At the April meeting, Rhett Thompson gave a great presentation on CoreMotives suite of “integrated digital marketing” add-ons for Dynamics CRM. I’ve been using this tool and I love it. I’ve written one long article about it so far and I’m almost done with article #2, but in the meantime, here’s a link to Rhett’s presentation at the April 2010 meeting.

Richard Knudson
www.DynamicsCRMTrickBag.com

First, a big thank-you to Jeff Holway of Experlogix for a great keynote presentation at the March meeting. I’m still not sure I can explain to my Mom why companies might need a configurator; but I can definitely explain it to people like the following

• the channel manager for a hot tub manufacturer
• the sales manager for an aquarium distributor
• the director of marketing for an airplane manufacturer 

The Experlogix tool is impressive, and the recorded version of Jeff’s presentation is below. For more information, visit www.experlogix.com, and be sure to visit their booth at Convergence, coming up in Atlanta on April 24.

I gave a tutorial on how and why to do “Internet lead capture”, using Web2CRM from CRMInnovation.  This tool is definitely in my “indispensable” category, and if you need to capture information from a web form directly into your Dynamics CRM, I recommend it highly. If you purchase the tool, tell them Richard sent you. Here are links to the recordings of each session, in the order they were given: 

• My presentation on Internet Lead Capture with Web2CRM
• Jeff Holway’s presentation on Experlogix for Quote and Order Configuration

Richard — richardk@imginc.com

And now, without further ado, finally and at long last, here they are…

The February DCRMUG session recordings

• Data2CRM from CRMInnovation
• E-Mail Marketing Integration

We celebrated DCRMUG’s first year with what I thought was an excellent meeting! It was different from our usual dedicated-topic sessions, since we covered a raft of different topics by way of reviewing all of the new features Microsoft included in the November Service Update for Dynamics CRM Online. As usual, along the way a number of interesting side-topics came up, questions were asked, so here’s a recap, with links to the recordings and other pages you might find interesting:

• I kicked off the meeting, and in the substantive part of my presentation covered two main topics: how to configure your (new) home page dashboard and how to use the Chart Designer: Introduction and Part 1.
• Jonathan Lee did a great job with a LOT of different topics. He covered the new & improved data import tool, the new tool in the Outlook client for importing contacts, Mobile Express, the built-in sampled data set, and a few others: Part 2 and Conclusion. (CORRECTION: In the recorded webcast, I mentioned that once you disable “Show Get Started Panes on all list” from Set Personal Options form that you can NOT re-enable them.  This is not accurate.  You can re-enable this option if you keep the option “Show Get Started Panes on all lists for all users” set to “Yes” from System Settings.  Sorry for the confusion. – Jonathan 12/30/09)

 I announced the availability of our first annual DCRMUG Annual Member Survey. It’s Friday as I write this, and we’ve already had a bunch of survey respondents! For those of you who have responded, thanks! And if you haven’t yet, there’s still time. On Monday morning, Kim Nogle & I will perform the ritual raffle drawing, and three lucky winners will get free attendance at their choice of one of my upcoming Dynamics CRM Essentials events.  If you like DCRMUG I think you’ll like these fast-paced one-day training sessions!

 Here are two links related to some of the other questions that came up:

•  The E-Mail Router now works with BPOS Exchange Server
• Dynamics CRM SDK article about programming Visualizations

Also, Ian Smith (I think it was Ian – apologize if not!) asked about data migration and integration tools. I mentioned that Scribe is probably the most popular provider of integration software, and nobody seemed to disagree with that characterization. For data migrations, one of my favorite ISV’s, CRM Innovation, has a new tool called Data2CRM that you should check out.

• Scribe: www.ScribeSoft.com
• CRM Innovation: www.CRMInnovation.com  

And in the “speaking of which” category: If you take the member survey, I’m sure it will give you a warm and fuzzy feeling to know that as soon as you click submit, your survey responses will create a brand-new record in a custom Dynamics CRM entity I created to capture survey responses!  Being able to survey customers, members, subscribers and so on is an important way to communicate, and I’m happy to recommend CRMInnovation’s excellent product, Web2CRM, which is what makes possible our DCRMUG member survey.

