Unitek Microsoft CRM Blog

Another great feature of Microsoft CRM 4.0 is the Create Record option in the reworked Workflow. Being able to utilize this functionality opens the way to some interesting possibilities. The first one that we’ve utilized is an ownership audit trail for Contact records. We’ll also be using one of the new entity relationship options that have been added in Microsoft CRM 4.0.

The steps are pretty easy so let’s get started.

First we’ll create a new entity. This will be the entity that holds the ownership history so let’s name it “Ownership”. Additional info about the entity:

Organization Owned:

• Uncheck “Notes” and “Activities” (optional)
• Uncheck “Enable Duplicate Detection”
• Uncheck all the items in “Areas That Display this Entity”
• Under the Primary Entity, change the display name to “Details”

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If you are planning an upgrade and have considered the enhanced functionality with the new N:1, 1:N and N:N (Many to Many) relationships, you may be re-working some of your entities in the new Microsoft CRM 4.0 deployment, or you may just be cleaning up unused custom entities from your initial Microsoft CRM 3.0 deployment. We were excited at the flexibility in Microsoft CRM 3.0 with the many to one relationship creation and the platform’s protection and involvement in that process, but in many cases the creation of custom entities was over-used in Microsoft CRM 3.0 so we have some clean-up to perform.

If you plan on re-working some of your entities to take advantage of the new Many to Many capabilities, you may be removing some of your entities and consolidating them in Microsoft CRM 4.0, so it may save you some time to move the data from the re-purposed entities and delete them in Microsoft CRM 3.0 before you upgrade because when you go through the upgrade process you’ll have to consider removing references to your related entity from all your column views in the primary entities as well as the filter criteria.

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With the ever increasing demand for Microsoft CRM 4.0 Training from the east coast, our sales staff have had their desk phones forwarded to their cell phones for early morning inquiries. Last month, we had a reality check when Verizon Wireless sent us a gigantic phone bill. Our CFO nearly had a coronary, and asked us to look at other options.

After careful analysis, it seemed that AT&T Wireless / Cingular had a much better corporate plan (they also have the iPhone, but we neglected to mention that to the CFO). Unfortunately, we have a bunch of rabid ‘Verizon lovers’ around the office that insisted that Verizon had much better coverage around the Fremont, CA area. So, to shut them up, we decided on a road test. We had two volunteers drive around Fremont doing the ‘Can you hear me now’ thing. The first volunteer drove out from Unitek to the Mission hills (filthy rich people such as our CEO live up there, watching over us mere mortals) and then drove along Mission Boulevard to the extreme north end of Fremont. The second volunteer drove from Unitek to the extreme northwest point in Fremont (close to the Dunbarton bridge). On day 1, they used AT&T phones, and they used Verizon phones on Day 2. Continuous talk time was approximately 1 hour on both days.

Alas, those !#$!@#% Verizon lovers were right !! Verizon consistently delivered better cell quality throughout Fremont, and didn’t drop calls (AT&T did, occasionally). Much as we hate the gigantic phone bills (and love the iPhone), we’ve decided to stay with Verizon Wireless and hope that they come up with better corporate plan for their long-suffering customers. Can you hear me now, Verizon?

One of Microsoft’s strongest selling points of Microsoft CRM 3.0 was its integration with Outlook. Microsoft correctly deduced that many Users were used to managing their day to day activities through Outlook. This not only included email activities but contacts, appointments and other tasks as well. Many Users had become dependent on Microsoft Outlook’s calendar as their primary visual tool for managing their appointments and tasks. In Microsoft CRM 3.0 emails and appointments could be synchronized in CRM but not other activities (the biggest complaint was the lack of synching of phone calls). But my experience in teaching CRM 3.0 Applications to end users has been User frustration about not being able to fully use Outlook to manage all of their day to day tasks. They did not like having to go in and out of Microsoft CRM to schedule common tasks such as phone calls. They had grown used to scheduling phone calls as tasks in their Outlook Calendars and getting convenient pop-up reminders.

