When reviewing CRM systems to consider for your business you may have preconceived ideas about what you are looking for.  A good CRM system will allow a strong working relationship between your customers and company from the salesmen and marketers to the customer service team.  Even if every part of your CRM desires are met, there are other aspects to consider when in the market for a new CRM system. Microsoft products are widely used within businesses whether it's Powerpoint, Word, Outlook, Access, or Publisher.  Microsoft has designed their products to have standard functions, which makes them easy to learn and use.  This means that if a new user with past experience in a Microsoft product is using Microsoft Dynamics CRM 2011 for the first time, they are well on their way to understanding how to use this CRM system.  Because Salesforce is a company that is only CRM, their system is unfamiliar to many new users. Depending on the needs and wants of a company, they may want to handle their CRM system on their own on premise or they may want Microsoft to handle this for them by using Dynamics CRM in the cloud.  Dynamics CRM users have the flexibility of choosing which solution works better for their needs.  Salesforce users are not given this choice and are forced to use CRM in the cloud only. Because Microsoft is a large company that has the ability to handle multiple platforms and technologies including the .NET Framework that is used by a wide variety of technological professionals, there is a native integration between Dynamics CRM and these platforms and technologies.  Salesforce, being much smaller, must create each platform specifically for CRM purposes which is a tall order for a small company.  Since Salesforce uses Visualforce, a technology specific to Salesforce, customizations can only be made by a Salesforce professional who is familiar with Visualforce. When shopping for a new CRM, keep in mind that there is more to consider than key features.  Dynamics CRM not only has an extensive list of features that engage all aspects of a business's customers into a single place but it has been designed to meet the needs of CRM for all types of businesses.  For more information on this topic download:  Comparing the xRM Application Framework and Force com - A Guide for Technical Decision Makers.pdf (672.30 kb)

Parrot is Webfortis’ Social Media solution for Microsoft Dynamics CRM and is currently being used in 32 countries worldwide spanning six of seven continents.  Parrot has a large adoption range of industries as well as cultures, allowing companies to globally market their businesses, provide customer service and conduct research.  In addition, Social Media is becoming a worldwide phenomenon that is spreading throughout the industry, making Parrot the optimal tool to bring Social Media into your Dynamics CRM no matter your location.  Our team of Parrot professionals are available virtually for demos or questions.  For more information on Parrot as well as a free download, go to http://www.webfortis.com/webfortis-social-media-solutions.aspx .  

I've come across a number of projects here at Webfortis that utilize Notification Emails by Workflow(i.e. a system process that has a defined trigger to implement a system task). A lot of industries require utilizing this because it is very valuable. Here is an example: I was working with a scientific consulting company that dealt with the handling and research of blood. They had both a Sales team and a Science team. The Sales team was in charge of the business management aspect and client base,while the Scientific team oversaw the internal processes for the actual blood. There were certain phases of the processthat required a CRM system to track all of their clients and products due to the fact that the company was rapidly growing to the point where it was difficult to organize. The solution was to have an option set in the Opportunities Entity to have the different stages itemizedfor the whole business process. Each stage in the process triggered a Workflow upon Save to send out an email stating what stage the opportunity was in to members of a specific team. That solution worked well until I found out that they only had four licenses. I set aside time to speak to our expert engineers, and with some arduous work, we came up with a solution. Only users could be assigned to Teams, but this client did not need the extra user licenses because they would only be receiving emails on where they were in the business process.  They would have no visibility to the administrative side of the company. To resolve this, we first added a Team lookup to the Email entity. We then created a N:N relationship between Contacts and Teams.  By creating a workflow to open an Email and populate the Email with the message, it would then be sent to the appropriate Team. Then, we created a plugin to fire off when the Team field is populated in the Email. It would then look for the emails of the Contacts assigned to that team, populate the "To" field with those emails, and send the email. This solution is now being utilized in a couple of different projects. It is a very convenient way to meet a client business requirement, and is also a very good selling point that can be applied to a lot of CRM customers.  

CWR Mobility, the top provider of mobility solutions for Microsoft Dynamics CRM and a partner of Webfortis, released their newest version of their CWR Mobile CRM 2011.  In addition to the features of the previous version which integrated with customer’s Dynamics CRM 2011 systems, either in the cloud or on-premise, the latest version of the mobile CRM delivers native Microsoft Dynamics CRM dashboards using iPad, iPhone, Blackberry and Windows Phone 6.5 mobile devices.  For more information, visit CWR’s website at http://www.cwrmobility.com/ or read the full article at http://www.cwrmobility.com/cwr-mobility-launches-mobile-crm-dashboards.  

