Every business can benefit from implementing a CRM system. But why should you invest in one? We’ve identified seven reasons why you need CRM for your business. Read on to learn how a CRM can help take your business to the next level!

1. A Customer Left for No Reason

Breaking up is hard to do. Sometimes it seems like a customer left you for no reason. Perhaps they were even one of your top customers and you thought they would remain loyal to the end. After the initial sting fades, you need to figure out why they left. That’s where a CRM system can help. With CRM, you can analyze historical trends, monitor past communications, and even analyze sales trends. With this data, you can make improvements to your client relations and flag certain events during the customer relationship cycle, all of which are things that can help you prevent losing another customer in the future.

2. You Lost Data

Without a centralized system, it becomes very easy to lose data. Maybe an employee leaves, taking all of the knowledge and information stored in their brains with them. Maybe you can’t remember what you named a certain file. Perhaps your lost data even led to a lost customer. Data is the fuel that makes your business run, and having it centralized in an easily accessible format means a more efficient business.

3. You had Incomplete Data

Perhaps even more frustrating than losing data is having incomplete data. Imagine how amazing it would be having all of the information you need about a customer accessible at any moment. A CRM system provides extensive data storing capabilities. It also enables you to have emails centralized, which provides a complete view of your business. That way, if a key employee leaves or responsibilities shift, you have the ability to dig into past communications to ensure that your customer experience doesn’t suffer.

4. Your Sales Process Stinks

To be blunt, your sales processes may be inefficient and your sales people might just be winging it. While that may have gotten you by in the past, why not invest in a CRM system to take your organization to the next level? With CRM, your sales process will be streamlined. No more stinky sales process! Give your sales people access to all the client data they could ever need! Never forget the favorite football team of the person on the phone ever again!

5. Client Communications Aren’t Strong

How long does it take you to respond to a client question? How are your calls and emails prioritized? Better yet, do you know how your clients prefer to be communicated with? Should you pick up the phone or send a quick email? So many questions, and CRM has the answers! If you master your client communications, you create raving fans and avoid a customer leaving for no reason.

6. You Lost Revenue

Whether this comes from losing a customer, losing an upsell, or just losing a sale, this one really hurts you and your business. Nothing hurts quite like losing revenue when it’s your livelihood at stake. A CRM system can help ensure that you don’t miss out on revenue from any angle. Is there any reason better than maximizing revenue to inspire you to invest in CRM?

7. Your Competition Beat You

One of the most frustrating things that can happen to a company is when they are beat out by a competitor. What do they offer that you don’t? Did they do a better job winning over the customer during the sales process? A CRM system empowers your business to leverage the wealth of data in a smarter way to crush the competition. Think of CRM as a hardworking member of your team; ready to crush the competition!

Of course there are more than just seven reasons to implement a CRM system, but hopefully the ones we talked about today will get you inspired to look into what a CRM can do for you and your business. Ready to talk CRM? Reach out to our CRM experts today!

Happy CRM’ing!

Those who have worked with Dynamics CRM for a longer period of time will remember how the user experience delivered by the platform has evolved over time: from an Office style, data entry focused, Internet Explorer popup window application into the clean and modern Dynamics CRM 2015 application that works on any device and aims to present the maximum amount of relevant information to the user with the minimum amount of clicks. There was a time when CRM didn’t exactly seem like something that was designed with the needs of the end user in mind, but this direction changed quite drastically from the CRM Online December 2012 Service Update onwards, as Microsoft started to redesign the experiences they wanted to deliver for the users of their business applications in the new era where mobile, social and cloud were quickly becoming the most dominating forces in the world of enterprise software. Not forgetting the consumerization of IT, which had shown people that not every app used in a work context needed to look like a 90’s ERP system.

I have covered this transition in quite a bit of detail in my four part article series titled “Dynamics CRM Platform Evolution”, which I’d recommend you to read through for understanding the practical impact of moving from the “first era” of MS CRM v1-v5 onto the current era of largely CRM Online focused rapid product iterations. One of the points I raised in the article was that not all the CRM software providers in the market had chosen to follow a similar path of introducing a big bang revolution to their application. Unlike Microsoft, Salesforce.com had instead opted for an evolutionary path that had seen their application UI remain almost unchanged for the main components and layout, as depicted in the image below.

