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All you can consume, Dynamics News

The Real Reason Microsoft Is Buying LinkedIn (And It Is Not For Their Profitability)

Great post by Leon Tribe on why Microsoft bought LinkedIn – the real reason, his view anyway!

That CRM Blog

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?”

The Numbers

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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Remove the project data silo from your business with project services for Dynamics CRM Online

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:

• Deepen customer and employee engagement – focus on building credibility through collaborative project planning, estimation and expectations setting. Provide confidence in project success through proven processes and a responsive engagement model. Then deliver predictable on-time and on budget projects with process automation and transparency. 2015 Miller Heiman Global Sales Best Practices study states that 94% of world class organisations collaborate across all departments to close large deals, as opposed to only 43% across all organisations.
• Empower Professionals – at the end of the day it is the quality of your professionals that deliver excellent customer engagement and customer experiences. The focus here is ensuring consistency and process excellence to drive up the maturity lifecycle. Through a single system view, you can facilitate transparency with comprehensive views of skills and their relationship to project requirements, ensuring the right resource with the right skills is assigned to work. Inevitably, driving more realistic attainment of on-time and on-budget projects. You can enhance productivity through providing collaboration tools via Office 365 groups, project team sites and tools like visual studio online. By empowering the employee to find projects to maintain skills, to collaborate amongst the team increases loyalty through visible interaction, recognition and skills development.
• Optimise Growth – 2016 SPI Professional Services Maturity Benchmark states organisations using an integrated project-based solution with CRM are 44% more profitable than those using neither. Coordinating a firm wide approach to prioritizing client and pursuit management using team collaboration in consistent ways helps to deliver successful projects. Monitoring and managing overall status and having that visible to the professionals is critical in ensuring that real time visibility of project status. The more people are aware then the more they care and focus on delivering successful project outcomes. Using the built in metrics in Project Services and PowerBI reporting tools facilitates timely decision making enabling the business to adapt and change accordingly before it is too late.

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.

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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.

An Overview of Project services

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:

• Opportunity Management
  • Estimate, quote, and contract work, Plan and assign resources and Enable team collaboration
  • This great feature allows for a project quote to be created off the back of a work break down structure definition. As pre sales you will be create a draft project, start from a project template and adapt for the specific needs of the opportunity. Once the plan has been approved you can import in the project lines in to the quote and summarise the details by role or phase. Using the new word template functionality you will then be able to create a nice looking word document for your quote / statement of work.
• Project-based contracts
  • Project contracts relate quotes and orders to project plans, financial estimates, labour pricing, and billing arrangements, like time and materials or fixed price. The contract highlights key metrics, including profitability and feasibility.
• Project planning
  • Visual project planning and estimation includes predecessors, automatic task scheduling, and views of sales and cost information for time and expenses. You can use the resulting plan in quotes and project contracts.
  • 
• Resource management
  • Resource information includes the skills and proficiencies of your workforce. You can view and filter resources based on skills and availability, so you can assign the right people to the right projects. You can also track resource utilization and forecasting metrics.
  • Resourcing of projects can be performed by a centralized user role or by the project manager depending on your organisation needs.
  • Resource Availability screenshot
  • 
  • Resource Utilisation screenshot
  • 
• Time and expenses
  • Capture time, expense, and progress data for real-time insights and accurate invoicing
  • Team members can use the web or mobile apps to record time and expenses for multiple projects. Managers can easily approve new entries while understanding the financial implications of the newly-approved items.
  • Screenshot of the time recording grid view
  • 
• Project billing
  • Project invoices reflect the terms of the contract and the approved work and expenses. The financial impact of project work, including costs, unbilled revenue, and invoices, is recorded for use in analytics and integration into financial systems.

What’s new in the CRM 2016 Spring Release

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:

• The big news here is that it has gone Offline, you can now define the rules for offline access via the new administration settings area in Dynamics. Some caveats to be aware of, its only available to organisations that have 5 or more professional licenses or 1 enterprise license, the licenses do need to be assigned to users for mobile offline to be engaged, it is not available for trial or sandbox environment, and any changes to a user security privileges will not take effect for offline until after the next synchronization.
• Data for the offline users is stored in a separate SQL Azure Database and for offline access stored on the device in a local database. It is important if you are going to use CRM Mobile Offline that you utilize tools like Intune to manage the devices connecting for security of local data. iOS and Android mobile applications can now be managed in Intune MAM without enrolling the device.
• For more information on setting up Mobile offline see Offline User Guide
• Other mobile enhancements include the ability for service reps to manage Knowledge base articles
• For sales professionals to manage quotes, orders and invoices via mobile
• Improved start up performance after admin changes
• Ability to set-up mobile device conditional access – You configure conditions for CRM access at the Azure Active Directory group level. For example, you might want to set up conditions that require multi-factor authentication for mobile users accessing CRM when they’re not at work—or maybe you want to require it at all times. You can also set up conditions that require the user’s mobile device to be compliant with your policies before the user can access CRM.

