I have just finished a multi-million pound Microsoft CRM 2011 implementation that saw the team building and using every single extension and enhancement that you can do in CRM 2011. It was a pretty large project, with very tight timelines and for a very important client. I even talked to Brad Wilson, Microsoft CRM Product Manager, about the project and what we achieved during his visit to our offices in London. I am now aiming to deliver a series of posts about CRM 2011 that explains and describes some of the functionality, ideas and extensions we delivered for CRM 2011. This will be in a way to give back to the Microsoft dynamics CRM community and also a way to say sorry for being late in posting on my blog recently.
Microsoft Dynamics CRM 2011 Full production version (RTM) launch release date (Release to Manufacturing)
Microsoft has announced that the launch of the new version of Microsoft Dynamics CRM 2011 release date (full production launch release to manufacturing) will be on the 20th January 2011 (20/01/2011).
Dynamics CRM 2011 release date (full production launch release to manufacturing) will be on the 20th January 2011 (20/01/2011).Please click on register now to register free for the event and watch from anywhere in the world.
The source of this information is: http://crm.dynamics.com/online/flash/dynamicswidget.swf
Microsoft Dynamics CRM 2011 Release Candidate installation & reporting services extension components
As you may already know, Microsoft Dynamics CRM 2011 Release candidate (RC) has been released on the 14 December 2010. For more details and to download the release components, please visit the Microsoft Dynamics CRM blog. This post is about the reporting services extension components which some may can get confused between them.
It is important to note that there are two reporting services extension components that come with Microsoft Dynamics CRM 2011 release candidate (RC):
- Microsoft Dynamics CRM 2011 Reporting Services Extension (SRS Data Connector), and
- Microsoft Dynamics CRM 2011 Report Authoring Extension
Both components have to be installed on the Reporting Services Server (if you have it on a separate server from CRM). Both components are installed after Microsoft Dynamics CRM 2011 server release candidate is installed, but the first component is the vital component that is required for creating new CRM Organizations. The SRS Data Connector (first component) is found inside the server component after you unpack its components. You will find it in this location: YourCRM2011ServerBitsFolder\server\amd64\srsdataconnector. The report authoring extension (second component) on the other hand, is a separate standalone installation which you download separately and is not part of the CRM 2011 server redistributable files.
It is important to mention that the CRM 2011 server install will run normally without problems without the SRS Data connector, as is not required for installation. On the other hand, if you try to create a new CRM 2011 organization without the SRS Data Connector installed on your reporting services, you will not be able to do so. You will also find a warning in your CRM 2011 deployment manager if you have not installed the data connector. So normally you would start by installing the CRM 2011 server component and I would advise that the second component to install straight after that should be the SRS Data connector. You can then setup the integration with SharePoint 2010, install report authoring extension and the rest of your components.
Please refer to CRM 2011 release candidate Software Development Kit (SDK) and the CRM 2011 Implementation guide for more details on what each component does, CRM 2011 overall installation planning and best practices you should follow for installing CRM 2011 components and in which order.
Hope you find this post helpful.
Running 64 bit Virtual Machines (VPC) on Microsoft Windows 7, Windows Vista not on Microsoft Windows Server machines using Oracle virtual box
Most recent and future Microsoft server technologies will be running on 64 bit machines (or 64 bit virtual machines) only and there will be no install for 32 bit operating systems. Microsoft products and technologies such as Microsoft Dynamics CRM 2011, Microsoft SharePoint 2010 are already produced for 64 bit operating systems only. If you have a laptop or a PC running Windows vista or windows 7, you will not be able to run virtual machines with 64 bit operating systems on your computer using Microsoft Virtual PC or Microsoft Windows Virtual PC. These Microsoft products are designed to run 32 bit virtual machines only at the moment. Microsoft may decide to get these products developed and upgraded to run 64 bits in the future. Until this happens, many people change their laptops and PC’s operating systems to be windows server 2008 with Hyper V. Microsoft Hyper V is the product that can run 64 bit virtual machines and almost any other virtual machine you have.
I was left in this dilemma, thinking should I switch my laptop to windows server 2008 and do the settings that would make my windows server 2008 operating system look like a workstation (like windows 7) to be able to run virtual machines. Then, I looked at Oracle Virtual box (Oracle VirtualBox) for running 32 and 64 bit virtual machines (i.e. virtual machines with 64 bit operating systems). Oracle virtual box is free, efficient, runs on windows 7 (and I believe vista as well) and works absolutely fine when it comes to running your normal (.vhd) virtual hard disks. You can download and install virtual box and you can then instantly get your .vhd files added to a new virtual box virtual machine. It has most of the features you would expect in a powerful virtualisation software. I definitely recommend trying it (no warranties from me), if you are in a similar situation.
