It’s been one year since I was diagnosed with rheumatoid arthritis. Time flies when you’re having fun?

In that year I have cried a lot. Had a few pity parties. Gotten angry. Learned tons about auto-immune disorders (or are they conditions?). Took more steroids in that one year than the rest of my whole life combined.  I’ve tried a few meds and started on one that is comparable to low-dose chemo. I’m pretty sure every single day had pain, I don’t remember a pain free day. There were varying degrees of pain. Some days annoying. Some days debilitating.

In that year I have also…

· Spoken at several conferences all over the world

· Had a bear try to get into my house

· Watched a herd of elephants play in a big pile of mud for hours

· Appeared on a career panel for impressionable young minds

· And cursed

· Twice

· Spent the day with my son in NYC

· Celebrated 14 years married to Mr. Right

· Got in a car accident

· Watched my brother-in-law get married

· Watched my son dance with his grandmother(s)

· Found a gas station gravy tap

· Hosted my girlfriends on a wonderful weekend in Breckenridge

· Discovered I am the fox whisperer

· Spent the first Christmas in 20 years without my daughter (I guess it was time for us both to grow up?)

· Had to explain to non-native English speakers way too many inappropriate things in Cards Against Humanity

· Found grey hair in my eyebrows (seriously, eyebrows?!)

· Captured someone’s marriage proposal with pictures

· Spoke to members of Congress about things that are important to me (and you)

· Purchased an acre of land for our next home

· Did not see Star Wars

· Caught a ball at an NBA game

· Celebrated New Year’s on a boat in the Caribbean under the stars

· Said goodbye to an old friend, INETA

· Smuggled gummi bears into the US Capitol Senate reception room

· Went to Spain

· And Turkey

· And Poland

· And Slovakia

· And Hungary

· And Hawaii

· And Africa

· And Holland

· And Belgium

· And UK

· Too many trips to Seattle to count

So, life goes on. And will continue to do so.

Only in our dreams are we free. The rest of the time we need wages.

Terry Pratchett

Dynamics recruiter Nigel Frank International annual Microsoft Dynamics salary survey is available and is an interesting read, you can Download Salary Survey Report

The Dynamics survey is made from 18704 professionals in 131 countries and doesn’t just focus on salary but other areas

• geography
• wages
• working hours
• gender
• certifications
• bench time
• reason for changing jobs
• bonuses and benefits

Why you should care about average wages?

Average salary surveys are a broad guide,roles and responsibilities can’t always be grouped.  The regions in salary surveys can be vast, in the UK it groups the Midlands and East Anglia when these areas are over 100 miles apart (it’s big in the UK overseas readers).  Salary surveys have peoplewhohavejust started ina role and someone whohasbeeninthat role formanyyears.

Working isn’t allabout money, well until you find someone else in the company is getting paid more for doing the same job!

There is value to salary surveys, it gives you an opportunity to compare your current wage with the average, it gives you an estimate of what you couldearn for your current role or a different role.

Its perceived wisdom you will get bigger pay rise if you move companies because companies give you a percentage pay rise of around 3 to 5 percent.  When you move companies you might get a double-digit pay rise when the company pays you for the experience.

With the increased effectiveness of recruitment consultants thanks to LinkedIn, perhaps Microsoft Dynamic partners should pay more attention to the average wages because its likely Microsoft Dynamics professionals will receive job offers via LinkedIn.  If companies aren’t paying the average wage then these employees could be tempted away.

I’m often curious of the cost of replacing an employee, do companies take into account

• business knowledge
• project knowledge
• relationships
• internal process and procedure knowledge

hiring a new person brings

• Recruitment costs (time)
• Recruitment agencies (if you can’t use your network)
• risk of hiring unsuitable person (skills, personality/culture clash)

There are lots of potential pluses if you hire the right person, they bring in fresh ideas, different perspectives, energy and enthusiasm.

It’s easy for Dynamics professionals to leave, this highlights how important managing your Dynamics professionals is and ensuring they are content.  Dynamics CRM is a people business, in most instances the company is selling the skills, knowledge and experience of their CRM professional rather than a product.

Average Salary is a tool

Knowing the average wage is a useful bargaining tool to take into your review (as long as its more than your current wage).  It gives an anchor to the discussion and offers an impartial view of an average wage in the industry

if you arethinking moving jobs, it be used toseeifthe role is paying thegoing rate andnotjustmorethan your current wage.

