Book Review: Teach Yourself Microsoft Dynamics CRM 4 in 24 Hours

Introduction

This is the second book SAMS asked me to review, authored by Anne ‘The CRM Lady’ Stanton. Again, the only compensation for the review is the book itself. In terms of knowing Anne, she is someone most of the CRM MVPs know given she used to be one, although I’ve only met her once at Convergence where she presented, at Microsoft’s invitation, on the benefits of the xRM platform for business.

I did indirectly assist Guy Riddle with the chapter on security (Chapter 5), bouncing ideas for subject matter (the writing was all his though). Also, I just discovered, I was quoted at the end of Chapter 1 from my What is CRM? post. We at least know Anne uses great references and has excellent tastes in blogs ;)

Overview of the Book

Anne Stanton and other well known figures in the CRM community (Irene Pasternack, Darren Liu, Curt Spanburgh, Guy Riddle and Scott Head) have compiled a book to give a foundation on what Dynamics CRM is about and what can be done with it. The book is broken down into 24 chapters (or ‘hours’ as they’re called). The thinking being that reading each chapter and doing the exercises and quizzes should take about an hour.

I have not road-tested the claim but each ‘hour’ is about 20 pages long so if you’re looking for something to read ‘in the gaps’, this should work well. To get the most benefit from the book, I’d recommend having a demo version of CRM to play with as you read. This probably means you’ll spend more than an hour on each chapter but you always learn the quirks from doing rather than being told. Also, as Anne admits herself, the screenshots are not the greatest. You have small font, small book form-factor and greyscale all conspiring to make you lean in about 2 inches from the page so you can see what is happening. Having a demo system in full colour on a monitor eliminates this issue.

If you have access to PartnerSource, you can download the demo VPC, or you can sign up for a trial of CRM Online.

Book Structure

The book is grouped into six parts:

• Business Use of Dynamics CRM
• Structure of Dynamics CRM
• Getting Started
• Using Dynamics CRM for Support
• Reporting
• Expanding the Application

This is good if you want to focus on one particular area e.g. ‘how does reporting work?’ or ‘when the IT department tell me they can’t expand the product, are they lying to me'?’. However, as explained below, some areas do overlap so look at the specific hours before writing off a whole section.

Part 1: Business Use of Dynamics CRM

Comprising of:

• What is Dynamics CRM?
• The Vocabulary of CRM
• Matching Business Process to CRM
• Infrastructure of CRM

Rather than leap straight into the technology, Anne starts with the business process. So many technology projects fail to consider the alignment to business and it is essential for CRM projects which are as much about change management as they are about technology. CRM is simply a tactic to meet a strategy. To put it in the language of the book, Anne talks about the importance of considering people, process and technology for the success of a CRM project.

She then moves on to describe how CRM describes elements of business process and how this process can be captured for the purposes of managing it with CRM. She even puts in a sample business case at the end of hour 3 to get the reader used to putting on the consultant’s hat. All very practical.

She ends the chapter talking about the infrastructure needed to support CRM. While this is very high level (no direct mention of the requirement of Active Directory for authentication) it does give a good overview of the deployment options for CRM, what Microsoft call ‘The Power of Choice’.

Parts 2-3: Sales and Marketing Plus Some Other Bits

Part 2 comprises of:

• Security
• Capturing, Importing and Converting Leads
• How Accounts Work
• The Sales Funnel (pipeline)
• Marketing Campaigns

Part 3 comprises of:

• Capturing and Converting Leads
• Configuring the system (Changing forms and views)
• Capturing Contacts and Activities
• Emailing from CRM
• Doing Word Mail Merges From CRM
• Outlook Integration
• How to Set up Workflows

While Part 2 is labelled as ‘The Structure of Microsoft Dynamics CRM’ and Part 3 as ‘Getting Started Using the Software’, there is obviously some crossover and overlap here. Both sections have an area describing lead conversion and configuring workflows. One has a section on accounts, while the other has a section on contacts and activities. There is also information in these chapters on importing data into CRM and Mobile Express, although it is not clear where from the part descriptions or hour descriptions.

Despite the taxonomy being a bit confused, the information is excellent and covers the essentials. The only exception I can think of in the entire two parts is a section in the Outlook Integration specifically talking about tracking is missing. The tracking feature of the Outlook client is one of its key value propositions, and while Outlook-CRM synchronisation is discussed, how to track and the ‘regarding’ property of tracking is not. 

