and downloads for all the software components are here:
http://www.microsoft.com/download/en/details.aspx?displaylang=en&id=29221 

Read-Optimised Forms

The KB article above refers to a feature update in UR7 to provide “Read Optimized Forms”, which sounds very much like one of the minor features which was announced for the Q2 2012 service update, or release R8. This got a little bit buried in all the excitement about multi-browser and mobile capabilities, but essentially means you can deliver a faster experience to your users by providing them with a rapid-loading, reduced functionality, read-only form for entities which are often read and rarely updated. The Release Preview Guide published in February said this:

RAPID VIEW FORMS
In many organizations there are groups of users who typically use a CRM system to look up key information about their contacts, accounts, opportunities and cases but have no immediate need to modify that information.

For example, many contact center employees or managers primarily use Microsoft Dynamics CRM to review business information before deciding whether any action is required. For these users the optimal experience is to load this information very quickly so they can immediately assess a situation and determine the correct course of action.

In order to provide this type of user experience, we’re introducing rapid view forms. The rapid view form is a read-only form that can be configured like any other form in Microsoft Dynamics CRM to display any record in the system.

When viewing information in these forms, users can switch to an editing experience with the click of a button. Administrators of Microsoft Dynamics CRM will have the option to set all forms to load in rapid view mode; if appropriate for business needs. Individual users will have the personal option to choose the form mode they prefer (Rapid View or Standard Edit).

At the moment (just after midnight UTC 22nd March) the links in the UR7 article which should point to more information about this new feature seem to redirect only to a generic page in the Resource Center and an MSDN SDK article about editing forms. From the latter article there is a link to another subsection “Design Considerations for Read-Only forms” which provides more details.

Key features of Read-Optimised Forms

The first thing to note is that read-optimised forms don’t have a Ribbon and won’t run any scripts, so you need to re-consider any scripts you use for hiding or revealing fields, sections, or tabs. CRM 2011 allows you to set the default visibility of a field so you can have a field hidden normally and then use scripts on normal forms to reveal them when needed, rather than using scripts to hide things which are otherwise always visible. This approach may help in some situations but is no use to help with scripts used to do calculations or change field values for users to see.

Like scripts, web resources won’t be retrieved and displayed on read-optimised forms. Some situations can be circumvented using iFrames, but of course that may defeat the whole point of trying to reduce the amount of data retrieved to present a form and the time a user has to wait for the fully rendered result.

Administrators can enable read-optimised forms for the whole organisation (this is off by default) but can’t control this individually for different entities, unfortunately. Whether they turn them on or off globally, they can also control whether users can turn them on or off for themselves (so you can enable them but allow users to turn them off, or disable them and allow users to turn them on. Or not!)

(Update 23rd March: Actually, now that a bit more information is becoming available, it seems to be slightly more complicated than this. You can enable read-optimised form mode for selected users, you don’t have to turn it on or off for everyone. You can’t select specific entities though. However, it seems that if your forms do have scripts or web resources on, it will always display the editable form in order that these show up and work. So on the face of it if you want to publish efficient read-optimised forms you have to strip them bare yourself otherwise users will get your full-fat form anyway despite enabling the new feature. Presumably you would then publish an alternative form for users to be able to switch to which has all the rich stuff on. I’m going to do some work and testing on this and publish more detailed notes once I get it figured out.)

Why are they called “Read-Optimised”? Although they are read-only, the name is an attempt to draw a clear distinction between this new type of form and any “normal” form which is read-only because of the access rights a user has or because a record is inactive / completed / closed.

Forms will display inline grids (and charts if they are turned on) but since there is no Ribbon a user would have to click to switch into edit mode to do anything with these (eg add an existing Contact child record from the Contact grid on the Account form).

One disappointing thing for me is that the read-optimized versions of the forms also lose the very helpful navigation at the top right corner to go to the previous / next record. Hopefully they might reinstate this in the 2012 Q2 update.

Read more about read-optimised forms in this MSDN blog post.

Update rollup 7 pre-requisites

Most important to note is that UR6 is a pre-requisite so you have to go get that and install it first if you have not done so already. Also don’t forget that UR4, 5 and 6 cannot be removed once installed without uninstalling the whole application, so this is a really good time to check those backup plans and make sure you test before deploying to your live environment if possible.

KB article 2600640 for Update Rollup 6

Download page for all Update Rollup 6 components (server, router, client etc.)

If you are installing CRM for the first time you can download the installation with UR6 already slipstreamed in to save time and effort:

CRM 2011 Outlook client with Update Rollup 6 already included

CRM 2011 Server with UR6

CRM 2011 E-Mail router with UR6

If you want to stay ahead of the curve, check out when update rollups are due on the Microsoft Dynamics CRM 4.0 and 2011 Update Rollup Release Dates, Build Numbers, and Collateral page. This page seems to have been removed or renamed at the moment as it is unavailable, but hopefully it will be back soon as it is an invaluable resource.