While being wildly successful in becoming the “next CRM application” after the 90’s generation of Siebel style, on-premises enterprise CRM suites had began to slide out of the limelight, Salesforce also began to receive a growing amount of criticism over the legacy that its user interface had accumulated over its history. The question of “Why doesn’t Salesforce upgrade the UI/UX of its core CRM web app?” did seem more and more valid, especially when competing products like Dynamics CRM were transforming the user experience that one could expect from a customer relationship management application. Well, finally in late August 2015, Salesforce announced that their next era of CRM UX would arrive in the form of the new Salesforce Lightning UI.

Welcome to the Future of CRM, Salesforce!

First of all, congratulations to the product team behind the Lightning UI on the launch! Pulling off a major redesign like this is bound to be a massive task and I’m sure in many ways the work has only begun now, but it’s still definitely an achievement worth celebrating. As many of you may have noticed, in my day job I work exclusively with Microsoft Dynamics CRM, so whatever I write here about a competing CRM solution is not going to be 100% objective. For that I apologize, but the point of my post isn’t to bash Salesforce but rather to analyze some of the trends in CRM software in general and also reflect back a bit on what has taken place in the world of Dynamics CRM during the past few years.

But first, I need to just get something out of the way. Damn how these two apps look alike! Here’s the brand new opportunity form on Salesforce Lightning UI, a.k.a. Opportunity Workspace:

…And here’s how the opportunity form on Dynamics CRM has looked like pretty much since the 2013 version:

Notice any resemblance? Let me help you out a bit by listing the first five things that come to my mind from the Salesforce screenshot:

• Sales Path for visualizing the sales process stages and related fields, known as Business Process Flow in Dynamics CRM
• Tabs for switching between related activities and social posts, known as the Social Pane in Dynamics CRM
• Composer for adding new tasks, phone calls and events to the opportunity, which simply is an inline activity quick create form in Dynamics CRM
• Related information on Contact Roles, essentially the Stakeholders editable grid in Dynamics CRM
• Persistent four header fields at the top of the form, ditto for Dynamics CRM

Yeah, of course these both are applications for managing your typical sales opportunity information with activities and contacts, so its understandable that the concepts used in the default screens would be unlikely to radically differ from one another. Still, contrasting Lighting UI with the traditional Salesforce UI and looking at how close to the now familiar Dynamics CRM form layout, UI controls and especially the Business Process Flow feature the Salesforce product team has ended up with their design is, well… Quite remarkable in my opinion. Not a bad choice by any means, and also serves in validating the direction that Microsoft’s team took when overhauling their application’s UI a couple of years ago.

Aside from the similarity to Dynamics CRM, there are plenty of nice looking designs and features included in the Salesforce Winter ’16 release notes. Some of them are about filling the functional gaps to Dynamics CRM (list view charts known from CRM 2011 make an appearance here), others are borrowing concepts from the more recent CRM apps out there (Kanban style opportunity board used in Pipedrive, Pipeliner et al., as well as SalesFlow for Dynamics CRM), but many of the release items seem to be focused on fine tuning the application usability and removing unnecessary friction from common tasks that sales people need to perform on a daily basis. Rather than just slapping on a new field layout and updating the icons, it does seem like the user experience of Salesforce will change quite dramatically with Lightning. Of course the true UX can only be evaluated once a live version of the application is available for testing how it truly feels like to use the app, but at this point it looks like a major step forward.

The Price of Revolution

Introducing a new application user experience to new users who don’t have prior experience of the product will always be far easier than forcing it upon the existing user base. While few people would say that they don’t want a nice & easy UI, the reality is that resistance to change is always a factor when dealing with human beings. When it comes to business software especially, disruptive changes are at the very bottom of the want list for the majority of people who are responsible for ensuring that information systems deployed for managing the core business processes of their organization keep on churning out the expected results. What’s going to happen when a CRM system jumps from evolutionary releases to revolutionary changes instead?

