A glimpse of R8, Q2 2012 Service Update, Update Rollup 9

I was spending a little more time in the R8 beta release today (not to be confused with Update Rollup 8, UR 8), and thought I would list out some of the exciting features we can look forward to.  So here goes:

Business Intelligence

For CRM OnPremise installations (CRM Online coming later) we will be able to download PowerPivot workbooks from the Dynamics Marketplace.

• This puts Business Intelligence directly into the hands of the end users
• Ability to upload the workbook to SharePoint and build new workbooks on top of it
• Leverage the SharePoint reporting capabilities to include animated reporting with some simple drag and drop technology
  • Yes, that’s correct, animated reported!
• PowerView will also become more of a player in this release to include the ability to surface the SharePoint Reports in CRM leveraging a custom entity
• Some features will require SQL 2012

Process Improvements

• Custom Workflows in CRM Online
  • Requirements will be the same as those that exist today in relationship to CRM Online Plug-ins
• Ability to call out to external web sites and back into the SDK
• Use Plug-in registration tool to register custom workflows

Vertical Templates

• Insurance & HealthCare
• Use for demos, starter solutions for vertical markets, validate CRM for the vertical
• Includes Vertical relevant sample data, dashboards, entities, demo scripts, demo videos and more

Performance Enhancements

• Platform
  • Quick Find and Retrieve Multiple
  • Upgrade Performance
    • 2011 already had significant improvement in this area as compared to the 3.0 to 4.0 upgrade.
    • Additionally improvements to this area should make this impressive
  • Improved Performance for Published Metadata
• Client
  • Network related enhancements
  • Scale or Large Data enhancements
  • Ability to disable caching per machine
  • Smarter meta data caching
  • Enhanced Outlook stability
  • Improved folder load times

Read Optimized Forms (RO Form)

• Changes required for cross browser support
• Visibility for Images
• Activity Feeds
• More intelligent script detection
• Open Note attachments

Cross Browser Support

• Does not mean all features and functions will work in all browsers
• Browser functionality will be dependent on not only browser version but also the Operating System
  • In most cases, the Settings & Admin areas are only supported in IE browsers.

and in the event that was not enough..

• A new browser agnostic Mobile CRM (CWR feature set)
• Activity Feed Enhancements
  • Ability to Like and Unlike posts and create filters
• SQL Server 2012 Support
• CRM Online Data Center Certifications
• Portal Framework Enhancements

Hopefully this is enough to get you excited about the feature set included in the upcoming release.  I’m sure we will all be quite busy in the very near future taking it all in.

Cheers

SharePoint & CRM Online Document Management

In November 2011, Eric Boocock from Microsoft announced a change to SharePoint Online (Office 365).  The change included the ability to enable document management using the SharePoint List Component with CRM Online. 

Since I’ve been waiting for this feature for several months, I decided to give it a try.  The first thing I did was to clear a 4 hour block of time from my schedule to implement the solution.  I was aware that several articles list a few clicks here and a few clicks there, a tweak here and a tweak there and you’re done.  I also understand that one person’s experience with a new feature can vary from another’s so I decided to allow ample time to deal with any unexpected issues.

The key article I used to understand the steps required to implement the solution is one written by the Microsoft Premier Field Engineers; CRM Online Document Management with SharePoint Online (Office 365).  If you don’t already follow this blog, I encourage you to consider adding it to your list.  The articles are packed full of great advice, helpful hints, issue resolution and more.

A couple of things you need to get started:

1. CRM Online, you can obtain a trial account if you don’t have an account.
2. Office 365, you can obtain a trial account if you don’t have one.

You’ll have two choices with the Office 365 account; Small Business (P1) or Midsize / Enterprise (E3).  Ensure you select the E3 type as P1 does not have CRM Online integration capability.  Once you’ve completed the sign up and activation steps, you are ready to begin the integration. 

• The first step in the process is to download and save the Microsoft Dynamics CRM 2011 List Component for Microsoft SharePoint Server 2010 to a folder on your hard drive.  I created a folder for the list component so it would be easy to find when I needed it.
• The list component will download as an exe file which you can select to run after the download is complete.  Run the exe and accept the license terms when the screen appears.

• When you select the Continue button you will be prompted to save the extracted files to a folder.  I selected the same folder where I saved the original download.
• You should be able to see the list component file in the directory when the extraction is complete.

Now the fun begins.

• Sign into your Office 365 account and select Team Site from the top navigation menu or select Visit SharePoint Home from the left navigation menu under Team Site:

• Next select Site Actions from the top navigation menu and select Site Settings

• Select Solutions from the Galleries section

• Select anywhere in the Solution page and the Upload button will appear on the Ribbon.  The dynamic ribbon is one of the nice features of SharePoint 2010 and many other Microsoft Office and business application products

• Select the Upload button and browse out to the list component file.  Select the list component file and select the Open button from the lower right.