A Note & a Tip:
One tip though. If you ever have problems or errors trying to add a .vhd file to a virtual box virtual machine, try to add your virtual hard disk files (.vhd) to the virtual machine as IDE rather than SATA drives. This was an annoying issue (or a bug may be?) that meant I couldn’t get any of my virtual hard disks to work as long as they are added as SATA drives. Once I add my hard disk files to the Virtual box as IDE drives, I was able to load them perfectly fine and I’ve been running them this way as IDEs since then. Also make sure you install virtual box additions (similar to virtual pc add-ons) to have a smoother virtual machine experience and to have a bag full of options and features added to your virtual hard disk.
Any virtual hard disk file (.vhd) that gets added to a virtual box virtual machine, can still be re-used by windows virtual PC (if the OS is 32 bit obviously), so there is no permanent change to your VHD file has taken place.
CRM 2011 new features highlights: What’s new and Introduction to Microsoft Dynamics CRM 2011 new Productivity functionality, Web Client & development enhancements (part 2)
This post is a continuation of a series of posts about what’s new in Microsoft Dynamics CRM 2011 and introduction to new features in CRM 2011. This series focuses on highlights and general list (bullet points) of new productivity and UI enhancements (UX) in CRM 2011 and it is not aimed as a detailed step by step guide to all dynamics CRM 2011 features. I’m hoping to write in the future more detailed posts about each and every Dynamics CRM feature but at this stage I’m focusing on the main new additions and improvements. Please read the previous post here for the full list of features.
- Charting & Graphs: CRM 2011 comes with loads of charting capabilities and features. You can create a chart or a graphical representation of your data in few minutes and against any entity or group of records. You can then drill into the data represented inside this chart or graph. Drilling into data in charts is another way of navigation in itself. Business users can create charts and graphs themselves and can have their own dashboards without the need of development or developers involvement. Out of these charts, CRM 2011 users can create their own dashboards that would be then made of a group a charts and can have multiple dashboards with a variety of information.
- Navigation enhancement in CRM 2011 include the new Home button which gets you to your homepage from any screen and anywhere you are on the system. There is also the recently visited button next to your home button which has links to all your recently used views and items including recently opened records. You can also pin items in this recently used menu so it will always be in the menu in the future and you can quickly jump to it whenever you need. This is useful when you have an account record for example that you use daily or you will extensively use over a period of time. You pin it to this menu and quickly go to it whenever you want. You also have your most used views so you can jump to them directly with one click.
- Views selection: Another time saving navigation enhancement: You can now select which entity view you want to see before you actually click to open the open the entity. For example, you can click on the arrow next to the Contact entity–> select which view to open as in screen shot below:
- Filtered Views: CRM 2011 now allows filtering of views similar to how excel filters work so you can filter what records to see within the view.
- You have a graph & charting tool next to every view where you can view your records in a form of a chart, graph or any graphical representation you choose. You can also drill into the records in each section of the chart.
- CRM 2011 Ribbon: The new ribbon now allows you to qualify a list of leads (multiple leads) via a button on the ribbon. You can also assign, merge, add to a queue and do a variety of other things to a selection of records of any entity type.
- Connections: A new feature in CRM 2011 where records of different entities can now be connected to each other. So for example, you can now create a connection between a contact and an opportunity, a contact and a user, an account and a competitor. Basically any combination of two records from any two custom or system (customisable) entities can have a connection created between them. So you can now have a grid that shows all records of all entities that have a connection (i.e. related) to a specific record. Almost like a social networking capability for your CRM 2011 records.
- Goals & Goals Managementin CRM 2011: MS Dynamics CRM 2011 now comes with out of the box built-in goal management feature. You can find this in the Sales section, Goals, Goals Metrics and Rollup queries. You can have a parent (main) goal for a department for example and child goals for individuals. You can also aggregate all CRM 2011 goals by individuals into the parent goal to see whether or not you are approaching your goal. Very useful feature for reaching sales targets and managing sales personals targets.
- Queues: Now you can have each and every record in CRM added to a queue. You can add leads to any queue or any other entity. Previously in Dynamics CRM 4.0 you can only add cases to queues but now you can add any entity record to any queue you create.
- Filters: Filters in views are built in CRM 2011 so that you can create a personal/shared view (similar to advanced find) out of a filtered view! Simply, add your filters –> Save this view —> Create a personal view (Advanced find) —> edit filters and add/remove columns —> Save personal view —-> Share the view with your colleagues.