Part 4: Support

Part 4 covers all aspects of the support module in CRM and is well contained. If you need to know about how CRM handles tickets/cases, contracts for services and service scheduling, this is three hours well spent.

Part 5: Reporting

This comprises of:

• Using Excel (including how to use Advanced Find)
• Using SRS Reports

Very nicely put together and even covers some of the ‘gotchas’ such as dynamic exports not working for online without the use of the Outlook client. You could spend an entire hour (or day!) just on Advanced Find but this definitely gets you on the right track for your own learning and discovery. Similarly the SRS section covers the essentials. It even mentions the little-known features of using the reports mechanism for displaying files and web sites and creating report snapshots.

Part 6: Expanding the Application

This comprises of:

• Integration to Other Applications (including CRM’s importing tools)
• Useful Add-ons
• CRM as a Development Framework

If you wanted to boil down ‘CRM 4 Integration Unleashed’ into one hour, the first chapter in this section would be it. It talks at things to consider in an integration rather than specifics, although vendors for general integration and, more specifically, integration to Dynamics GP are listed.

The add-ons section covers areas of CRM which are generally considered ‘lightweight’ out of the box and it discusses third party add-ons to ‘beef up’ the functionality. Overall it does a pretty good job of covering the gaps. The only criticism I can lay at its feet is not calling out codeplex in its own section (although it is mentioned in passing) and not listing solutions for product and price list configuration, which can be difficult for businesses which have anything but the most basic of pricing schemes.

The last hour is spent on customisation. Configuration of forms and views was covered earlier in Part 3. This section is all about scripting on the client and server sides. There is no depth here but if you want to know what can be changed, in what way and how, this gives you the high-level concepts. It also mentions the accelerators but does not say where to go (hint: the missing section on codeplex would have covered it).

What I really liked about this section was the section on considering the aspects of CRM which make it a good fit for a development project and when CRM needs additional elements to make it practical. Calling out the key questions to ask makes it easy for a business to decide to go with the ‘CRM team’ or the ‘.NET team’.

Conclusions

Despite my odd complaint, overall this is an excellent book of high quality. If you are looking for ‘deep dive’ this is not the book, and that is hardly surprising given the approach the book takes.

However, if you are new to CRM and want to get an understanding of CRM’s approach, the book does the job. If you are a new user looking to understand the basics of operation, you will not be disappointed. If you are considering using CRM as a development platform and want to know its capabilities and limitations, this is also a great place to start.

Definitely worth the price of entry and if you want a copy here is the link.

Book Review: Microsoft Dynamics CRM 4 Integration Unleashed

Introduction

The good folk at SAMS Publishing asked me to review a couple of books back in November. Having had a baby daughter I didn’t see the email until February and, when the books did arrive, they sat in my ‘to do’ pile for quite a few months. I can only apologise to Andrea and the hard-working team at SAMS and here is the review I promised.

The first book they sent me to review was ‘Microsoft Dynamics CRM 4 Integration Unleashed’ by Marc J. Wolenik and Rajya Vardhan Bhaiya. Given they have just released chapter 15 onto MSDN, which looks at Azure Web Service Integration, a review is probably quite timely.

Incidentally, if you want the sample code from the book, chapter 3 and the index, you can also go here.

As a disqualifier, I know neither of the authors personally and the only compensation I’ve received for this review are the books themselves (which given the delay is response, Andrea may ask to be returned).

The Lay of the CRM Land

The first 100 pages outline the CRM ‘territory’. That is how one extends the application, design considerations such as the available authentication methods and deployment scenarios as well as licensing considerations. Given some of the solutions available at Convergence, this last section on licensing should be a must-read for any development team looking to release a real-time integration piece with Dynamics CRM. While the finer details of licensing are not covered (SPLA implications, for example) the guiding principles are there.

Those Familiar Integration Scenarios

Then, up to page 265, it goes into specific detail about common integration scenarios including:

• Silverlight
• SharePoint
• BI (SQL Analysis Services, SQL Reporting Services and PerformancePoint Services)
• Phone integration (TAPI/SIP/OCS/Cisco Unified CallConnector/c360 CTI)
• Social networking (LinkedIn, Facebook and Twitter)
• Mapping technologies (Microsoft Live Search Maps, MapPoint, Google Maps)

Phone integration piqued my interest given the recent release of the customer care accelerator where you have to develop your own phone integrations but, unfortunately, while high-level concepts were discussed and screenshots were provided for the commercial products, no sample code was provided for TAPI, SIP or OCS.

