Employee Self Service – W2 | |
One of the top suggestions for employee self-service functionality is to let the employee view and print their own W2. With Microsoft Dynamics GP 2015 R2, this functionality is now available as part of Time Management self-service. | |
Link to the PDFs: http://1drv.ms/1GRR5TB
by Janet Kahr | The Microsoft Azure Partner Community is led by National Partner Technology Strategists from the Microsoft US Partner Team. Partner Community activities include blog posts, discussions on Yammer, newsletters, and community calls. |
Over the past year, Microsoft executive keynotes and presentations to partners have increasingly included an emphasis on Microsoft Dynamics CRM Online, encouraging partners to seriously evaluate adding CRM Online to their Microsoft practices. Cloud and hybrid cloud services are expected to reach more than $127 billion by 2018 (2014 IDC study commissioned by Microsoft), with opportunities that are not limited to Microsoft Azure and Office 365, but extend to CRM Online.
The transformation Microsoft has made to being a mobile first, cloud first company offers new opportunities for partners to identify and pursue new cloud-oriented revenue streams for their business. The two graphics below show that cloud-focused partners are growing more rapidly and more profitably than their counterparts with traditional IT businesses, and that the growth of Microsoft Dynamics CRM Online is significantly outpacing Microsoft Dynamics CRM on-premises, presenting partners with a clear cloud opportunity.
Microsoft Dynamics CRM Online helps sales, marketing, and customer care teams at an organization work as one to deliver personal experiences across every customer interaction of their business. The suite of services offered includes CRM, Marketing, Customer Service, and Social Engagement functionality.
Microsoft Dynamics CRM Online can go beyond sales force automation as a development platform that helps you deliver differentiated and compelling online customer experiences. This is referred to as xRM. At the heart of these systems of engagement are meaningful line of business (LOB) applications that become key business processes, and help customers compete and win. Microsoft Dynamics CRM Online offers Microsoft customers a consistent platform to build additional LOB applications, and also allows them to extend traditional Sales Force Automation (SFA) solutions for specific industries and verticals.
[download the above IDC infographic, Benefits at the Intersection of CRM and Cloud]
By combining CRM Online with Microsoft Azure, which offers world-class cloud computing power, you find the platform to create powerful line of business applications. One of the key selling points of Microsoft Dynamics CRM Online is that it isn’t just a sales productivity solution but an integrated, standardized, development platform that a company can quickly utilize as the need arises for line of business applications in the support of key business processes. This platform can be used in combination with Azure to deliver innovative solutions that will delight your customers.
Partners with a Microsoft Azure practice today are well positioned to expand their practice to include CRM Online as a part of an integrated application platform that allows them to rapidly deliver functional solutions that are secure and mobile. They can also deliver a comprehensive productivity solution that includes Office 365, CRM Online, Power BI, and Skype for Business.
While some partners will build practices that deliver the cloud end-to-end—from Cloud Platform to Cloud Productivity and Enterprise Social to Business Intelligence and Productivity—many Azure partners will likely specialize in developing repeatable IP integrated with Azure. This IP can become key business processes that differentiate their client’s offerings attracting new business growth. Leveraging Microsoft CRM Online as a development platform will allow these Azure partners to more quickly be able to create systems of engagement that delight customers and keep ongoing maintenance costs lower.
 | In the Microsoft Azure Partner Community blog series and call for May, we’ll help you learn more about CRM Online and why you should consider adding it to your Azure practice. Register for the May 21 community call. Our next blog post in this series will include examples about how CRM Online and Microsoft Azure work can work together. |
CRM Online partner resources
CRM Online product information
I don't call myself a Trusted Advisor. Client trust isn't a brand. You have to earn it.
In the first part of this series I referred to a report from Econsultancy and Adobe called “Impact of Digital Transformation in the Media and Entertainment Sector” which included results from a survey of media execs, as follows:
How does your organisation regard the following challenges as it continues for second half of 2014 and into 2015?
