it was available before configuring CRM. Launching the CRM client Configuration Wizard and selecting CRM Online on the Server URL field of the Configure Organizations prompt gave a familiar error: “Cannot connect to Microsoft Dynamics CRM server because we cannot authenticate your credentials.” Just like before, it appears that the Configuration Wizard automatically attempts to use the Microsoft Account of the local user for logging in to CRM Online. Logging out of the account in Internet Explorer and then logging in to CRM Online in the browser didn’t seem to resolve the issue with the Outlook client connectivity, as a further error message was presented later in the Initializing the Organization phase:

There is a problem communicating with the Microsoft Dynamics CRM server. The server might be unavailable. Try again later. If the problem persists, contact your system administrator.
[Expanded Information]
Unable to load the native components of SQL Server Compact corresponding to the ADO.NET provider of version 8082. Install the correct version of SQL Server Compact. Refer to KB article 974247 for more details.

The KB article referenced in the error message discusses the following issue: “You receive an error message when you run a SQL Server Compact 3.5-based application after you install the 32-bit version of SQL Server Compact Edition 3.5 Service Pack 2 on an x64 computer.” However, downloading and installing the x64 version of Microsoft SQL Server Compact 3.5 Service Pack 2 for Windows Desktop didn’t resolve the CRM configuration error, so I opened a support ticket with Microsoft. They instructed me that I also needed to install the Cumulative Update 2 for SQL Server Compact 3.5 Service Pack 2, which is a hotfix that you need to request a download link to be sent to you by email. After my SQL CE 3.5 had been updated to build 3.5.8082.00, I was finally able to connect my Outlook 2013 with our CRM Online demo organization.

Connecting to CRM on-premise with IFD

During the previous test with CRM Online I had also tried to connect the Outlook 2013 CRM client  to our production on-premise CRM server that is IFD configured. I kept receiving the following error: “Cannot connect to Microsoft Dynamics CRM server because we cannot authenticate your credentials. Check your connection or contact your administrator for more help.” Looking at the error details there was a message claiming “no credentials are available in the security package.”

Having struggled with the CRM Online connectivity issue, I naturally assumed that it was the same issue with Windows 8 or Outlook 2013 compatibility that was blocking my access to the on-prem server. Especially the fact that I wasn’t getting prompted for credentials at all before seeing the error lead me to believe this was the case. However, the actual solution was much more straightforward than the SQL CE hotfixes. All I needed to do was enter my credentials as DOMAIN\username instead of the username@domain format. While the ADFS 2.0 login screen in Internet Explorer accepts both formats, the Outlook client Configuration Wizard doesn’t. However, because of the fact that my credentials for the CRM server URL had already been cached on IE’s side, I assume the Outlook client attempts to use the username@domain format the first time the URL is entered in the Configure Organizations prompt, even though it’s not capable of authenticating with them.

Connecting to CRM Online with Office 365

I was going to end this post on a high note and test how easy everything is when connecting to a brand new CRM Online organization running on the OSDP platform, meaning an organization using the Office 365 / Microsoft Online Services user account for authentication instead of the consumer grade Microsoft Account / WLID setup of CRM Organizations created before July 2012. Unfortunately this was not possible, as I’m now encountering the following error message whenever I try to open the CRM Configuration Wizard: “An item with the same key has already been added. at System.Collections.Generic.Dictionary`2.Insert(TKey key, TValue value, Boolean add).”

OK, I give up. I’m not sure whether this is caused by the brand new Update Rollup 12 that I installed for my CRM Outlook client, but I can’t be bothered to start over and uninstall everything. At least I now have two CRM’s connected to my Outlook 2013 and they’re working perfectly by the looks of things.

At some point I will inevitably need to re-configure that old CRM Online organization, though. Microsoft is finally moving on with transitioning old CRM Online organizations from the CTP platform onto the new OSDP one. As all the CTP organizations will be migrated by Q4/2013, based on the information available in the CRM Online Transition Center, there will come a time when Windows Live ID will be history in terms of any Dynamics CRM connections.

The post Windows 8, Outlook 2013 and Dynamics CRM – part 2 appeared first on Surviving CRM.

Anyway, as we await for the new process flow oriented user experience to be enabled in the cloud, here’s some nice live footage of how the new UI works in practice. In this YouTube video Reuben Krippner walks us through the changes you can expect to see in your CRM once the December 2012 Service Update has been applied.

Some things worth paying attention to in the video include:

• The browser client running on Chrome (including administrative UI)
• New social dashboard including the Activity Feeds web part
• Inline editing and adding of subgrid items (notice the lack of any save buttons)
• Recording a completed phone call directly on the lead form
• Lookup existing contacts or accounts from the Process Control component
• Transition from a lead to an opportunity without any popup window appearing
• Moving forward and backward freely in the process stages
• Editing process stage fields with the Process Control Customization Tool
• The new forms in the customization UI (and the lack of support for any form scripts in this release)
• Simplified UI of the iPad Sales Experience browser client on Safari

The post The new Polaris UI in practice appeared first on Surviving CRM.