CRM Solution Lifecycle Management White Paper Summary

Posted by Blake Scarlavai on May 21, 2013  |  Comments (0)

The white paper ALM for Microsoft Dynamics CRM 2011: CRM Solution Lifecycle Management was released last Friday.  This white paper is 76 pages of very detailed information on best practices and direction for the whole solution lifecycle.  It is an invaluable read and highly recommended as it touches on an array of topics from requirements gathering, development techniques, version control, daily builds, testing and deployment.

1. Hotfix Process

2. A variety of hotfix types are discussed, including the deletion of solution components.  If you are a solution customizer or developer then you understand the pain in having to delete a component from a solution that has been already deployed. The white paper solves this problem with a complex solution called the “Shared Publisher Technique” on page 13 that is worth checking out.

1. Solution Architecture

2. Guidance is provided on three types of solution architecture:

• One CRM Solution for One Production Deployment
• One CRM Solution for Multiple Regional Deployments
• Multi-Solution Environment

A scenario is provided for each type of architecture to help understand which type should be used.  The white paper also goes into detail on versioning, deployment and patching for each type of solution architecture.  All of this is good information for CRM implementation teams who haven’t ran into these specific scenarios before.

Version Control

In this section, different techniques are discussed on how to control, track, and manage changes to the source code files which are shown in the diagram below.  Using TFS, specific individual changes can be tied to work items or bugs which proves to be extremely helpful for the development process.

Solutions can be stored as a single file or multiple unpacked files.  The advantages and disadvantages of each approach are carefully detailed as well as scenarios for managed vs. unmanaged solutions.

Personally, I recommend using a Visual Studio solution to develop and keep track of all your CRM solution’s web resources as well as TFS, Subversion or a similar tool to version your solution components.  Also recommended is the CRM Solution Manager for Visual Studio which allows you to easily create, edit, and publish your files to CRM as web resources.  This helps maintain the same structure that you have created within Visual Studio.

Build

The whole build process is detailed out including check-in policies and gated builds to help ensure code quality.  It talks about how continuous integration builds can be used to deny check-ins until the build completes successfully which is a big part in ensuring each check-in doesn’t have any breaking changes. 

Probably my favorite section in the whole white paper is about developer environments.  Recommendations are given on different options of setting up the environments, from isolated CRM instances per developer to sharing an instance for all developers.

The following is a well laid out diagram on an enterprise development scenario with a centrally prepared development environment show on page 38.  This approach is highly recommended for enterprise scenarios with several developers.  More in depth information can be found on pages 38 and 39 as well as Appendix F.

I highly recommend isolated dev environments for each developer if you will have multiple developers working on the same CRM organization.  It is much easier for developers to debug plug-ins in an isolated environment so they are not stepping on each other’s toes.  Web resource changes made by developers can then be merged into source control and the latest can be pushed to the master development org.

Test

In this section, best practices are recommended for the best ways to find defects as early as possible.  Tests should be created for each user story.  Ideally the tests are automated and ran each night.  The paper also recommends a test plan to define testing scenarios as well as to help measure testing progress.

The authors go very in-depth on setting up testing automation, testing tools, how to manage the testing lifecycle and a big variety of testing scenarios.  In my opinion, all of these testing techniques should be used to ensure code quality and a successful deployment.

Diagram from page 41 - Running tests by using environments from Microsoft Test Manager

Deployment

Two types of deployment are described, manual development deployment and automatic deployment.  Microsoft makes it easy for automatic deployment with the concept of solutions but sometimes there are external components that need to be deployed as well, such as a nightly task.  These components should be deployed automatically where possible to save time and money.  The white paper lists out different tools that can be used for automatic deployment.

The white paper then finishes with a multitude of detailed concepts and methodologies in the appendices.  In my opinion, this is a must read for all teams implementing a CRM solution.  It’ll help plan out your design and architecture for all aspects of the lifecycle to ensure a time and cost friendly implementation that is scalable and easy to maintain for the future.