Many media and advertising firms have systems-based obstacles to deriving the most value from their data, and thus face great difficulty in getting insight as to how they can improve their asset base, sales targeting, customer service and revenue growth. There is a general feeling that the problem is too big, and I often hear the question ‘We want to do it but where should we start?’.
So what should be your key initiatives to deliver better customer relationships, sweat your digital assets, improve marketing, and measure performance against corporate and departmental KPIs? From a systems perspective, how can BI/analytics and CRM help you deliver them? Well, I think the answer, as often, lies in some business change as well as technology; here is an approach I suggest based on customer experience and observation:
1) Streamline your sales force. Many agencies and media firms have multiple, parallel sales operations that don’t necessarily compete with each other for share of the same customers (although some do – I always remember dealing with a UK agency that had spent a six-figure sum on a bid. When they arrived to deliver the pitch in Paris, they met their French operation’s team walking out of the client’s foyer having delivered their own pitch for the same business. Luckily for me, this happened just before the board meeting to consider my proposal for a new CRM system that would enable transparent communication and collaboration, and prevent this sort of thing from happening again. Big success for me J). But the point is, firms are asking “why have multiple sales teams doing similar things in similar markets, and how can we best consolidate them and give them the tools to become more skilled and more efficient across a wider range of our business?” CRM systems, driven by powerful customer insight analytics, can provide the processes and focus that helps underpin this transition.
2) Enabling your customers to buy and execute their own advertising. Many years ago in the mid 90s, my firm implemented a new ad sales and scheduling system for Teletext – the old block-script information and advertising ‘portal’ broadcast on ITV and Channel Four (Minecraft addicts would be very jealous of the “futuristic” typeface…). Our new system replaced an antiquated mixture of separate sales systems and manual operations, replacing them with a straight-through process that captured the ad contents via email or a phone conversation. It then processed it through all steps needed to get it automatically published on the right page, at the right time, for the right time interval, and billed in the right way.
My point in mentioning this was that we spent a lot of time trying to convince Teletext to do something radical rather than just streamline what they had always done – we said they should open part of their new system up to their customers, so they could enter their own ad text and format it all themselves. At the time, the technology would have been a lot more expensive than nowadays, but we knew the business case was strong enough because of the time it would save Teletext in ongoing admin and error correction. Today, almost all the most successful media companies including gorillas like Facebook, Google and Twitter rarely have any of their staff involved in selling or producing advertising. Most ads come from customers going online, creating and scheduling their own. It’s tremendously efficient. A good CRM and sales system, open to your customers, can in most cases affordably do the same for you, no matter what the size of your business.
3) Converge your advertising. If you consolidate your selling activities, and allow customers to do a lot of the buying/production themselves, you can join the many firms now pursuing convergence – making multiple channels to market more attractive to advertisers by offering integrated advertising and marketing campaigns across multiple outlets and formats. Of course, customers would much rather work with a one-stop shop for national or international positioning across TV, radio, internal and newspapers in both electronic and digital formats than to deal with each outlet separately.
Some forward-looking firms were pursuing convergence a long time ago. I worked with United Business Media on a large convergence project in the early 2000s. They had very many channel outlets through their various publications, periodicals, exhibitions, conferences, and directories businesses, as well as their then emerging digital channels, and realised that in many cases, the same customers/buyers were being dealt by many different UBM staff who did not communicate with each other or share any information. So we built a number of parallel CRM solutions, each one optimised to suit the particular area or department it was built for to optimise their particular selling process, but a key corporate goal of this was to be able to identify common customers and needs, and then suggest and enable up-sell or cross-sell of multiple channel opportunities.
