The bad news is that this piece of helpful functionality has remained uncustomizable throughout different Dynamics CRM versions. A lot of users were annoyed with especially the same filter in the associated history view, nowadays known as Closed Activities view in CRM 2011, which used to default to “Last 30 days” and hide away all but the most recent email threads, appointments and other information that you might have been searching for. You always had to change the filter manually to “All” to uncover the historical information about the relationship with the account or contact. However, this has changed now in the latest version and “All” has become the default filter (or should I say the filter is off by default).

That’s definitely a step towards the right direction. It’s not exactly what the response on Microsoft Connect suggests, which claims that “we’ve allowed a user to change the default filter for associated views in CRM 2011″. I’ve yet run into such a setting and neither has The Great Internet, unless Google is hiding such instructions or blog posts. It would be useful to be able to configure or remove filters that the end users don’t want to deal with, without having to resort to unsupported customizations.

Open vs. closed activities

History is one thing but it’s the future actions that matter the most. Until very recently, I’d say up until Update Rollup 2 of CRM 2011 the filter functionality in the open activities associated views used to be such that the default “Next 30 days” would also show any activity that was missing a due date. By default the due dates are not a required field and sometimes they are not that practical for the CRM users, as many things in the daily life of a modern information worker don’t have strict deadlines. Also, there’s no out-of-the-box functionality in Dynamics CRM to set default values for date fields either, so setting the exact due date for every task or phone call you enter on your task list may feel too bureaucratic. An activity with a missing date should be considered as “do this as soon as you can, given all the surrounding factors”, in my personal opinion.

In the current version of Update Rollup 5 the “Filter on” value is applied in such a way that it by default hides away all activities that don’t meet the “Next 30 days” criteria. If the due date is blank, the activities won’t show under the account/contact/opportunity. This may seem quite confusing to the user, since any new activity that he or she creates for the record will appear to “vanish” into thin air after clicking “Save and close”. In the My Activities view they will still appear on the top of the list, as null values in the Due Date column are sorted on top.

What’s even more confusing is that CRM 2011 introduces two different ways for users to navigate to related activities on the account form: the familiar associated view and the new subgrid. If you’ve been reading my blog, you’ll know that subgrids ain’t exactly what associated views used to be. They don’t contain the activity roll-up feature, so you won’t see those activities that are set regarding a child record of an account (for example, opportunities) instead of the account record directly. Just like another filter, except you can’t even change it.

How to change the default filter value

There’s been numerous blog posts written on the topic of setting the filter defaults on CRM 4.0, but I was initially a bit surprised I couldn’t find a working piece of Javascript to achieve this on CRM 2011. Examples like this, this or this didn’t seem to be working for me, but luckily I ran into this post on the Microsoft Dynamics CRM German forum by Andreas Buchinger. To save you the trouble of Google Translate (well, it’s not much trouble at all when using Chrome’s built-in translation toolbar), here’s a walk through of the steps needed.

1. Create a new Web Resource of type Script (Jscript) and click the Text Editor button, then paste in the code from the above post.

2. Open the form customization window of the entity where you want to change the Activity view filter default. In this case we’ll do it on the account form. Select “Form properties” on the ribbon, click “Add” on the Form Libraries section and find the web resource you created in step 1.

3. Click the “Add” button on the Event Handlers section of the window to add a new entry for form OnLoad event. Select the library you created in step 2, enter SetView as the function field value and ‘Activities’, ‘All’, “crmGrid_Account_ActivityPointers_datefilter” in the parameters field.

4. Save & publish everything. Done! Just open an account form, navigate to associated activities view and witness the “Filter on” value being set to “All”.

When working with Contacts or Opportunities, just modify the third parameter value accordingly. If you want to set a different default value than “All”, the choices for the second parameter are ‘Overdue’, ‘Today’, ‘Tomorrow’, ‘NextXDays;7′, ‘NextXDays;30′, ‘NextXDays;90′, ‘NextXMonths;6′, ‘NextXMonths;12′. Once again, thanks to Andreas for providing us this script and the parameter values!

Just remember that it’s not a supported customization, so in case any of the view names change in future updates, you may need to modify the script. For instance, when I was testing on a system with Finnish base language, the view parameter was “crmGrid_Account_ActivityPointers_scheduledend” initially, but on an Update Rollup 5 system this appeared have changed globally to “crmGrid_Account_ActivityPointers_datefilter”.

If you’d rather see the Activity default filter being set to “All” in the Microsoft Dynamics CRM standard configuration, please go and vote on the related Microsoft Connect suggestion (Windows Live ID login required). Thanks.

In order to make Activity Feeds a shared, trusted source of information on customer related events, the organization using Dynamics CRM needs to provide its users a path that they can follow to become a member of this community. Although it is possible to build custom business logic through the SDK that automates the following of records, wouldn’t it be better if teams of users could themselves choose topics that they wish to follow, and also broadcast their posts to other users following the same topic? You know, like #hashtags on Twitter. Well, there’s no built-in support for hashtags in the current release of the Activity Feeds solution, but here’s a description of one possible workaround which I’ve come up with.

In my previous post on the topic, I covered the general process of how to enable Activity Feeds for entities in Dynamics CRM. The natural choice for supporting a team collaboration scenario would be to use the default entity Team to display relevant posts for its’ users on the entity form. Unfortunately you can’t enable Activity Feeds for teams, since that’s not a supported entity. In fact, you cannot enable Activity Feeds for any organization-owned entities, even custom ones.

Luckily there’s nothing stopping your from creating a user-owned custom entity and enabling it for Activity Feeds, so let’s go ahead and create a new entity called “Group”. No need for new fields, just publish the entity, then create a Post Configuration record with the same entity name (new_group or something like that). After this you’ll need to go and adjust the form so that the Record Wall is directly visible when you open the form, by moving it below the first General tab.

Now you’re all set for starting to use the group entity in Activity Feed posts. No matter on which record’s wall (or your personal wall) you’re writing a post to, you can perform a mention by entering the @ character followed by the group’s name. In this case I’ve created a group called CRM, so I’ll add a mention of @CRM on an account record wall. You’ll see how that turns into a hyperlink to the group record.

How the user’s personal wall works is that it will display all Activity Feed posts that contain any reference to a record that the user has followed. It doesn’t have to be the record where the post has been written on. This is what enables us to make following updates concerning a certain topic easier for the end user, as long as the posts contain a mention/link to the group record. For manual posts the users will need to indicate that they wish to direct the post to the group’s followers by performing the @[groupname] mention as seen below.

So, does this mean that the mentions can only be utilized with manual user initiated posts? Absolutely not! There is a new attribute available in the workflow editor, called Post Url (Dynamics value). You can read this post on the MS Dynamics CRM Team Blog for details on how the feature can be leveraged in building workflow rules that create Activity Feed posts with mentions referencing other records. This allows us to reference multiple related records in a single post and make it appear on the personal wall of anyone who’s following one of the records.