Know Your Enemy: Boosting Your Competitive Intelligence

Posted by Sonoma Partners on May 20, 2013  |  Comments (0)

Today's guest blogger is Jacob Cynamon-Murphy, a Sales Engineer at Sonoma Partners

Though we may not be fighting a war each day that we are out selling, competition certainly is fierce in most industries, so I'll paraphrase Sun Tzu by saying, "If you know your [competition] and know yourself, you can win a hundred [customers] without a single loss."  Across CRM implementations, I've found that the Competitor entity is one of the least-utilized of the core entities.  With the goal of making it a more significant player in your sales arsenal, I beefed up the entity and made a managed solution for Dynamics CRM 2011 that can turn the Competitor entity into a more valuable resource in your sales efforts.

What is in the solution?

• The Competitor entity is now firmly in the 21st century - I've added three new URL fields that can offer quick access from the Competitor record to your competition's Facebook, Twitter and LinkedIn pages.
• In case you (or another solution you deployed) have made updates to the native Competitor form, I created a new form named "Competitor Plus".  This new form includes a tab containing the three new social media fields.  By default, this form is enabled for all roles and shows as the first role-based form for the Competitor entity; you can modify these settings to meet your users' needs.
• I created four new Connection roles - Former Customer, Current Customer, Former Vendor and Current Vendor.  The "Customer" roles can be linked to Account and Contact records; the "Vendor" roles can be linked to Competitor records.  Additionally, Former Customer and Former Vendor are linked, as are Current Customer and Current Vendor.

How do I deploy the solution?

• Download the Competitor Plus managed solution.
• Within your CRM system, navigate to Settings | Solutions.
• Click the Import button at the top of the Solutions grid.
• Navigate to the location of the managed solution (where you downloaded or saved the file) and select the solution.
• Complete the import wizard.

How do I use the Competitor enhancements?

• When creating or editing Competitor records, you can populate the social media fields to add shortcuts to your competitors' pages; this will make it easier for your users to quickly find out how the competition is engaging with customers.
  • Twitter has the friendliest URL format.  It is simply "https://twitter.com/<username>" where you remove the "@" from the username.  For example, our corporate Twitter account is @sonomapartners and our Twitter URL is https://twitter.com/sonomapartners.
  • Facebook is similar, but their vanity URLs can be customized.  Simply go to http://facebook.com and search for your competitor by name to find the URL.
  • LinkedIn is the least "friendly" when it comes to URL discoverability.  When I search "Sonoma Partners" on the LinkedIn website, I get http://www.linkedin.com/company/41393?trk=tyah as my URL.  If, however, I search "sonoma partners site:linkedin.com" on Bing, the first URL in the search results is http://www.linkedin.com/company/sonoma-partners, a much more friendly option.
    
    
• You can also leverage the new connection roles.  Opportunity natively has a N:1 relationship with Competitor, but Account and Contact do not.  For long-running relationships, these additional connection roles can provide you with visibility to current competitive relationships as well as past relationships.
  • On a Competitor record, navigate to the Connections subgrid in the left-navigation.
  • Click on the Connect button (by default, 2nd in from left).
  • In the Connect To tab, select an Account or Contact in the Name field.
  • Next, select either Former Customer or Current Customer in the As this role field.
  • Optionally, you can expand the Details tab and set the Start Date and/or End Date fields.
  • Click on the Save & Close button.
  • Users can navigate to this subgrid to quickly review current and former relationships that the competitor has had with customers and prospects.
    
    

What's next?

I'm intending this solution to be a starting point for much-needed Competitor enhancements.  If you like what you see and want to suggest additional changes, send me a Tweet (@jcynamon) or email me (jcynamon AT sonomapartners DOT com).  Additionally, I have a Microsoft Connect suggestion to create a new field type to make the social media URLs (and other common URL fields) more user-friendly - please vote it up at http://www.bit.ly/12sajOm.

Dev.login.live.com to be Retired in Early June

Posted by Peter Majer on May 20, 2013  |  Comments (0)

We’ve been notified through the Microsoft MVP channel that the Microsoft Windows Live ID team will be shutting down the Dev.login.live.com endpoint in early June.  This endpoint was never meant to be a production endpoint, and apparently there aren’t a lot of people hitting this endpoint, so shutting it down should cause minimal issues.  However, there is still some traffic hitting this endpoint therefore it appears as if some Dynamics CRM customers CRM Online organizations are still using it.