The benefits to the customer are obvious. But to make sure your organisation can achieve this efficiently, and so effectively compete in the market, you will need have a powerful infrastructure which provides:
a) Proper integration for an overall view: Advertising should no longer be sold in silos, and so you will need to provide self-service advertisers with a single view of availability and customer demographics across all your channels and advertising platforms. Your various sales and CRM systems that control each of these will need to be integrated, often in real time.
b) Drive repeat/regular advertising via proper relationship management: Integrated campaigns cannot work as well if you still rely on advertisers going online ad hoc to buy ads or space. One-off transactions are expensive for both sides. Instead, you need to build excellent relationships with your advertisers, and this means a combination of understanding their business, and making it easy to do business with you, by tailoring your systems around how your customers work (and doing this for each large customer so that they can do what they need with you, easily and quickly).
4) Leverage the data you capture to sweat your assets. Life used to be simpler. Advertisers came to media and advertising firms based on the demographics of their outlets. They advertised. And they measured the result, if they could. If they thought the result was good (or in many cases, even if they couldn’t tell one way or another) they came back and advertised again.
Those times have gone. The internet blurred the boundaries between customers and consumers – often someone is both. Communication is bidirectional. Social media has further stirred the mix.
However, this has created a new holy grail – the connected customer where:
This looks a daunting task, but it can be broken down into simpler elements; in many cases this has already happened and is still happening.
A great example is Sky Adsmart. Using the data gleaned from digital boxes in over 500,000 UK homes, and combining it with additional data sources, this technology gives advertisers greatly valuable information including geodemographics, personal data, behavioural information, what programmes where watched, for how long and at what times, how much channel switching there was, what ads were viewed, and so on. It gives far more detailed feedback to advertisers than BARB ever could, and thus enables Sky to offer a business proposition to their advertisers which promises them results that can be far more targetted and predictable.
Applying this to your own business, can you combine the various sources of data you have about your customers, consumers, and readers, their geodemographics, behaviour, likes/dislikes and so on? Could you provide your advertising customers with a view that can go from a high generic to a personal individual level, so they can pinpoint target a campaign and then get direct feedback on the campaign effectiveness?
This sort of insightful data, and the targeted advertising they can thus deliver, is why platforms like Facebook and Google are so valuable. This is also why other media firms need to improve and integrate their own systems, and create relationships with owners of external but useful data, so they can share rich information back with their advertisers, combining customer data in new and valuable ways, and using BI analytics and CRM systems to deliver related sales and services in an easy to use manner.
© Steve Sydee 2015
This article was first published here by Steve Sydee.
About us: 365 Freelance is the first online platform that gives Dynamics partners and end-users instant access to hundreds of contractors. With a network spanning 87 countries, it allows companies to search for freelancers based on their skills, rates and available dates, enabling them to find the best person for their projects without incurring the hefty fees typical of recruitment agencies. Register here – www.365freelance.com.
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Sometime in administration work you would like to see history of database restore, like when we have restored this version of data. Usually helps in development and test system.
SELECT [rs].[destination_database_name],
[rs].[restore_date],
[bs].[backup_start_date],
[bs].[backup_finish_date],
[bs].[database_name] as [source_database_name],
[bmf].[physical_device_name] as [backup_file_used_for_restore]
FROM msdb..restorehistory rs
INNER JOIN msdb..backupset bs
ON [rs].[backup_set_id] = [bs].[backup_set_id]
INNER JOIN msdb..backupmediafamily bmf
ON [bs].[media_set_id] = [bmf].[media_set_id]
ORDER BY [rs].[restore_date] DESC
Scriptable Provisioning & Management |
|
A critical element in successfully delivering Microsoft Dynamics GP as a cloud offering is the ability to centralize and automate the provisioning and management of the application. Automation speeds up delivery, minimizes human involvement which reduces costs and the possibility of human errors, and can provide self-service functionality to the end user. This feature will add APIs and PowerShell cmdlets that will enable automated/scriptable GP provisioning and management. The screen shot shows a list of the PowerShell cmdlets available. | |
Link to the PDFs: http://1drv.ms/1GRR5TB
http://mvp.microsoft.com/en-us/virtualconference.aspx
Microsoft recently announced the General Availability of the CRM Online Spring Release ‘15 and we wanted to share yet another one of the new features that has been rolled out to CRM Online. This post will cover the new Folder Level Tracking feature that CRM Online users should start seeing, and CRM On Prem users should hopefully see in the near future.