It is not all doom and gloom though, the BI walks you step-by-step through creating cubes, there is a nice walkthrough, including code, on creating a document store in CRM with SharePoint and also having the Search Center talk to the CRM DB. In fact the SharePoint section appears to be quite comprehensive.

Social Networking provided brief examples for ‘iframing’ the social networks and similarly, if you’re looking for a pointer on embedding a mapping technology into CRM, you’re given the code.

Accelerators

Chapter 11 is a bit of an odd one in that it reviews the accelerators available for CRM on codeplex or, at least, a few of them. Specifically:

• Analytics
• eService
• Event Management
• Extended Sales Forecasting
• Newsfeed Business Productivity
• Notifications

This is not the complete set of accelerators (workflow extensions anyone?) and is pre-customer portal but for the ones listed it reviews their purpose and walks through their installation.

SCOM and VSTS

I don’t know either of these technologies very well, so it is hard to comment on these sections. The SCOM chapter talks about the importance of monitoring CRM performance and walks through installing the CRM 4.0 Management Pack onto SCOM to do this. The VSTS chapter gives a comprehensive sample solution for integrating CRM and Team Foundation Server for case management over 50 pages (that’s 9% of the book!)

Middleware Integration

Pages 405 to 540 talk about integration to middleware solutions such as:

• BizTalk
• Azure (others may object to the classification of Azure as middleware, however it suits my taxonomy for the purposes of the review)
• Scribe

BizTalk has a bit of a reputation when it comes to integration so the sample of linking CRM orders to GP (including code) is great. Sample code is provided for creating an Azure .NET application and showing it in a CRM iframe and Scribe gets a whopping 3 chapters (overview, components and templates). That’s 90 pages of Scribe (15% of the book). If you didn’t know what Scribe was for before reading them, you will afterwards.

Other Integration Tools

The last section talks about other integration tools available including:

• The GP Adaptor (unreleased at the time of writing)
• c360 tools
• Semantra tools
• Nolan
• eOne

This is more of an overview chapter for CRM-GP solutions.

Overall Thoughts

This is not a book of code snippets. Some code is provided in some sections but the primary purpose of this book is to give a plain English overview of common integration scenarios for Dynamics CRM. Given recent changes to the SDK, this is probably a good thing.

The book is designed for people who know how to code but may be unfamiliar with the products being integrated to. In this regard, the book is a resounding success. If you want a general overview of how product x talks to CRM, this is a good place to start. Once you understand how things should be done you may need to look elsewhere for specific code to meet your business need or you simply write it yourself leveraging the examples provided.

If you want a copy of this book, you can buy it here:

Using Google Trends to Predict CRM Market Sentiment

What I present is far from science but more of an interesting observation. For those that don’t know about it, Google have a neat tool called ‘Google Trends’ (http://www.google.com/trends). you basically put in comma separated search terms and Google tells you how popular those terms have been relative to all searches or relative to themselves. For example, if I was looking at MySpace vs Facebook (http://www.google.com/trends?q=facebook,+myspace&ctab=0&geo=all&date=all&sort=0)

I would see that which most of us already know. Facebook is hugely popular compared to MySpace. Here is the interesting bit. Let’s compare this graph to page views for the two sites (http://www.zdnet.com.au/facebook-is-beating-myspace-in-popularity-contest-339290024.htm)

The crossover is in the early part of 2008 in both cases. This is not massively surprising. It makes sense that people wanting to go to these sites would use a search engine like google to find them.

So let’s try something else. How about software sales? how do the sales of Windows XP, Vista and Windows 7 stack up? (http://www.google.com/trends?q=%22windows+xp%22%2C+vista%2C+%22windows+7%22&ctab=0&geo=all&date=all&sort=0)

Well qualitatively it still makes sense in that the order of release matches the order of google hits. While I couldn’t find anything on the sales of “Windows 7” yet, I did find a reference for Windows XP and Vista (http://radar.oreilly.com/2007/05/a-tale-of-two-oses-vista-vs-ma.html)

In this case the transition on Google Trends is around the last quarter of 2006 while the sales graph is first quarter 2007. Not bad.