Loads of discussions take place during planning meeting about what fields will be included, what their purpose is, what should or should not go into a particular field and what will happen when a user fills it in (eg scripts or workflows, or how the data surfaces in a report). Most of that detailed consideration gets buried in project documents, some of it may be covered in user training, and even less may actually make it into end-user support articles and training hand-outs.

Some of these are common misunderstandings, such as what should you use “Address Name” for? (hint – it’s not the building name nor part of the address, it’s the name of the address, i.e. what do you call this place? answer might be “Head Office” or “North West Distribution centre” for example).

The most obvious place to put this stuff is on the form, and the most logical place is right next to where it is needed, by adding tooltips to the field labels. Yes, I know they do have tooltips, but these simply repeat the text of the field label! Zero value is added by having them there, they don’t even go as far as using the “normal” display name or the description.

There are ways to create tooltips by adding an “onmouseover” event to the field, but since this is a direct DOM hack, this won’t be supported. It is also yet another bunch of scripts being delivered over the wire, which also need to be written, maintained and updated, usually by system admins with at least a basic level of Jscript coding skills.

There must be a better way…

For me the ideal answer would be a property of a field on a form where a system customiser (i.e. not admin, no coding skills required) can easily add text they want to use as a tooltip. Either directly as custom text or perhaps simply ticking a couple of boxes to include the field display name and/or description and/or schema name and/or custom text as well.

So I went over to the Microsoft Connect site where you can give feedback about CRM and other products. This is intended for product suggestions and definite bugs, rather than support for things that don’t work in your particular implementation. Other site users can vote up or down the importance of your suggestion, and can comment or provide information about workarounds.

I posted a new suggestion to provide useful "tooltips" on rollover/mouseover of form labels and/or allow supported customisation of them and within two weeks it had already reached the all-time top ten most upvotes. It is continuing to rise and I really hope this is given serious consideration for the next version (either a quarterly release, or more likely the next “full version” given that it might require changes to xml schema for exporting and importing customisations).

You can help get this idea implemented

If you like the idea go and vote it up and if have useful input add a comment so that if and when it gets implemented they can make it fit people’s real-world needs as closely as possible.

There are loads more great suggestions in the Dynamics CRM section – have a look round and vote for those you would most like to see built first.

Better still, it uses some pretty clever algorithms to figure out which bit of the text is the name, job title, company, address, telephone, mobile, email and so on. Any data it can’t interpret it adds to the notes section so you can a) see what it was and b) copy and paste it somewhere else if needed.

It’s not perfect, and sometimes gets bits of the information in the wrong places but it is a heck of a lot quicker than creating a new contact by hand then copy and pasting information across by hand, which is usually very painful. While the new contact is still open you can use the program’s “Utils” menu to swap some things round which may be commonly mistaken, such as name<>company or job title<>company, which is easier than copy / pasting these via notes to get them in the right places.

A very common use for this is with someone’s email signature as the source text. Select, hit your shortcut and you have a new contact record pretty much ready and waiting to be saved.

Copy2Contact is not free, but I have easily earned back the $40 cost of the personal edition through the time I have saved by using this. There is a Pro version as well which has additional features to help do things like consistent (US style) formatting of phone numbers, capitalizing city names and so on which I don’t really feel the need for.

To be absolutely clear: I have no affiliation with Copy2Contact and have my own paid-for copy of their software, I have not received any freebies or review copy or anything else in order to write this article.

You can try the software for free for 14 days from the trial download page to see if it suits you. There are versions for Outlook, salesforce.com, Google apps and more PC-based tools, as well as Blackberry  and iPhone/iPod/iPad.

How to use this with Dynamics CRM for Outlook

As you are probably aware, to get from an Outlook Contact to a CRM record is only one click away – hit the Track button and you are done.

So let’s look at this for something like a very simple Opportunity capture process. Say you have a “mailto” link on your website so visitors can send you an email if they are interested in buying your product / using your services / signing up for your newsletter.

You open the received email and select the sender’s email signature. Hit Ctrl+C,C and Copy2Contact creates a new Outlook contact record which you then edit and correct. If they have not included their email address in their signature (some people seem to think this is redundant) then go back to the email, hover over the sender’s name and when an Outlook “contact card” popup appears, you can easily right click on the email address as it appears there and choose “copy” (this strips any odd things like < > characters from around it, for example).

I would advise hitting the “save” button at this point (top left in the quick access toolbar, not the big “Save and Close” button on the ribbon) – this will use Outlook’s duplicate detection to warn you if it already has a matching contact.

If this is all OK, click “Track” to promote a copy of this contact into CRM. If it is a Contact for an existing company you should use “Set parent” instead to connect it to the correct Parent Customer Account at the same time.

Note this will also change the company name in the Outlook contact to match the name of the chosen Account record. You can turn this off if you prefer: go to File > CRM > Options > Synchronisation. Uncheck “Update Company fields with parent account names”.

Track and convert the e-mail

Now, track the e-mail into CRM too (it will recognise the sender’s email and connect the email to the new contact record), then click “View in CRM” to open it there. In the “Convert activity” group of the E-mail ribbon tab, click “To Opportunity” (or Case, if that is more relevant to you).

