Dynamics CRM Roadmap – Spring 2015 and Beyond

Get ready ... CRM 2015 just came out, but the spring release is just a few months away.  Microsoft is including a lot of new features in this release that you'll want to take advantage of including: new (easier) navigation, OneNote integration and Power BI dashboards.

Working with Dynamics CRM 2013 Plugin Profiler

Clients often ask us to customize their CRM implementation beyond the original out of the box capabilities. There are many options you can use as a developer to eXtend CRM (xRM). For the sake of this blog, we'll focus on plugins; and in particular how to circumvent an issue when working with Plugin Profiler.

The Salesforce and Microsoft Partnership – Part 2 – What it means to the companies and to the market

After the article we published yesterday, a number of people have asked what the Microsoft/Salesforce global partnership announcement might mean for Salesforce and Microsoft as companies (rather than as CRM products).  Financial details of the deal were undisclosed, so we can only speculate.  Here are a few quick thoughts for discussion:

The Salesforce and Microsoft Partnership: What It Means To You

On May 29, 2014, Satya Nadella (CEO of Microsoft) and Marc Benioff (CEO of Salesforce.com) announced a global strategic partnership between the two firms.

As one of the very few organizations certified on both platforms and providing in depth books and digital training on both platforms, C5 Insight is uniquely qualified to comment on this announcement and what it might mean for the customers of both products.  So what has the scuttlebutt been around our office and among our clients on the topic?

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.

How the Cloud May Have Prevented the Cyber-Security Storm in South Carolina

 

Earlier this week it was announced than an international hacker had successfully made off with over 3 million social security numbers and almost 400,000 credit and debit card numbers from the state of South Carolina.  State and local governments have collectively spent billions of dollars trying to secure their data systems.  In spite of this investment, a hacker was able to identify and exploit a weak spot in their armor.  As public sector budgets are continuing to shrink, there is pressure to add more software applications to automate tasks and lower costs; increasing pressure to cut costs on security for these applications; and increasing pressure to extend the life of less secure and aging legacy computer applications.  The result is that our government agencies are at increasing risk of successful cyber-terrorism through a greater number of applications, lower security standards, and aging applications that should be replaced.

How could South Carolina and other state and local governments cost-effectively protect vital citizen, business and government records?  The answer comes from an emerging private-sector technology: cloud computing.

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.

Game-Changing Dashboards Combining SharePoint and CRM

 

SharePoint has had excellent dashboard presentation capabilities for a long time now.  Dynamics CRM formally rolled out dashboard reporting with CRM 2011 (although using SharePoint and/or SSRS enabled dashboard reporting with previous versions of CRM).  Now that this functionality is getting embraced and adopted by many organizations, how can it best be leveraged to change the game by truly accelerating performance?  Simple.  Combine the best of Microsoft SharePoint, Dynamics CRM 2011 and TV or large monitors placed in public areas within your business.  Here’s how we’ve done it at C5 Insight.

Activity Feeds, CRM 2011 Online and Windows Phone

Activity Feeds are a great new social feature in CRM 2011 that was made available with the November 2011 update.  Many organizations using CRM 2011 have begun to gain tremendous benefit by enabling Activity Feeds and training their users on how to take advantage of them.  Not as many, however, have started to use the Activity Feeds app for their Windows Phones yet.  This app has some great features, but it also takes a few tricks to get it working with CRM 2011.  This post will focus on the specifics of using Activity Feeds on a Windows Phone – and fixing a known bug with CRM 2011 Online and Activity Feeds on your Windows Phone.

Get Your Head in the Clouds – with Cloud Computing

Cloud computing has been the subject of much conversation (and hype) for about a year now. Our 4 City Tour (www.successaccelerators.com/4city) focused on this, as did some recent research with one of our partners (white paper forthcoming) and our partner Salesforce.com has long led the charge in the cloud computing conversation.

This past week, cloud computing took center stage at Microsoft’s Worldwide Partner Conference (WPC) in Washington DC. From all indications, cloud computing will be the number one area of focus for Microsoft for the next 12 months (or more). So just what is cloud computing, why is it important to you and what is Microsoft doing that will impact it?  Let’s tackle each of those questions in sequence.

XRM and CRM 2.0

Traditional CRM needs to evolve to keep pace with customers who are accustomed to two-sided relationships, a la Web 2.0 social media/communities.