Here at Webfortis, we use a standardized and well documented methodology for our CRM Design to help maintain quality control in our CRM projects [More]

We recently encountered an issue where we needed to import a large data set from CRM 4.0 to CRM 2011. In CRM 2011, there are no methods available in the SDK that will allow you to modify the createdon, createdby, modifiedon, modifiedby fields. The baton was passed to me to write a TSQL script that would loop through all the rows in a bridge table and find correlating records in a CRM 2011 target then update certain system protected fields before moving to the next row of data. The first part of the solution was to have Scribe write this information to a temporary table. The second part is to read this information and populate the necessary fields in CRM.  Our bridge table had the following schema: Scribe writes to this table whenever it performs an insert. So, when the scribe import is done running, you have all of the necessary information stored in this table. It is then just a matter of moving it from the temp table to CRM. Here is the script we used to accomplish this. The idea is to cursor through the rows and update as necessary in CRM. The script was built to run in multiple different environments (development, QA, production) with having to change only the variables at the top.     After running this little gem, we were able to open any of the records and see verified historic data across the board! Win one for the good guys.

A couple months ago I attended a social media conference.  I sat down at a large round table with about ten other people and the introductions started.  I introduced myself as the Social Media Coordinator for Webfortis, a company that specializes in Dynamics CRM.  Another gentleman at the table introduced himself as Robert , the CEO of a Social CRM company.  Then the question arose, “What is Social CRM?”  Robert and I looked at each other and paused, “Well… I would like to hear your definition,” he said to me. So, what is Social CRM?  This is a question that fills Social Media Marketing and CRM communities and it seems as though definitions very from person to person.  This is due to Social CRM being a broad term that came from a need for businesses to keep track of their engagements within social media, a tool not designed for businesses. At first glance these two things appear as though they have little to do with each other but if we go back to elementary school and compound words, breaking down Social CRM can help us understand exactly what it is.  Social Media is the newest and greatest marketing, sales and customer service strategies that companies are successfully using.  Social Media allows companies to be able to go where their customers are, see what their customers are talking about, gain their trust, interact with them and provide another channel to help with any complaints or concerns from current customers CRM is software that manages a company’s interactions with customers through the marketing, sales and customer service process.  These interactions include everything from phone calls to emails to snail mail to quotes to invoices and everything in between.  It also helps a company be efficient in these interactions, see and understand all aspects of the business and close their deals.  If a company is using social media to further achieve their efforts with customers it is only logical to use your CRM system to help plan and track these interactions as you would with any other interaction a company would have with a customer.  Therefore Social CRM is nothing new and different from what we already know about CRM and Social Media, it is simply the wording used for companies to be more efficient in their social media strategy. For a Social CRM strategy of your own, contact me at mgoepp@webfortis.com.

…I got a call from one of our project team members regarding the Scribe packages that had been built for a client.  Apparently, the client needed us to migrate over data from system protected fields to maintain valid historic values. Ok, I’m down with that.   Having been involved in the upgrade process and hurdles with this client at earlier stages, I was aware that they had issues with AD users.  Having come from a history of CRM 1.0, I could feel the scars of the past tingling.  My mind was racing… “deleted AD users = orphaned SystemUser GUIDs…orphaned GUIDs = ‘Object not set to an instance of an object’ errors…”  Ughhh.   I quickly determined a default user to use in the case that the source user had been deleted, then proceeded to set variables using the cross reference key values stored in the Scribe Internal database from when the SystemUser entity rows were written originally to the target.  As basic as it seems, the formula called XREFLOOKUPNOLOCK_BKEY([label]”SystemUser”, S[x]).  Not so magically, the return value of the formula pulled the new CRM 2011 SystemUser GUID where it found the matching CRM 4 SystemUser GUID in the cross reference table.  Bam!    Now that I had the GUID values that would either match to an active user lookup value or fail to the default system user, I had to find a way to write the data into the target.  Remember, these are system protected fields, so we all knew the Scribe CRM Adapter would be a bust….    Understanding that the Scribe Adapters for CRM communicate through the presentation layer and not directly to the data layer, I knew that the CRM SDK (the foundation for the Scribe Adapter) would not allow an Update function against these system protected fields (hence they are system protected!).  Thinking it would be easy to change my adapter to use the OLEDB connection to the CRM database (yes, I know it’s unsupported), I quickly pointed my source to the new target connection and Viola! all test rows passed successfully.  Job done; go home, right?  Not really.   While the rows all seemed to pass through the OLEDB connection fine, they didn’t get committed to the database completely.  So, since we had already gone down the path of unsupported methods, we decided to go with a straight TSQL script.  However, since we had already validated our lookups and defined what our static source data elements would be, we got a little creative.  Rather than write a set of TSQL nested cursors to do lookups and validations, we added a secondary target to all of our Scribe packages which contained all the key value pairs between the CRM 4 and CRM 2011 records.  We sent this master bridge information to a custom table we created in the Scribe Internal database and used that as our source for a single tiered cursor.  Not only did we mitigate the execution time of a would-be hectic cursor in SQL, but we also created a veritable audit log for the migration effort by safely storing the migration mapping values!   Now that the stage was set, I passed my bridge table information along to our script master.