Finally, I want to close by thanking, on behalf of what passes for management of our little group, all of the members of the DCRMUG community for your participation in a great first year. I hope you enjoyed it as much as I did, and I’m looking forward to a great year #2.

At the October meeting of the Dynamics CRM User Group, I followed a presentation by C360 on their Core Productivity Pack with a session of my own on the BI Analytics add-on. I consider myself an “educated layman” when it comes to BI, which made me all the more impressed with how much business intelligence I could glean from using BI Analytics with only about five hours of learning time. (Impressed with the tool, that is!)

I recorded the session, and here’s a link to it: http://www.imginc.net/images/stories/videos/dcrmug/Richards_BI_Analytics_Demo.wmv

This is a non-trivial add-on: it’s powerful, complex and justifies a much more comprehensive write-up than I have time to do now. On the other hand, I’ve been asked by a couple of attendees to get the recording posted, and I hate to post a recording with no context, so here’s my executive summary on C360’s BI Analytics add-on for Dynamics CRM:

• I think this application is excellent, and I wish I could run it on my production system. (It only works currently with the on-premise edition of Dynamics CRM 4.0, and my production system is Dynamics CRM Online.) 
• BI Analytics is developed by a firm called Strategy Companion. Their flagship product is the “Analyzer”, which is a general purpose Business Intelligence application that can integrate information from lots of different data sources. BI Analytics runs on top of the Analyzer, and is specifically designed as an add-on for Dynamics CRM 4.0. C360 is the exclusive reseller of the CRM-specfiic BI Analytics.
• The installation process is relatively complicated and should not be performed solo by an ”educated layman”. I had to run through it a few times to get it to work, and required the help of the folks at Strategy Companion.
• Once installed, using the application can be done without heavy-duty BI or technical expertise. As I mentioned above, I spent about five hours familiarizing myself with it. Strategy Companion has some video tutorials on their web site that are helpful.
• In my view, the two barriers that will prevent some organizations from using BI Analytics are:
  • Availability. I already mentioned that it’s currently only for on-premise. I wish they’d come out with it for Online!
  • Price. The license fee is $4,000. My understanding is that gets you a license for one “designer” — that being a single person who has the ability to create reports. Users who consume the reports can do so for free. More designer licenses each cost an additional $4k up to five of them, after which the per-designer fee drops somewhat.       

A note on price, which is a general one that could fairly be made about any add-on that a) saves you time, and b) costs money: If you need the kind of functionality BI Analytics contains, trade off the time it takes you to implement it from scratch, against the $4,000 license fee. My guess is that very few organizations can implement the functionality available in BI Analytics with anything nearly as small as $4,000 worth of effort. And a large organization with lots of potential report consumers will be able to justify the investment a lot easier than a smaller one. If you’ve got 100 users, a $40/user one-time might not seem too high, compared to the BI value you’ll realize.

The October meeting of the Dynamics CRM User Group (www.DynamicsCRMUserGroup.com) featured two presentations, the first of which was by Brad Burks and Patrick Sells of C360 (www.C360.com) presenting on their best-selling product, the Core Productivity Pack for Dynamics CRM 4.

I thought they gave an excellent presentation! I recorded and posted the  presentation for your viewing pleasure.    

I won’t write too much here on it, since Brad and Patrick cover it thoroughly in the recording, but here are a a few comments:

• You can tell the product planning people at C360 spend a lot of time either using Dynamics CRM or talking to people who do. For example, users often remark that the Dynamics CRM web UI is extremely “clicky” (or words to that effect), meaning you have to click a lot and open lots of windows to drill down to the information you need. As you’ll see in the recording, the “Console” (one of the primary features of the Productivity Pack) relieves about 90% of that clickiness. The tradeoff is a slightly busier screen, but I think a lot of users will prefer the busier screen/fewer clicks UI presented by the Console.
• Personally, the editable grid they also include with the CPP (how soon we geeks lapse into acronyms!) was my favorite. I think that would make batch editing of records way easier than it is out of the box.
• The SharePoint integration part is new, apparently, and it looks like a great start. Basically, it sounds like they’ve automated the process of creating a SharePoint site or document library when a new account is created in CRM. I’d like to know more about it, such as how much control you have over determining which accounts get sites created automatically, how the integration UI looks and so forth. In any event, this is an important function for a lot of organizations and I’m glad C360’s added it to the CPP.