The one important thing to keep in mind is that changes like this never take place overnight. Migrating over all the functionality that vast application platforms like Salesforce of Dynamics CRM have accumulated over time isn’t something you can get away with a single big bang release. With Microsoft there was a preview version of the new UX introduced with the Online only Polaris release, launched almost one year ahead of the actual major release of CRM 2013 (v6.0). Initially only five core entities were updated to the new “refreshed” forms, and even today the latest v7.1 still contains lots and lots of entities and menus that follow the old Ribbon based user experience. So, three years later the work isn’t even done for the Dynamics CRM product team in renewing the platform, which means that the end users and system customizers need to cope with a somewhat mixed application environment. The platform legacy becomes most apparent with the new mobile client applications that don’t support the old product architecture, resulting in features like marketing lists or connections not being available on the modern client versions. Sure, life is much, much better with the new UX, but it has also introduced some new complexities into the product.

In the case of Salesforce, the story sounds to be somewhat similar, as not every area of their platform will be Lightning enabled right from the start. The Service Cloud will not yet be updated, nor will features like forecasting, orders or person accounts. In moments like these it’s always interesting to see how companies prioritize their development efforts, as they are likely to indicate either the observed level of usage for certain features of their products, or alternatively possible future plans to scrap something old and rebuild it from the ground up. If you’re working as a consultant that advises customers on what features they should take into use or invest in developing for their CRM systems, the messages conveyed by the application vendors via the frequency of updates to certain functional areas of their products are signals you’ll most certainly take into consideration when deciding on what strategy to recommend to your client base.

With 150k customers and millions of users, it’s going to take a while before Salesforce will have safely moved each and every one into the Lightning world. In fact, based on the statement by Sara Varni, senior VP of marketing for SFDC Sales Cloud,  this milestone may never even be reached, since Salesforce will support the classic experience “indefinitely”. In the oldskool settings of on-premises servers, the way this could have been handled would be for the customers just sticking to an older version of the software and not deploying any updates. When you’re the grandaddy of SaaS platforms, things are obviously a bit different and supporting older versions will require more than just accepting support tickets for ancients releases of your software. With CRM Online, Microsoft has previously been pretty strict on getting every customer to move on to the latest version via the CDU (Customer Driven Update) program, but lately they’ve also changed their update policy to allow skipping the bi-annual releases and updating only once per year. As SaaS products become a more mature market, I bet we’ll be seeing a growing number of options for customers to choose which versions to use, which features to activate and when to schedule these changes to take place.

Universal Experiences

The way Salesforce chose to build their next generation UI is different from the path that Microsoft took. While Dynamics CRM 2013 introduced both the new web client experience as well as the “MoCA” tablet client application as separate experiences (followed by the refreshed mobile app in CRM 2015 Update 1), Salesforce decided to first build the Lightning framework for their Salesforce1 mobile app and then scale it out to the PC screens. As a result, the screenshots that we see in the Winter ’16 release notes look very much like a mobile app placed onto the screen of an iMac. While you could in theory also use the Dynamics CRM for Tablets app on a Windows 8/10 laptop, the users will certainly almost always end up choosing the Dynamics CRM web client designed for interaction with mouse & keyboard rather than touch optimized “Metro” experience.

I think this will be one of the most interesting design choices to keep an eye on when it comes to user reactions to the new Salesforce Lightning UI. Regardless of all the recent Universal Apps hype that Microsoft has been building up alongside the Windows 10 release, I’m personally not quite convinced yet that you can deliver a great UX with a single app that needs to scale from 5″ touch screens to 27″ desktop monitors. As a result, I’m also not a big proponent of the “configure once, deploy everywhere” slogan used in reference to the Dynamics CRM mobile apps, since I’d rather see CRM applications truly optimized for the device and use case in question. However, if Salesforce can pull this off with Lightning, then perhaps Microsoft has been right all along with their OS strategy and the application teams should now move faster towards unifying the client side of things.

Applification of Platforms?

When it comes to products like Dynamics CRM or Salesforce, one of the key reasons why they are being so widely deployed across enterprises today is the ability to customize them to align with the business processes specific to the customer organization. They are not only replacing legacy CRM suites but also capturing an ever larger share of the market that used to belong to custom developed business software, since using a customizable application platform delivered from the public cloud can really drive down the TCO quite significantly. But if the CRM applications are now reaching towards an even more polished user experience in performing common tasks with sales, marketing and service records, what will happen to supporting the business specific scenarios that are more unique than what pre-built application features can cover?