Let’s say we want to create an auto post whenever a case record is created and it has the value “CRM” in the subject field, to notify anyone who’s following the CRM group. Ok, so we can find a relationship to the related subject record but since that’s not supported for Activity Feeds (just like teams aren’t), we wouldn’t be able to use it for creating a mention. Also, since the group entity we created doesn’t have a relationship to the case entity, it’s not available in the workflow dynamic values menu.

Should we go and create a relationship through entity customization? Well, that would be a bit cumbersome, since you’d then have to include a reference into the actual group record in every case record you wish to create a post a mention on. You’d pretty much have an additional subject lookup on the case form as a result, which is not a good solution in terms of usability (at least if you already use the default subject entity in your processes).

Luckily there’s one more place on the Activity Feed post entity that you can use in the workflow: RegardingObjectId. Normally this would represent the main object of the post (such as the opportunity record which has had a state change event that triggered the post), but you’re free to select a record from any of the entities that have been enabled for Activity Feeds through the Post Configuration records. So, let’s proceed by creating a workflow that runs whenever a new case is created, checks if the subject is “CRM” and creates a post record with the following attributes:

Let us now return back to the new user sign up scenario. In the beginning the personal wall is going to look quite empty and the user will not necessarily know which records he or she should start to follow, in order to get an idea of the activities going on in the system.

After the user clicks on the follow button on the group record, all the posts that contain a mention of the group’s name will be visible on his personal wall. The user will immediately be up to speed with the latest activities around the topic of the group.

An added benefit of following groups or topics instead of individual records is that this makes it much easier for the users themselves to apply noise controls if the number of updates on the Activity Feed walls gets to high for them to keep up with. All they’ll need to do is unsubscribe from groups that are not providing updates relevant to their own work. No need to start selecting accounts, opportunities etc. that they wish to unsubscribe from, or to contact the sysadmin and request an adjustment to the workflow rules that are generating low value auto posts into the feed.

Issue 1: Dashboard ribbons are not context sensitive in Outlook

If you build a dashboard out of grids that present the user with relevant data from various entities, this can significantly cut down their need for jumping between different menus and screens. Say, a customer service representative can easily view all the new items in the email support queue, active cases assigned to him/her and also other open activities. With the help of the context sensitive ribbon the user can then process these records in the same screen, by changing record status from open to closed, accepting items from the queue, creating new tasks etc.

Except, in Outlook that won’t work. The user will only be able to create a new dashboard, but not any of the common tasks, like creating new records for the selected grid. This is because in Outlook the ribbon is not context sensitive within the dashboard. Why is this? It works elsewhere in Outlook, so why not here? I imagine the explanation is that while the normal grids are composed of native MAPI objects inside Outlook, the dashboards are merely web pages as far as the Outlook client can recognize them, so it can’t understand which ribbon should be shown in which part of the page. Bummer.

As a result, if you want to create actionable dashboards that allow users to work on the items presented there, it’s better to instruct them to open CRM through the web client instead of the Outlook client.

Issue 2: Different logic in Quick Find

People who have worked with Dynamics CRM throughout several versions will surely have learned how the Quick Find operates and when you need to use wild cars. With the CRM 2011 Outlook client, this logic no longer holds true. Outlook has its own way of handling search terms, so now we can punch in a search word right from the middle of a field, such as the account name, without entering the asterisk wild card in front of the term.

Great, easier for the user to perform searches, right? Well, it is if you only ever work inside the Outlook client. If you step into the web client views, you’ll discover that things work differently there. Not only do you need to remember to use the wildcard in Quick Find criteria, but there also is a specific Quick Find View. Whereas in the web client the search will cover every active record in the database, no matter from which view you start, in Outlook the search is conducted on the records in the selected view. So, if you’re in the My Contacts view in Outlook client and search for a contact that belongs to another user, the Quick Find results will not deliver any data. In the web client it will.

Also the columns presented in the web client will always be the ones specified in the Quick Find View customizations, but in Outlook the columns will not change as you’re searching from within the current view. However, it appears that the search columns that the Outlook client performs the query on are still affected by the ones defined in the entity Quick Find View, even though this view is never actually presented to the Outlook user. Still following me? If the different search logic is hard for a consultant to remember, just imagine how confusing it can be to the CRM user.

Issue 3: Writing emails from Outlook without Outlook

One of the three core modules in Dynamics CRM is Service. The most typical scenario for utilizing CRM for customer service processes is directing the incoming emails for an address like support@company.com to a queue in CRM. This way the emails are automatically tracked under a contact record if the sender email exists in CRM. Also the queue allows you to see which items are already being worked on by customer service reps.

If you’re working with the Outlook client for Dynamics CRM, then you can write all your emails with the normal Outlook email editor and make use of the rich tools for message formatting, signatures, attaching multiple files with at once etc. Right? Not in this case. If the email you are replying to does not exist inside your Outlook mailbox but rather as an email record inside a CRM view, you can’t send “Outlook” emails as a reply. When you click the reply button, the Outlook client will open the web client email editor form for you.

There’s surely a reason why the email editor in the web client hasn’t been improved since CRM 3.0. Outlook is Microsoft’s premium experience editor that should be used wherever possible, whereas the web editor is a secondary feature. But if you’re using Outlook already, then it would be nice to be able to always remain within that rich client, even when replying to queue emails, wouldn’t it?

Issue 4: Recently used and pinned records behind the File button

Many users will normally be working with a selected few accounts, contacts and opportunities at a time, rather than the whole CRM customer database. This is why the Recently used records menu in CRM 2011 is a great usability enhancement, which is also familiar from many other CRM applications. Right from the CRM main window, from the top left corner where you first look, you’ll be able to open a rich pane that presents all the latest records as well as the views you’ve recently visited.

So, when I’m in the Outlook client then, surely I’m able to access the same list? Well, you are, but you’ll have to open the Office Backstage menu by clicking on the Outlook File menu, then glazing past all the file manipulation options and settings menus, to finally reach the recently viewed CRM records. And even if you reach it, you won’t be able to launch any views from this menu, since again the way how Outlook treats grids is different from the web client. Anyway, you probably won’t be accessing this menu any more often than you tweak your CRM settings, simply because it’s so well hidden away.

Desktop Outlook: how crucial is it still?

Ok, so there are a few quirks to be aware of when jumping between the web client and Outlook client. But how essential is it really to use the Outlook client in the first place?