Interesting facts in the survey

  

42% are certified

35.7% experience a pay rise post certification

It shows the benefit of passing Dynamics certifications with a 3rd receiving a pay rise, surely it’s worth a couple of months revising for a certification to get a pay rise and increase you knowledge of Dynamics CRM.

34% plan to leave their current job within 12 months (if you listen carefully you can hear the recruitment consultants cheering)

28% sat on the bench for more than 1.5 days a week in 2015.

34.3% said the reason to move job was lack of Leadership & vision

Sales Salary Figures UK

Who do you work for?

It is not the employer who pays the wages. Employers only handle the money. It is the customer who pays the wages.

Henry Ford

The question of who you work for? is different to who pays your wages.  People stopped working for one company for their entire career.  Microsoft Dynamics CRM professionals are likely to move many times in their career, so the person you work for is yourself.

You should make sure you are managing your own career

• Getting useful/desirable experience
• learning new skills
• Getting certified
• Making sure your career is progressing

If you haven’t set yourself a career goal or next step in your career, its unlikely you are working towards it efficiently.  When you know your dream job/role, you can work backwards from it, calculating what the skills, experience, network and knowledge you need for the job.

If You Don’t Design Your Career, Someone Else Will

Purpose

Everyone wants to get paid and lots of money is great but it won’t help you enjoy your work.  People spend at least 7.5 hours a day at work,  its important you enjoy work and feel you are contributing.

Many articles I have written on CRM development – Hosk‘s CRM Developer articles involve people having high standards and passion for the role as CRM Developer (CRM Developers need Passion), if you don’t enjoy something you won’t push yourself to learn and improve, holding back your career development.

I have asked myself the question – Why do people stay in boring jobs.  Sometimes the answer is money because they can’t earn as much money doing something else, this leads to long work days and people counting down the days to retirement.

 “The purpose of life is not to be happy. It is to be useful, to be honorable, to be compassionate, to have it make some difference that you have lived and lived well.” ― Ralph Waldo Emerson

With Clone pro,  users can set up what to clone including the cloning of related entities, like products, when cloning invoice. Now you can clone with Workflow!

Consider the need to create recurring invoices or recurring orders once every moth. With Dynamics Clone, you can automate this process using workflow.

Here is an example to of how to clone an order once a month.

Step 1: Set up cloning functionality to Order entity.

Go to Settings> Clone Pro. Create new record and select Entity Name as Order

To clone the Order and the order products (Sales Order details) select this relationship for Copy the selected 1:N relationship records.

By default we clone all fields of the Order record, but you can select fields you do not wish to clone.

Create new order, add products and test that with one click of the Clone button, the order and products are cloned.

Step 2: Clone with Workflow

Your workflow can be automated to create recurring orders once every month. To do so, add a date field in the Order record. This date field is used by the Wait Condition to wait with the workflow execution and it is updated to current date each time the process runs. You also need to select the Available to Run >As a child workflow, to allow recurring orders to be created periodically.

The workflow will have the following steps:

Wait Condition: Wait until>Date>Equals>Date+1 month

Dynamics Clone Pro> Clone record (no properties required)

Update >Order> Select the Date field and update with process date

Start Child Workflow>Order>select loop again to same workflow.

Download Free trial Version:  http://dynamicsobjects.com/Products/Dynamics-Clone

by Dynamics Objects

.

The post Clone Pro- Clone Records with Workflow! (Recurring Cloning) appeared first on CRM Software Blog.

Running is all the craze these days. 5k, 8k, 10k, 12k, Quarter, Half, Full and Ultra Marathons, Kids Races, the list goes on and on.  Take any distance and someone will host an event around it. According to running usa in 2014 there were over 28,000 race events in the United States alone.

I’m an avid runner. Not a fast one, but fairly dedicated. Since 2012 I have participated in several races ranging from 5k’s to full marathons (just finished my second full marathon last weekend). I also have “all the gear” – clothing, watches, shoes and accessories so when it comes to putting together an email list to promote a race (anywhere across the country) I seem to be on all of them.

I’m also a marketer, a CRM enthusiast and a fan of a good discount offer. If you have participated in events (any event) you know that typically there is an early bird discount. I sometimes have signed up for races nearly a year in advance just to take advantage of a deep discount.

Unfortunately this also means that for the next year, I will continually get emails from the event letting me know that the spaces are filling up and that I better “register today” to take advantage of the pricing.