If your solution is hitting this endpoint, the fix is simple.  You just need to update your code to hit login.live.com instead.  Simply pointing to this new endpoint should be all you need to do.

In order to avoid having any down time or issues with your code, we recommend you look at your solutions to see if you’re using the Dev.login.live.com endpoint, and make the change to login.live.com immediately.

Site Map Error Troubleshooting

Posted by Blake Scarlavai on May 8, 2013  |  Comments (0)

A co-worker ran into this pesky Site Map error the other day after importing and publishing customizations into a new organization. 

Unfortunately the ability to download the log file was disabled and the CRM trace was of no help.  Since we knew the Site Map was the culprit, we opened up the XML and began to review it.  After scanning the XML we discovered a privilege requirement for an entity that was no longer being used and the entity has been removed from the main solution, therefore the new organization doesn't contain this entity. 

Once this privilege was removed and the Site Map imported back into the organization, we were error free!

Hopefully this can save someone from a lot of troubleshooting time if you run into a similar error.

DefenseReady Daily Standup Released to the Win 8 App Store!

Posted by Blake Scarlavai on May 2, 2013  |  Comments (0)

We are excited to announce the release of the DefenseReady Daily Standup app on the Windows 8 App Store!

DefenseReady is a Dynamics CRM solution built by Permuta Technologies, Inc. that provides DoD and DHS organizations out-of-the-box mission-enabling solutions for Force Readiness, Mission Execution and Training Management.  Developed jointly by Sonoma Partners and Permuta, the Daily Standup app provides military commanders and leadership real-time insight into PERSTEMPO and strength levels throughout their organizations.  The app will be available for free to users of DefenseReady.

The app also has a built-in Demo Mode so even if you are not currently a DefenseReady customer, you can still check it out!

PERSTEMPO

The Daily Standup app will default to the PERSTEMPO view.  PERSTEMPO stands for Personnel Tempo which is the amount of days a troop has been away from home.  A column will be displayed for every child unit of the selected unit as well as the individuals for the selected unit.  Four ranges of PERSTEMPO are used to visualize the breakdown of each unit and individual.  A unit column can then be selected to drill into that unit and see its child units and individuals. 

Strength

The strength view displays how many positions are needed and how many are filled.  This helps monitor if the organization is under or over staffed.  The Strength view is shown by Rank or by Skill and each one is represented by a bullet chart.  The gray background bard represents the number of positions needed while the solid blue bar indicates the number of occupied positions.  The light gray bar indicates a 25% overage range.  The value and percentage to the right of the chart show the amount of occupied positions.

Map

The map view uses Bing Maps to display where troops are currently located as well a past and future locations.  The map will group the troops by location and display the number of troops in that location.  The Projection slider can be used to visualize troop locations in the past or future.

Follow-up List

The follow-up list can be displayed from the application bar.  The list will display any open waivers or tasks.  Waivers are used to get approval from a superior to go ahead and deploy a troop that has a high PERSTEMPO score.  Tasks can be used to flag a certain individual or a unit and take any notes which will be sent to the DefenseReady system.

I highly recommend checking out this app to see the ease of use and the power of DefenseReady.  It also displays the great potential of mobility with Dynamics CRM.  If your organization is looking to bring a powerful new app to the Windows 8 store, let Sonoma Partners help.  Contact us at info@sonomapartners.com.

For more information about DefenseReady or to schedule a demo, contact info@defenseready.com

CTI is not Just for the Big Guys Anymore (Part 3 of 3)

Posted by Sonoma Partners on April 22, 2013  |  Comments (0)

Today's guest blogger is Luke Simpson, a Technical Architect at Sonoma Partners.

This is the 3^rd in my series on Computer Telephony Integration (CTI) with salesforce.com.  If you haven’t read the first two posts, I definitely encourage you to do that.  You can find the 1^st post here and the 2^nd post here.  The last two posts have covered CTI in a general sense and the CTI Adapter implementation method specifically.  In this final post, let’s evaluate the Open CTI framework that was introduced in the Summer ’12 release for salesforce.com.