Ever since email became the ubiquitous tool for communication, task management, documentation and almost everything involved in the information work that many of us perform in order to get the regular paycheck, there’s been a whole generation of people born into a world where they “live inside Outlook“. Now, in the year 2011 we should all be aware of how email is most often not the optimal tool for the job, but as it remains the lowest common denominator between people, teams and organizations, you can’t easily just stop using email. Even an Enterprise 2.0 organization needs to remain backwards compatible with Enterprise 1.0 level users, after all…

Having said that, remember that you don’t need Outlook for using email. For those of us who started using email before the common availability of webmail solutions like Hotmail or Gmail, installing an application on your PC for receiving and sending email messages may not sound so silly, but for the younger generation I’m quite positive it does. You don’t install Facebook, you just use it. Even for the oldskool users accustomed to an email client application running on their desktop, the rise of smartphones with 3G data plans and mobile access to email will surely have affected their perceptions of what is needed for a person to be email enabled. Email is available everywhere, you could say it’s become light as air.

There’s of course a lot more you can do with Outlook than just email and there’s a wealth of handy add-ins that Outlook can host to make your communication, task and calendar management work more fluent than it would be with separate web apps. Still, whenever I boot up my PC, I’d prefer if I didn’t have to launch Outlook. Why? Because most of the time I just need to quickly access a few messages, which I can do a lot faster by just opening up a browser window and going to Outlook Web Access. If I had the option of tracking activities from the browser application into the related CRM records, this would surely be my preferred method of using CRM. Just a lightweight bridge between the two worlds, not a rich, heavy client application. Why couldn’t it just work like that?

What will the future hold?

It’s no secret that the world of personal computing is moving away from desktop PC’s, towards devices that will be more portable, always-on and always-online. Microsoft was late to the tablet game (because it wasn’t willing to cannibalize Windows with its Courier project), but you might have as well said that about cloud computing. In 2010 they announced the “all in” cloud strategy and in 2011 we saw how Windows 8 has been designed to fit the era of slate devices with touch UI’s.

This leaked photo from March 2011 shows how the new Office 15 could look like. Yes, it’s pretty obvious by now that there will be a Metro style version of Outlook, in one form or another, to go with Windows 8.

Supporting nearly all the Dynamics CRM server and client functionality in offline mode is no small task, but that has been the requirement for the Outlook CRM client in the past. Will this feature remain in the product? I’m positive it will. Does it make sense to try and implement something like it for an ARM processor based tablet device designed to be always online? Now you’ve hit the nail on the head: it probably doesn’t. An application like Outlook cannot be transferred into the world of mobile & touch just by redesigning the UI to have bigger icons and Metro style tiles. Something’s gotta give.

In his presentation on CRM Outlook client optimization at Extreme 2011 Las Vegas, Tripp Parker listed a few considerations that Windows 8 will impose on the CRM client design. The lower resources available on slate devices may introduce the need for conditional disablement of features. The possibility of suspending Metro apps to the background will affect how data synchronization can be performed. Network traffic and disk storage usage will all require optimization. As you can imagine, turning a laptop software package into a tablet app is no small feat.

The new Microsoft Dynamics CRM Mobile application for Windows Phone 7 gives us a taste of how people will expect to be able to access data from their business information systems. Not with a big client but preferably through a small app that provides them with the essential features in that environment. Yes, they will want to link items from their calendar to the contacts in their CRM, or make updates or add notes to existing  CRM records. It won’t be a competition of having the most features available to the user – it will be about having only the right features.

Some of the legacy that Outlook has accumulated since its birth in 1997 may still be relevant to driving information worker productivity 15 years later when Microsoft steps into its “post-PC” era with Windows 8. Some of it will be a burden that the company will have to carry, due to it’s choice of persistently delivering backward compatibility to customers who’ve standardized their IT architecture on the MS stack. From the perspective of Dynamics CRM, I think we’ll inevitably see an increasing number of client options in the long run. Soon CRM will break free from its “Internet Explorer only” roots with cross-browser compatibility in R8 release (Chrome, Firefox, Safari, including iOS Safari). How long will it be before we also see its activity synchronization functionality break free from desktop Outlook?

Another common real life phenomena is that duplicate records find their way into the CRM database. This can be due to data imports from external databases, web forms feeding in new contacts, or simply two users being unaware of each other’s records and entering data with slightly different spelling or email address variations. Luckily Dynamics CRM has a built-in functionality that allows you to merge duplicates from the database. This process will move all the child records from the subordinate record to the master record, thus ensuring that everything remains linked to the active record and not the deactivated duplicate.

Except that for connections this doesn’t happen! Once the merge is done, all the connections will still be referencing the inactive record, not the master record. In the aforementioned example, you would have effectively lost the information about the contact’s relationship with Company B. Even though you could still see it by opening up Company B’s record and seeing the connection there, how would you ever have known where to look?

There is an existing feedback item 683301 on Microsoft Connect regarding this functionality:

Here’s a quote of the comment I’ve posted on the item:

I think this is a serious flaw that undermines the perceived reliability of the Merge Duplicates feature in the eyes of the end users. The merge screen indicates that all child records related to the subordinate record to be deactivated would be transferred to the master record, but it doesn’t warn that connections would need to be manually checked.

The merge process works just fine for custom entities, activities and pretty much everything except connections. Why would the user ever want to leave behind some non-duplicate information to the deactivated record? By merging two accounts or contacts the user is effectively declaring that these represent the same object in the real world. If something in the database has a relationship with either of these records, it should be carried over to the active record, as the inactive record no longer serves any other purpose than indicating the prior existence of a duplicate entry and the possible differences in attribute values compared to the current active record.

If you think connections should be transferred over to the master record when merging duplicates, be sure to log in to Microsoft Connect with your Windows Live ID and cast your vote on this item. In the meantime, if you’re planning to use the connections entity for recording any data related to accounts, contacts, or leads, my suggested options are:

• Don’t do it. Create a new custom entity for recording this data, as they will merge over to the master record just fine.
• Develop you own plugin for capturing any merge events and updating the related connection records accordingly.

The Data Import Wizard used to be a curse word among the Dynamics CRM crowd for a long time, but you shouldn’t ignore this option right away, just because of its bad reputation. Sure, there are many limitations with the built-in tool, but it has come a long way since the previous versions. Having recently spent some hands-on time with the CRM 2011 Import Wizard, I decided to put together some of the useful links and pieces of information I discovered during the process. There’s plenty of great blog posts out there on individual data import features, but perhaps this can serve as a “getting started” tookit for planning on how to import data into Microsoft Dynamics CRM 2011.

Mapping related records based on custom ID fields

The CRM database by definition is primarily a place for storing information about how different objects relate with one another. This means you will almost always be dealing with source data that needs to reference another set of data once imported into the system. In Dynamics CRM these relationships manifest themselves as lookup fields that point from a child record to its parent.

When you are mapping the lookup fields from a child entity into a parent entity that’s already in the system, you always need to consider the possibility of duplicate values in the list of parent entities. Contact names are not unique, and neither are account names in many cases. Yes, you could import lookup references by using a CRM GUID instead of the primary field (most often the name attribute) of the parent entity, but how often would you have that available in your source data to be imported? Exactly.

