CRM de la Crème: a Social CRM Primer – Think customers: The 1to1 Blog

A really nice short article about social CRM. The combination of Social Media technics and Customer Relationship Management.
http://www.1to1media.com/weblog/2011/08/crm_de_la_creme_a_social_crm_p.html

Microsoft CRM Partner Questionnaire

Microsoft has a really strict policy for end customer support and implementation in the business application area. If you need assistance for all the LOB (Line of Business) applications, like Microsoft SharePoint, Dynamics Products, Exchange and so on the common way is to work with a Microsoft Partner. Beside that it is also possible to get support by Microsoft directly.

If you have choosen to implement Microsoft Dynamics CRM with partner support you need a good one. But what means good in this case. What criterias makes a partner a good choice. For an company without knowledge about the partner economy of Microsoft it could be hard to evaluate that.

To give you a starting point for an evaluation I have prepared an Microsoft Dynamics CRM Partner Questionnaire with questions in the areas:

• Microsoft Partner Network
• Organization
• Reference
• Technology
• Workforce

You can download the spreadsheet in OpenDocument format from here:
Questionnaire – Microsoft CRM Partner Evaluation

If you have suggestion to improve this questionnaire feel free to comment or email me. It would be great to enhance this as much as possible, because it can help a lot of people!

Changeover from Partner to Customer

I’m happy to announce, that I have changed over from Microsoft Partner side to customer side. Since 15th of April this year I’m responsible for the internal Microsoft CRM Deployment of the hotel.de AG

hotel.de is a booking and rating portal for more than 210.000 hotels worldwide. It’s a real pleasure to bring in all my consulting experience to this young and open company.

In order of my new role the content of this blog will slightly change and include customer problems a little bit more

xRM as new topic

Why do I add xRM to my blog title?
It’s easy, because I think that xRM is the next step in business applications and that this area will be the future.

What does xRM means to me?
For me it’s the generic approach to manage business information in a centralized and hugely integrated system. This information is not only available in lists or tables. No it’s relational, hyperlinked, structured in different ways. It’s not domain specific. It’s different from ERP, CRM, CMS and so on, because it’s a connection and a combination of that all. An xRM system can be a CRM and an ERP where a CMS is integrated into.

What is xRM for?
The biggest challenge in the information technologie was and is to provide needed information to the right person or mashine in the right moment in the correct format at the right place and well processed. xRM is nothing less than that. It’s a new component to implement that a a new concept to get rid of seperated systems and data storages.

What does xRM needs?
I think xRM needs a general desctiption that states what xRM is. At the moment, like with CRM in the past, the term is not exactly defined . Even in Wikipedia there is no explanation for xRM.

It would be nice to hear your definition of xRM! Feel free to comment here and now

My first Post with a Windows Phone 7 device

There is a new app available at Zune Marketplace, the Blog Client. It’s an easy to use Blog Client that works with the metaweblog Api. IT lists all old Posts and gives you the Chance to create new ones. Nicely done Matteo Pagani. Thanks for the free tool!

My first Post with a Windows Phone 7 device

There is a new app available at Zune Marketplace, the Blog Client. It’s an easy to use Blog Client that works with the metaweblog Api. It lists all old posts and gives you the Chance to create new ones.

Nicely done Matteo Pagani. Thanks for the free tool!

http://winmobile7.apphab.com/blog-client-by-matteo-pagani/

Microsoft CRM 4.0 to CRM 2011 JavaScript Converter Tool

Hey, there is a converter tool for Microsoft CRM 4.0 JavaScripts to Micrsoft CRM 2011 format.

It converts the scripts from the old crmForm.all… to the new Xrm.Page… approach. So far I can see it’s working fine.

Example:

function setFullName() {
crmForm.all.slatzel_fullname.DataValue = crmForm.all.slatzel_lastname.DataValue +", "+ crmForm.all.slatzel_firstname.DataValue;
}

becomes

function setFullName() {
Xrm.Page.getAttribute("slatzel_fullname").setValue(Xrm.Page.getAttribute("slatzel_lastname").getValue() +", "+ Xrm.Page.getAttribute("slatzel_firstname").getValue());
}

You can find the corresponding article from MSCRM Bing’d at http://bingsoft.wordpress.com/2010/09/09/crm-4-to-crm-2011-javascript-converter-tool/. It’s a Codeplex Project (http://crm2011scriptconvert.codeplex.com/). There you can download the files.