What is it?
Folder Level Tracking is another way for users to track emails in Dynamics CRM from Exchange. With Folder Level Tracking, you don’t need to have the CRM Outlook Client installed. This means that Folder Level Tracking will work with native mobile apps. For example, if you use a Windows Phone, you can move emails from Exchange to CRM by directly using your Windows phone and we’ll describe how below.
How does it work? Well there are two main scenarios that Folder Level Tracking supports:
How do you set it up?
Folder Level Tracking has a few requirements for it to work. First there are system level settings that need to be enabled.
Now the users themselves also have to go within their Personal Options –> Emails –> Configure Folder Tracking Rules. From here they can select the Exchange Folder, and then the CRM Record (optional) they want to track the emails against.
As you can see from above and as stated earlier, these are user specific configuration rules so each user can have their own synchronization setup. That’s it! Pretty simple right?
What does this mean for me:
This is a new powerful option to track emails. The beauty of this is that you don’t need to have a separate client installed, but it’ll work with any native client you’ve been using for emails. This is available for ALL mail apps on ALL devices.
There are a few tips we recommend when using this option.
A few notes that you should be aware of:
I hope you’re as excited for this new feature as I am. I’ve been a part of many mobile projects where the CRM Outlook Client isn’t installed (can’t be installed), yet the client wants to send an email from the device and have it tracked in CRM. To date there’s been no simple way to use the native mail client, and have those emails tracked, but Folder Level Tracking should solve that problem. Enjoy!
This is very useful query while doing upgrade, you can get the count of records in each table from source and target environment. This helps you with initial level of testing. I found it useful to share.
DECLARE @QueryString NVARCHAR(MAX) ;
SELECT @QueryString = COALESCE(@QueryString + ' UNION ALL ','')
+ 'SELECT '
+ '''' + QUOTENAME(SCHEMA_NAME(sOBJ.schema_id))
+ '.' + QUOTENAME(sOBJ.name) + '''' + ' AS [TableName]
, COUNT(*) AS [RowCount] FROM '
+ QUOTENAME(SCHEMA_NAME(sOBJ.schema_id))
+ '.' + QUOTENAME(sOBJ.name) + ' WITH (NOLOCK) '
FROM sys.objects AS sOBJ
WHERE
sOBJ.type = 'U'
AND sOBJ.is_ms_shipped = 0x0
ORDER BY SCHEMA_NAME(sOBJ.schema_id), sOBJ.name ;
EXEC sp_executesql @QueryString 
Solutions were a fantastic concept added into CRM 2011 allowing CRM developers to easily group their CRM customizations in groups (solutions) and easily move their customizations between CRM organisations.
Solutions in CRM offer the CRM developer great flexibility but which can lead to complex multiple and overlapping solutions mixed with branched/versioned solutions.
or
The CRM developer can use unmanaged solutions :-)
I have written many blogs on CRM solutions
Solutions are great but when they go wrong they are awful and can take lots of time poking around trying to find out the cause of the problem.
I’m sure many CRM developers have had problems trying to import a solution where someone has deleted a field, only to add it again as a different type (covered in SQL error whilst importing solution)
Here are some common errors I have encounted with solutions
If you want to learn about solutions read this blog CRM 2013 – Understanding Solutions and how they work, below is a quick recap
One of the major headaches with managed solutions is if you remove a managed solution, it removes all the customizations and the data. This combined with the customizations being non editable (read only) can lead to many frustrating situations which the CRM developer has to work round because they cannot uninstall and install a CRM solution due to the loss of data.
Choosing your solution strategy is an important and scary decision because it can be difficult to swap back from a managed solution to an unmanaged solution. There is usually some anxiety before you make the decision and push the button and import a managed solution.
There are many choices you have to make in CRM which are very hard to undo like
CRM Entity ownership – How do you decide?