The first and in my opinion the best improvement with the Import Wizard in CRM 2011 is the possibility to reference the parent entity with an alternative field. Yes, if you have a reliable unique value available in your data, such as customer number or contact email address, you’re free to use that to link your records together. Alternatively, you can construct specific import ID’s out of your data that you first import into a hidden field, then later on use that as the reference which connects your related child records into exactly the correct parent record without the risk of import row failure.

For step by step instructions, check out this blog post by MVP Leon Tribe: Changing the Lookup Reference When Importing Related Data.

Importing data for multiple entities in one go

A common format for customer data coming from non-relational systems is a flat file that contains both account and contact data on the same “table”. In these cases you will have multiple instances of the account’s information repeated on each line where there is an individual contact related to that account. You first reaction might be “oh well, guess I’ll have to split that into an accounts file and a contacts file, then remove the duplicates“. Well, good news: you don’t have to anymore!

Nowadays CRM comes with a built-in data map called  ”For Generic Contact and Account Data”, which will allow you to import a file that has data intended for both account and contact records. First of all, you can map some of the source fields into both the target entities. Address information is a good example, as it’s typically stored separately on both accounts and contacts (yeah, data redundancy, but often it’s just more convenient for your everyday CRM usage).

Secondly, you will not get duplicate account records from each of the rows, as the Import Wizard is smart enough to detect the distinct parent accounts needed for the child contacts. Now, in order to get the expected results, it’s also up to you to be smart with your source data and field mapping. If any of the fields you’ve mapped to the parent account have any variation in their contents (such as phone numbers with different spacing formats), you will get duplicates, simply because the system will not throw away any unique data rows. Additionally, your child record imports to those accounts will result in failures, as the parent account lookup field will point to a non-unique value in the database (unless you used the aforementioned method to specify an alternative lookup reference). You should also take into consideration if the source data actually has intentional duplicate values for account names, such as branch offices with only a different address.

Check out this article for step-by-step instructions on how to import accounts and contacts from a single file. But what if you need to perform the same type of import, only you’re not dealing with accounts and contacts? Say, importing data to custom entities with a parent-child relationship, like “event” and “event attendee”? No problem, you can build a data map just like the “For Generic Contact and Account Data” one, by leveraging the multi-entity data file import mapping feature.

How much data is too much?

Even if you are importing only into a single target entity, there’s a good chance that you’ll cross the line of allowed maximum size of the import file for the Import Wizard, which is 8 MB. While the XML data import templates available for download from the CRM UI provide very nice features for ensuring the input data is in the correct format, they have the downside of increasing the file size considerably. Compared to an Excel file (xls, xlsx) the size of a file saved in the Office 2003 XML file format can easily be tenfold.

One potential way to get around this limitation is to zip up your import files. You can read the requirements for the zip file contents here, but in general your everyday import files should be zip compatible without any extra tricks. This is actually how the multi-entity data file imports are also handled, as there will only be the possibility of uploading a single file into the Import Wizard to be processed, so you’ll need to package your import files into a zip archive.

In addition to the source data files, you can also include attachments into a zipped import file. Yes, the Import Wizard does support attachment import as well. You’ll need to be careful with the data structure, so have a look at this article for specifications on how to Import attachments with notes. Keep in mind that the 8 MB file size limit does still apply here, so a large number of big file attachments may not be a fun task to perform throug the Import Wizard.

Field and value mapping made easier

If you are working with a data set that contains several picklists with lots and lots of values, mapping them could potentially consume a lot of your time. The first thing you want to make sure is that there are matching values in the CRM picklist fields (nowadays known as option sets) for all the distinct values available in your source columns. Auto mapping will do the heavy lifting for you and match the source and target values as long as they are identical in both. One thing you may not initially notice while mapping the data, though, is that the Import Wizard will also automatically append the list of values in the option sets if it encounters new source values. While it sounds like a neat feature, this may mean you end up with an unexpected set of values, duplicates with slight differences in spelling, breaking workflows or plugins due to mismatch of value ID’s etc. In my opinion, it’s much better to plan ahead and be in the driver’s seat of how your CRM is customized, even if the Wizard offers powerful but dangerous new features that can extend the schema with new fields or even entities.

When you’re working with development, test/QA and production environments, performing the same data mapping procedures time and time again could quickly become a very tedious task. Not only that, but the chances of making a mistake in the process of mapping the fields and values becomes ever more likely if you have to repeat a manual task like that. Luckily Dynamics CRM allows you to save your data maps after you create them (and before you start the actual import job), so be sure to take advantage of this feature. Of course, saving your data map into a test server won’t provide you with that data once you move to production. That’s where the export/import feature of data maps comes in handy. Just create your field mapping once and then take it with you to the next organization you’re working on.

More handy improvements in the Wizard

There used to be limitations on some of the entity fields which you weren’t allowed to update in previous versions. A common pain point was the inability to directly set the record owner, so you had to import this information in a temporary field and perform bulk updates on the records after the import. This limitation has now been removed and you’re free to assign the records directly to users or even teams.

Another caveat of the Import Wizard was that you weren’t allowed to set the state of the imported records, meaning you couldn’t easily import inactive records for historical purposes. Well, now you can, so no more need to leave out information on past activities with your customers, just because you don’t want to re-send all your emails to get them appear as closed activities. Just set your activity status as completed, import opportunities as won/lost or whatever status it is you require.

One thing to note while importing records is that the status change will actually take place after record creation. Why is this important? Well, the closing event will trigger workflows you may have in the target system. Also with the new Activity Feeds functionality introduced in the Q4 2011 update, there’s a chance you may have activity feeds rules in place that will spam your import actions all over the personal wall of your CRM users. Since no one wants to see hundreds of “activity X closed” notifications in their activity feed, be sure to remember to deactivate all rules which could wreak havoc on your brand new internal collaboration channel.

How about update existing?

While creating new records with the CRM 2011 Import Wizard is supported, updating existing records isn’t. In case you would like to only import some new fields for existing customers, by using an identifier field like email address or customer number to locate the records to be updated inside the CRM database, you’ll need to look for alternatives to the Wizard.

It is supported to perform an “export for import” extraction of data from Advanced Find that provides you an Excel sheet you can import back to update records (by selecting “make this data available for re-importing by including required column headings” option). However, unless you’re willing to dump all your records into this Excel and then match them against your import file with your custom ID field by using a tool like Access, to get the corresponding GUID’s, this won’t be the tool you are looking for.

I guess you could also create a temporary child entity for the target entity, then import new records here with the required lookup reference linking them to the parent, followed by a set of workflow magic that would transfer the required values from child to parent. It all depends on how much effort you’re willing to put in working with the out-of-the-box data import tool.

Beyond the Import Wizard: ISV solutions

There will always be many data migration needs that simply cannot be covered with a wizard like application, no matter how much Microsoft would improve the feature set of the Dynamics CRM Import Wizard. At some point it would have so many parameters and options that it would no longer resemble a wizard at all. Since the out-of-the-box functionality has to remain approachable for the “normal” user who just wants to get a simple Excel list uploaded into the system, I’m pretty certain that the market for 3rd party solutions is not going to go away anytime soon.