You will be asked who the customer is (but it already fills this in with the new Contact), and whether you want to open the new record (yes), close the e-mail etc. When you finish with this dialog, it creates the new Opportunity and will set the “regarding” link on the e-mail so it appears as the first item in the Opportunity record’s activity history.

“The reason why I recommend you do the “view in CRM”, then convert, is because if you just use the “convert to opportunity” in the Outlook client, it does not do the final step of linking up the email with “set regarding”. This is currently logged as a bug with Microsoft via the Connect feedback site and hopefully they will get round to fixing this behaviour soon.)

What about an Account record?

Good question. My recommendation if you want to be able to use this sort of prospect capture process would be to create a workflow for newly created Contacts which checks to see if they already have a parent account, which would be the case if you created them under an existing Account directly in CRM, or if you use “Set Parent” to track them in from Outlook.

If not, then go create a new Account record using the same address as the Contact, their phone number (perhaps) and so on, and link the new Account to the Contact as Parent Customer and vice versa as Primary Contact. But where will you get the company name from?

Outlook and CRM simply do not synchronise the company name field at all, so you can’t use that. My suggestion would be to copy the company name into “department” and use that instead for this specific purpose. I realise some people probably use department, but most of the implementations I have dealt with don’t rely on this heavily. To see the “department” field in the Outlook contact form, click Show > Details on the main Contact ribbon tab (this is because the “Show” group usually gets compressed when the form is not full screen). Do this before you track the item into CRM ideally.

So your workflow now has this logic – run the workflow for every Contact record which is created or when the department field is changed (in case you forgot to do this, Tracked it, then updated it). Check if there is no Parent Customer Account, and that there is something in the Department field. If so, go create a new Account, copying a whole bunch of fields from the Contact (address etc, and link Primary Contact to the Contact record). Then update the Contact record to link to the new Parent Customer and clear out the department field. This should look something like the workflow below (click to enlarge):

Note that my workflow includes deleting the value from the “department” field, and this is also a field which will trigger the workflow to run again. So the workflow will run a second time, but do nothing because of the opening condition. Not a big deal, in this case, but more generally you do want to watch out for this sort of thing causing a circular repetition.

Notice the “default action” in the “otherwise” clause at the bottom so that if the condition is not met, the workflow will stop with a status of “Canceled”. This ensures that these are obvious when you view the workflow history or system jobs. If you leave this out then it will reach the end of the workflow and show a status of “succeeded”, which to my mind implies it did something and is less obvious when troubleshooting.

Considering the longer term – what if you updated the Contact to have a department at a later date? Again, the workflow would run and if they already have an Account, it would do nothing and be canceled. If they don’t have an Account because this Contact does not work for a company (or you are not interested if they are, maybe in a B2C sales organisation), what would they be doing in a department anyway?

Can I use this with data emailed from a web form?

Yes, if you have a web form that captures data and sends it to you by email (a fairly common setup), you can use Copy2Contact to create an Outlook contact and Track this into CRM. The only missing link is that when you Track the e-mail it won’t get linked to the Contact automatically since it is not “from” their email address. If you use “Set Regarding” on the e-mail you should still be able to do the rest of the convert process, but once the e-mail shift across to be “regarding” the Opportunity (or Case) then it will no longer show up in the Contact’s history since there is no relationship between the records.

Not just for contacts – create tasks, appointments and notes too

Despite the name, Copy2Contact can be used for other things too, such as tasks and events (appointments) which again can be Tracked in CRM to join things up.

I often get asked whether someone can convert an e-mail into a Task or Appointment, and while there is no direct way (lots of options such as automatic or on-demand workflows or using dialogs in CRM 2011, all of which are a bit unsatisfactory). Using Copy2Contact you can select your text in an e-mail, hit your hotkey and then switch from creating a Contact to creating a Task or event (Appointment). It will use relevant bits of the text to set the due date or the appointment time (and if possible, the subject and location but I find it tends to only get these if they are very explicitly labelled as such).

For example, selecting part of the text from an e-mail your manager sent you as shown below:

would allow you to create a Task very quickly with this text in the description and a due date of Wednesday.

The following e-mail could easily be converted into an Outlook Appointment for 8pm on Thursday next week, which of course in turn could be made into a meeting request back to that person to make sure you both diarise it, and you could Track it in CRM as an activity against a custom Project entity, or for that customer Account, or wherever is most appropriate.

I’m not sure if Copy2Contact is using their own algorithm to figure these out as part of their parsing, or using Outlook’s own natural language interpreter for dates, but either way it gets a pretty reliable result.

Outlook does have a little-known feature to reply to a message with a meeting request rather than an e-mail, shown in the screenshot below:

Perhaps your manager asks for an update on something, and the truthful reply “it’s complicated” does not seem appropriate. Reply with a meeting request and book ten minutes with them to go through it face to face. While this is useful, it just defaults to the next calendar slot (eg a half hour period if that is what you have set as default), leaving it to you to schedule this and choose a more sensible time and duration.

When a time has already been proposed by the other person as part of the e-mail text, Copy2Contact is probably a faster option, so use both methods depending on circumstances.