- Process automation and control: Workflows(process) and Dialogs. Workflows in CRM 2011 are now part of Processes. When you go and create a new process you decide which category your process falls under: Workflow or Dialog. Workflows are the standard Dynamics CRM workflows as in CRM 4.0. Dialogs are a completely new addition to CRM 2011. Dialogs are in effect UI scripts or a scripting tool that allows you to create a script with questions (prompts) and allow you to store the answers of these questions. It also allows branching where your dialog process or script changes its direction based on the answers you get from the customer. This is ideal for call centres where you need a structured process and scripts for call centre representatives. It can be used in a variety of other things as well including data entry for example. Responses to questions and answers are stored during the dialog and can be re-used further on in the process (as if they are variables in code), or they can be used to to update a record field value. At the end of your script, you can create, update & assign a record amongst many other steps that you can do.
- Solutions Management: Microsoft Dynamics CRM 2011 has a new concept called solutions management. This is a totally new and unique way to build your own solutions. You can create and save your customisations and then share them with other users and clients. You can create a solution or import a solution created by another company and add it to your organisation. This is ideal for companies and partners who want to produce solutions and sell them on or re-use them as packaged solutions for other projects, sell them on the new Microsoft Dynamics CRM marketplace and so on. There are 2 types of solutions: Managed and unmanaged. A managed solution can be edited only by specific users and if exported and imported at nother organisation, users of the other organisation will not be able to edit or modify your solution. Managed solutions are fully secured and cannot be edited. An unmanaged solution can be edited by any user with an appropriate user role. A solution can have version number, It includes entities customisations, relationships with entities and other components, and security features based on user roles.
- Import and export data: You can now create new entities while importing and you can dynamically create fields to map against source fields in the source data file such as an excel sheet.
- SharePoint integrationbetween CRM 2011 and SharePoint comes now out of the box as a built in feature in CRM 2011 with no development or custom code needed.
- SDK: The new powerful SDK for CRM 2011 has all full support for all the new features in CRM 2011 including Auditing, Security, charts (3D charts by Fetch xml) and much more.
Previous posts is this series:
CRM 2011 Productivity enhancements (Web client, customisations, etc.) (part 1)
I hope this post was of some benefit for some of you. Please feel free to correct any possible mistakes in this post. As always, the post and information in this blog are all provided as is with no warranties and confers no rights.
New Features in Microsoft dynamics CRM 2011. Introduction to CRM 2011 new Customizations & Productivity functionality, Web Client & development enhancements
What’s new in Microsoft Dynamics CRM 2011, Microsoft Dynamics CRM Online 2011 & International worldwide Europe and United Kingdom (UK) CRM Dynamics Online launch. This post tries to answer these questions. The post is the next one in the series and collection of posts that discuss Microsoft dynamics CRM 2011 new features, changes, additions, add-ons and improvements. We discussed in our previous post CRM Outlook client for Microsoft Dynamics CRM 2011 New features, changes, additions and improvements & gave a fairly quick introduction to the CRM Outlook client (you can read the previous post here). This post is focusing on what’s new in Dynamics CRM 2011 Web Client (IE) and CRM 2011 Customizations, configuration and development o f the new Microsoft CRM 2011 version.
The number of additions, enhancements, improvements in CRM 2011 are estimated to be over 500 new features at least. Some new features are fundamental and others are minor changes that are aimed at making the lives of Microsoft CRM Architects, consultants and developers easier, much easier I would say.
Let’s now go through some of the enhancements in CRM 2011 without too much details and I will aim to do more detailed posts in the future on how to work on each main new feature.
- Dashboards: CRM 2011 now has the big, major change which is the Dashboards. You can now build out of the box standard dashboards, graphical dashboards, charts, etc in CRM 2011. Building dashboards has been made easy enough so that business users can build dashboards for themselves without the need of CRM consultants or developers to build them unless they are advanced dashboards. Gone are the days (or at least I hope so) when CRM Consultants had to build dashboards for clients using Asp.net page, user controls a.k. widgets, etc. We can now very easily configure (can’t really call it develop) a dashboard in quick few steps. I think I will have to do a separate blog post to go through CRM 2011 Dashboards in detail.
- Records Navigation: CRM 2011 now has full records navigation in the web clients, so CRM users can just click on the next record or previous record buttons to navigate easily between CRM records especially in case they want to do a specific task on all records one by one. They no longer now need to double click a record, edit it, save it, close and then go back and open the next one. There is simply one button to get you to the next one.