Instead of rooting for one particular vendor, I’m going to provide a list of the data import solutions that I’m aware of and let you evaluate which one best fits your needs.

• Scribe Insight
• InaPlex Inaport
• CRM Extensions Import Manager
• Starfish ETL
• eOne SmartConnect
• QuickBix Integration Suite
• …and many more

There’s lots of neat things included in the update, such as multi-category charts, user access auditing, lookup and date fields for dialogs, ignoring null values and inactive records in duplicate detection rules etc. Have no doubt, though, this release will be remembered from the Activity Feeds, so let’s proceed straight to them.

More than just an accelerator for CRM

Microsoft has split the delivery method of the Activity Feeds functionality into two tiers. The platform level changes are delivered with Update Rollup 4, which brings us a selection of new default entities, such as the feed Post. These will provide the building blocks not only for the visible Activity Feeds released now but also web services API enhancements, which are covered in the 5.0.7 update of the SDK.

The Update Rollups can nowadays be considered pretty much as “business as usual” hotfixes like the ones released for other Microsoft products, both on server and client side, as they are delivered through the common Microsoft Update mechanism. Testing and planning for the Rollups is of course very much recommended still, as significant changes can be included in them, and yes, they do occasionally break compatibility between versions. Furthermore, the Update Rollup 5 required for Activity Feeds to function cannot be uninstalled if things go wrong.

Anyway, unlike the hotfixes that can be expected to be installed on almost all CRM environments, the Activity Feeds user interface components will probably remain missing from many instances. Why? Because there is no automatic delivery method for them, unless you are using a CRM Online environment that has been provisioned after the R7 release became available. You see, Activity Feeds still are kind of like an accelerator package, as the solution file will need to be downloaded from the Dynamics Marketplace and installed by the system administrator.

Not even installing the solution file and publishing the customizations is enough – you still need to configure them. The menu item for “What’s New” will appear in the UI after the solution installation, but none of the entities in your CRM have yet been enabled for Activity Feed posts. To do this, you’ll need to navigate to Settings and go to Activity Feeds Configuration menu. Create a new Post Configuration record for each entity that you wish to relate posts to. The configuration UI of the solution is not too nice, as you’ll actually need to use the logical name of the entity rather than the display name. So, to enable the new functionality for the user entity (which is the very first thing you must do!) is enter the value “systemuser” and click save. Make sure you check the box for “enable walls for this type of record form” and don’t forget to publish the entity’s customizations after clicking on save.

What’s a “wall”? If you’re on Facebook (and who isn’t), you’ll know this refers to the place where the posts related to a user will be displayed in a descending chronological order. Now, in CRM it’s not only users that can have walls, but any entity for which you have created a Post Configuration entry for. Even your custom entities, like “project” or “event” can be set to have their own Wall. However, bare in mind that not all the system entities are supported for the Activity Feeds functionality, so you can’t have a discussion related to, say, competitor or product records (which kind of sucks, as those are some very common topics for employee discussion around the water cooler, but guess you’ll still need to get away from your desk every now & then). For a complete list of supported system entities, see this page on the SDK.

As you can see from the image above, the wall is actually a web part that is presented on a new tab, that is located before the first default tab (general). The tab will be collapsed by default and the form actually scrolls to the general tab right after the form script is loaded, so a user may not notice anything new on the form. However, if you click on the anchor on the left side navigation, the Record Wall will be revealed in all its glory. Here the user will have the option of adding the record into his list of followed CRM records, see who else is following it, and of course post an update on the wall. (By the way: if you have multiple forms per entity, you’ll need to add the Record Wall web parts manually, by following these instructions.)

There’s also a Personal Wall that shows the user all the content from followed records, and that’s the first entry visible on the updated sitemap for Workplace. What’s really nice is that you have a link right after the “What’s New” header, which will allow you to pop up the wall in a new window. This way you can have the feed view quickly available for you at any time, no matter with which CRM entities you are currently working on in the main application window.

Furthermore, every user has a User Record Wall, which would be identical to the concept of a Facebook profile page. Sorry, no timeline design available here yet!

Not just for mindless chatter: business logic for Auto Posts

If all that Activity Feeds provided was the ability to chat with your colleagues or manually post updates related to records, then it would have a tough time competing with established enterprise microblogging apps like Yammer. Luckily the Dynamics CRM platform can offer much more than that. By allowing certain events related to CRM records to generate content for the Activity Feeds the system can actually serve as a tool that removes the need for you to email information about business events or type updates into a microblogging app. A traditional way to demonstrate the CRM workflows has been to create email alerts on closed opportunities, but now you can reduce the clutter in your inbox by moving these into the right context (opportunity form) with the ability for users to comment and see others’ comments.

The way to configure what gets posted on the walls is through the Activity Feeds Rules menu in the settings area. It’s here where you can enable or disable rules that have been tied to certain events, such as qualification of a new lead, case routed to a queue, appointment closed for an opportunity and so on. If you follow the record that these events have been associated to, you’ll see a pre-formated Auto Post on your personal wall after the event takes place.

Great, so how do I create new Post Rule Configuration records? Well, unfortunately, you don’t. You see, all the entries visible in the list have been created as the result of enabling Activity Feeds for an entity. There is no UI available for creating new rules, nor modifying existing rules – all you can do is change the status. If you want to have different events triggering Auto Posts, you’ll need to either use a workflow rule or plug-ins. Here’s a quick example of a workflow that executes every time a new contact is created, checks whether the parent account relationship type is “customer” and then proceeds with creating a Post record with the contact details inserted as dynamic text. Note that the RegardingObjectId is set to the account and not the contact record. This is very important, since a new contact will not have any users following it at the time the record is created into the database, so the Auto Post would only show on the Record Wall but not the users’ Personal Walls.

As we see from this example, it makes all the difference what kind of a following strategy the CRM users adopt. How to get the right amount of posts in the feed, without missing out on any important pieces of information? Also, how to handle the process of unfollowing? There’s a limit to 5000 records a user is allowed to follow, and managing a list as long as that will require some planning.

I also tried this the other way around, with a workflow rule that would be triggered based on User Posts creation, which would email the post text to a user, but apparently that particular field is not  compatible to be inserted into workflow generated records (even though the workflow editor allows you to select it). Also, it’s worth noting that even with plug-ins you can only create Auto Posts with text content, not the rich XML content that the out-of-the-box Activity Feeds Rules utilize to present their information with customized images and other tricks. Furthermore, while the default Auto Posts will be presented in the user’s language, this is not available for custom Auto Posts yet.

So, is this now Social CRM?