As I mentioned in my last post, the name of this series is ‘CTI is Not Just for the Big Guys Anymore’.  As the name implies, everyone is considering CTI today.  When a consumer interacts with a call center today, she or he expects a personalized experience.  Social Media has spoiled us to the idea that if you are trying to sell me something, you should understand my specific situation instantly and be able to adapt to it.  So having all of the customer information immediately at a service representatives fingertips is no longer a ‘nice to have’, it is a ‘must have’.  This also becomes an area where organizations can differentiate themselves based upon the level of personalization that they can provide to the call experience.  This is where the Open CTI framework proves to be a difference maker, in the way the UI can be customized while lowering maintenance costs.

Open CTI is a framework designed to allow telephony systems to communicate directly with salesforce.com without the use of an intermediary desktop adapter.  Prior to Open CTI, any Computer Telephony Integration project required that an organization install a small (or sometimes large) application on each user’s PC that would communicate with the CRM system as well as the telephony server.  With the advent of many new web-based technologies, the need for the desktop adapter has been eliminated.  This allows organizations to deploy solutions that are easier to install and require far fewer maintenance resources.  Additionally, using Open CTI gives organizations an entirely new level of customization options for their CTI deployments.  Because Open CTI is HTML5 and JavaScript based, the UI can be customized at a far greater level.  This architecture also allows organizations to more easily integrate data and functions from more systems into a single user experience (UX).

In Figure 1, below, we can see the standard architecture for a CTI desktop adapter prior to Open CTI.  The caller is routed from the CTI Server through the salesforce.com CTI adapter to the agent.  The adapter, which is prebuilt and installed on each client machine, performs all routing between the systems.  Most CTI desktop adapters are configurable to a point, and salesforce.com does an excellent job of providing the ability to configure the softphone within the salesforce.com UI to display a fairly large variety of entities and fields when a call is received or made.

figure 1 - courtesy Gautam Vasudev

In Figure 2 we see the same process but with the browser, and the Open CTI framework, acting as the intermediary.  This JavaScript and HTML5 based framework enables the web client of salesforce.com to receive screen pops and other notifications from the CTI Server without the need for a desktop based application.  What this means from a support perspective is that testing and deployment costs are greatly reduced.  Once an update has been developed and then tested in the sandbox, it can be deployed once for every user without the need for individualized testing based upon Operating Systems, and other client specific information.

figure 2 - courtesy Gautam Vasudev

If you would like more detail about the Open CTI architecture, I would encourage you to read Gautam Vasudev’s post on CTI integrations in the cloud here.  Gautam does a great job explaining the technical benefits and considerations.

Because Open CTI is a framework, each organization has the ability to modify the UI of the softphone to an incredible level of detail.  When using the softphone that is available to a desktop adapter, the basic UI cannot be modified.  Organizations can choose what entities and fields should be displayed, but there is no way to modify color schemes, phone layout, menus or to integrate data from other systems.  Compare the two images below, figures 3 & 4.  In Figure 3 we see the standards salesforce.com softphone that must be used with the desktop CTI adapter.  In figure 4, compare the layout of the demo Open CTI softphone layout

figure 3

figure 4

The softphone displayed in figure 4 is an entirely custom HTML5 pages that interacts with the CTI server via the Open CTI framework.  Obviously the example is fairly simple: 1) We have a dropdown that can be set by the user to show current status; 2) a menu bar that allows the user to select options, dial out or search a help page; 3) A Search dialog to look for contacts in the system; 4) A list of recently people recently contacted.  The Action buttons located to the left of the Contact names allow the user to answer an incoming call or dial out with a single click.

The possibilities for customizations within this framework are outstanding!  Any information that you have which is accessible via the web is now available to be displayed within your softphone.  So you have information not currently stored within salesforce.com, but that you want the user to have the ability to see within the context of a call, you can retrieve it.  An example of this would be for current account balances.  It would be incredibly advantageous to an organization to allow users to see a flag of account status based upon the current balance immediately on the initiation of a call.  Often many customer issues can be resolved with a simple piece of information such as notifying that a credit card has expired, that a bill is overdue, or on the bright side that a credit is owed back to the customer.