Are you already using Copy2Contact? Do you have any particular tips on getting the most out of it? Do you use some other third-party tools to get information from other sources neatly into CRM as Contact records?

Sorry to say, Outlook does not know when your birthday is (“You look like you are opening a present! Do you want help with that?”), nor can it deal with Easter moving around every year, but otherwise it’s pretty smart.

Examples of Outlook date translations

In the examples below, on the left you see various examples of the sort of things you might type into a date control on an Outlook appointment, and on the right is how this would be converted into a date when you click or tab to another field.

Notice that this feature is not case-sensitive and you can abbreviate names of days and months to be quite short. NB: Wednesday is always “Wed”, not “Weds”. Most other days are more flexible eg Thu, Thur, Thurs but stick to three letters generally and you will be fine.

Some of these may be subject to your setting in Options > Calendar for which day of the week you start on, so if you choose Sunday as a start day, “this Sunday” will be in the past (or today), while “Sunday” will always be the one in the upcoming weekend.

Watch out for dates moving further into the future

In general if you don’t specify a year, Outlook will always interpret things to assume you are moving things forwards, not backwards. For example, if you have a meeting set up for 1st September 2012 and change this to “1/8” or “1st Aug” – it interprets what you probably mean in either case and it will end up on 1st Aug 2013. Even if 1st August 2012 is way in the future from the current date and seems to you and me like a more reasonable option, that is not what you will get since that would move the meeting backwards in time, so do watch out for it and specify the year if in any doubt at all.

I agree with Pedro’s view that some users get unnecessarily knotted up over labels sometimes because they are creatures of habit rather than purely logical data processing machines (which is probably a good thing most of the time). But if you re-label state as province or canton for their ‘convenience’ and they want to add an Account which is in another country they can get all flustered rather than using common sense.

The choices to make can also depend on the context of the business. If you only really do business in one US state then you might feasibly want to divide up records by the next level of hierarchy for sales territories, or service visits using counties even if they are not used for postal addressing. If your business is nationwide, then it is far less likely that anything below the first level state/region/province would be necessary.

So is the built-in “stateorprovince” field the best option?

One big thing to sway in favour of using the built-in state field (even if renamed to localise it for the business location) is that when you do a mail merge, the built-in stateorprovince field is included in the list of address fields, whereas the county field is not, and nor will any custom fields you add. Asking users to remember to add the right fields every time they start a new mail merge is a bit nuts and time consuming when changing the display name and form labels achieves the same thing more easily.

What is against it is that if you do rename it you need to change the display name, and the label on every form where it appears – but as you will see below although you should change the display name, I suggest taking it off the form in many cases anyway

Using an Option Set to make life easier

If your country has only a few top-level regions then setting up a global option set in a second field can help users avoid spelling errors. This is great where there are very few “states”such as in Canada or Ireland, reasonable enough for the 16 Lände in Germany, maybe OK for 26 cantons in Switzerland but starts to become a horribly cumbersome picklist in France, US or UK.

But I said you should use the built-in stateorprovince field for state for things like mail merging, didn’t I, so how can you get the best of both worlds? Use both!

I would suggest to use an option set for data entry then copy this value into the ‘real’ field using workflow so it is there when needed for a mail merge (yes, you can copy the value from an option set into a text field in workflow, but not vice versa). Make sure you do this when the records are created and when the option set field value is changed.

I would be tempted to only display the option set on the form, and keep the built-in text field hidden from users, and similarly make only the option set searchable (see below) since that lends itself well to use in Advanced Find for doing implicit “OR” queries simply by choosing multiple values (equals “Texas” or “Kansas”, for example).

Add the same option set and same workflow to Leads, Contacts and Accounts. Of course in CRM 2011 you can use a global option set so you guarantee to get the same items in all three entities. Make sure to add mappings for the option set and the text field to copy values from Lead > Account, Lead > Contact and Account > Contact.

Using a lookup as an alternative to an option set

If you have a few too many values for a usable option set, consider creating a custom entity to hold the “state”. This approach at its simplest would use a set of records (pre-populated ideally by data import) each of which has a single text field to hold the name of the state. Again, use workflow to copy the resulting value to the built-in stateorprovince field and make sure to map the lookup between Leads, Accounts and Contacts.

The lookup approach has a few extra possibilities that can add levels of convenience for users, such as:

• You can add more than one text field to the “state” custom entity, for example to add the state abbreviation and make this available as a find field (by editing the Quick Find view). Now users can simply type the abbreviation in the lookup field, hit tab and it will resolve to the right record. This may not be perfect in all cases but it is a damn good start – eg in the US typing “MA” will result in a list to choose between Maine, Maryland or Massachusetts since they all begin with that pair of letters. Likewise for “NE”, but in both cases three letters for Mas or Neb is unambiguous, for others use the regular abbreviations.
• You could add another field on the state record for any additional information or disambiguation to help users make the intended choices, which may be according to your own set of rules rather than some “ideal” perfectly accurate reflection of reality. Maybe there is a city which sits across two states, or some degree of ambiguity whether to use more or less precision (eg should you be looking for “London Borough of…” or just lump everything together as “Greater London”? Is Bristol in Avon or South Gloucestershire, or North Somerset, or is it a separate unitary authority in its own right?). To see this, from the lookup dialog simply select the “possible” state record and click “properties” to open the record to view (you could also include the disambiguation text in the lookup view, but if it is lengthy that might not be ideal)
• Once you have a lookup, you also have a “look down”! Opening a state record would give you instant access to the Accounts (or Contacts, or Leads etc) which are in that area from the left navigation. Make sure you don’t give most users the privileges to create new state records otherwise you loose the element of control which is part of the point here. Users will need to have the rights to read and “append to” on your custom entity (as well as “append” on the Account entity, which they probably already have, hopefully). Including this in a baseline security role which you give to all users will be a good way to ensure this works.