No, not quite yet. The first release of the Activity Feeds solution for Dynamics CRM is squarely focused on introducing the data model and user interface components needed for sharing information in a more modern, social way inside the corporate firewalls. The customer (the first letter in the CRM acronym) has not yet been invited to be a contributing member in this internal community, as all the data in the Activity Feeds will be from either employees or  internal business rules configured in CRM. To really step outside of the traditional silo of CRM and adapt it to the world we now live in, where the customers are A) social and B) in charge, a lot more will be needed. To get an idea of Microsoft’s roadmap for developing their Dynamics CRM platform to become a business hub that supports input from external communities, be sure to check out this presentation on Slideshare, especially the “Beyond Wave 1″ part.

However, as there is an API available already today, expect to see new 3rd party ISV solutions that tap into the CRM feeds and push content from external networks right into your lead or contact walls when they post content on Twitter. Technically it’s not difficult at all to achieve, but a more important aspect to consider is how you will make that customer contributed data add value to the CRM users and enable them to gain new insights based on it. It’s a fire hose of data out there in the social networks and online communities, so simply linking up your CRM system to that data pipe may not be a smart choice.

Even for the internal communities use case, it’s very important to remember that just because you built it, doesn’t mean they’ll come. In this case “they” means the CRM users, who shouldn’t just be expected to automatically adopt the new social features of Dynamics CRM, even though they have been installed into their system. Not only will the new ways of working require support from top management, a plan on how & why these new information management capabilities will be leveraged, but also a conscious effort from Dynamics CRM system customizers and administrators on making these new features approachable, usable and relevant for the everyday tasks that the CRM users need to perform.

Thanks to the Activity Feeds in Dynamics CRM, we now have a lot more toys to play with and certainly a lot to learn about them. So, what are you waiting for? Let’s get to it!

You pass!

During the test I did have to go back to some 15 questions I marked for review during the initial round and spend a fair amount of time rolling the virtual dice in my head. Well, not exactly like that, but rather trying to reverse engineer the process of how the people at Microsoft might have designed the application to function in different scenarios and what reasons and practical limitations lead them to these choices. While many of the questions could well be taken from real life use cases, the way in which you need to be able to solve these problems in the exam is quite far from the normal routines. In real life you experiment, investigate and iterate, whereas here you’ve only got a few words to work on; each of them possibly containing a hint towards the right answer, or alternatively loaded with the malicious intent of leading you astray.

Just because you’ve been working with the Dynamics CRM application on a daily basis for several years, doesn’t guarantee you would pass the MB2-868 exam. Even MVP’s have failed on their first attempt, so beware! The amount of product information covered in the Applications exam is growing all the time as new features are introduced and with CRM 2011 there’s a lot to read, let alone to try out in the application itself. At least when I was going through the training materials, the most time consuming part was when I constantly kept coming up with new ideas about “hey, this is something we must also set up for our presales demos”. Even though I had started digging deeper into the new version functionality already before the beta of CRM 2011 was released (and compiled my findings into two “what’s new” presentations you can find here: pt1 and pt2), preparing for the Applications exam made me realize how much of pre-2011 functionality you also need to keep in mind at the same time.

So, tell me then, how important is it to remember by heart from which menus a particular standard report can be executed, when they’re A) all available from the Reports menu anyway and B) usually available in the right context for the user? Or what about studying all the different record statuses in which certain actions can be performed, when we’ve got a graphical, context sensitive ribbon persistently available in the UI, gently reminding us of the things we can and cannot (greyed-out/hidden buttons) perform at any given time? Like it or not, this is the direction that these multiple choice exams tend to drift towards: detailed information that’s perhaps nice to know, but won’t matter much in terms of real life skills required while actually using Dynamics CRM.

If we look at Microsoft’s target audience definition for this exam, it reads:

This exam is intended for individuals that plan to implement, use, maintain, or support Microsoft Dynamics CRM 2011 in their organization.  The exam is also intended for service schedulers, administrators, office managers, CEOs, and consultants who want to demonstrate foundational understanding of the application functionality.

Quite a broad definition then. If you as an end-user or administrator are interested in learning details about the default functionality available in Dynamics CRM 2011, by all means do attend the training courses and download the training manuals from CustomerSource. They contain a wealth of useful information and some nice exercises you can try out in, for example, your very own 30-day trial environment of CRM Online (which may offer you quite a different “vanilla” training environment than your customized production CRM server). However, don’t worry too much about “demonstrating foundational understanding” of Dynamics CRM through the MB2-868 exam. The system is far easier to use in everyday life than how the exam questions portray it, so you’re better off in directing that time and energy towards exploring the possibilities that Dynamics CRM gives you in customizing the system to fit your business data and to automate your business processes. That’s where the real ROI of your CRM system is hiding, after all.

For those of you who need to take the exam due to MS partner competency requirements, the MB2-868 exam page section “skills measured”  is a useful document to keep by your side when browsing through all the CRM 2011 applications MOC courseware. Checking the topics enables you to better balance your study efforts, to make sure you’re not just diving deep into one module and neglecting another. This is how everything counts:

• Marketing automation: 27%
• Sales management: 30%
• Service management: 24%
• Service scheduling: 19%

For example, service scheduling and service contract management have been standard features of the Dynamics CRM product for a long time, yet I find it hard to discover real life use cases of customers having deployed these processes into production use. Either the organization has initially tried using them, but later given up due to the mismatch of the built-in process flow and solved their problem with custom entities instead, or then they’ve gone down the customization route directly. As a result of this, it’s not necessarily an area that CRM consultants would be too knowledgeable on, when considerably more of their time is spent configuring and training the sales process in CRM.

Does this then mean that these modules should have less emphasis in the exam? Well, at the end of the day, probably not. If you look at things from Microsoft’s point of view, it is in their best interest to have CRM consultants be aware of all the different functionality that their product contains out of the box. Precisely because their common tendency might be to focus on what they already know best and leave out the rest of the story when discussing with potential and existing Dynamics clients, it’s actually a fair exercise to make these specialists step outside of their comfort zones for a while during the certification process. Sure, you may not need the information in the projects you’re working on right now, but you need to have the ability to get up to speed quickly when duty calls.

Finally, here’s a few practical tips from me on how to prepare for the CRM 2011 Applications exam:

• Goal management: understand what values are recorded on which entity, the impact of ownership, fiscal year settings.
• Teams and queues: this is where most of your answers based on experience from CRM 4.0 will guide you down the wrong path, so forget what you know and learn the new CRM 2011 way of working.
• Charts and dashboards: what the user can do vs. what the admin can do, this should actually be pretty much 101 stuff if you’re well in grips with the solution management side of things. However, you shouldn’t forget about SSRS entirely: open each default report at least once and try them out, just to refresh your memory.
• Marketing lists: Try building a few dynamic marketing lists to see how they’re different from the traditional static ones, and also how to mix’n match them.
• Scheduling: you’ll need to understand how capacity management and resource selection rules work from the service and the resource perspectives, there’s just no way around this.
• Record statuses: trust me, things that require no attention from you in everyday life will be very important here, so play around with as many different entities as you have time for and examine what actions are available on the ribbon in which record status.
• RTFM: knowing how the system works is not good enough, as some of the questions are clearly derived from how the use cases are described in the training material, and in these kind of exams every word in the questions and answers is significant. So, don’t just play around with the fun tools built into CRM 2011 or trust what a lecturer tells you – also read through the MOC PDF’s.