When Microsoft launched the Dynamics CRM 2013 version with the refreshed UI, they didn’t only add more features into the already crammed product, but rather they took away some configuration options that had been previously expected from the platform. As the saying goes about the goal of design work, “perfection is achieved not when there is nothing more to add, but when there is nothing left to take away.” That may very well be true when designing a product to serve a specific set of tasks, but it may not resonate so well with a toolkit used for crafting these end products. Limiting the options shown to an end users is different from limiting the options available to the designer of the final solution that the user will be exposed to.

How do such limitations show up in everyday life with the latest Dynamics CRM version? Today we have inline quick create forms for effortlessly adding activities for records, but we can no longer choose if we want to record a future phone call activity instead of a completed one. We can use an editable grid for adding line items into opportunities, quotes and orders, but we can’t configure these grids to contain those fields that the business logic would require to be recorded onto these line items. The price of added convenience for some is therefore resulting in the reduced usefulness to others. Looking at the Salesforce Winter ’16 release, it’s apparent that also here the polished UX will be come at the cost of reduced options. For example, there will be a brand new, great looking Home screen offered for sales users, but the components shown in it cannot be customized at this time.

Is there an inherent conflict between the needs of the application end user and the platform customizer? I don’t believe this is necessarily the case, but it is obvious that there are trade offs in building something that works great and building something configurable when it comes to the allocation of development resources for these software products. As the release cycles get faster and faster, the pressure for getting a new feature out there can mean there’s no time to perfect the first version into something that will meet the needs of all user groups and align with the rest of the platform functionality. The real question is, will the features be made more customizable in the subsequent releases, or will the requirements be pushed down in the backlog when the demand for more new features arises?

When discussing the user experience of applications that are not commodity services like email but highly business specific process management tools (at least when properly deployed), it’s very important to understand what the final UX really consists of. It’s not only about having the slickest UI controls for working with the data, the flashiest graphics for visualizing the sales pipeline or most creative layouts for presenting different data sources on one screen. At the end of the day, the users need to feel like they can easily accomplish the tasks they are responsible for, with the help of the application – not despite of it. Understanding what exactly those tasks are and what pieces of information are relevant to the process of their completion is something that requires careful analysis conducted at the organization deploying a new CRM solution. Failure to do this will quickly wash away any value that the software features could have potentially delivered to the organization.

As today’s CRM platforms become more and more sophisticated with the functionality and data presentation options available, the design work of those who configure the customer specific solutions also needs to be aligned with the increasing expectation levels for application usability. It’s still not rocket science, but it does require a greater attention to detail than the earlier, more primitive business applications where the UI was essentially a reflection of the data model. I’ve illustrated some of these design aspects in my 10 Tips for Designing A Great User Experience presentation, which hopefully can give an idea of how the system customizers can do their part in building CRM systems that the business users will find great value in – a Useful Experience, if you will.

The post The Irresistible Force of Great User Experience in CRM Applications appeared first on Surviving CRM.

A client emailed us that they couldn’t connect to their CRM 2011 on premise environment. When we tried to login it appeared that ADFS authentication wasn’t working. We logged into their front end CRM server where ADFS lives and expected to see a certificate error or something similar. It all looked good.

We then opened up the deployment manager and saw one of the weirdest CRM error messages ever. I mean in like 13 years of working with the product I have never seen it or heard of it. Searching online didn’t give us any immediate tips.

So here is what we observed and the steps we followed:

1. Both the front end and back end CRM servers were asking for a reboot to finish installing some Windows Server updates. So we figured that must be it and obliged. However, after rebooting we still couldn’t connect to CRM.

2. We then checked the Windows Update history on both machines and observed that the front end machine was on Update Rollup 17 and the back end was on UR 18. We applied update rollup 18 to the front end machine and rebooted it.