• Leave the Overwrite existing file checkbox and select Ok. 

• Select the Activate button and select Close

• The SharePoint List component will upload to the SharePoint site.  You should see the component listed with a Status of Activated

• Copy your SharePoint URL to notepad or some other document and save it for the next step.
• You can copy the URL from the address bar of Internet Explorer or go back to Site Settings and it will be in the left window under Site Information

At this point you are ready to configure CRM Online to use SharePoint Online as the document repository.  It’s now time to login into CRM Online.

• Log into CRM Online and select Settings, Document Management from the left navigation menu and select Document Management Settings

• You can now select the entities that you want to allow for document management or leave the default selections.  You should also copy the SharePoint URL into the URL field.

• Select Next and CRM Online will validate the settings to ensure that the SharePoint URL is valid and available.  
  • If CRM Online is not able to validate the URL, you will receive a message asking you to valid the site or correct the entry.
  • If CRM Online is able to validate the URL a dialog window will open asking you to select the Folder Structure

• If you leave the default settings, the folder structure will default to a simple approach; Entity, Record Name, Documents.
• If you select the Based on entity checkbox, the folder structure will be more complex and locating documents from the SharePoint repository could prove more challenging for the end user.  I recommend keeping the structure simple but you’ll need to decide which is best for your implementation.
• Select Next

• Select Ok to continue and the document libraries are created
• Once completed you will receive a status message.

• If all entities completed successfully you can select the Finish button.  If not, select back and resolve issues as needed.
• Next, go to one of the entities that you selected for document management and open an existing record or create a new record as needed.
• For this example, I opened an Account record and selected documents from the left navigation menu.

• The first time you select Documents from an Entity, you will receive a notification that the folder will be created in the SharePoint site.

• Select Ok to continue
• Once the initial folder is created you will be able to add a new document or take a different action.

At this point you are done with the steps required to integrate the systems.  It is now time to get familiar with the new feature.  Adding new folders, changing document locations, uploading new documents are just a few of the actions available.  I encourage you to explore the various options to gain a comfort level with each.  As you will discover, it is very easy to open SharePoint from CRM Online and go back and forth between applications. 

Although I cleared my calendar for 4 hours to ensure I had enough time to implement and troubleshoot the solution, it took less than 30 minutes to complete.  It actually took me four times longer to write this article than it took to integrate CRM Online with SharePoint online. 

Well done, Microsoft, this is about as easy as it gets.

Cheers

Configuring Cascading Entity Relationship Behavior

As we know, CRM is a highly configurable application.  One of the configurable options is to configure the behavior of related records when a CRM record is assigned, merged or some other action is taken.  This is a very important concept in CRM because the decisions and actions you take will affect your Organization’s data. 

By default, when you install CRM,  the cascading relationship of entities is generally set to Parental for actions like Assign, Share, Unshare, Reparent, etc. where there is an option to modify the relationship behavior.  Some entity relationships are not available for modifications because there are System dependencies.  The “Type of Behavior” will appear as System and you will not be able to modify those relationship behaviors. 

So what does this mean?  Let’s use the Contact entity as an example to understand how cascading behavior impacts CRM data.  

A common action that users might take on a Contact record is to reassign the record.  By default, that means that when a Contact record is reassigned to someone else (ownership change) other related record ownership will also be updated to the new Contact owner.  Ownership for related records like a Case, E-mail, Task, etc. will change to the new Contact owner for those records that are in an Active or Open status.  This can be confusing for the end user when viewing the records because it can appear that someone different from the original owner (created by) created the record.  We can modify this behavior to alleviate the confusion and ensure that the related record maintains its original owner. 

Here are the steps to configure the cascading behavior of the Contact entity relationship with the E-mail entity.  This examples assumes that you know how to open the Contact entity to customize it.

From the Contact entity, select 1:N Relationships.  Find the row named Contact_Emails and open it.  Notice that the default behavior is set to Parental.

After opening the relationship record, select Type of Behavior and change it from Parental to Configurable Cascading.

Change the remaining behaviors from Cascade All to Cascade None.  Save your changes and Publish. 

You can repeat these steps for other entities like Accounts, Cases and their relationships with Activities and other CRM entities.

Generally speaking, when I install a CRM application, I modify the system to set the cascading relationship of related Activities (E-mail, Appointments, Phone Calls, etc.) to System Configurable, change the behavior from Parental to Configurable Cascading, and set the Assign, Share, Unshare, and Reparent behavior to Cascade None. 

Now that we have CRM 2011, this is much easier to manage as we can create a ‘Default Solution’ that contains the default Cascading behavior desired and import that into each new CRM implementations as a starting point for the project.  This is a significant productivity gain.

If you would like to learn more about CRM Customization, check out the 11 Things to know about Customization on the Resource Center.  See # 5 for more information about Cascading Behavior.

Cheers