And just to close things off, some useful links for seeing what others think about MB2-868:

• MS Dynamics CRM 2011 MOC training courses and…
• MS Dynamics CRM 2011 Certification Tracks and Exams by Adam Vero
• Dynamics CRM 2011 Certifications by Richard Knudson
• Exam MB2-868: CRM 2011 Applications Preparation tips by Mani Ramachandran

Let’s take a look at some of the recent news surrounding the world of CRM, to gather evidence of where we might be heading towards.

Takeways from #SFDC #DF11

On the last week of July, Salesforce.com held their annual Dreamforce conference in San Francisco. As a person working with Dynamics CRM for a living, it’s a good idea to keep an eye on where the other CRM solution providers are focusing their development efforts on, and SFDC certainly is one of, if not the main competitor that Microsoft has their eyes on. In his opening keynote, Marc Benioff made it very clear where his team’s focus is on, and that is the concept of a social enterprise. I’ll spare you from the marketing flare and instead present a few screenshots captured from the presentation, highlighting the new feature announcements.

So, what’s in the pipeline for Salesforce.com during the winter 2011/2012 then?

• Contact profiles will be “social enabled” by default, showing public feeds from networks were your customers are present
• Data.com, previously known as Jigsaw, will power the social data discovery and data import, in combination with D&B’s database
• Chatter Now extends the functionality from microblogging to instant messaging with presence information
• You can invite your key customer contacts to specific Chatter networks, or even publish Chatter on the web as a customer service channel
• Radian6′s technology will monitor those customer complaints that are not targeted at your helpdesk, enabling you to jump in on the conversation
• All of this follows you everywhere you go, as touch.salesforce.com promises to deliver a HTML5 client that’ll make your iPad or smartphone a full-fledged social CRM control panel

Even if you leave away some of the over-the-top scenarios presented, like friending the Coke machine or having network routers tweet you on social networks, it’s still clear that with all the promised functionality at your fingertips (once it’s available and working in a reliable manner), the possibilities for you to design and implement new business processes will be dramatically expanded. Whether companies are able to make use of and, more importantly, make money out of these new possibilities is a different question, but it surely does push the boundaries of CRM as we know it.

Social CRM is where it’s at

“Social” certainly is an attractive attribute to include in your product description these days. Gartner, for example, has predicted that the market for Social CRM would reach a total value of one billion dollars by the end of next year. Predicting the future with concrete figures is always a challenge, but it’s even more difficult when people don’t even agree on the definition of the market to be predicted. Several analysts have commented on Gartner’s reports, starting from reminders that an SCRM market may not really exist yet, or they have questioned Gartner’s choice of products included in their SCRM Magic Quadrants as including applications aimed at other functions than what CRM systems traditionally are about – managing customer information, that is.

Aside from the numbers, an important prediction that Gartner made is that the Social CRM market (however you define it) would begin to see a shift towards more integrated platforms over the initial point solutions that have emerged during the first wave of the social business boom. In the age of the cloud, both developing as well as buying and deploying new applications designed for addressing a specific business need can be lightning fast, compared to what the corporate IT projects were like a decade ago. This can easily lead to a situation where individual departments have gone and acquired “shadow” solutions to help them get started on participating in social media, monitoring the buzz around topics and measuring results of their actions. Now, the next step of tying all this back to the customer records in the company’s operational IT systems will often be much more complicated than signing up for the new service initially. A quote from Gartner describes the situation further:

The need for integration will favor more-traditional CRM vendors that add social capabilities. Integration did not matter much when enterprises were just experimenting with social CRM,” Mr. Sarner said. “However, companies are asking for the integration of social data with other customer data within sales, marketing and customer service processes, which will require the integration of social CRM with applications such as a knowledgebase for customer service, multichannel campaign management, sales force automation or e-commerce, Web content and Web analytic applications, master data management, and even back-office applications.

Sounds convincing to me. The first mover advantage is unlikely to be such that it would overshadow all “oldskool” CRM functionality and allow the new players to start building an empire from a clean slate. Gradually we will see everyone adopting the new social paradigm into their product offering, in one form or another.

Upcoming social features for Microsoft Dynamics CRM

We’ve already seen Microsoft lay out their roadmap for new features in the Statement of Direction whitepaper released in May 2011. “Microblogging, business activity feeds and social intelligence” is what we’ve been promised. During the WPC 2011 keynote we saw pieces of this type of functionality utilized in the CRM demo and now we have what appears to be the first official screenshot of the activity feeds leaked out into the open.

So, what we will definitely get is an activity feed of different events taking place inside the CRM database, combined with the ability to post updates and reply to posts. If you’ve used Twitter, Yammer, Chatter or any other microblogging app, you should know the drill by now.

How about the social world outside the firewall? Traditionally Microsoft has preferred steering clear from committing to any specific 3rd party networks. For example, the Outlook Social Connector does not integrate with Facebook or LinkedIn out-of-the-box, instead you have to download a separate provider per each network (there’s not too many of them, btw). With the release of Windows Phone 7.5 (Mango), Microsoft now appears to feel comfortable enough with the top 3 networks of Facebook, Twitter and LinkedIn, by integrating them right into the core of their product: the People Hub. Check out the picture on the left and tell me if you spot a slight resemblance in the two feed UI’s… If this is anything to go by, I’m expecting to see the same three brands bundled into Dynamics CRM’s default integration points.

As for the rest of Microsoft’s social CRM plans, we’ll need to wait and see if there will be any deeper integration to services such as social media monitoring or whether the Redmond folks simply decide to support and promote some of their partners’ solutions more heavily. In the age of cloud & social, it’s still all about developers, developers and developers, which is why a healthy ISV ecosystem remains a crucial asset to cherish.

My feed is your feed and your feed is mine

Not too long ago, Yammer was accusing Salesforce.com for being a copycat when releasing their Chatter product. Now at Dreamforce ’11, the mascots for both companies were holding hands under the “Friends With Benefits” slogan of the campaign that announced integration between Yammer and Chatter. Well, you know what they say: keep your friends close and your enemies even closer.

Yammer does already integrate with SharePoint. By the time Microsoft incorporates the Activity Feeds into the core product of Dynamics CRM, I assume there will be a full API available for 3rd parties to tap into the event data of the feeds. Therefore I’m expecting that we’ll also see Yammer providing a solution for Dynamics CRM integration.

Where does this feed actually belong to?

