Side effects of the Polaris UI

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Posted on 25th February 2013 by Jukka Niiranen in Annoyances

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

Relationship attribute inheritance

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

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

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

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

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

Polaris_add_related_contact

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

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

Opportunity products

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

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

Polaris_opportunity_products_small

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

Polaris_quote_products_missing

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

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

Creating recurring goals with some workflow magic

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Posted on 25th October 2012 by Jukka Niiranen in Features |Tips

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Goal management is one of those features in Microsoft Dynamics CRM 2011 that has a relatively high barrier for utilization. The initial thought of measuring the business results of your organization through a built-in mechanism in your CRM system resonates with almost any customer that you tell about goal management, yet the excitement tends to wear out quickly once they discover the effort required in configuring and maintaining the goals. Sure, if you’ve only got a small organization and set goals on annual or quarterly level, it’s not such a big burden to key in the goal records with metrics and targets. But what if you’d like to measure something on a more real-time basis, like monthly or weekly? Even daily? Not such a fun thought anymore, now is it?

There are creative workarounds available for generating goals for a larger number of data points. The most practical tip I’ve come across has involved copying goal records by creating a dialog process to streamline the steps required for reproducing existing goals. I originally read about it from a presentation by Richard Knudson on Scalable Goal Management in Dynamics CRM 2011. You can view the slides from eXtreme CRM 2011 Las Vegas in PowerPoint Online or alternatively read this blog post by PowerObjects that walks you through the dialog creation process.

A different way to define goal time periods

Sometimes what you need in terms of process measurement isn’t down to the detailed level of setting individual target values for each week or each user. Maybe you have a steady weekly target of X records in a particular state and you’d just want to easily see how you’re currently performing against this target. Here’s were a more recent article by Richard comes in handy: Goal Criteria and Dynamic Goals. The big message here is that you’re not actually forced to use the From and To dates of a goal record to determine the measurement period. You can basically set a goal to be running for 20 years and instead limit the number of records evaluated by the goals Rollup Query through a dynamic date criteria like “last 7 days”.

Whit this little trick, setting up a dashboard that shows the current performance is super easy, no matter how short your goal time period is. The charts will update once per day based on the default roll-up recurrence  frequency, so displaying the difference between the target and the actual value for metrics like leads qualified or calls made requires you to only set up the goal once per each variant (owner, status, type…) but not the different dates. Just stretch the goal period to be as long as you like and control the dates in the Rollup Query definition.

The downside of this approach is that the goal measurement is completely dynamic, meaning past values will leave no trace. Sure, you could enable audit on the goal entity to keep some form of results history, but since the audit data is not available for views, charts or even custom SQL reports (without some hacking), it’s not quite as easy as with the traditional method of creating goals for each time period separately.

Tracking historical results without manually creating goals

Another recent Dynamics CRM blog post favorite of mine comes from Yaniv Arditi. In his three part series (part 1, part 2 and part 3) Yaniv presents a model of how to implement an asynchronous batch process in Microsoft Dynamics CRM. Best of all, in his final post he provides a solution file that you can download and apply in your CRM organization.

What does the solution do then? Basically it is a way to implement a much needed but currently missing feature of Dynamics CRM: easily scheduling recurring workflows on a group of records. With this solution you can specify a batch process that runs every X days, performs a query of the required CRM records and then initiates a workflow process for each of those records found. You schedule it once, leave it running and the related process will always create a new waiting instance of itself once it stars at the defined intervals.

What’s the Fetch XML in there? It’s the Target Records Definition that determines for which records the workflow process selected in the Action Workflow lookup field will be executed. Where do you get the Fetch XML then? That’s easy: from any Advanced Find view, just by clicking the “Download Fetch XML” button on the ribbon.

To put this solution into work together with the concept of dynamic goals, I’ve got the following sample use case: track the number of active cases on a daily basis and compare it with a target value. This is an example of a status metric that’s not so simple to directly calculate from the records in CRM. To produce a figure like helpdesk queue length you would need to not only retrieve the number of cases created on any given day but also compare it with the closure dates of cases. It would be much easier if we could just take a snapshot of the currently open records on a set interval and store the information into CRM. So, why don’t we do just that?

First, let’s set up a custom entity called “Snapshot” to hold the data for us. We’ll establish relationships to both Goal and Goal Metric, then add the necessary fields for holding the types of data we want to track, in this case integer values for target and actual.

Next we need an on-demand workflow process that will create these Snapshot records for us from the goal data.

The batch process record shown previously has already been configured to perform the task we want: based on a daily schedule, retrieve all the goal records for which we want to be tracking the snapshots. All we need to do is set its Status Reason field to Scheduled, save the record and the process kicks off. The Asynchronous Batch Process Pattern solution will run every day (unless residing on a shut down virtual machine, like in my example image below), triggering the Take Goal Snapshot workflow, which in turn will create a daily snapshot of the actual and target number of active cases in the system. You can naturally visualize the history data with a chart, too. If you have different goal owners or several different goals to take snapshots of, just create the necessary views to filter the data shown.

