One of the enhancements I was most excited about when I first read Microsoft’s CRM 2011 Statement of Direction November 2012 was the enhanced user experience for CRM online.  Six months later, I am still excited about the new user experience which lives up to the description of being a process driven experience designed to provide speed and simplicity.

The speed and simplicity is realized for the user in two ways;  the presentation of the process across the top of the form is easy to understand and it enables capturing the needed information without having to search the form for the field to update.  Users not only love the simplicity of the form, but the fact that it they spend less time entering data and more time interacting with customers.

Editing the process flow to support your business is uncomplicated and quick.  Click on the more commands ellipsis on the form to edit the process.

You may add or remove stages and steps as well as change the order of the stages or steps.  One click publishes the changes.  Additionally, online help is only one click away.

The release planned for later this year is slated to make the process driven user experience available for on premises as well as take the process centric experience to the next level.   I look forward to these innovations.

For more information on the process driven user experience or on leveraging your business relationships, visit our CRM page.

This posting is provided “AS IS” with no warranties, and confers no rights.

RBA Consulting  will be in Denver on May 15th at the Denver CRMUG.  We will be presenting on the topic of CRM and SharePoint integration and will go well beyond what you can do out of the box.  Presenters will include several members of the CRM Team at RBA including Jamie Miley – CRM MVP.

Date:  May 15th
Time:  4:00 pm – 6:00 pm
Location: Microsoft: 7595 Technology Way DenverCO80237

Some topics we will be covering:

• Document Management
• Contextually appropriate templating using content types
• Portals
• BI Dashboards

Learn more and get registered here:

I recently received an email from a salesperson wondering why she could not edit one of her Opportunities.  After confirming she did not accidentally close the Opportunity, we brought the CRM administrator at the client site into the conversation and asked about recent changes to the sales process.  The CRM administrator advised he did not implement any changes, but he did reassign the Account.  Although I was not involved in the original implementation for this client, I was certain the parental behavior of the Account was the culprit.  I was confident this behavior was the root cause because the default entity relationship between Account and Opportunity is parental.  When the CRM administrator reassigned the Account, the system reassigned the Opportunity.  Because users at this client site may edit only the Opportunities they own, the salesperson could not edit the Opportunity.

There are multiple parental relationships in CRM.  While the potential impact of these relationships varies based on your business processes, the ones most likely to result in frantic calls and emails from users insisting records have disappeared or that another user took them are:

In addition to dictating what happens when a record is reassigned, the parental relationship also controls what happens to child records when the parent record is shared, unshared, or re-parented.  You may change the parental relationships to configurable cascading relationships.  The behavior options are:  cascade all, cascade active, cascade user owned and cascade none.

The procedures to change a parental relationship are straightforward.  Start by customizing the parent entity.

Select 1:N Relationships in the navigation pane, sort on the Type of Behavior column to see all parental relationships at the top of the list, and then open the relationship you wish to change.

Change the Relationship Behavior to Configurable Cascading.

Select the option for each of the actions to meet your business needs.

Once you have selected the appropriate options, Save and Close the relationship.

After you have changed each of the parental relationships to support your business process, select the parent entity in the navigation pane and click Publish.

Leave a comment if you have questions about parental relationships in CRM.

For more information on leveraging your business relationships, visit our CRM page.

This posting is provided “AS IS” with no warranties, and confers no rights.

Microsoft provides an abundance of information on Dynamics CRM across multiple sites.   I appreciate the diversity of topics and perspectives as well as the various formats used to present the information.  However, effectively searching a specific topic can be frustrating and time consuming.

The CRM Dynamics Team published a reference guide which is designed to help you navigate the websites and in-product help and to understand when to use each of the available resources.    I found the guide to be extraordinarily helpful; it includes links websites, blogs, and Dynamics CRM on social media.

Download the guide today:  Finding Help When You Need It:  A Guide to Online Resources

For more information on leveraging your business relationships, visit our CRM page.

Sources:  CRM Documentation Strategy

This posting is provided “AS IS” with no warranties, and confers no rights.

The idea of saving extra parts and pieces because we are not sure what to do with them right now, but because we believe they may be useful someday is nothing new.  For some of us recycling and reuse is a way of life where there is a mindful effort to find a use for everything and nothing stays in the junk drawer for very long.  For others, it is only when the junk drawer becomes full to the point of overflowing that they begin to sort through the contents or find another drawer to take over.   Many of us fall somewhere in the middle; we eventually find uses for some stuff in the drawer, but we do not make a concerted effort to evaluate, organize or use the contents of the drawer.

CRM solutions typically have two major categories of stuff in the junk drawer:  data and form design.  Reliable data enables efficient, impactful business processes and is critical for making informed decisions.  Scrubbing data often consumes many hours during CRM implementations. We all recognize the importance of data integrity and most of us spend at least some time keeping data out of the junk drawer.   Approaches to keeping data out of the junk drawer range from enforcing data entry standards to subscribing to services which provide up to date details on current and prospective customers.  Hardly a day goes by that there is not a new blog, article or podcast discussing “big data;” this is not one of them.

The focus of this article is the second major category of stuff in your CRM junk drawer – form design.   The elements of form design that may end up in your CRM junk drawer include unused fields on the form and the layout of the form.  During your CRM implementation, chances are some time was devoted to updating option sets, adding custom fields to out of the box forms and creating forms for custom entities.   In a typical implementation, little if any time is spent on removing out of the box fields from forms.  A few of the reasons I have encountered for this during implementations are:

• We don’t use some of the out of the box fields today, but we may someday
• There is a lack of consensus across teams regarding what fields are needed
• We can just ignore the fields we don’t need
• We will make fields business required or business recommended to guide data entry
• We would rather use the time it would take to remove fields from forms on scrubbing data

We all recognize the need to have fields on the forms to capture information to support our business processes.  The layout of those fields on the forms in CRM impacts user efficiency and user adoption.  It makes sense to group fields into sections based on categories of information in a manner that fosters readability, but in doing so we sometimes neglect to consider the order in which the information will be entered by a user.  As a result, your users may have to tab multiple times or scroll & click to find and populate the required fields when creating a new record.

Banishing the form design junk from your CRM junk drawer is typically a low effort/high impact endeavor.  The flexibility of Dynamics CRM offers multiple options to meet the needs of your business processes:

• Form customization:  Through form customization you may reduce the need to tab, scroll and click by changing the order of the fields on the form, adding or removing sections, or removing unused fields.
• Creation of role based forms:  Role based forms allow you to present a form which is designed specifically for the user’s role.
•  Process specific dialogs to guide customer interactions and data entry:   Dialogs guide the user through the interaction with the customer and update the form with the information captured.

 Call to Action

As your business processes evolve, update your use cases for out the box and custom entities to include data entry as well as readability.

If you are a CRM system administrator, observe a cross section of your users in action to identify stuff in your CRM junk drawer.

If you are a CRM user, provide your system administrator with examples of scenarios where you suffer through excessive tabbing, clicking or scrolling.  In addition, keep your CRM system administrator in the loop as your business processes evolve to make certain CRM supports the revised business process.

If you have questions about cleaning out your CRM junk drawer or for more information on leveraging your business relationships visit our CRM page.

This posting is provided “AS IS” with no warranties, and confers no rights.