Looking at Microsoft’s big stack of software products, it’s not so very obvious where all this new type of social activity functionality should be built into. SharePoint is the collaboration platform, Lync is for unified communications and, well, CRM could be considered as the solution for managing interactions and processes related to customers. So, tell me then, what specific application will the Microsoft end-user be using when he engages in the types of activities that a Yammer user has already grown accustomed to? “All of them” is not a very good answer, because that leaves you without a name to assign to the activity. Without a name, you don’t have a brand, and unless you have a brand, it’s very difficult to make anything stick. Just like with CRM implementation projects, user adoption is the golden key which you will need for unlocking the door that leads to ROI from your social business initiatives.

Much of the functionality needed as the building blocks for a social enterprise is already included in Microsoft’s portfolio today. The thing that is missing is the super glue to attach all the pieces together and make them really stick, i.e. work effortlessly in real life business scenarios. I’m not tallking about the “regular” glue, which in IT terms would mean configuration, customization, development and integration work. With enough skills available you can do great things with the stack already today and build the solutions needed. What the new, cloud-based players on the field of social business are promising is however a different value proposition: products built for the exact scenarios that companies encounter when dealing with their customer base in this world gone social. A solution you can just grab and start using.

It has taken Microsoft a massive effort to work its way into the current position, where their crown jewel productivity tools are available as cloud services you can subscribe to. The next shift that will need to take place is the integration of these services into a whole that is greater than the sum of its parts. Instead of just using traditional business applications like SharePoint or CRM, the new business processes for the social enterprise need a technical foundation that effortlessly extends beyond the corporate firewall and reaches the conversation that is taking place “out there”. Not so easy to achieve with on-premises building blocks alone, but hey, that’s when you gotta go “all in” to you know where…

Social business remains a hot topic and Microsoft will add some of the much needed social aspects into the next release of Dynamics CRM. Activity feeds á la Twitter, Facebook, Yammer, Chatter and the likes will be integrated also into Dynamics CRM, as can be seen in the demo dashboard below.

In addition to allowing status updates from colleagues, the functionality we saw earlier in CRM 4.0 as the Business Productivity Newsfeed Accelerator (though merely a report) and then later on implemented through 3rd party add-ons like Vibe from Sonoma Partners, now looks to become a core part of Dynamics CRM platform. I’d imagine these automatic feed items are still posted as a result of record updates triggering workflow process rules, like in the aforementioned examples.

Office 365 will become the new home of CRM Online in Q4 as it integrates into the same infrastructure. In addition to subscription management and authentication provider improvements, there’s some interesting benefits for CRM in the Lync integration provided from the Office 365 cloud. No longer will you be limited to only have chats and video conferencing with your colleagues. If the customer contacts in your CRM database are also users of Office 365, their presence information can be federated across organizations (if they choose to, I’m sure) and presented right inside the CRM forms, allowing you to reach out to them through Lync with one click.

Azure Data Market is now being marketed as the “one-stop shop for premium data and applications”. The Dynamics CRM demo included a custom button called Azure Enrich, which went out into the Data Market, opened up D&B’s company database and provided the missing address information for the Contoso account. I guess the big news here isn’t how you can retrieve company data through the API, but rather what the existence of a central marketplace can actually do in making data available to a whole new scale of potential customers, from a variety of global players. The cloud is not only for apps anymore.

In the WPC keynote demo we saw again a Windows Phone 7 client for Dynamics CRM. This time there was also one new screen included, which presents the same activity feed information (labeled as “records feed”). It doesn’t quite compete with the other flashy WP7 Mango demos presented later on in the session, but definitely a useful way for mobile workers to keep an eye on what’s going on in the CRM database while outside the office.

Oh, and of course there was the tablet app built for running Dynamics CRM on a Windows 7 slate. With all the Metro UI goodness, I’m wondering what the out-of-the-box experience could actually become like once we reach Windows 8…

Microsoft confirmed already last fall that also Dynamics CRM Online will eventually be migrated onto the same Online Services Delivery Platform as Office 365. In addition to being a natural fit with SharePoint and Exchange, CRM Online should also gain benefits into both its subscription management as well as authentication options as a result of  this migration. However, there’s no official timeline or feature set communicated yet, so we’ll have to keep waiting possibly until Q4/2011, when the next update for Dynamics CRM has been scheduled to become available, as announced in the latest Statement of Direction document.

Ever since Dynamics CRM 2011 was launched with built-in SharePoint document library integration, there’s been a bit of anxiety on when this functionality could be leveraged with the cloud versions of CRM and SharePoint. Since BPOS was built on SharePoint 2007, it wasn’t possible to utilize the Microsoft Dynamics CRM 2011 List Component for Microsoft SharePoint Server 2010 in the Online environment. This meant that setting up a document management enabled trial environment with CRM Online required an on-premises SharePoint server, which wasn’t too convenient. Nor was it for any customer looking to go “all in” with their MS applications. Oh well, but now that Office 365 is available, that’s all a thing of the past, isn’t it?

Wrong! Despite of the better together marketing message surrounding Office 365 and CRM Online, there’s actually still no way to integrate the SharePoint document libraries with the CRM List Component. Sure, you can upload the solution file into a SharePoint Online site and publish it. What you cannot do in the Online version is to take care of the second part of the installation steps, which involves the AllowHtcExtn.ps1 PowerShell script,used for enabling .htc file extensions to be served from SharePoint.

Why is this important? Because without the .htc support, you can’t actually do anything with the document library. The folder creation can be configured and it flows through as it should when accessing the Documents menu for a new record, such as an account. However, after that you are presented with the following prompt:

“The action buttons are disabled because the SharePoint server that you are using does not allow HTC component files. To enable the buttons, contact your system administrator.” What this means is that the document library will be rendered nicely inside the CRM entity form, but you can’t upload any documents to it. Clicking on the buttons does nothing, as they’re all disabled.

How about on the SharePoint side of things then? We can see that the entity specific document libraries are created and also the corresponding folders for each record where the document location has been defined. We can also of course use the native SharePoint UI to upload documents into the library.

Then when you access the corresponding record through CRM, you can see that the document does appear in the library. But with all the controls disabled, you again cannot do anything with it, like open the document, for example. How nice…

How did we end up in this situation where the latest and greatest cloud offerings from Microsoft are not working together like they obviously were inteded to? That’s a very good question. The problem with Office 365 SharePoint Online limitations and their implications to Dynamics CRM document management functionality has been a known issue throughout the whole beta phase of Office 365. There are several threads on the Office 365 community forums regarding this. Yet the response from Microsoft has been that this cannot be resolved by GA (general availability) of Office 365 (as in “today”), but rather we’ll have to wait for the first service update, probably. Come on! How can 6 months not be enough to allow one .htc file to perform its work and provide the document integration between CRM and SharePoint? I find it extremely strange that the product management behind Office 365 has allowed such a flaw to be included in the initial release version.

Of course eventually this issue will be solved and we’ll be able to experience the full document management process flow with Microsoft’s cloud applications.