3. The error message when away and users were able to login to CRM once again.

In summary, I get the warning that one or more servers don’t have the latest update. But one or more server roles are missing and the front end server can’t find the back end server? You certainly don’t want add a new server to the deployment.

Errors

• One or more server roles are missing from this deployment.
• One or more servers in this deployment do not have the latest update.

CRM 2011 Deployment Manager One or more server roles are missing from this deployment

The post Missing CRM Server Roles – Weirdest Error Message Ever appeared first on Innovating on CRM.

It’s Friday and this week the video subject is on something closely related to and built on top of the Dynamics CRM. USD, which stands for United States Dollars Unified Service Desk.

In the first video in our USD series, we walk you installing Dynamics CRM’s USD desktop client as well using package deployer to import USD Sample data into a CRM Online instance.

Give us your feedback, all of it: good, bad, and ugly, I’m sure we can take it. Suggest new topics either in comments or by sending your ideas to jar@crmtipoftheday.com.

I will be doing a webinar next Thursday with my friends from ClickDimensions. I hope you can join us!

Leveraging the right approach to sales is like having a customized blueprint for success. But in today’s competitive marketplace, technology has become an essential tool for top producing sales professionals looking to build the right approach. This non-technical session was designed for Sales Leaders and Sales Professionals to help them to better understand how Dynamics CRM along with ClickDimensions Marketing Automation platform can have a significant impact on sales. This 1 hour session is based on the Full Contact Selling Methodology which helps sales teams build powerful business development strategies through the integration of: 1) proven business processes; 2) people skills and 3) the best practice use of Microsoft Dynamics CRM and related technologies.

Click here to register

In this e-book we’ll identify the most common risks, the departments they affect, and their potential financial impact on your company. We’ll also address some solutions for preparation, prediction, and management that can have a huge impact on your business.

Your supply chain shapes investment plans, production processes, manufacturing decisions, and more for the entire company. Using top-tier management tools ensures accuracy and provides you with a comprehensive view of your supply chain risks. Learn more about real supply chain impacts and innovative risk solutions in the e-book below.

About Halo Business Intelligence

Halo Business Intelligence, established in 2008, is a San Diego-based, Microsoft Gold Certified company offering a full suite of business intelligence solutions. The company has more than 300 customers in construction, health care, hospitality, manufacturing, professional services and retail worldwide. Developed to leverage common business software systems, open technologies, and mobile devices like smartphones and tablets, Halo BI frees non-technical users to do their own data mining, analysis and reporting without relying on IT staff or proprietary applications. Additional offices are in Australia, Austria, China and New Zealand. For more information, contact Halo BI at (888) 300-0219, email: info@halobi.com, or on the web: www.halobi.com

The post Have you considered the supply chain risks associated with your business? appeared first on goERPcloud.

Have you ever run into an instance where you needed to see when the last time an activity was completed for a record in Microsoft Dynamics CRM? What used to be a custom utility is now officially a PowerPack add-on – PowerLastActivity! PowerLastActivity still holds the same functionality as the utility, but now users can track all of their custom activities as well. In today’s blog, we will show you all that PowerLastActivity has to offer for your CRM system!

To get started, you will need to download the free 30-day trail of PowerLastActivity from our website if you don’t already have it!

So, what happens when you import this add-on? You will notice that PowerLastActivity is supported for these out-of-the-box entities:

• Accounts
• Contacts
• Leads
• Cases
• Opportunities

Additionally, there will be two custom fields that will be added to those entities:

1. Last Activity
2. Last Activity Date

The Last Activity field will populate the activity name and the Last Activity Date will populate the last activity that has been marked as Complete.

In the screen shot below, you can see an example of where a custom activity (Sales Transaction) was created and we can see that the activity record is still open:

If the activity is still in an open status, the last activity fields will not be populated. However, once it has been completed, the Last Activity fields will populate as shown below:

The custom activity (Sales Transaction) has been set to Complete. Now, after refreshing the form, the last activity information will be on the bottom of the form as shown in the image below:

The Last Activity field is populated with the schema name of the custom activity that was created, which is indicated in the yellow highlighted text. Additionally, the text in the red box is the name of the activity that was created for the record. The Last Activity Date is populated with the date the last activity record was set to complete.

