Just created my first paper.li, read it here:
All you can consume, Dynamics News
Filed under: Microsoft CRM - Functionality | Leave a comment »
Just created my first paper.li, read it here:
All you can consume, Dynamics News
Filed under: Microsoft CRM - Functionality | Leave a comment »
Great post by Leon Tribe on why Microsoft bought LinkedIn – the real reason, his view anyway!
Microsoft bought LinkedIn this week which came as a surprise to practically everyone. No one leaked the story and the rumor mill was quiet as the grave. The immediate question was “Why?”
Financially, like my old friend Salesforce, recent years have not been kind to LinkedIn in terms of profitability. Revenue is expected to be $3.7b for 2016 and is growing but they consistently make a loss.
So, from a financial perspective, the deal is problematic. At $26.2b, even if Microsoft took 100% of the revenue as profit, it would take more than seven years to get their money back. If we are a bit more realistic and suggest a modest profit of 10% on this revenue base, we are looking at a return of the buy price in 70 years.
And yet, Microsoft paid almost a 50% premium on the share price. It is clear they were…
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Filed under: Microsoft CRM - Functionality | Leave a comment »
What do your customers remember you by? Your last delivery.
Building long lasting trusting relationships around a solid reputation of delivery is paramount into today’s services economy. With many providers delivering similar services your customer experience needs to be distinct and consistent across every client interaction. As an organisation the level of transparency and collaboration both internally and externally has escalated to the point people expect it, they expect to be involved, they expect to collaborate, they expect to be online, they expect to be able to do it anywhere, and they expect it to be simple. Delivering projects is all about the relationships and team collaboration so why should it not be embedded into a Customer Relationship Management solution?
Process maturity as published by SPI Research for Microsoft on 2016 Professional Services Maturity talks about moving organisations from Project Heroic and Functional Excellence to Portfolio and Collaborative Excellence, the move away from individual project heroes leads to significant performance improvements and increase in average EBITDA compared to organisations that are less mature. To be able to progress on the maturity lifecycle you require systems that are embedded into the process, systems that remove silos of data, that enable greater collaboration amongst teams both internal and external
The focus of Project Services
Project Services for Dynamics CRM focusses are removing the project data silos by embedding deep project services capabilities into Dynamics CRM. This focus of Project Services is on three core operational excellence factors:
Introducing Project Services for Dynamics CRM
Project Service is an end-to-end solution that extends Microsoft Dynamics CRM to provide a single system of customer engagement for project sales, resourcing, delivery and billing.
Through Office 365 integration collaboration becomes second nature and automated, notes can be shared using OneNote, documents worked on by multiple people seamlessly and shared with the team both internally and externally.
If you’d like to know more about Microsoft Dynamics CRM project service and how we can help your organisation to deliver project excellence and move along the project lifecycle, we’d love to talk to you. Find out more and download a datasheet here.
Filed under: Business CRM, CRM 2016, Microsoft CRM - Functionality, Project Services | Tagged: Dynamics CRM Online, MSDynamicsCRM, Msdyncrm, Project Services | 1 Comment »
Project services for Dynamics CRM has been released in the CRM Online Spring release. Project services will enable all aspects of a project to be managed in CRM from Pre sales opportunity management through to project planning, delivery and billing.
Project services will be delivered under an add on license to a CRM Online Basic or Professional sku. When trialing Dynamics CRM Online you will be able to load as a solution a trial of Project services.
The core capabilities of Project Services are:
Filed under: Dynamics CRM Online, Microsoft CRM - Functionality, Microsoft CRM - News, Project Services | Tagged: CRM 2016, CRM online, MSDynamicsCRM, Msdyncrm, Project Services | Leave a comment »
Dynamics CRM 2016 Online SP1 has been released and again its another big release for Dynamics with a lot of new capabilities being added. The focus has been heavily on expanding the service and mobile capabilities of Dynamics CRM
In this blog I will summarise some of the changes and values that they bring you as a business:
Mobile:
Productivity:
As with every release a high degree of focus is placed on productivity as with this release. The following improvements have been made:
Service
Service has seen some major enhancements with the release of Project and Field Services as core components of Dynamics CRM Online. These new features are licensed as an add on to a Basic license so are not included in the base license.
Analytics Features
Portals
Self service portals will be released slightly after the general release of Dynamics CRM Online and will include a set of preconfigured portals that can be deployed utilizing the Adxstudio recent acquisition capability. The following portals will be made available and will utilize Azure services:
Unified Service Desk Enhancements
A number of improvements were made to the Unified service desk these include:
Company News
Hybrid server-side sync (CRM on premises to Exchange Online)
CRM APP for Outlook available for CRM On Premise
Read email | Compose email | |
Outlook on the web (OWA) on all major desktop browsers | Yes | Yes |
Outlook 2013 | Yes | No |
Outlook 2016 | Yes | Yes |
Outlook for Mac | Yes | No |
Customer Field
Filed under: CRM 2016, Dynamics CRM Online, Microsoft CRM - Functionality, Microsoft CRM - News | Tagged: CRM 2016, MSDynamicsCRM, Msdyncrm, Spring release, Whats new | Leave a comment »
The activity pane is a great area in CRM to see all the activity regarding an account and if used well can create a great story of interactions. But there is often a lot of noise with system activities being displayed or activities that you are not interested in.
In CRM 2016, you can filter the activity pane by clicking on the filter icon, see screenshot below. You can then select the activities you are interested in.
