Top 3 Differences Between Microsoft Forms and Forms Pro

As of 7/1/2019, Microsoft announced the availability of Microsoft Forms Pro—the “pro-fessional” version—but what does that mean? What’s the difference between Microsoft Forms and Forms Pro? Let's discuss the differences screen by screen so you can make the most informed decision.

Web-to-Lead with Microsoft Flow, Forms and Dynamics 365

Today I’ll show you how to use Office 365 Forms, Microsoft Flow and Dynamics 365 to easily create a form that adds a new lead record to CRM. 

Marketing Automation: Questions To Consider When Selecting A Solution

I recently ran across a staggering statistic: less than 10% of businesses are using a marketing automation solution.

How can this be? What are businesses using to not only create and send email templates to their marketing lists, but also tie in nurture marketing, web forms, landing pages, web tracking, social sharing, campaign management, and more? It’s time to address what to look for during solution selection.

From CRM 2011 to CRM 2015: 9 New Form Features

Welcome to the third in a six-part series on the new features available to you if you are upgrading from CRM 2011 to CRM 2015, with a focus on changes made to CRM forms.

In this article, we will look at 9 new features available on the forms within Microsoft Dynamics CRM 2015.

Update the Default Associated View on a CRM 2011 Form

Our Project Managers use Microsoft CRM to manage and track all of our projects – including the project plans, financials, time tracking and expenses.  When combined with SharePoint, our Agile Project Management solution has become a great way to carefully track all the details of our projects and communicate with our clients.  During a recent update to this solution, our Project Managers asked us if we could use a different view for the Time Tracking entity than the associated view.

After doing a bit of research we found that this is possible to some extent, but it is not well documented.  So here are some options for changing the associated view on a specific Microsoft Dynamics CRM 2011 form.

Use JavaScript with Parent Entity Forms to Update and Retrieve Records

Dynamics CRM makes it easy to customize forms.  But businesses frequently require that a form needs to inherit some data from the parent record.  A hypothetical example of this is a part on a piece of equipment might inherit some information about the piece of equipment that it is a part of (in this particular case, both of these would be custom entities).  This article discusses some best practices for using JavaScript to inherit this data.

Adding a Twitter Feed to CRM Leads

When reviewing a lead, account or contact prior to a sales call, it is always helpful to have as much context about a company prior to making the call.  Putting a Twitter feed on the CRM record for a lead can put this information in a place where it is easy for a sales person to quickly see it.  By passing in the name of the company dynamically, the feed can show relevant information about the specific company.

Twitter makes it pretty easy to generate the “base” code for integrating with CRM (or any website) as a widget.  You can find their tools for generating widgets here.  Even if you use my code, below, as a starting point, you’ll likely find this link helpful as you start to fine-tune your code a bit.

An Analysis of Handling a Year Data Type in CRM 2011 - Date versus Text

Introduction

When dealing with the account entity you may decide to display the year founded as part of the company information. This information can come from various public sources of information. It feels natural to think of year as a date since it is part of a date. But of course it is really in fact a “date part”. It is part of what makes up a date but in and of itself is actually just a number. Handled alone it is best stored as a numeric value which makes it easier and faster for filtering and searching purposes. The problem is that if you try to store a date as a numeric value in CRM 2011 that value will be displayed with a comma on the form. If you can live with that fine, but if that bugs the heck out of you then you have to look at the pros and cons of other options.

Let me just preface this discussion with my option that when deciding between making it a date or a text field in order to fix formatting, text is the way to go. Maybe I’m preaching to the choir but I had this discussion on this topic recently. I’ll briefly go over some points on text versus the date data type.

Collapse and Expand: Working with Tabs in CRM 2011

CRM 2011 forms include “tabs” to help organize information.  If you are a user of previous versions of CRM you know that tabs used to be presented across the top of a form.  In CRM 2011 tabs are now presented vertically.  Read on for the advantages of this change.

Getting More Real Estate on Your CRM 2011 Screen

The ribbon menu in Dynamics CRM 2011 is a very popular new addition. This puts many function of the application within reach of all users and presents an interface similar to other Microsoft Office products – resulting in a shorter learning curve.  But it does have one drawback … the ribbon takes up quite a bit of real estate on the screen and users often would like to have that space in order to see more of their form or list. Read on for some options for expanding the available real estate on the Dynamics CRM web forms.