- Headers & Footers: Every form for every entity record in Microsoft Dynamics CRM 2011 now can have footers and headers. Here is a screenshot:
- Sub Grids:You can now build sub grids in CRM web client for drilling further into CRM data.
- Customise Tab: To customise (or customize for my American friends!), you now have a tab on ever entity that allows you to customise it without having to go to the settings –> customisations area as in Dynamics CRM 4.0. Obviously only users who have the relative security roles that allows them to customize entities can see this tab. Normal CRM users will not see this tab if they do not have the related security role.
- Form editor: Forms customisation and editors are now much much simpler really. No more going between several screens to add fields and then go back to the main form to add the field. It is now as simple as drag and drop fields on the form, and as easy as creating a new field while customising the form, there and then. This will definitely lower down the time required for customisations as everything is handled from one screen.
- Multiple Forms per entity: Every CRM 2011 entity now can have one or more forms. Each form can have different security roles associated, so you can basically have a form for each security role or in other words each group of users. So if you want not to display certain data to specific CRM user, you can just create a form that only has the data they need to see. Don’t confuse this with field level security which is also a new feature in CRM 2011. You can also add parameters to be passed to the Form from within the Form properties. This data from the parameters can be accessed in scripts for form and field event handlers.
- Global Picklist - Option set: CRM 2011 now has a new field type which is Option set. An option set is in effect a picklist (or dropdown) field type but which is global to all CRM entities. So any entity form can add the same option set. This is quite useful when you have something like countries list or job types, etc. You can now create one global option set and then all entities can reference this option set.
- Entity Forms left navigation: You can now edit every entity’s left navigation graphically (no JavaScript is needed). You can move (drag and drop) left nav items up and down, from one group to another group (for example from sales to marketing, etc) for each form. You can also remove specific left navigation links on any form. You can even hide all left nav items for a specific form for a specific entity. You can also rename any section (such as sales, etc..) and you can rename every left nav item using their properties dialog window. Again, no scripting required. You can add a new navigation item which can be pointing to a URL or to any web resource and you can choose an icon for it.
- Publish within the customisation screen: Do all your customisation changes then click Publish button without the need to close or open any windows (horrayyy).
- Auditing: CRM 2011 now comes with an auditing module included. You can enable and disable auditing for every entity. If auditing is enabled on an entity, all its fields become audited as well. You can then go through each field in this entity and disable auditing for it if required.
- Field Level Security: You can now enable and disable field level security for every custom field (not customizable ones). If a field security is enabled, you can then go to Settings –> Administration –> Field security profiles and change the field level security for each field for as many profiles as you want. For example you can create a profile for temp employees and set certain fields as: Read, Update and/or Create. If you don’t tick any of these 3 options, Teams and users in this profile will not see this profile’s fields on the related entities’ forms. You can add teams and users for each field level security profile.
- Form level Security: Every CRM 2011 form now can be secured against each security role. When you edit every form in CRM 2011, you will have an option on the CRM 2011 ribbon at the top that allows you to assign security roles to this form. So, you can either choose the option to display this form to everyone or you can select what security roles can see this form. Anyone who does not have the security roles assigned to this form, will not be able to view it.
- Excel Import and Export CRM Data: CRM 2011 allows for the import and export of data to and from CRM and an Excel sheet. You can now add information in the excel sheet and import to CRM and vice versa. When you open excel spreadsheets with CRM data exported from CRM, you will be able to see all values for each picklist to change the values in the excel sheet and then import back to CRM. This is excellent for Sales and field employees who can work disconnectedly on excel sheets and then import to CRM at the end of the day. This is also very useful for data cleansing where you can export data, do a data cleansing exercise (wash it thoroughly) and then import back.
That’s it for this post. More blog posts are coming with more CRM 2011 features and capabilities. Next blog post will be a continuation of the productivity enhancements that Microsoft Dynamics CRM 2011 has.
The next post will be published very soon so, please watch this space.
// Update 1 November 2010——————————————
The new post, in continuation of this series can has been published and can be viewed by clicking here.
Hope this post was helpful. Please feel free to comment with your feedback and input.
Thanks,
Mohamed Mostafa
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Disclaimer: No Warranty or Liability on this post:
As always, this post, like all other posts on this blog are presented as is without any guarantee or warranty and I’m not responsible for any inaccurate or incorrect information mentioned in this blog nor decisions made based on this post. Myself, Microsoft and my employer can not be held responsible for any of this post content or information.