Let me know what you think.

Here’s the full URL to the recording: http://www.imginc.net/images/stories/videos/dcrmug/C360_DCRMUG_October2009.wmv

Richard

At the September DCRMUG meeting (www.DynamicsCRMUserGroup.com) Microsoft’s Bob Piskule gave an excellent presentation and demo on the topic of Microsoft’s XRM platform.

For me, one of the most interesting things about the session was Bob’s presentation of the more-or-less official Microsoft positioning statement on XRM. Up until now most of the discussions I’d seen were by “outsiders” such as myself. (For example, here’s an article I wrote).

Here’s a summary of how Microsoft describes XRM:

Microsoft Dynamics XRM is an application platform layer that sits on top of CRM, designed to accelerate the development of relational business applications through flexible dynamic application services. XRM’s multi-tenancy allows you to build and run as many line of business applications as you need on a single platform. XRM also leverages other Microsoft technologies as building blocks including: Office, Outlook, SQL Server, .NET and Windows.

XRM can be used for vendor, asset, property, employee, program, recruit, grant, contractor, fleet, resource, product, licensing, contract, lifecycle management and more. The possibilities are endless.
Here’s Bob’s demo:

We concluded our Dynamics CRM Mobility Solutions So-Hot Summer Series with our second session on this important topic.  Microsoft’s Bob Piskule presented on Microsoft’s Mobile Express toolkit, and TenDigits Software’s Ben Mitchel showed us their Mobile Access flagship product.

Here’s a detailed writeup of the session, plus links to the recorded sessions. Enjoy!

And don’t forget to register for the September meeting, “XRM Unleashed”!

Richard

July 27, 2009: Dynamics CRM Mobility Solutions

The July meeting of the Dynamics CRM User Group featured two of the leading providers of mobility solutions for CRM: SoftBridge Inc., and CWR Mobility. Their positioning is an interesting contrast, and I thought the session was a good one. I mentioned in the introduction that the general topic of mobility in Dynamics CRM has been one of our most requested, and just to show you how customer-focused we are at DCRMUG, we’re going to follow up in the August meeting with another meeting on the same topic. (Different presenters – more on that later!) So, since we’re on a mobility solutions roll, and it’s summer (and quite a hot one, at least in Forks and Phoenix), I put my marketing hat on and dubbed this our “Dynamics CRM Mobility Solutions So-Hot Summer“. (That’s a literary reference, btw.)

Here is some background information and website links to the presenters at our July meeting:

• CWR Mobility’s flagship product Mobile CRM 4.1 “is positioned as the leading Windows Mobile client for Microsoft Dynamics CRM”
• SoftBRIDGE emphasizes their support for three platforms: their product, Bridge2CRM, “works with iPhone, BlackBerry and Windows Mobile platforms”

I wasn’t super-happy with the way the recordings published (next month I’m ending my experimenting with Captivate and going back to Camtasia unless somebody can convince me otherwise), but if you can get past the large file size and the SWF format they’re fine. I chunked them down a little bit to make the download a little quicker, so here they are:

• Introduction – this is me doing the meeting kickoff
• SoftBridge, Part 1 – this is primarily the slide part of Mark Aucoin’s presentation
• SoftBridge, Part 2 – Mark’s demonstration
• CWR, Part 1 – again, I started with the slide part of Erik van Hoof of CWR’s presentation
• CWR, Part 2 – then we finish up with the demo part of Erik’s presentation

For convenience, here are a couple of the slides from my introduction:

Contact information for SoftBridge and CWR Mobility:

Here’s how I compare the mobile solutions offered by each of these vendors:

These vendors have fundamentally different architectures, which account for many of the differences in features. SoftBridge’s code all runs on a (SoftBridge-hosted) server, and you don’t install any code on the client, since the client just uses the browser UI. That accounts for why the current version of SoftBridge’s product supports all mobile clients – all you need is a browser. CWR Mobility currently supports only the Windows Mobile OS, but Erik announced upcoming support for the other platforms during our meeting. The reason it’s harder for CWR to support multiple clients is that their approach has you install code that runs on the mobile device. So they’ve got to work harder to support multiple platforms.