Productivity:

As with every release a high degree of focus is placed on productivity as with this release. The following improvements have been made:

• Collaboration with Office Groups – Office groups can now be reconnected to other records in CRM.
  • Notification of deleted groups within CRM to allow you to reconnect to another group
  • Project team members are automatically added to a group
• Email signatures – you can now define signatures for users and queues for web client emails
• Inline Help – Learning path is a new guided user experience tailored to roles in the organisation. The first release will see the content pre canned for some of the new features, we hope in future releases this will be opened up for configuration so that we can create personalized content for a releases

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.

• Project Services – manage project based sales, includes:
  • Estimate, quote, and contract work
  • Plan and assign resources
  • Enable team collaboration
  • Capture time, expense, and progress data for real-time insights and accurate invoicing
  • Project based contracts
  • Project planning
  • Resource management
  • Time and expenses
  • Project billing
  • Watch the video at Project services YouTube video
• Manage your Field service workflows
  • Field service, the recent FieldOne acquisition has now been fully embedded and enhanced for Dynamics CRM.
  • Field service is an end-to-end solution that delivers advanced scheduling, inventory tracking, and asset management for service depots and highly mobile, in-field specialists who need to fulfill work orders and provide preventive maintenance across multiple sites under complex service agreements.
• Create SLAs for any entity
  • With this release you can now easily create SLAs for a select few system entities and all custom entities. For example you could create an SLA for a Lead first response in, conversion SLA. Lots of possibilities for SLA configuration.
  • The following system entities are included:
    • All activity entities (such as Email, Task, and Appointment) except recurring appointments
    • Account
    • Contact
    • Invoice
    • Opportunity
    • Quote
    • Lead
    • Order
  • For more information on SLA configuration see My post on SLA set-up and SLA Help guide
• Interactive service hub enhancements
  • Apply service level agreements (SLAs) for Case and custom entities. This functionality is the same whether you use the web client or the interactive service hub.
  • Track progress of SLA KPIs with the timer control.
  • Remove redundancies between similar cases by merging them into a single case.
  • Access forms and dashboards easily using keyboard navigation

Analytics Features

• New Service Content Pack includes several key indicators such as cases created, cases resolved, satisfaction percentage, top agent leaders, and most used and viewed KB articles.
• Improved Sales Manager Content Pack includes OData (Open Data Protocol) version 4.0 support.
• The ability to embed Power BI tiles directly into CRM user dashboards. This allows you to launch an interactive report from Power BI tiles directly from a CRM user dashboard, without having to switch to the Power BI service.

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:

• Custom portal. The custom portal is a basic portal that contains flows and pages common to all portals. It includes basic support content as well as custom applications to meet the specific support needs of different organizations, including login/authentication features and contact pages.
• Customer Self-Service portal. Lets customers access self-service knowledge and support resources, increasing customer satisfaction, reducing call center volumes, and ultimately allowing service agents to focus their efforts on issues of greatest impact.
• Employee Self-Service portal. Creates an efficient and well-informed workforce by streamlining common tasks and empowering every employee with a definitive source of knowledge. Employee self-service is now available worldwide using CRM and portal capabilities, and is available in all CRM Online markets.
• Community portal. Enables peer-to-peer interactions between experts in the community, subject matter experts within an organization, and internal and external users. Communities organically grow the catalog of available knowledge from knowledge base articles, forums, and blogs. Participants can provide feedback through rating and comments features. Contributors can also receive alerts on content revisions and workflow updates.
• Partner portal. Create an environment for interacting with your partners and collaborating on sales opportunities to provide products and services based on your customers’ needs.

Unified Service Desk Enhancements

A number of improvements were made to the Unified service desk these include:

• Interactive service hub integration. The interactive service hub can now be integrated with Unified Service Desk so users can open and control interactive service hub pages inside Unified Service Desk.
• Windows Update. Unified Service Desk also supports Windows Update now. Windows Update is an easy and free way to help keep Microsoft applications (like the Unified Service Desk client) safer and running smoothly. Just turn it on, and you’ll get the latest security and other important updates from Microsoft automatically, or you can choose to apply updates manually.
• Demo packages. New demo packages include samples for new Unified Service Desk environments, upgrading existing Unified Service Desk environments, interactive service hub integration, and Dynamics CRM 2013 or later web client.
• Telemetry. You can now help improve Unified Service Desk by sending usage data to Microsoft anonymously.