May be in the future will also be able to do it by date, but not just yet.
Filed under: CRM 2016, Dynamics CRM Online, Microsoft CRM - Functionality | Tagged: crm2016, Msdyncrm, Tip | Leave a comment »
In the latest release of Dynamics CRM Online, a large focus has been on increasing productivity, by deeper integration with the Office 365 products. One of these investments has been with OneNote. OneNote is a great tool for capturing all sorts of notes, from meeting notes, to actions, to pictures and the list goes on via any device. So image the ability to take ad-hoc notes and seamlessly link them to the appropriate CRM record be an Account or Opportunity or Case, no more hidden notes in emails, description fields, appointments it’s all discoverable.
So why Integrate to OneNote?
OneNote is a well-established tool that enables people to take notes, to collaborate to capture ad hoc conversations, to embed voice and photos of whiteboards, while being fully accessible on any device from Phones, to Tablets, to Desktops, to iPads and Android based devices.
If we look at traditional CRM systems, when it came to note taking or capturing the outcome of a meeting we were left with wondering what to do with the notes, do we attach them as a note, do we summarise using a text box field, do we implement a web resource to invoke a rich text editor in CRM, often though these notes were never updated in CRM, leaving a hole in the interaction, probably the most important interaction.
To demonstrate the value of this productivity enhancement, let’s take a simple example, I am a sales person going to meet a client regarding a new opportunity to deliver some services and implement a new product. I know I will be asking plenty of questions, taking notes and I am sure the whiteboard will be used to draw some pictures. So how does this play out with CRM and OneNote.
I open the CRM App on my tablet. I bring up my opportunity and review the customer details. | ![]() |
I click on the OneNote link and start taking my notes in OneNote.
I can draw pretty pictures, write some notes, and do what I need to do. |
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I complete the appointment record against the opportunity | ![]() |
My pre sales team can immediately review the notes of the meeting. | ![]() |
So as you can see a seamless experience for me and my team. Writing notes in a tool meant to write notes in. The benefits being:
How do we set this up, what do I need to know?
Ok, so you get the point CRM + OneNote = Productivity, so how do I enable it what are the must haves. It is simple really if you meet the following criteria you can enable this integration:
If you meet this simple criteria you can get going. So to start using OneNote integration, follow these simple steps:
STEP 1 | Decide which entities you want to enable OneNote integration for i.e. Accounts, opportunities, Cases etc |
STEP 2 | Open “Customise the System” and for each entity make sure the Document Management and OneNote Integration flags are checked. Publish the changes.
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STEP 3 | If you have already enabled SharePoint integration skip this step. Otherwise you need to enable SharePoint Integration via Settings -> Document Management
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STEP 4 | Finally you now need to select the entities in which you want to enable OneNote integration for. So navigate to Settings -> Document Management and select OneNote Integration:
Now select the entities and click Finish. You have now configured OneNote Integration. |
STEP 5 | Once you have enabled OneNote, to create your first connected OneNote section, open up the record and ensure a document library has been created, then in the social panel click on the new OneNote tab and an OneNote file named Untitled will be created. Open this up and start creating your notes.
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Finally how are they stored and linked?
The OneNote files are stored in SharePoint within the document library for the record. Each record where you initiate an OneNote, a new Notebook will be created. In the social panel, sections of the OneNote notebook are displayed individually.
In Summary
Bringing the power of OneNote together with the structure of Dynamics CRM, enables individuals to work within the tools that are best suited to the job, while being connected to the context of the CRM record. OneNote enables collaboration, sharing of information and enables users to work smarter reducing the duplication of data entry and the complexity of sharing insights amongst the team.
Filed under: Business CRM, Microsoft CRM - Functionality, OneNote | Tagged: Dynamics CRM Online, MSDynamicsCRM, Msdyncrm, OneNote | 1 Comment »
So my problem I open up my contact to view the emails that have been sent via ClickDimensions, when I open the email I see the subject of the email that was sent but not the content. To get to the content I have to click the link to the email send record. This can be frustrating to users who what to get a quick view of the email content.
This started me thinking, if we can view a preview in the email send record then maybe we can construct the correct URL and display that in an iFrame in any related record. After a bit of playing and an email with Matt Wittemann from ClickDimensions I had a nice solution.
I thought I would share this and if I am honest as I am not a developer I would probably convert a couple of my steps into plugins rather than using workflows! Anyway this is how I achieved the solution.
First of all if we take a look at the URL in the preview of an Email send record, it looks something like this:
Now the only thing that changes by email send is the email send GUID. So if I know the GUID of an email send record then I can display the email in any iFrame, simple!
Remember now that I am not a developer so my tools available to me are workflows, fields and web resources! This is how I did it:
Filed under: ClickDimensions, Microsoft CRM - Functionality | Tagged: ClickDimensions | Leave a comment »
Dynamics CRM 2016 in the name of the next release for Dynamics CRM expected this Fall (December / January), and what a release it looks like it will be.
I have listed some resources that share some of the new features and content:
Microsoft Blog by Bob Stutz
Microsoft Dynamics CRM 2016 – Delivering the Next Generation of Intelligent Customer Engagement
YouTube Video on the new features
Preview Guide
Filed under: Business CRM, Dynamics CRM Online, Microsoft CRM - Functionality, Microsoft CRM - News | Tagged: CRM 2016, CRM online, CRM Preview, Dynamics CRM Online | Leave a comment »