I have talked to many CRM developers who hate managed solutions and only deploy unmanaged solutions. I have been asked numerous times why anyone would use a managed solution, so lets investigate the reasons.
The logic behind a managed solution is two fold
Managed solutions are great for CRM resellers who created a solution for CRM which acts like a products. E.g. an Autonumber solution. They can sell the Autonumber solution, it’s gets deployed and the users can’t change any of the code to stop it working and other CRM developers can look at the code to steal the code/ideas.
This scenario is ideal for managed solutions because if the users change their mind and don’t want to use the solution they can uninstall it and it removes all traces of the solution and its data.
If managed solutions can be problematic why doesn’t everyone use unmanaged solutions?
Unmanaged solutions are great but there are some things to consider
When importing unmanaged solutions, your changes will be written to the default solution. This will overwrite all
This article Use solutions for your customizations
Never import an unmanaged solution unless you are sure you want to accept all the customizations in it and allow any of those customizations to overwrite any customizations you previously created.
Unmanaged solutions means all customizations are editable, this means users could possibly change a customizations and stop them working as intended by
Unmanaged solutions can avoid conflicts but can lead to other problems, often problems caused by overwriting customizations which are not initially obvious.
Below I discuss some problems CRM developers can experience when using managed solutions.
Managed solutions can be problematic is when you have overlapping managed solutions where you have different managed solutions which have the same entity in both.
Managed solutions can have problems when different managed solutions overlap when values and files can overwrite each other and CRM developers being unsure what will happen when one solution is imported over another.
The worst problem can be conflicting problems which cause a manage solution to fail.
Managed solutions can be problematic when different versions/phases of the same managed solution are deployed in different environments (e.g. prod, pre prod, dev) with different functionality being delivered.
To visualise this scenario it helps to think of CRM solutions as branches in source control. Users want changes made to an earlier version but later versions have already been modified.
The CRM developers is in a tricky situation of adding fields/customizations to an older solution but cannot bring these changes to the later branches because it could/would overwrite changes made in the later solution. This can lead to manually adding fields into the different versions of solutions which can lead to problems
I recently experienced a problem with branched/versions of solutions which I will explain the problem (I will try, it’s complex), the cause and the solution.
When I use the term branched solution, I am referring to the same solution but with different versions. I find it easier to visualize and explain the problem if you consider these solutions as code branches.
Any developer who has gone through the process of merging changes through code branches knows it can be a difficult and slow process, involving merging the code, working out if the merged code works and importantly checking the merged code hasn’t broken anything.
When you merge code this can lead to a conflict (this happens when the same piece of code has changed in code being merged) and the developers needs to decide what to replace.
This highlights one of the problems CRM developers have, we don’t do the merging, CRM does and if there is a conflict! A conflict in customizations
Conflicts usually involve the imported customization overwriting the current customizations.
I had multiple versions of a solution which was managed
e.g.
The solutions above are the same solution with entities, JavaScript, plugins in.
Understanding the solutions and their states is easier if you visualise the separate solutions as a waterfall.
Remember HSV2 was created from HSV1 but is now very different and HSV2 was created from HSV3 but now is very different with lots of new and cool functionality. I have tried to show this by creating them as different colours and shapes.
A situation can occur where a bug is found in Hosk version 1 – HSV1, the CRM developer must decide which solution the fix should be put in. This problem needs some extra fields to be added to an entity as well as some code.
We can’t put the fix into the latest version HSV3 because we couldn’t deploy this solution to live until all the customizations were finished and tested.
If we put the change into HSV2 we would then need to put all the customizations and changes into live and the customer hasn’t finished testing the customizations. We would have a problem where HSV2 and HSV3 are out of sync.
The choice made was to put the fix into HSV1 (production solution), add the fields and code, test it on the HSV1 organisation we have and deploy the fix to live.
We now have a problem because the CRM solutions HSV2 and HSV3 are now out of sync.
There are fields and code in the live CRM system which doesn’t exist in HSV2 and HSV3.