To summarize, in this solution we use the Goal record as merely a “calculation machine” that produces the Actual Integer value we need. It also holds the data for the Target Integer, with the ability to update this figure if the targets should ever change. The scheduling is managed by the Batch Process record. It takes care of initiating the Take Goal Snapshot process for the selected Goal on a daily basis, which results in the creation of the Snapshot records you see above. All we had to do was to create each record once and we can leave this solution running for as long as we need.

I think this is quite a wonderful example of how you can mix’n match the different functionality of the Dynamics CRM platform to come up with a new feature that doesn’t exist in the product right out of the box, yet it can be implemented by using the platform components and supported extensions developed on top of it. Thanks again to both Richard and Yaniv in providing me with the building blocks for implementing the recurring goal solution.

Country lists and multi-language lookup fields

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Posted on 1st October 2012 by Jukka Niiranen in Configuration |Tips

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One of the most common customizations almost any organization working with customers from multiple countries will want to have in their Microsoft Dynamics CRM data model is the addition of a structured list of country names, to ensure they are stored in a consistent format. Yes, by default the Country/Region fields on the account, contact and lead entities are free text fields that a user must manually fill every time. This can result in some serious issues with data quality that make it difficult to perform a common task such as searching for accounts from specific countries. The field may contain values like “United States of America”, “United States”, “USA”, “Estados Unidos de América”, not to mention different conventions for upper/lowercase letters, hyphens etc.

Why doesn’t Dynamics CRM come with a pre-configured list of countries? There are probably several reasons for the choice of this design, some of them which date back to the early days when CRM wasn’t a multi-language platform (before version 4.0 came along). Anyway, there’s absolutely nothing stopping us from fixing this gap by using the basic customization tools, so let’s get right to it!

Picking the right Country field option

There are two alternative approaches to implementing a controlled list of values for country names. You can either create a new option set (preferably a global one) or a new entity to hold the country name values. There are pros and cons to each method, which means the right choice depends on the use cases of the organization in question. In a simple scenario the option set may well be sufficient, if there are no other requirements for country data in CRM. For implementation guidance, look no further than this excellent post by Pedro Innecco: Dynamics CRM: Adding a Country/Region option set using ISO 3166-1.

Sometimes the country data management requirements may be somewhat more complex, which may lead you into choosing to create a custom Country entity. This approach has the benefit of allowing you to store other variables than just the name of the country on the same record. For example, there may be parameters related to reporting that are country specific and would therefore be logically placed on the same record as the official name of the country. Other regional variables such as states or languages spoken are also a natural fit to be stored on the country entity.

One interesting scenario to explore is the possibility of using the Country records as a central location for posting updates specific to a particular region, by using Activity Feeds on the Country record’s wall. Let’s say you have a multi-region Dynamics CRM implementation and you want to target auto-posts to users working with customers from specific countries. By generating posts like “New campaign Big Fair 2012 launched in @Finland” or “Major opportunity closed in @Sweden for account Contoso” that mention the country record you can easily push updates to any user who’s following that particular country. For a more detailed explanation please see my earlier post on how to make CRM Activity Feeds easier to follow by creating custom groups.

There’s a catch with the custom entity approach, though, and that is the lack of native support for multiple languages. While the option set labels are a part of Dynamics CRM solution files and support translations just like your regular form fields, a custom entity is just data stored into the CRM database, no matter if you use it in a metadata like manner. As a result, if your CRM organization has different languages enabled and the user switches from English to Spanish, the value on the Country field on the account form won’t change from “United States of America” to ”Estados Unidos de América”. If you had used an option set, all you’d need to do is export the labels for translation, enter values for the Spanish language column for the option set values, import it back and publish the results. However, with the custom Country entity we’ve ended up choosing, the value stored in the name field of the Country record will display the same way, regardless of the UI language of the logged in user.

Nothing a little Jscript can’t fix

Lucky for us, Pedro has come up with a solution that can also handle the multi-language support requirement when using a custom entity to hold the country labels. In the image below, you can see an account record viewed first in English, then in Finnish. Even though we’re using a lookup field to the Country entity on the account form, the label of the selected Country record has magically been translated from one language to another. As if that wasn’t enough, also the Look Up Record dialog window shows a list of values that has been tailored to the language of the user. Well, that looks like the best of both worlds, doesn’t it?

How can you switch the label in the lookup field then? All you need to do is to download the Country/Region for Dynamics CRM solution created by Pedro Innecco and configure your CRM organization to take advantage of the scripts included. The solution also provides the ability to add more languages, so I’ll list out the steps I followed to add the Finnish language support for this Country lookup field.

(more…)

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