Company News

• The Company news and timeline solution lets users see the latest and most important news from Bing news on their mobile devices. News articles are organized by time (Today, This Week, Last Week) and contain the headline, date/time, and source of the news article. Important events are detected and categorized, including management changes, earnings releases, new offerings, cost cutting, growth, legal issues, acquisitions, and partnerships.You can use a new custom control to add and configure a news feed for the mobile apps.

Hybrid server-side sync (CRM on premises to Exchange Online)

• You can use server-side synchronization to automatically synchronize email, tasks, appointments, and contacts between CRM and Microsoft Exchange. Now you can do a reverse-hybrid scenario by connecting CRM on-premises with Exchange Online. This means you can now use server-side synchronization for all four connection scenarios:
• 

CRM APP for Outlook available for CRM On Premise

• The CRM APP introduced in the CRM Online 2016 release is now available for CRM ON Premise. The following table defines the versions and functions available:
  

  	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

• The customer field is a special field you find on some custom entities that let you select an account or contact record as the customer. In the new release you will be add a new field as a type of Customer to your system entities.
• This feature will be available slightly after the general release of CRM

Filter your activities in the activity pane in CRM 2016

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.

CRM + OneNote = Productivity

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.
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:

• Based on security access, everyone who needs to see my notes can, in the context of the record
• I can work on any device anywhere, seamlessly
• OneNotes are stored in SharePoint so no storage impact on my CRM Online
• I can take photos, draw pictures, record videos, take typed notes, I am not restricted by a field or size of a field
• I can collaborate real time with other users in the OneNote
• Users do not need access to CRM to contribute to the OneNote
• I can utilise other tools that are integrated with OneNote i.e. IFTTT.com provide many simple tools to really start empowering users usage of OneNote

 

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:

• You have Dynamics CRM Online, with the latest Update 1 applied
  • If you a new customer, then when you create a trial instance of CRM you will be on this latest update
  • If you an existing customer then you can schedule your instance to be updated via the O365 admin centre
• You have SharePoint connected to your CRM instance, be Online or On Premise
  • OneNote files are stored in SharePoint using the documents area

 

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.
STEP 3	If you have already enabled SharePoint integration skip this step. Otherwise you need to enable SharePoint Integration via Settings -> Document Management
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.

 

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.

 

 

Microsoft Social Engagement and Dynamics CRM Integration Update

With the latest release of Microsoft Social Engagement we can now connect Dynamics CRM up to it and create social activities inside of Dynamics CRM automatically.

I was going to blog on this great new feature but fellow blogger Jesper Osgaard has already compiled a fantastic detailed step by step guide to how to do this, so please refer to the link below for the in-depth details!

Social CRM at its best – Leads or Cases in Dynamics CRM from Social Posts in Microsoft Social Engagement

For more details and some great Microsoft Resources see links below:

• Set up the connection between Dynamics CRM and Social Engagement – link
• Create a new CRM record from a social post – link
• Set up rules to automatically create or update records in CRM – link

ClickDimensions – adding a preview of the email that was sent in the Email sent record

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:

https://mscrmapp.clickdimensions.com/editor/previewversion?accountKey=xxxxx&typename=cdi_emailsend&orgname=xxxxx&id=A7167B49-B950-E511-8105-FC15B428FA14&disabled=true

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:

1. I utilised the GetRecordID workflow function provided by ClickDimensions in the blog (http://blog.clickdimensions.com/2013/02/link-a-survey-response-to-a-case.html)
2. I created a new field on the Email Send record to hold the GUID of the record
3. I created a workflow on the Email Send record that on create uses the GetRecordId action and populates the returned value in the new field (This could be a plugin instead of a workflow)
4. Save and publish the workflow
5. In the Sent Email entity
   1. Create a new field to hold the URL of the preview
   2. Create a new iFrame that will display the preview
   3. Create a simple Web resource to take the value of the URL field and update the iFrame URL as below:
   4. function Emailsend()
      {
      var emailsendurl = Xrm.Page.getAttribute(“new_emailsendurl”).getValue();
      Xrm.Page.ui.controls.get(“IFRAME_emailsend”).setSrc(emailsendurl);
      }
6. What I did then was to use another workflow on the Sent Email to generate the URL into the Sent Email URL field, using the standard preview URL as above and populating the GUID from the related Email Send. This could equally of been done in a plugin on the create of an Sent email record.
7. When I publish all of the components I now have the preview of the email that was sent displayed in my Sent Email record.

Dynamics CRM 2016 Release Preview Information

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