So now for the CRM bit. We know, according to Gartner that back in 2008, Dynamics CRM was 4th in terms of CRM software revenue (http://www.gartner.com/it/page.jsp?id=1074615) after SAP, Oracle, Salesforce.com and Dynamics CRM. Let’s see how Salesforce.com and Dynamics CRM compare (if you add SAP and Oracle to the query the popularity matches market share but they swamp the results because they are more than just CRM)

Despite being around since 2003, the product used to be called “Microsoft CRM” which is why it is off the radar until the end of 2005 when version 3 came out. Here is the thing, it is slowly gaining ground on salesforce.com, although the rate of gain appears to be slowing. Given the Gartner data is about a year old and given Dynamics CRM got their first million users in 6 years as opposed to 9 years for salesforce.com (http://blogs.technet.com/b/microsoft_blog/archive/2010/06/25/microsoft-by-the-numbers.aspx) it should be interesting times ahead.

How to Find the Total Number of Records in an Account, Contact or Lead view

If you are here, you are probably aware that the most rows you can achieve in a CRM view is 250. Moreover, the views in CRM do not tell you the total number of records. Therefore if, for example, you want to know exactly how many contact records do not have the ‘gender’ attribute filled in (or whether it is male or female) it becomes a tedious process of getting the total number of pages, taking away 1,multiplying by 250 and adding the total number of records on the last page.

Here is a workaround.

Step 1: Create a Marketing List

Step 2: Add Marketing List Members using an Advanced Find Query that mimics the rules of the view in question

Step 3: Click the Find button and Add All Members Returned to the Marketing List

Step 4: Take a Good Look at the Marketing List Members Section of the Marketing List Record

There it is, above the action toolbar, the total number of members in the marketing list; in this case 1785.

Leon’s Quick Codeless Auditing Tool

The workflows in Dynamics CRM 4.0 are very powerful. Here is an example of an auditing tool which can be implemented without code, without additional attributes or additional entities and if you just need an audit log to roll back when people make mistakes, it should do the job.

Step 1: Setting up the Workflow

The workflow is pretty simple. All you do is create a note when a new record is created or when a specific field is changed.

In this case I’m auditing the first name attribute of the Contact record. The details of the note are thus:

That’s 90% of the work now done. We publish and the engine is in place.

Step 2: Make some changes

When we create a new contact or change the ‘First Name’ field, a new note will be created against the contact showing the current value. To determine the previous value we look back through the notes.

If there are extensive notes, we can use Advanced Find

We can even save the Advanced Find as a View and while there is no simple way to access the log through the interface, we can always go to Advanced Find – Saved Views.

Each time you need to audit a new field you just create a new workflow. If you are monitoring many fields, a plugin may be a better option but if you need an audit tool to manage a few key fields and don’t want to spend a lot of time messing about, this should do the trick.

What is Markinson up to?

I came across this article:

http://www.crn.com.au/News/174746,markinson-acquires-new-zealand-crm-vendor.aspx

So far Markinson have acquired Adexio and Acuere (the former Trialta) and now Zeron in New Zealand. What’s the big deal? There are not a huge number of active resellers for SalesLogix in Australia and New Zealand and Markinson seem to be gobbling up a good fraction of the active Sage SalesLogix reseller channel.

Are they just looking for more clout with Sage? No idea but interesting to see what gets bought next.

Review of the April 2010 CRM Statement of Direction

It is that time again when Microsoft throw out the latest statement of direction for CRM for us to glean morsels from. For those interested in reading it, this is where you can download it from.

http://cid-4d66c5ae1389f5d8.skydrive.live.com/self.aspx/Public/Dynamics%20CRM%204.0%20information/CRM%5e_StatementOfDirection%5e_April2010.pdf

Here is my take on the big-ticket news from the document.

Accelerators

The already released Social Networking (Twitter) accelerator and the Partner Relationship Management accelerator also got a plug but there was mention of future accelerators:

• Portal Accelerators: Basically creating a web site, linking CRM and using CRM as a store for the content. Those that went to Convergence this year will have seen the foundation product of this, namely the ADXStudio Portal generation tool for CRM. Microsoft will make a 'lite' version of this available as an accelerator. Imagine you want a web site linked to CRM and don't want to use SharePoint as the CMS, you now have an alternative.