One of the main concerns is the current development might not work when deployed with the changes in HSV1, so we have to sync the environments.
How do you get these changes into HSV2 and HSV3?
The fields were manually added to HSV2 and the code added/merged.
The plan was to export HSV3 as unmanaged.
Import HSV2 into HSV3 and then reimport HSV3 with the previous exported version, this will have added the new fields.
Problems occurred when we tried to import HSV2 managed into HSV1 Managed. The reason it complained was because of duplicate fields.
We added new fields in HSV1 and HSV2. These fields have the same schema name but importantly different guids.
CRM doesn’t see the new fields as the same field because they have the same schema name; it sees it as a CRM developer trying to add another field with the same schema name.
Gulp, we now can’t import HSV2 solution into the HSV1 environment!
Managed solutions make things tricky because if you remove a managed solution it takes away all the precious data with it.
One of the reasons we ran into this problem was because we didn’t use any other solutions to move new fields/customizations between the different solutions.
Created a new organisation with HSV1 unmanaged – the CRM org we will call Operation SYNC
Deleted newly added fields/views/dashboards in HSV2
Export HSV2 unmanaged – call this HSV2 modified
Imported HSV2 modified solution onto HSV1
We now have the customizations with the same guids in HSV2
This organisation now could be used for the HSV2 environment (old one had to be trashed)
The same technique was used to get the changes from HSV2 to HSV3.
How to avoid Sync/branching solution problem
The key to the problems I experienced was you need to be aware you have different branched solutions.
If you need to add changes to the earliest solution (e.g. HSV1) you need to have a mechanism to bring these changes through the other branched solutions. It’s important you bring the SAME changes through the CRM systems otherwise (if you add the fields manually) you will be get duplicate errors.
The solution we used above seems easy when you read it but it took a whole day of creating organisations, importing solutions and we weren’t sure it was going to work (fingers and legs were crossed) until it worked.
If the solution didn’t work we hadn’t considered the alternatives but none of them would have been very pleasant, which is why we put of making any further plans.
The first step to avoiding this scenario is don’t create duplicate fields in different branched solutions. This will lead to duplicate fields and cause solution importing problems.
Ideally it’s better to add new fields in the latest solution; you wouldn’t have to worry about syncing your solutions.
Sometimes this isn’t an available choice because the customer needs a resolve a bug in the production solution.
If need to make a change to an older version you need to view your solutions like a water fall and make sure the changes flows down through all the solutions to ensure the fields have the same guids in all your solutions and as good CRM developers know we should never create duplicate customizations.
You could create a patch solution and import it to your branched solutions but you will need to export/import.
Say you want to add new field called HoskField
The most important message in this blog post is for people know the danger of branched CRM managed solutions and the potential problems.
The documentation for CRM 2015 SP1 is fantastic. This link shows all the documentation for the new features
Hosk blog posts about solutions, managed solutions and problems with branching solutions
CRM Online has some limitations this article looks at how you can create solutions to work around them based on an interesting white paper from Microsoft
A page on the hierarchical data structure in CRM
A look at the changes in business rules in CRM 2015
a nice helper method
logging options in CRM
a tool to convert FetchXML to sql
JavaScript code to implement a callback function
Great blog post from CRM MVP on charts
The dynamics support team have a feature to improve wildcard searching with CRM on premise
A list and review of CRM 2013 tools, this will probably work in CRM 2015 as well
A collection of my favourite CRM Developer articles I have written
All the CRM 2013 content to help you pass the exam
Words of Wisdom from the Hosk. I have written over 900 articles, surely I should have said a few memorable things
Microsoft MVP and veteran Dynamics AX solution architect Brandon George has been named President of Hillstar Business Solutions for the Americas region. The new role redoubles George's focus on business intelligence and reporting solutions and services for the Microsoft Dynamics ecosystem, an area he has evangelized on for many years as part of a broader role focused primarily on delivering Dynamics AX solutions.
We caught up with George this week to learn more about the new role and his outlook on BI in the Microsoft Dy...