In fact, I just got another email today for a race I am doing in San Diego in July that I registered for nearly two months ago.

Has this happened to you? It could be a race, a conference, a webinar or any event.

Sometimes if the emails are far enough apart you might think to yourself “I thought I already registered” and you find yourself searching through your email confirmations and credit card statements to confirm.

With CRM and Marketing Automation it’s all about personalizing the experience. As an enthusiast of both I know first-hand how much better the experience can be.

Once I register for the event (a race in this example) that should automatically remove me from the “lead/prospect” email list and put me on the “customer” email list.

You may think it is simply easier to set up just one email and sent it to everyone. That is not the world we live in today and what people expect. With marketing automation segmenting your list and putting those who register down a different email path is VERY easy and MORE effective to help you reach your goals.

For the races that I register for (if utilizing CRM and/or Marketing Automation) I should instead start getting another set of emails with training tips, nutrition facts, hotel options, refer a friend links, and more – not reminding me with a Call-to-Action that I have already completed – that could sour my taste for this event before I even cross the starting line.

If you are the organizer of any event, I encourage you to take advantage of CRM and/or Marketing Automation to segment and personalize your communications and make the experience for your customer’s top notch.

If you want to learn more about Marketing Automation or CRM, here are two (free) webinars coming up from Ledgeview Partners that you should check out.

• June 8, 2016: Marketing Automation Bootcamp
• June 22, 2016: Salesforce vs Microsoft Dynamics CRM

And if you are a runner drop me a comment. I love to hear from other crazy people like me.

The post Stop Asking Me to Register When I Already Have appeared first on Ledgeview Partners.

1. General Tab (contains the name of the rule and name of the survey)
2. Conditions Tab ( contains the conditions to be met on the survey)
3. Actions (contains the actions to be taken when the conditions are met)
   Actions can be of 2 types

• • Client: These actions will be triggered on the survey itself on run time. for example hiding or showing a question.
  • Server: These action will be triggered out side a survey. for example creating a follow up or complaint etc..

Requirement

Solution

1. Navigate to the the survey and select Response Routing from the drop down menu as shown in the screen shot below
   
   
   
2. The system will display the list of Response routings associated with the survey.
3. The system will display the “New Response Routings” form.
4. Enter the name for the routing rule and press same
5. Navigate t the  “Conditions” Tab and a new condition.
   
   
   
   
6. The system will display the condition form as shown in the screen shot below
   
   
   
   The condition in the above screen should is checking if the rating selected in the question 2 is less than 3.
   Note: The options for “Operator” and  “Comparison Value” will change based on the type of question selected. Save the condition.
7. Navigate to the Actions tab and add a new action.
   
   
8. The first action will be triggered on the client side. Select Client from the scope. The action form will look like the following screen.
   
   
   
   The Client tab displaying the actions details. In short, it is saying to display the question 3.
9. The second action will be triggered on the server side.The action form will look like the following screen.
   
   
   
   The Server tab displaying the actions details. The action will create a response outcome record of type follow up add it to <Amreek Singh> queue.
10. Make sure the response routing rule is activated and test the action.

Test Results

Client Side Results

Server Side Results

Prerequisite:

Power BI Desktop Tool, Power BI Online Service

Purpose of the setup:

Purpose of this blog is to demonstrate USERNAME () function with Row Level Security (RLS) using Power BI to get the dynamic security when users login.

Procedure:

To demonstrate this, we have created a Power BI Desktop file and published it to Power BI Online service account.

Now the basic steps for creating role based security is explained in our previous blog on RLS in Power BI. You can refer the steps in the link given below:

http://www.cloudfronts.com/row-level-security-using-power-bi/

In the above mentioned link we used DAX function as [Sales Manager] = “Ashish” i.e. we have hard coded the DAX Function to filter data only for specific records. The drawback is that we need to hard code for every user in the organization no matter how many users are present.

So, now we can make use of USERNAME() function which will automatically filter the data depending on the username used to login to Power BI service account. You can read more about this update in the Power BI blog given in the link below.

https://powerbi.microsoft.com/en-us/blog/using-username-in-dax-with-row-level-security/

Here, USERNAME() is used to get the current logged in user and filter the data accordingly so as to enable him to view his own data. Below is the screenshot of dataset used.

In the Example, Ankita is the CEO (i.e. the one who has Admin rights) so she can see all the data in the dashboard.

Whereas Ashish and Prakash are the two Sales Manager who when logs in can view only their data i.e. data for them and the Sales Person in their team.