Well Microsoft has addressed this in CRM 4.0 with the ability to synch not only emails, but phone calls, faxes, letters and tasks. Users can now function primarily through their familiar Outlook interface using the Outlook Calendar to schedule tasks in CRM. They also get the benefit of being able to schedule useful pop-up reminders that Users have grown use to (or in some cases dependent upon) to remind them to do daily tasks. When a task is scheduled, the “Track in CRM” box gives the User a Drop Down option to select which type of task to be tracked in CRM. CRM tasks are viewed in the Outlook Calendar as all other tasks in Outlook. When tasks are scheduled within CRM they are automatically pushed out to the User’s Outlook Calendar. There is only one drawback to scheduling tasks directly in CRM and that is inability to schedule a pop-up reminder within Outlook. An Outlook pop-up reminder will still occur for those tasks directly scheduled in CRM but it will be for whatever the Outlook default pop-up reminder setting is set for. This new feature should make Outlook Users much happier and more comfortable using CRM.

KE
Microsoft CRM Consultant
Unitek Microsoft CRM Services

One of the unusual quirks with Microsoft CRM 3.0 is the hard-coded default Views. For example, while in a Contact form and you click History, the default view is for “Last 30 Days”. This has been one of the most disliked features of CRM 3.0 and we are sad to report the same condition exists in the new CRM 4.0 version. The good news is we’re going to show you how to change these Views.

Let’s start with the CRM 3.0 method . The code we’re going to use was borrowed from Michael over at stunnware. He has a great explanation of how we build the code, but we’ll just get straight to the code and enhance it a little. Our adjustment will modify 3 related entities, Activities, History and Opportunities. For each one we will make the default View “All”.

Assuming it’s the Contact’s View that you want to alter, in the Customization area, open the Contact form. Go into the Form Properties and then the OnLoad event. Copy this text and paste it into the OnLoad window:

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One of the most desired and long awaited features for Microsoft CRM is duplicate record detection. In Microsoft CRM 4.0 (formerly Titan), Microsoft has added duplicate detection capabilities at multiple levels. One of which is Duplicate Detection Rules which can run automatically to safeguard the system from users entering duplicate records. Duplicate detection can take place only if duplicate detection is enabled in Duplicate Detection Settings and if at least one duplicate-detection rule (A rule that specifies criteria for identifying a record as a duplicate.) exists for the record type. Rules interact differently depending on if they are grouped together or separately.

We can take a look at how this works by using an example that I’ve found many clients have desired which is duplicate detection of Leads to existing Contacts. The criteria I use in this example are to check for identical email addresses, first name and last name. In the Duplicate Detection Rules area (located in the Data Management area in Settings) we start a new rule and choose Lead as the Base Record Type and Contact as the Matching Record Type. Then we select the email, first name and last name attributes in both of the records and set the criteria to “exact match”. We have created one rule for all of these criteria which will cause duplicate detection to detect a possible duplicate Contact record when a new Lead is entered if ALL criteria are met. So if a Lead is entered with a different first name but the same email address and last name are correct, duplicate detection will NOT detect the possibility of a duplicate Contact record.

Let’s try two rules that involve both entities. Again the Base Record Type will be Lead and the Matching Record Type will be Contact. In this case we will create two separate rules. One with criteria matching exact email addresses and one rule that matches exact first and last names. When we run both of these rules together, duplicate detection will detect if a newly entered Lead has an email address that matches an existing Contact OR if BOTH the first AND last name of the newly entered Lead matches a Contact.

The way I think of this is similar to groupings in the Advanced Find. When using one rule with multiple criteria it’s like grouping your criteria with an “AND” grouping in the Advanced Find. When using multiple rules on the same entity(s), it’s like using an “OR” grouping in the Advanced Find. One last thing to consider is that there is a maximum of up to 5 rules per entity in Microsoft CRM 4.0

KE
Microsoft CRM Consultant
Unitek Microsoft CRM Services