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)

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.

Webfortis is excited to announce that we have recieved the Partnering for Success Award from the SoCal Chapter of the IAMCP.  Our team works hard at being a valuble Microsoft partner and we are greatful to be recognized for our effort.  For those of you who are not familiar with the IAMCP (International Association of Microsoft Channel Partners), they are a group of all people within the "Microsoft partner eco-system."  For more information about the IAMCP visit their website at http://www.iamcp.org/.  And once again, we would like to thank the IAMCP for this award.

…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.

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.

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. 

Girish Raja and Jim Glass posted a couple of great articles about Convergence on the CRM Team blog the other day. With so much interest from our customers and prospects I wanted to repost a consolidation of it here. Webfortis will be there in strength - will you? Convergence 2010, the premier Microsoft Dynamics conference is here shortly (April 24-27) and this year the event is organized a little differently, beginning on a weekend and with a virtual partner day. If you are thinking about attending Convergence register now to take advantage of possible early-bird discounts. Here is the entire session catalog for your reference and please remember that this is still work in progress. http://www.msconvergence.com/Topic/List Of course there will be keynotes, breakout sessions, interactive discussions and everything but the key part of any conference is networking with fellow attendees, organizers and to your social world out there. So make sure you take advantage of the tools to have a wonderful experience. Remember to use the official hash tag: #CONV10 Jim's top 10 reasons for attending Convergence include: 10 – Atlanta is a cool place to visit. 9 – Southern food/hospitality can’t be beat. 8 – Gather the best resources, reading material, and ideas that can be reviewed at your leisure when you get home 7 – Customize your sessions to include the ones you are interested in the most 6 – Meet some of the superstars in the world of CRM and xRM 5 – Learn tips and tricks about finding solutions in the CRM community 4 – See examples of customized solutions and talk to the people creating them 3 – Hear about CRM Next 2 – Network with companies who use CRM in the same areas you do (hospital, sales, etc.) And the number ONE reason to attend Convergence is to meet the Microsoft Dynamics CRM team  in person and talk to them about your experiences, recommendations, and observations.