In addition to the customization options, Open CTI still provides the organization with basic CRM integration that we have come to expect.  Screens automatically opening to a Contact or Case record, options to change status or open a new Case?  All of these and more are available through the framework.

click to expand

Open CTI is not without its challenges, and it is understand the differences between the two approaches: 

The first obvious difference between the Open CTI framework and the desktop adapter is the UI.  Open CTI is incredibly customizable, but begins as a blank slate.  An implementer will need to spend time considering the layout of the softphone, the various buttons & menus, etc.  The desktop adapter, on the other hand, provides a softphone UI that is ready to deploy out of the box.  The limitation to this is that you have much less capability of modifying this pre-built UI.  Also, while the desktop adapter only requires configuration, the Open CTI framework requires custom code to customize and setup the UI.  This means that the skillsets needed to deploy an Open CTI softphone need to be far more technical than those needed for the desktop adapter.

Another difference comes in the architectural requirements for each method.  While the desktop adapter requires a small application to be installed on each client machine that Open CTI does not require, the Open CTI framework requires a web server to host the pages that interact with salesforce.com.  Those pages may be deployed within salesforce.com as an application, but that would then require testing and architectural support for communications between the application and the telephony server through whatever firewalls and security are deployed.  The desktop adapter does not require a web server, and is designed to communicate directly with the telephony provider. 

In addition to the architectural and customization differences, Open CTI requires the implementer to consider authentication and security when designing the solution.  As the softphone is a custom HTML5 web page, organizations will need to determine what security concerns must be addressed within the application, and then create solutions to those potential issues, prior to deployment.

Without trying to sound like a Consultant, “That depends on what you need!”  Sonoma Partners has a long history of helping organizations determine the right solutions for you specific problems and then helping do solve those problems.  Whether you are a small firm looking to integrate your phone and CRM system for the first time, or a Fortune 500 that would like to catch the wave of the next big thing in the Salesforce.com customer experience, we would love to help.  Hopefully this series has helped you to understand a little bit of the options that are available to you.  If you have any questions regarding the use of CTI or the Service Cloud, please reach me at lsimpson@sonomapartners.com.

Dynamics CRM 4.0 Mainstream Support has Ended - In Extended Support

Posted by Peter Majer on April 12, 2013  |  Comments (1)

Microsoft recently provided an update on the support lifecycle for Microsoft Dynamics CRM.

Mainstream Support for Dynamics CRM 4.0 has ended, and it is now in Extended Support which goes until 4/10/2018.  What this means is that CRM will continue to be supported through 2018, but there will be no special treatment unless you pay. 

For the most part, this will have little impact as paid support (support plans, Pay Per Incident, Premier hourly, etc.) will continue as before with no changes.  The biggest change is the removal of non-security hotfix support (except for customers who purchase an Extended Hotfix Agreement) and design change requests.   Except in very limited circumstances, there will be no new hotfixes generated for Dynamics CRM 4.0 except the currently in-progress 4.0 fixes.  

If you want to sign up for the Extended Hotfix Agreement, you need to have a Premier Support Agreement in place (or you need sign up for one if you don’t have one already).

What is the difference between Mainstream Support, Extended Support, and online self-help support for software products?  The table below provides this information:

The table below shows a full grid of the different Dynamics CRM versions and the current support that is being offered (or not offered in some cases) per version.

More details on the Microsoft Lifecycle Policy can be found through this link.

Announcing the Sonoma Partners Community Site

Posted by Sonoma Partners on April 9, 2013  |  Comments (0)

Our new Sonoma Partners Community is now LIVE!  To access the site, click here or “Community” on the Sonoma Partners website toolbar. 

Check out the key areas of our community site:

• Blog – find countless articles on MSFT Dynamics CRM and SalesForce.com lessons learned, trends, and Sonoma Partners solutions
• Applications – download and access help for all of our free solutions and apps
• Forums – post and browse discussions and issues related to our products
• Ideas – search and provide suggestions for product enhancements

Our community site is built using the Portals product from our friends at Adxstudio.