Lastly, reporting can be built around these fields. A view or chart can be created to display activity records that are older than a certain amount of months, or display records that are in an open status for a specified amount of time.

PowerLastActivity is just one of the many PowerPack add-ons we offer at PowerObjects. Check out all the great add-ons for Dynamics CRM, and remember, all of our add-ons are available for a free 30-day trial. Download yours today!

Thanks for stopping by our blog today! And as always, happy CRM’ing!

With Microsoft Dynamics CRM necessity can definitely be the mother of invention. And using Microsoft Dynamics CRM Business Rules can help with the invention part . . .

We have a lot of happy clients. One of those clients sells a product suited to physicians in a niche market. It makes sense for them to categorize a physician which they have done business with as a Contact and those they haven’t yet done business with as a Lead. CRM 101 -- right?

Here comes the necessity

Our client often needs to gather information regarding forecasted surgical cases that could be captured at the Lead or at the Contact level. Much like the out of the box behavior for CRM that allows you to specify either an Account or a Contact as a Customer, our client needs to be able to select either a Lead or a Contact as they record their forecasted information. Pretty sure CRM doesn’t have a special system field that will let you do that!!

We’ve got to get both those lookups on the form and figure out how to guide the User into filling one in -- and only one. And, do it in a manner which is both simple and cost effective for our client.

Is this the mother part or the invention part?

You have to understand that my boss advocates above all else we take "care of our customers" and "keep things simple whenever possible". There are no doubt ways to use jscript to make sure that only one and not both -- Lead or Contact -- gets populated on the Case Forecast form. I’m not a developer so I started thinking about whether I could use jscripts simpler cousin -- Business Rules -- in some way.

Along those lines I had an epiphany! When you use required fields to enforce your data entry, CRM alerts you when you are missing data via error messages. Business Rules can have messages too. Error messages, but messages nonetheless.

I thought I’d at least futz around with it a bit to see if I could get the job done without getting our Developer involved. Yes, jscript is more elegant but there is no shame in using the tools you have out of the box -- right?

Getting their attention

So it didn’t take long to figure out that one way I could do this would be to throw an error message at the User right away. In the scenario for this particular client, we start out on load of the form with both the Lead and the Contact blank – why not yell at the User right there and let them know they better not even THINK about saving the form without providing a value for one or the other. ☺

Business Rules to the rescue:

It looks like this to the User (note that the message does temporarily cover up the Contact label and lookup control):

The User can’t save the record until they populate one of the fields. Once they do, we figured it would great to hide the other field so they can’t put data in both. We added a little bit more logic to the rule:

Is there a moral to this story?

You bet. CRM is like a Swiss Army Knife. Lots of tools in the box and even better, there is no rule that says you can’t try to use one of the tools in a different way than it was originally intended. You can do it too. Use Microsoft Dynamics CRM Business Rules to do things simpler, faster and with less expense than using jscript. Saved our client time and money. Oh, the client liked that!

By John Clifton, Microsoft Dynamics CRM Consultant with xRM³, a Microsoft partner specializing in Dynamics CRM consulting, implementation, integration and Microsoft Dynamics CRM administrative services. Based in San Diego County Southern California.

The post Microsoft Dynamics CRM Business Rules – Who Needs Required Fields? appeared first on CRM Software Blog.

How do you manage projects?

Many companies have outgrown the basic systems used in the past to manage the delivery of professional services.  It is time to look at Project Management software.

Should you choose a stand-alone system like Microsoft Project or one that is integrated with your Dynamics CRM software? The answer depends in part on the size and type of projects you manage.

Stand-alone Project Management software helps streamline projects with its tight control and focus on the tasks involved. It makes all the data your team needs easily available, significantly reducing errors in processing and scheduling. Because the stand-alone systems are so competent, they increase team confidence and efficiency.

On the other hand, the complexity of many of the stand-alone systems and the advanced skills needed to use them, make them better-suited for very large companies working with highly complex projects such as highway construction or large-scale heavy-equipment manufacturing. And because the systems are stand-alone, data collected from CRM software has to be in-put again. Double entry always increases the chance of error.