I created and worked with a SoftBridge demo account for the two weeks before the meeting. Sure enough, I could access and update records from the Dynamics CRM server on my iPhone. One of my favorite features was being able to navigate to a Contact record, click on the phone number to make a phone call, and then have call saved and recorded as a CRM history item! Even though that’s a trivial little example, it definitely suggested (to me, at least!) how mobile access to CRM information can make mobile sales forces more productive. On the down side, I found the SoftBridge solution a little slow, which is probably explainable by the browser-only approach. I’m looking forward to comparing the experience to the rich-client one CWR Mobility supports. I am a VERY happy iPhone user, so I’ll have to wait until they come out with the next release!

I encourage all DCRMUGers to reach out directly to Mark Aucoin of SoftBridge and Erik van Hoof of CWR Mobility, and to explore how their solutions might work for you. Mark and Erik: on behalf of the DCRMUG community, thank you so much for the excellent presentations!

Richard Knudson — richardk@imginc.com

June DCRMUG Meeting – Topic 1

At the May meeting, I mentioned I’d never actually used the Data Migration Manager (DMM) to migrate anything other than the downloadable sampled data set. Between the May and June meetings, I got more practice with it than I expected, between a couple of internal projects and one for a client. I hope you can benefit from my experience. Let me know if you have any questions!

The media files are large, so I broke the recording out into two parts:

Part 1 — DMM Configuration and Basics
Part 2 — Using the DMM and Migrating a Data Set

We had a great meeting last night (Thursday, April 30) at the Microsoft Downers Grove office. Microsoft’s Bob Piskule headlined the evening’s program on the Dynamics CRM 4.0 Accelerators. As has become the DCRMUG custom, most of the attendees were online, but the folks who came in person actually got treated to real food purchased by Jonathan Lee. Thanks Jonathan! 

I made some reasonably good quality recordings, which I’ve included links to below, along with my commentary & meeting notes. For those of you who simply want to watch the recordings, here you go:

• Bob Piskule’s slide presentation on the Dynamics CRM 4.0 Accelerators
• Bob’s demonstration
• Richard Knudson’s slide presentation on the Enterprise Search Accelerator
• Richard’s demonstration

Intro, Announcement of Data Integration Main Topic for May Meeting

Jonathan (www.riics.com ) led off with an announcement of next month’s meeting, to be held on May 27 (location TBD but certainly available online as always!). The featured topic of the May meeting will be data integration and migration. In the Dynamics CRM world, Scribe is one of the leading provider in that space, and Jonathan has lined up a couple of Scribe representatives to keynote the meeting for us. The meeting format will be a little different next month: after a shorter than usual main presentation we’ll have a panel discussion, featuring the Scribe folks plus some of our members with extensive Scribe and app integration experience sharing their expertise and war stories. We’ve already got a volunteer, but we still need a couple more to round out the panel – if you’d like to step up, please email Jonathan directly at jonathan.lee@riics.com

Main Presentation by Bob Piskule of Microsoft

Bob Piskule is a Partner Technical Specialist on the Dynamics team here in the Midwest District, and he gave us a great presentation on a popular topic: The Dynamics CRM 4.0 Accelerators. If you’re new to the Accelerators, they are essentially add-on modules that extend CRM 4’s out of the box functionality. They are developed by Microsoft, and available for free downloading from www.CodePlex.com/CRMaccelerators.

The CRM team is cranking them out fast and furious, so it was great to have Bob give us an overview of ALL of them, and put everything in context for us. I’m still not quite sure how he presented 40 slides plus a demo of all the Accelerators save Enterprise Search (I did that one) in 60 minutes…but he did!