The downside of a lookup is that it does make advanced find or other reporting more clunky compared to an option set, and to do an “OR” you have to do the long-hand method of grouping clauses and so on. It’s a trade off between functionality on the form, and in the query – which do your users interact with most?

Tidy up the loose ends

Whatever solution you use to the problem, make sure you help users further by tidying up the loose ends such as:

• fields you are not expecting people to use, such as the built-in county field should be marked as not searchable so they don’t appear confusingly in Advanced Find (edit the field under the entity in your solution or the default solution, and change “Searchable” value to “no”, you can multi-select fields and click edit to change this property for several fields at once if you want to).
• rename these unused fields as well so they are obvious to future system customisers and to users when they show up in other contexts (such as mail merge field choices, Excel export list). a suffix of "DO NOT USE" on the end ought to be obvious enough
• personally I would not like to remove built-in address fields since they are not really on the Account and Contact records but in the addresses table. Hide and rename them, but I would probably avoid actually deleting them from the schema.

What do you use for states, counties and everything else? Are options sets better than lookups for this? Start a discussion in the comments below

You can download it from Partnersource here (authorised LiveID required):

CRM 2011 Pricing and Licensing Guide Feb 2012 update

The guide covers differences between user and device CALs, and the different types for “Full”, “Limited” and the new (for CRM 2011, as opposed to 4.0) “Employee Self Service” (ESS) CAL, which was covered in the previous version of the guide but I am still amazed by the number of users and even partners who seem to have never heard of it.

What’s an ESS CAL for?

The ESS CAL is designed for situations where you have lots of employees who may need very limited interaction with CRM via another platform such as a specific portal, an existing intranet, HR application, etc. These users are not allowed to use the browser or Outlook client to directly work with CRM, but the licences are considerably cheaper than full ones, so it makes sense for some scenarios, in (typically) larger organisations. (It used to be about 10% of a full licence, but I have not checked recently – anyone have a rough figure on this? Add comments below.)

Activity Feeds – Rights for Different Licence Types

One of the reasons for the new release of this document is to include the changes in the November update – better late than never I suppose. Luckily they have very clearly signposted the changes so you don’t have to hunt them down amongst the 72 pages. The changes I was expecting were partly to give clarity around some of the record types to do with Activity Feeds, and they have added a couple of paragraphs follows(emphasis mine).

ESS CAL Changes

The use rights supported for ESS CAL include:

• …
• Data privileges to follow and post activity feeds against Accounts, Contacts, Leads, and Custom entity records created by any CRM user.

Note this implies access to do this via API calls from another application; ESS users cannot interact directly with CRM through a browser. Also note that although ESS users can read, create and updated Cases, they cannot post Activity Feeds against them or be set up to follow them. This seems a bit odd, since being able to link users to Cases to indicate “I’m affected by this issue too” when a printer goes down or the 2nd floor bathroom is flooded would make it easy for users to then see Cases they follow and track their progress to know when they can expect a resolution. Looks like you will have to use a custom entity linked to a Case against which to track this relationship instead and post updates there, annoyingly.

Limited Use CAL Changes

The use rights supported for Limited CAL include:

• …
• Data privileges to follow and post activity feeds against Accounts, Contacts, Leads, Opportunities, and standard entity records created by any CRM user using Microsoft Dynamics CRM clients.
• Data privileges to follow and post activity feeds against custom entity records using API access only.

Remember, Limited users have read access to everything in CRM via the usual clients, and limited write access to specific entities through the CRM clients but to others only through the API, and to some no write access at all. The first added paragraph seems a bit odd since it lists some entities but then says “and standard entity records” (which I take to mean built-in system entities).

The big thing stacked against using Limited User CALs for some users is they can’t create or update Opportunities or Marketing Campaigns, so that wipes out some big areas of your sales and marketing staff for a start, even if they could do the rest of their job with the other limitations. They can however create and update Cases and assign the ones they own, which seems pretty reasonable for customer service functions (albeit anything to do with Contracts would be out).

External Connector

The External Connector licence is still the right way to get external (ie non-staff, non-contractor) people such as customers or suppliers to interact with CRM via a portal application. They can also post activity feed updates and follow (some) records, so this might be good for getting social and interactive feedback about Events for example.

So what is a Microsoft Dynamics CRM Client?