Sonoma Partners Universal Search Update - CRM Online Patches Applied and Working Once Again!

Posted by Sonoma Partners on April 5, 2013  |  Comments (1)

Today's guest blogger is Cherish Orozco, a Consultant at Sonoma Partners

Universal Search is now working again for all CRM Dynamics Online customers!

As many of you know, Microsoft deployed a patch to CRM Online late February which adversely affected two supported functions used by Universal Search – Xrm.Utility.openWebResource (used to open the Universal Search page) and Xrm.Utility.openEntityForm (used to open the results records).  Mid-March, Microsoft provided a fix for the first function.  This allowed online customers to launch the Universal Search page, but still prevented users from opening up the results records.  Last week, Microsoft deployed a fix for the second function, Xrm.Utility.openEntityForm, to all geographies.  We have confirmed that Universal Search should now be working again for all CRM Online customers.  NOTE: On premise Dynamics customers were not affected by any of these changes.

If you have any additional issues or questions regarding Universal Search, please visit our Community Site Forum for Universal Search. 

Sonoma Partners Dynamic Forms Community Edition – New Release!

Posted by Sonoma Partners on April 5, 2013  |  Comments (0)

Today's guest blogger is Cherish Orozco, a Consultant at Sonoma Partners

We have just released a new version of the Sonoma Partners Dynamic Forms-Community Edition – 1.2.65.97938.  Click here to download. 

This version includes the following updates:

• Fixed bugs associated with calculation and hiding actions.
• Fixed minor cosmetic issues in configuration page.
• Improved behavior with saving and publishing records.
• Removed all dependencies to the 4.0 endpoints. 

If you already have the Dynamic Forms Community Edition installed, please be aware of the following:

• Be sure to choose Overwrite Customizations when installing the updated solution. 
• If you already have rules in your environment, they will not be affected by this new version. You do not need to delete or recreate those rules.  You can simply install the updated solution on top of what you already have and the rules should be visible to you in the Dynamic Forms configuration page as they were before. 

We hope that you continue to find Dynamic Forms to be a useful tool in your Dynamics CRM environment.  For issues, questions, and suggestions, please visit our Community Forum for Dynamic Forms.

Dynamics CRM UR13 and SDK v5.0.15 Released

Posted by Blake Scarlavai on April 2, 2013  |  Comments (0)

Update Rollup 13

Update Rollup 13 was released last week.  This update provides long-awaited support for Windows Server 2012 as well as support for ADFS 2.1.  The important thing to note here is that to install CRM 2011 on Windows Server 2012, a setup update is required first which won’t be available until April 9th.  http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/library/dn167638.aspx

Head here for the download.

SDK v5.0.15

A new version of the SDK was released last week as well.  This update provides new DLLs that are compatible with UR 13 as well as CRM Online.  Also worth noting is a new version of the Metadata Browser that adds new properties from UR 12.

Important new design considerations were added to the SDK for the new Auto Save feature in CRM Online as well.  Microsoft explains that the reason for moving to an auto save is to keep consistency with modern applications and that it can’t be disabled or configured.  Although I like the option of having auto save for advanced users, it would be nice to configure the behavior as I think this could be an abrupt change for users who have been using CRM for awhile now.

Also listed is a very important note to customizers and developers explaining that each auto save is considered an update so workflows, plug-ins and auditing will trigger each time.  With that being said, the filtering attributes in plug-ins and workflows will be even more important so that they trigger only when specific fields are updated.

The following excerpt was taken from this page in the SDK - http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/hh913610.aspx. 

Modern applications are moving to an implicit save model. The updated forms introduce this behavior in Microsoft Dynamics CRM Online. Auto save is not configurable. You cannot disable it or change the behavior. There is no save button. The auto save control appears in the bottom right area of the updated form and has the following behaviors:

• When creating a new record there is a Create button in the command bar.
• Auto save does not apply until the record is created.
• After the first edit of the form, auto save occurs every 30 seconds.
• Auto save retrieves any changes to the record and displays them without reloading the form.
• Only data that has been changed since the last save are saved.
• The field currently being edited is not saved.
• Command bar actions like New, Close, or Qualify saves the record.
• Closing the form saves the record.