For most businesses, an integrated solution is more logical. Integrating your Project Management solution with your CRM software ensures seamless handling of customers and their projects from beginning to end. All the information is in one place and more people are able to access the project data thus cutting down on time spent searching and asking others for information.

For a fuller discussion of the strengths of stand-alone compared to integrated PM software, download the White Paper:  CRM Integrated Project Management Software.

By Ryan Plourde, www.AbleBridge.com

Twitter: @AbleBridge

The post Project Management Systems Compared – Stand-alone or Integrated appeared first on CRM Software Blog.

The xRMVirtual session on Tuesday September 1 had to be cancelled last minute because of technical and audio difficulties.  Here is some insight from the Director of CRMUG Tony Stein on how to get the most out of CRMUG in Reno-Tahoe October 13-16, 2015. You can find Tony’s blog here https://www.crmug.com/crmug/blogs/tony-stein.

CRMUG Goals for the 2015 Summit are to demonstrate the VALUE that everyone brings to the community, to provide top notch CONTENT, education and programming, to help our COMMUNITY grow, raise AWARENESS of the growing community, provide a strong NETWORKING environment and of course, to have FUN. CRMUG’s summit attendance growth has risen since 2008. From 113 to 750 and we are still growing.

There are many different job roles that attend CRMUG summit. To name a few who attend there are CRM support, IT, Business Analysts, CEO, Marketing and more. We are the largest Microsoft Dynamics CRM User training conference, By registering before Sept. 15 you can save money, go to www.crmugsummit.com/register there are half and full day course available. Classes are filling up fast.

Also enjoy listening to Keynote speaker George Kourounis deliver an inspiring address to kick off the summit on Wednesday morning. If you choose to stay longer in beautiful Lake Tahoe, there are exclusive lodging deals available for CRMUG summit attendees!! Hope to see you there!!

The xRMVirtual session on Tuesday September 1 had to be cancelled last minute because of technical and audio difficulties. So here is some information from  Chief Executive Officer of eXtreme, LLC, Christy Spokely and Co-founder and Chief Operating Officer of eXtreme LLC, John Verdon, on how to get the most out of eXtreme CRM 2015 in San Diego from Nov 17-19th. You can check out more by clicking here https://www.extremecrm.com/eXtremeCRM2015SanDiego/tabid/88/Default.aspx

When you come to eXtremeCRM 2015 San Diego you will gain new business connections and new insight on the upcoming release. You will spend a week connecting with peers, Microsoft leaders, industry experts and gain new business connections along with a lot of information.  You will find value whether you are sales, marketing, consulting, technical sales or development. Our training is designed to fit every role.

eXtremeCRM is one-of-a-kind opportunity for participants to immerse themselves in everything CRM.  The conference is your chance to increase your knowledge, refine your thinking, and connect with your colleagues and with others from Microsoft. Whether you are preparing for the upcoming release or have questions, being part of eXtremeCRm will help with that. So come be a part of our conference in sunny San Diego at eXtremeCRM!

The xRMVirtual session on Tuesday September 1 had to be cancelled last minute because of technical and audio difficulties.  Here we offer you some insights from CRM MVP Ramon Tebar Bueno on how to get the most out of Convergence in Barcelona this November.  Romon’s blog can be found here:  http://www.ramontebar.com

There are three primary areas to focus on at Convergence; Community, Sessions and of course, the wonderful location in Barcelona.

To get the most out of your time with the CRM community you can focus on networking, the customer experience center and the customer excellence awards.  It is here that you meet and network with other like-minded professionals.  You never know when you might need someone with an obscure specialty to help with a project down the road.  The customer experience center is sometimes called the expo hall.  This is where you can interact with vendors and Microsoft to learn more about options that are available to help you meet your customer needs.  The customer excellence awards are a great opportunity to be inspired by teams that are successful in the Dynamics arena.

The sessions are provided by both customer and Microsoft.  You can learn about individual solutions from a successful implementation or directly from the team at Microsoft about exciting new features.

And now to Barcelona.  Take an extra day or two to explore the area.  This part of Spain is beautiful and worth exploring.

click here to register

We can change display name of the entity fields easily by editing field display name property. But we can’t change fields label used in address composite controls. In this post we are demonstrating how to relabel composite control fields.