According to a footnote under the big table of tickbox comparisons of what you can and can’t do with every type of licence, it says this:

Microsoft Dynamics CRM web client, Microsoft Dynamics CRM client for Microsoft Outlook, and Mobile Express for Microsoft Dynamics CRM

So that’s Internet Explorer (until other browsers become supported in the Quarter 2 R8 release), Outlook CRM client, and any browser connecting to Mobile Express at <yourCRMURL>/m

The thing which seems to be missing from this list is the free Windows Phone 7.5 Activity Feeds App for CRM. This is good news as it means all those exclusions saying Limited and ESS CAL users can’t use the CRM clients do not prevent them from using this app.

So they can read and even create activity feed posts while out on the road all day long, and follow records of certain types to ensure they get updates about them and then respond to those. This in turn means you can leverage their posts to create or update records (of the types they are allowed to deal with), in particular things like activities as described by Jukka Niiranen in this article about using hashtags on CRM 2011 posts for follow-up workflows earlier today. (Of course it does not have to be hashtags, you could use any convention of abbreviation as a “flag” to the workflow, but hashtags do seem to make good sense as a meme.)

“I love it when a plan comes together”. A new licensing guide, and a great article from Jukka on the same day which could not have been better timed to go together.

If you have any comments on the changes, or areas of CRM licensing you find particularly confusing, please start a discussion in the comments.

You may occasionally need one or more of these URLs for integration with other applications or components such as the e-mail router, or you may need your Organisation name to licence a third party plugin or solution (which is a rather annoying GUID if you use CRM Online, rather than the actual name of your Organisation as it appears in your URL).

Whether you are using CRM Online or have CRM 4.0 or 2011 installed on your own servers or hosted by a partner, you can find all the URLs you might need by going to Settings > Customization > Developer Resources as shown in the screenshot below:

When you click on the link you will see something like this:

Notice that the Discovery Service endpoint is the same for all CRM Online implementations in your territory, starting https://dev.crm… Outside the US replace “crm” with “crm4” for EMEA and “crm5” for Asia Pacific. The Organisation Services for SOAP and OData both use your organisation’s “friendly name” rather than the GUID.

Earlier information made it clear that the key aspects of this update would be to make CRM available to a wider range of clients, specifically by providing cross-browser, cross-platform support. Whispers had also indicated that some form of ‘real’ client for one or more mobile operating systems. Today’s press release is titled “Microsoft Unveils Microsoft Dynamics CRM Mobile” and the opening lines confirm the rumours:

Next Microsoft Dynamics CRM service update will include a new, cloud-based, cross-platform, native mobile application…This service update will deliver the capability for customers to access the complete functionality of Microsoft Dynamics CRM on virtually any device with a new cloud-based, cross-platform, native mobile client service for Windows Phone 7, iPad, iPhone, Android and BlackBerry mobile devices.

So, before discussing the news any further, the first thing to do is go and read some of the official information. The new General Manager for Dynamics CRM, Dennis Michalis published an article on the CRM Community blog entitled “CRM Anywhere” which looks like it will become the shorthand phrase to describe many of the changes being delivered in this next update.

A more lengthy and detailed discussion of the full range of features expected to be included in R8 can be found in the Release Preview Guide (aka February 2012 Roadmap). There is also some great information and various screenshots at the roadmap page of the CRM microsite.

So, the key features of the release will be:

• Cross browser support including Firefox 6+ on Windows and Mac OS-X, Chrome 13+ on Windows and Safari on OS-X and iOS 5 (iPad 2). Oh, and a little thing called Internet Explorer 7+ on Windows.
• Native mobile client for Windows Phone 7.5, iPhone 3GS / iPad (iOS 5), Google Android 2.2, RIM Blackberry 6 / 7
• Support for SQL Server 2012 when it is released
• Extended functionality of the “social CRM” features in R7 based around Wall Posts / Activity Feeds
• Support for custom workflow assemblies in CRM Online, previously not an option and for some customers a reason to go with an on-premises deployment instead.
• New UI options to give users a more responsive experience when doing read-only operations.
• “Template” solutions for a variety of vertical industries

Multiple supported browsers

One of the most common requests from customers will finally be answered with support for the most popular browsers on a range of operating systems. These do not require the latest versions in most cases, and although no Linux systems are specifically supported, it may well be that appropriate browsers will work anyway.

Native mobile client

This is the big one in business terms. A ‘real’ application that can be run on various smartphone devices for the users that need a much richer experience on the move than has previously been provided by the Mobile Express service or via a browser. Crucially, the apps are planned to provide for offline access to data for when network connections are unavailable. This won’t be a free option however, but is expected to be charged on a monthly basis per user, pricing not yet finalised.

For most customers this is likely to be an option reserved only for those who really need it, and of course may require an investment in devices not already used in the business. Ironically, the one platform which won’t have offline capability on day one is Windows Phone 7

Of course, there are other vendors in this “mobility” space such as CWR Mobility, Resco and Ten Digits. They already have existing customers and partners and flexible development platforms which will help them to retain some market share, but inevitably some new customers may not look any further than Microsoft themselves to provide an end-to-end service.

More soon when I’ve digested the rest of the details.