 
Now if the CEO wants to restrict the Sales Manager and Sales Person to view only at their level i.e. the Sales Manager can view data under his team and a Sales Person can view only his data as an owner.

For achieving this the CEO can share the dashboard to the person and then can assign the role.

The steps are similar to the steps demonstrated in the previous Blog the only thing to change is the DAX function. The DAX function used is [Sales Manager] =USERNAME ()

Now we are done with RLS in Power BI with USERNAME () function.

So when person named Ashish logs in with his Power BI account with username as ajagdale@cloudfronts.com, he will only be able to view his own data.

Here, data in same RLS_USERNAME_SECURITY dashboard shared with Ashish displays only data for ajagdale@cloudfronts.com as the Sales Manager.

Note: The column on which we are applying the USERNAME () function has to be the Login id (or username) which is used to log in to Power BI account so that the function can filter depending on username.

It may happen that the result is not visible immediately. So for that we can refresh the Power BI dashboard once.

Similarly, we can add another person to the same role created and he will also be able to view his own data.

For example, another Sales Manager named (say) Prakash logs in to Power BI with his email as pkavar@cloudfronts.com then he will also be able to view pkavar@cloudfronts.com as Sales Manager.

 
In this way as many users we will add in the role we can create Row level security for them.
 

The post Login Based Security in Power BI appeared first on CloudFronts - Microsoft CRM | AX | BI | Azure.

Several-out-of-the-box entities in Dynamics CRM (including Case, Lead, and Opportunity) contain a field that represents a customer, which can either be an Account or a Contact. In CRM, these fields have the Customer data type, which is a special kind of lookup field for these two specific entities. Previously, system customizers couldn’t add a Customer field to their own entities. As part of this feature, Customer is available as a custom field data type that can be added to any entity, system or custom.

One of our MVP’s Shan McArthur, now with Microsoft leading the the Microsoft ADX Portal development as been fighting for this feature for a long time. In memory of that fight, we will refer to these field type as a “ShanMC Field.”. Thanks for your support throughout the years Shan!

The introduction of Themes in Microsoft Dynamics CRM 2015 added much called for functionality to allow customers to change the branding of their Microsoft Dynamics CRM instance.  With this one feature Microsoft removed one a major driver for unsupported customizations in Microsoft Dynamics CRM (Why you shouldn’t put unsupported customizations in Microsoft Dynamics CRM)

Themes are awesome

Themes added much demanded branding functionality, it allows you to change colour scheme of your instance of Microsoft Dynamics CRM and add your company logo to replace the words Dynamics CRM.

Lots of customers asked to change the colour scheme but these changes could only be done using unsupported customizations.

The main functionality of themes is

• Add a logo to CRM
• create entity specific colouring
• Change navigation colours

Where do I find themes

  

Add a logo

The most common task you will need to do is add a logo.

You need to create a new theme first, the easiest way to do this is to clone the default solution

Open your new theme

Select the Logo lookup.  You will need to create a new web resource

Select logo and publish the theme.  Just because Microsoft allows you to select themes, it won’t stop you creating ugly colour schemes

Quick start

CRM 2015 – Theme’s youtube video

This technet article explains in detail what you can do and the limitations of themes

These two blog posts go into themes in details, showing you what each change does and where it’s used.

• Themes explained in Detail
• CRM 2015 Update 1: Exploring and Understanding Themes Deeper

One  criticism I have with themes is choosing the colours is difficult because you have to type in the correct color code and who knows that.  Luckily CRM MVP Guido Preite has made a fantastic Dynamics CRM theme generator

Dynamics CRM Theme Generator

It allows you to easily pick colour and preview your choices, awesome work Guido

Interesting use for Theme’s

Themes can enable people to easily identify what environment they are on.  When you have lots of environments

• Production
• Pre-Production
• Q&A
• Test
• Dev

It can be difficult to know which environment you are on, particularly if you have numerous Microsoft Dynamic CRM’s open at the same time, which is something developers often do because they are comparing values between environments.

In the CRM 2011 days we use to put an unsupported change which changed the a label on the CRM, sorry I mean other CRM developers did this sort of thing, I would never put an unsupported change into CRM

Themes allows you to set different CRM environments as different colours, increasing the chance of someone not accidentally updating production.

Limitations

The default theme is called CRM Default Theme
The default theme is type System and Default Theme = Yes

This technet page has some good limitations

What can you change or adjust?