Here’s Bob’s slide presentation on the Dynamics CRM 4.0 Accelerators.
Here’s his demonstration.
    
Here’s a summary of my “meeting notes” on Bob’s presentation:

• Both the Event Management and the e-Service Accelerators employ an ASP.NET application to add “portal” functionality. That is, they give you a web site where extranet users (customers, trading partners…) might go and view/update information that ends up in your Dynamics CRM. In my opinion, this portal functionality is critically important and has traditionally been way too difficult to implement in CRM. The fact that at least two of the Accelerators use a similar (the same?) framework to add this is encouraging, and I hope Microsoft continues to invest in this area!
• The Event Management Accelerator essentially customizes the Campaign entity and gives you a special campaign type of “Event”. One of the things you can do with this is distribute event invitations as Campaign Activities, and treat Campaign Responses as registrations. Martin Donnelly pointed this out, and noted the anomaly that these Campaign Responses could in turn be converted to Lead records. Interesting. Martin knows his entities!
• The Accelerators can seem a little mystifying if you’re new to them. Here are some of the ways they add their magic on top of your (on-premise only, for now!) Dynamics CRM:
  o   Some of them (see above) add portal functionality in the form of an entire ASP.NET web application you install on top of IIS. It works fine as is, but if you want to customize it you can, since you get all the source code.

o   Some of them use plug-ins you need to register, to customize the CRM UI.

o   Some of them use customizations (custom entities, workflows) that you need to import and publish.

o   Some of them use reports you need to import.

Because there are some moving parts, the setup can seem a little daunting, and Microsoft has started to include videos that walk through the setup. They’re somewhat odd, since there’s no audio. I kept thinking my speakers weren’t working at first, but after watching a couple I got used to it. If you’re going to install one of the Accelerators, I recommend watching the (soundless) installation videos at the same time as you’re doing the setup.

 Bob also mentioned that there is a brand-new VPC available for download that already has all the Accelerators installed…so if you just want to get some experience with them and don’t care about the setup part, I recommend you just download the new demo Virtual Machine and save yourself some install time.

Richard Knudson’s Demonstration of the Enterprise Search Accelerator

More than any of the other accelerators, ESA integrates Dynamics CRM with SharePoint, and since that’s an area of special interest to me, I was happy to take this one on. I had some Live Meeting challenges during my demo, so I re-recorded the PowerPoint part of my short session. If you want to skip the slides, here’s my demonstration of the Enterprise Search Accelerator.

Just for fun, I uploaded my re-recorded slide presentation to YouTube. (As usual, my son Jack was not impressed.) Here’s the embedded version of the link:

One of the things that I’m afraid didn’t come through clearly enough is this: if all you want to do is expose Dynamics CRM data to SharePoint users with the Business Data Web Parts (e.g., the “Business Data List” and “Business Data Related List” Web Parts), all you need to do is import the so-called Application Definition file and you’re good to go. In this sense, the ESA is simply a great example of what you can do with the Business Data Catalog (BDC) functionality that shipped with MOSS 2007.  Because of time limitations, I focused on this part of the ESA functionality more than I did on the explicit “Enterprise Search” aspect of it.

Anyway, if you have questions, please fire away: richardk@imginc.com

Sponsored by Riics and IMG

Agenda

• Welcome and introduction
• Keynote Presentation: Dynamics CRM Accelerators Overview. Presented by Bob Piskule of Microsoft. Bob is a Partner Technical Specialist for Dynamics CRM, and we’re looking forward to his presentation!  
• Accelerators Demonstrations & Discussion:
  • Analytics
  • eService
  • Extended Sales and Forecasting
  • Enterprise Search
  • Event Management
• Open Forum, Q&A: Bring your questions for this part!

Event Details:

Date:  4/30/09

Time: 6PM to 8:30PM CDT

Location:

Microsoft Corporation

3025 Highland Parkway

Suite 300 (Room: MPR2)

Downers Grove, IL 60515

 Attendance is free, please register here.