I also wrote about how you can get qualified in CRM  through the MS Dynamics CRM 2011 Certification Tracks and Exams. Again, some of this was getting out of date so I have included information in this single post about the courses and the exams to take if getting certified in CRM 2011 is your goal.

Microsoft Dynamics CRM 2011 is going through a period of very high adoption, with many CRM 4.0 customers upgrading their on premises system to CRM 2011, or switching to a cloud solution with CRM Online. People with skills in Dynamics CRM are in high demand as a result, as well as internal staff looking for ways to get their knowledge updated to the latest version.

Microsoft Official Courseware (MOC) courses for CRM 2011

Although there are four main exams (Applications, Customization, Installation, Extending) there are many more courses, most of which are already released, others around the corner. All of these are discussed in this article.

What’s Missing?

November 2011 saw the R7 release, which was also rolled into Update Rollup 5 (and UR6). This included new features such as the Activity Feeds / Posts / “What’s New” wall for internal social-media style following of updates. Other highlights included changes to charting capability through the UI (multiple series for example) and some additional field types being supported in dialogs (lookups and dates in particular), as well as record URL values being available to Workflows without extra code.

None of the official courses cover this material yet, and none of the exam requirements list the need to know about it, although in the real world you may want to get familiar with these areas in order to get the most out of the features available.

Unchanged CRM 2011 courses

What’s New in CRM 2011

The “What’s New in Dynamics CRM 2011” course 80289A is probably a little bit “old hat” now and I don’t expect many people would sign up for this one-day introduction to CRM 2011. Note, this course does not cover new features in the R7 release (see above), it covers things which were new compared to CRM 4.0. Having said that, none of the courses below have been upgraded to cover this content yet either, but it’s the “what’s new” title which could be misleading here.

Applications Courses

The big difference from the CRM 4.0 approach is the splitting up of Applications into four separate one day instructor-led course:

80290A: Marketing Automation in Microsoft Dynamics CRM 2011

80291A: Sales Management in Microsoft Dynamics CRM 2011

80292A: Service Management in Microsoft Dynamics CRM 2011

80293A: Service Scheduling in Microsoft Dynamics CRM 2011

80290 covers Marketing Lists, bulk (aka Direct) e-mail, Templates, and Campaigns. 80291 includes sales-oriented Goals, Reports, exporting to Excel, some charts, dashboards and Workflow processes. 80292 deals with Service Cases, Contracts, Queues, using Workflows with Queues, service-related Goals, Dashboards and Reports. 80293 specifically looks at service activities, services, resources and booking these using built in scheduling tools and conflict checking.

These four courses, plus some real-world experience, should provide you with the necessary knowledge to pass exam MB2-868 – Microsoft Dynamics CRM 2011 Applications.

Installation and Deployment

80296A: Microsoft Dynamics CRM 2011 Installation and Deployment is two-days of instructor-led material, during which you will actually install CRM 2011 from scratch (in a Virtual Machine environment).

Coverage includes different installation and upgrade scenarios including internet-facing deployments (IFD), how all the components fit together, including things like the e-mail router and Reporting Services. This course gives you the core information you need to prepare for exam MB2-867 – Microsoft Dynamics CRM 2011 Installation and Deployment.

New or updated courses and exams

New version of 80294  Customisation course

80294B: Customization and Configuration in Microsoft Dynamics CRM 2011 is a three-day classroom based course which is designed to prepare you for exam MB2-866 – Microsoft Dynamics CRM 2011 Customization and Configuration.

I taught this updated B revision for the first time last week and it was a huge relief compared to the A version with almost all the kinks and errors ironed out. This is a pretty full three days, so come prepared for long hours and lots of information. Even if you have some knowledge of CRM 4 there is sufficient new material covering the new features to make this course really worthwhile if you are considering an upgrade. Theoretically the course covers all the skills needed to build and customise your CRM 2011 deployment to meet your business requirements.

There’s lots of coverage of the organisational and security model (business units, security roles, users and teams, and field security), other key features such as managing auditing and using solutions, and plenty of material on customising entities, fields and relationships and on the front-end user interface components such as views, charts and forms.

What you won’t cover is anything to do with processes (workflows and dialogs), how to use JScript for client-side event-driven interaction, Reports, .Net plugins etc. Lots of areas which may feel like “customisation” are intended for end-users to do for themselves and so are covered on the applications courses (eg workflows, reports), others are seen as “developer” topics and are dealt with on the Extending course 80295 (see below).

New! Workflow and Dialog Processes in CRM 2011

Course 80444 Workflow and Dialog Processes in Microsoft Dynamics CRM 2011 has been announced for release in March. I am pleased this is still a one-day course and kept separate from customisation as there is a key target audience here for super-users and business managers to be able to build their own workflows or dialogs to help manage their day-to-day processes within specific areas of the organisation.

It would make sense for some people to do the four applications courses or 80294B followed straight on by this new Processes course. I would certainly not suggest anyone take this course as a starting point if they do not already have a good grasp of CRM (4 or 2011), how entities and relationships between them work, and the types of data and business processes they need to manage. Given the timing of this course release, it includes coverage of the Q4 2012 / R7 / UR5 features such as including URLs in e-mails which provide links to records for the recipient, and using lookups and date time fields in Dialogs.