Dynamic marketing lists in Microsoft CRM 2011

While writing a new functional design I just found a new option in the marketing module.

Now its possible to mark marketing lists as dynamic or static.

Statid marketing lists behave like in Microsoft CRM 4.0, but the dynamic ones are based a Advenced Search! You define a Advanced Searched for the memeber type of the list and that’s it. Every time you are opening or using the list in your campaigns or elsewhere, only the dynamically filtered records are used.

That’s a great advantage in comparison to Microsoft CRM 4.0.

Fulltext Search with activities in Microsoft CRM 4.0

As most of you know, to find a historical activity in Microsoft CRM can be a hard job. There are only two possibilities. The one is to go to Activities or History directly in the record and check them all. If you’re searching for something in the description you even have to open each element.

The other possibility is to use the Advanced Find. Here you can filter by criteria and speed up the search a lot. But like above you cannot see the description directly.

Because all Emails should be stored in CRM and all the other activities, too, this should be easier. Microsoft hasn’t done a good job here. What can we do to solve this?

1. Using ADD-ONs

There are solutions provided by Microsoft Partners:

• MSCRM-ADDONS Power Search
  Search in entities and attachments, work with a dashboard regarding your search and save favorites.
• c360 Multi-Field Search
  Search across multiple fields in multiple entities with just one click.
• Enterprise Search Accelerator
  This is a free accelerator from Microsoft. It allows you to search the CRM contents directly from your SharePoint site.

2. Implementing my Activity Explorer Report

I’ve developed a report with which it’s possible to make a fulltext search for activities directly from the entity form. The report has a parameter EntityId that is used to find all activities where the record is the regarding object. It’s implemented by an IFRAME where a HTML page is loaded that holds a little JavaScript.

Filters and View

The Activity Explorer consists of a filter bar at the top and the listview of the activities below. The most important part in the filter bar is the Search field. With this you can perform a fulltext search. The next checkbox allows you to show or hide the description of the activities. After that you can filter by type and state of the activities.

The list of activities shows type, subject, owner, priority, regarding object and state. Every underlined entry is a hyperlink to the corresponding record.

Fulltext Search

The fulltext search always searches in the subject and description, even if the descirption is not shown. the report in the background performs a SQL statement like this:

SELECT ... FROM FilteredActivityPointer WHERE subject LIKE '%search%' OR description LIKE '%search%'

Because of this you don’t need to add wildcards or so.

Installation

1. The installation is not that complicated. First of all you have to download the necesssary files.
   Download the Activity Explorer
2. Unpack the archive
3. Follow the installation instructions in the ReadMe.txt

Multi Language Support

At the moment there are two user languages supported, english (LCID 1033) and german (LCID 1031). So it can only be used with these two because of the script in the ActivityExplorer.htm.

The two files “ActivityExplorer_1033.rdl” and “ActivityExplorer_1033.rdl” are the technically the same, only the language of the labels and so on is different. If you need the report in other languages just save one of the others with the LCID of the new language as part of the file name. After that open the report in “Business Intelligence Studio 2008” and translate the labels.

Open Data, OData, Ohh Data …

I spent the last days at the Dynamics Airlift 2010 of Microsoft in Leipzig. Yesterday I heard from Open Data (OData) in a short side sentence. I had a look right in the session and was really suprised.

Open Data is a from Microsoft pblished protocal that provides CRUD (Create, Update, Delete) actions simple by URI. It follows the REST appraoch. It’s an open standard that can be used by everyone.

Microsoft implemented this protocol in a lot of products. One of the most important for me is understandably Microsoft CRM 2011. The others products are SharePoint 2010, Microsoft SQL Azure, Windows Azure Table Storage and SQL Reporting Services and even IBM WebSphere.

Additionally there are a lot of Live OData Services available. One famous example ist Facebook Insights.

You can get detailed information about OData at www.odata.org and there is a great article covering OData at MSDN (http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/ff478141.aspx).

It’s more than a look worth!