Requirement:Relabel city field in address composite control in account entity.

Note: You can’t change field logical name once it is created.

Solution: We can implement this requirement using Java Script. We have option to access composite control using Java Script, we can refer them using following way:

<composite control name>_compositionLinkControl_<constituent attribute name>

So if we want to refer any field which is used in the composite control, We can do like following, we are accessing city field here:

<composite control name>_compositionLinkControl_address1_city

To relabel the normal fields, we can use setLabel method. so we can use the same method to relabel city as well. let’s say we want to rename city field to “Distric”. We can use following code for that:

Xrm.Page.getControl(‘address1_composite_compositionLinkControl_address1_city’).setLabel(“District”);

Similarly we can refer other fields as well.You can refer composite control name from the respective entity form or you can also refer it here.

Using Code: To use this code we need to create Java Script web resource, where we can have below method. We need to call this method on Onload of the account entity form.

function RelableAddressControl()

{

Xrm.Page.getControl(‘address1_composite_compositionLinkControl_address1_city’).setLabel(“District”);

}

Now after publishing our changes, when we will open any account record we will see changes like below:

HIMBAP | Need any help in Microsoft CRM 2015 Development Contact US !!

Once again some of our CRM Software Blog members are in the spotlight

Microsoft has recognized 9 Microsoft Dynamics ERP and Dynamics CRM partners for their sales performance in Microsoft Fiscal Year 2015. The partners were considered in light of several criteria, including business development, top revenue attainment and customer endorsements.

The CRM Software Blog members who have been honored with these awards are:

Tribridge: Microsoft Dynamics CRM US Public Sector FY15 Partner of the Year

Hitachi Solutions: Microsoft Dynamics CRM US Financial Services FY15 Partner of the Year

We offer our congratulations to these and all of our valued members. Well done!

By CRM Software Blog Editors, www.crmsoftwareblog.com

The post Microsoft Awards CRM Software Blog Members appeared first on CRM Software Blog.

Most of the time Joel is very helpful but sometimes he’s just plain grumpy:

If you go to the lookup dialog, it honors the sort order in the lookup view:

Is there any way to make the quick lookup preview honor the sort order?

This is not possible today, quick preview list sorts it based on the “primary attribute” of the entity. But if this is something which blocks your scenario, I will be happy to add it into the backlog for lookup enhancements. Can you please open a connect bug for this and send me the ID.

Relentless man that he is, Joel indeed used Microsoft Connect to press on with the issue (and under the similar circumstances you, our readers, should do the same!):

Here is an existing Connect item with 15 votes. I would say this is high priority. The only way to make it work is currently to append numbers to the lookup list to make it sort correctly in preview.

Azure Web Apps is a service provided by Microsoft Azure to host .Net, Java, PHP, Node.js, Python applications. We can host Web, Mobile, API as well as Logic Apps using Azure Web App Service. In this article we will look at how we can deploy an ASP.NET application on the App Service.

Pre-requisites

1. Active Azure Subscription
2. Visual Studio 2013

A. Deploy ASP.Net Web applications by signing into Visual Studio

1. Open Visual Studio and create a new ASP.Net Application.

• Check Host in the Cloud in the Select Template Menu and click on OK.

• Sign in to your Azure Account. Select the Service Plan for your application.

• After the application has been successfully created you can publish it to Azure using the Publish button.

B. Deploy an already created ASP.Net Web Application on Azure

1. Login to your Azure account and then select Web Apps->New->Quick Create.
2. Enter a valid url for your web app and then click on Create Web App.

• Next click on your web app and then click on download publish profile.

• After downloading the Publishing profile go back to Visual Studio to import this profile and start the deployment.
• Inside Visual Studio right click on the project and click on publish.
• Click on import and then select the publishing profile file that we had downloaded and then click on Ok.
• Click on Publish and the deployment will begin.
• If the deployment is successful you can browse you website from the app service using the url you had used to create the web app on Azure.

The post Deploying ASP.NET Web Applications to Azure Web Apps appeared first on CloudFronts - Dynamics CRM | AX | BI.