This course does not have a specific exam associated with it, although it will help give a deeper understanding of Processes, which are included on exam MB2-868 Microsoft Dynamics CRM 2011 Applications.

New! Reporting in Microsoft Dynamics CRM 2011

Course 80445 Reporting in Microsoft Dynamics CRM 2011 is announced but not due to actually be released until the end of March. It is a one-day course which covers loads of ground about charts, including exporting and editing the Chart XML before re-importing. Reports are dealt with in depth, starting with the report wizard, then moving onto using Business Intelligence Development Studio (BIDS) to develop reports using SQL queries as well as FetchXML. There is no specific exam lined up for this one at the moment.

Introduction to CRM 2011 – new course

Course 80442 Introduction to Microsoft Dynamics CRM 2011 provides an introduction to CRM 2011 in a new one-day instructor-led format. This is ideal for people with no previous experience of Dynamics CRM as a foundation for other courses.

It is also aimed at business managers or project teams at an early stage of their implementation (perhaps still undecided if CRM is the right platform) to give them a grounding in the core capabilities of CRM without getting too bogged down in the technical details not taking the several days required for the Applications or Customisation courses.

The course covers key CRM concepts, the Web browser interface, Outlook CRM client, searching and reporting, data import, mail merge, charts and dashboards.

This course does not have a specific exam associated with it.

Extending CRM 2011 – exam now available

Course 80295A Extending Microsoft Dynamics CRM 2011 was released in August 2011 and is a three-day course aimed at Developers who need to write custom code, plugins and workflow assemblies to provide functionality which is outside the capabilities of the core application itself. This course also covers related areas such as client-side programming with JScript, customising the Ribbon and the Sitemap by editing the XML for a solution and integration with other systems using a variety of techniques.

The related exam MB2-876 Extending Microsoft Dynamics CRM 2011 was released in December so people who have already taken this course can now finally prove their skills. Now that all the key exams are out, hopefully there will soon be some news on exactly what the requirements are for the various IT Pro Tracks, but at the moment the Microsoft Learning page for Dynamics CRM Certifications is still only listing CRM 4 qualifications and requirements.

Administration in CRM 2011 – still no official news

I have not yet seen any announcements regarding an updated Administration course to match and replace the previous80002 Administration in Microsoft Dynamics CRM 4.0. If I find out anything about plans for this, I’ll update this post.

Problem description / reproduction steps

I created a custom entity in CRM 2011 to use as a joining entity in a manual N:N relationship. In this scenario it was an “Attendance” record to link a Contact to an Event, and enable the business to track the status of the attendance (tentative, confirmed, attended, cancelled) along with relevant dates etc.

To reduce effort on the user’s part I made the primary “description” field on the record auto-filled based on the event and contact name, using jscript web resources. To observe sensible UI practice, I made sure the lookup fields came at the top of the form, then the description which was a result of those, so it should be obvious to the user what to fill in first, then by the time they get to the name field it is already filled in.

A blank new record form is shown below.

So, what went wrong?

When the user creates a new record, they expect to be able to get on with the job of typing in the fields. Although the Event or Contact was automatically filled in if they created the record from the context of the parent record to make life even easier, this still means that sometimes they needed to fill in one or the other field, and that’s where it got strange.

The Event field is first on the form, and you might naturally expect it to take focus when the form loads, ready for typing. No such luck. Even worse, it was not possible to click in this field and start typing to use recent items or wait for the record name to be resolved. Clicking where the mouse is pointing in the screenshot did nothing; the field behaved almost as if it was disabled. Except the lookup button itself was enabled and the user could click here, do a search and choose a record that way, albeit that takes longer.

Nothing I did or could think of would work, the field simply would not take focus at all. This was using IE9 and CRM Online – all latest stuff, surely that should work best?

So how did I fix it?

As it happens I had another bug with IE9. If I got impatient waiting for a form to load, or realised I had clicked in the wrong place and did not want to load the wrong things, I would usually just close the window before it finished loading. This turns out to be a great way to crash IE9 using CRM – if you close a form before it is fully loaded and rendered, it can kill you whole session, which is far from ideal when you have several windows open, especially in the middle of a batch of customisations.

So I logged that bug on the Connect website. And someone from MS helpfully replied with a possible fix, by changing a registry key for IE9, ironically designed to guard against the browser hanging (well, I guess crashing would tend to avoid a hang…)

So I applied the fix:

Create the following Registry Key Value to disable the Hang Resistance feature:
HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Software\Microsoft\Internet Explorer\Main\
Type: REG_DWORD
Name: HangRecovery
Value: 0

and I still don’t know if it will stop IE9 crashing quite so much, but it sure has helped my ‘broken’ form to work properly. Now it takes the focus on the correct field when I click on it, and even opens the form with the focus already where it should be.

So I sorted it by trying to fix something else altogether. Typical. What’s the best thing you’ve ever managed to get working without actually knowing how?