• Customer Care Accelerator: This used to be a standalone set of tools called the Customer Care Framework (CCF). It's now been added to the CRM mix as an accelerator. The good news is this is already out in the wild:

http://blogs.msdn.com/crm/archive/2010/05/07/http-blogs-msdn-com-crm-pages-bio-karen-smith-aspx.aspx

If you have a bunch of old apps that need to talk to each other and don't want to re-create them on a modern platform, then the Customer Care Accelerator is your best friend. The evangelists will tell you it is much more than that i.e. it provides tools for CTI integration single sign-on etc. so feel free to check it out. Understand though this is a framework for development and not a solution as such.

Solutions

Microsoft is starting to play to verticals, leveraging the flexibility of the underlying platform of Dynamics CRM (often marketed as xRM). The first 'toe in the water' in terms of a commercial offering is the Non-Profit solution. This is an Online offering seeking to address common needs of Non-Profits (Donation/Pledge management, Member management etc.).

The downer is this is only available Online which means if you're not in the USA or Canada you're out of luck. However, if you're a partner or customer that think you could really get value from this, talk to Microsoft (if you're a customer, through your partner, if you're a partner through your PAM) as you may be able to get hold of the xml customizations which form the basis for the solution, no promises though.

Integration Tools

The CRM Adapter for GP got another plug. I've written about this before and I have big hopes for it (http://leontribe.blogspot.com/2009/10/dynamics-crm-gp-adapter-is-looking-to.html). Again, this was demonstrated at Convergence and as they are opening the API to it, potentially it could become a Scribe-killer, maybe not now though. For now, its lofty ambitions will have to settle for putting a serious dent in eOne's SmartConnect market.

The tool allows for connection between CRM, GP 10 and GP 2010 in any combination (it will also support CRM 5 when that comes out). Just as an aside, let's say you need a workflow engine to do x to Purchase Orders in GP when y happens in Sales Orders, or you need to replicate your vendors across multiple companies in GP. From what I can tell, this tool will allow you to do it, having source and target as GP, regardless of CRM.

In 2011, Microsoft will also update the adapter to work with AX6 and in 2010-2011 with NAV2009. We then have a workflow engine for those tools as well.

Developer Tools

The SDK has been updated to make life easier for developers. If this is something of interest, crack open the Statement of Direction because, as a non-developer, all I know is you can now use LINQ, there are a bunch of portal integration tools and the line count for setting up a connection to CRM via the web services has been reduced by about 1/10.

International Availability of CRM Online

Rumours abound on this one but Microsoft are getting more and more official on this every day. The Statement of Direction promises it will happen in the second half of 2010, in line with what Kiril said at Convergence. The promise at Convergence was 32 markets. This document commits to 29, of which New Zealand is included but Australia IS NOT! Remember Microsoft, Australians spell most words like Americans, we know who the first President of the USA is but few could name our own first Prime Minister and our dollar is practically 1-1 to the greenback, we are an obvious choice. Make us one of the missing 3 markets.

May's Online Service Pack

• Better integration tools
• Multi-lingual capabilities (I think it is French, Spanish and Portuguese for now, which makes sense for USA and Canada)

Finally a timeframe for CRM '5'

Again, rumours abound on this one and if you were at Convergence you may have heard dates mentioned. However, the Statement of Direction get us close to an official answer. CRM "5" will be released in the second half of 2010. So there you have it, no CRM "5" before July and given the historical release months, I'd say closer to December. Reuben Krippner has also been quoted as saying that Online will come out first followed by On-Premise a little later (see http://www.twitter.com/leontribe for details).

CRM "5" tidbits

An official screenshot of the CRM "5" ribbon! However, it doesn't give away too much. The only things which caught my interest are in the top right corner. 'Global Search' (could this be the holy grail of using a keyword across multiple entities?) and 'Sign Out' (Could this allow us to log in as different users or to different organizations easily and seamlessly?)

Other morsels include:

• A reduction in the number of open screens and clicks
• Allow users to select the views most relevant to their role (custom views at a user level?)
• Configurable SharePoint integration (as opposed to linking them through code) as well as leveraging team management across both products
• More complex territory management
• Graphical visualisation and personalised dashboards
• Better goal-setting and performance management of staff
• Allowing for 'team selling' on opportunities (This could mean team ownership or a 1:N relationship between Opportunities and Users
• They've 'fixed' emailing so you can now attach documents
• Support for recurring activities
• Custom solution management. Likened to the Windows Add/Remove Programs, this will allow solutions to be 'fenced' and added to CRM. Other solutions can build on top of them but now edit them
• Plugins in "5" will be able to be run on the server i.e. we can now run plugins on a hosted solution (and maybe on Online?)