In a recent project with one of our larger On Premise customers, we were tasked with an upgrade from CRM 4.0 x86 to CRM 2011.  As most readers should know, there is no direct upgrade path for this scenario due to the 32-bit to 64-bit disparity.  Using the Microsoft Implementation Guides for both CRM 4.0 as well as CRM 2011, we devised a plan to first migrate CRM 4.0 from x86 platform to x64.  This was easy as expected.  From there, we had expected to perform an in-place upgrade from CRM 4.0 to CRM 2011 but due to some inconsistent changes to the client’s Active Directory, this quickly became impossible! Faced with a more traditional migration effort, we quickly chose to deploy Scribe as a part of our overall tactics.  Our new plan was to take the x64 CRM environment, export the customizations, security roles, and workflows, then re-import them into a new empty CRM 4.0 organization.  From there we were able to get through a semi-successful in-place upgrade from CRM 4.0 to CRM 2011.  This was only semi-successful due to all the common and known issues with in-place upgrades.  But at least we had a CRM 2011 Solution set we could now work with (regardless of how ugly the upgrade process left things)!  We took the Solution and deployed it to our final target server and began to run the Scribe packages we had configured to port over all the data.  Everything went perfectly! So what’s the point of the blog then?  While there were no errors produced by the Scribe packages, it was because the system protected fields cannot be mapped inside of the packages.  When our client reviewed the data for validation, they quickly defined that they would need the static history values for system protected fields like CreatedOn, CreatedBy, ModifiedOn, ModifiedBy and so on.  This is where we had to get creative…so I put a call into the Scribe guy….

  In CRM Javascript Development you may run into the case where you have to close an entity record window when you attempt  to open it and only want a record to be created or viewed when certain conditions are met.  A good example of this is when you close a form when it is not opened from a related entity form. The way to do this has changed slightly from CRM 4 to a new similar method in CRM 2011. Let’s look at the method in CRM 4:  window.open() window.close() So these methods worked in CRM 4 since the popup window was your main window. However this Is not the case in CRM 2011. In CRM 2011 notice that the new interface is made up of different IFrames instead of one window due to the ribbon. Therefore in order to close the correct window we must change out code a little bit to have our close method to control the correct window.  We can do this by specifying the correct IFrame to close by using the following methods: Parent.window.open() Parent.window.close()  

The Microsft Dynamics CRM Sustained Engineering Team released Update Rollup 18 for Microsoft Dynamics CRM 4.0 today. For more information about Update Rollup 18 go to: http://bit.ly/ipotky.

Are you still on the fence about the best CRM system for your organization?  Not only does Microsoft Dynamics CRM offer the most bang for your buck, now they are offering new Dynamics CRM customers an unprecedented $200 per user cash back to your company! Contact Beth at Webfortis at beth@webfortis.com or (916) 813-3140 to learn more about how Dynamics can improve your business "and" how you can get paid from Microsoft for choosing Dynamics CRM.

Power your business with Microsoft Dynamics CRM 2011!  Dyanmics CRM now has 500 new features to help improve marketing, drive sales and improve customer service.  Help make your employees be more productive and spend less time searching for information   This is a software that is familiar and encourages an effective and familiar experience by inserting Microsoft Dyanmics CRM directly into Outlook.  Personalized views save time and role based forms only allow for relevent information to be accessable.  Improve insite into your business.  Easily track sales piplines, open cases and other key metrics in real time.  Have access to real time analytics that allow for insite into built in visualizations using few clicks. Connect with others and maximize the value of relationships.  Make it easier to work collaboratively of accounts, contracts, opportunities, cases, and more with team-based ownership of records.  Track key influencers to better identify and leverage ony business relationship. For more information go to:  http://www.webfortis.com/documents/whats_new_in_crm.aspx

We have just been notified that the New CRM 2011 Update Rollup 2 has been recalled and removed from the Microsoft Download Center.  A re-release will occur some time next week.  Stay tuned for more information.