Note

Each time auto save occurs, it is considered an update to the record. Plug-ins, workflows, and auditing of records will treat each update as a separate event. Developers and creators of workflows need to consider the impact this will have on the business logic included in their plug-ins and workflows. Rather than triggering business logic on each update, you should include conditions to check the values of specific fields in the update to initiate your logic so that they won’t occur indiscriminately with each update.

Below is the full release history taken from the MSDN page - http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/dn130122.aspx

Finally, head here for the latest SDK download.

Sonoma Cares at Inspiration Cafe

Posted by Blake Scarlavai on April 1, 2013  |  Comments (0)

Here at Sonoma Partners we have created a group focused on charity called Sonoma Cares.  Sonoma Cares will be giving back on a quarterly basis through donations and volunteering. 

Last week a group of Sonomans went up to the Inspiration Cafe in Chicago to help out with their dinner service.  The Inspiration Cafe is a part of the wonderful Inspiration Corporation and they provide restaurant-style meals to homeless or poor men, women and families in a therapeutic community that promotes dignity and respect.  Half of our group cooked up some delicious beef tacos, rice and beans, as well as an array of desserts while the other half served.

We had a blast and we’ll definitely be going back in the near future.  The Inspiration Cafe is always looking for volunteers for a variety of jobs so if you’re in the Chicago area, check them out and head here to sign up!

Debugging CRM 2011 Plugins with the Plugin Profiler

Posted by Sonoma Partners on March 26, 2013  |  Comments (4)

Today's guest blogger is BJ Dibbern, a Senior Developer at Sonoma Partners.

There are a bunch of scenarios where you might want to debug plug-ins in CRM 2011 where at first glance it may not seem feasible. Need to debug while others are debugging? Need to debug sandboxed plug-ins? Plug-ins for CRM Online? Plug-ins that are registered in a production environment? All of these scenarios have a valid solution, and one that is not that hard to achieve.

Enter the Plug-in Profiler. Long story short, it lets you debug plug-ins offline. While you may have heard of the Plug-in Profiler before, you may not have considered it for your situation. This may be because it’s not as readily advertised as the standard debugging process of un-sandboxed plug-ins in a local on-premise deployment. Hopefully this post will help you have a better understanding of why the Plug-in Profiler is a great tool, and how it may be able to help you in the future.

First things first, you need to ensure that you have the latest and greatest version of the Plug-in Registration Tool which is included in the Dynamics CRM 2011 SDK. You can grab the latest version of it here: http://www.microsoft.com/en-us/download/details.aspx?id=24004. If you have an older copy of the Plug-in Registration Tool, you may not be able to see the Plug-in Profiler as it was introduced in version 5.0.5 of the SDK. In the latest releases of the SDK, you should find the Plug-in Registration tool in the Bin folder of the SDK download.

I’m going to assume in this post that you are familiar with the Plug-in Registration Tool already and know how to connect to an environment. If not, please see this article for more information: Walkthrough: Register a Plug-in Using the Plug-in Registration Tool.

Now let’s follow through the few basic steps of debugging a plug-in with the Plug-in Profiler.

• Connect to your target environment.
• If you have not already, register a plug-in and step in the target CRM environment. Ensure that you keep a copy of the debug version of the plug-in assembly on the computer where you are running the tool – this is needed to use the Profiler.
• In the main toolbar of the Registration Tool, select Install Profiler. This will take a few minutes to complete as it installs a solution to your target environment. You can uninstall the solution at anytime without any worry.

• Now we can enable profiling on a plug-in step. To do so, select a plug-in step (not a plug-in class) and click on the Profile button (highlighted below).

• In the dialog that presents, the defaults are fine for most use cases. Click OK.
• Back in CRM, perform an action that causes an exception to occur in the plug-in step you are profiling. You will be presented with a Business Process Error dialog box. Note the key difference here is that the exception is not immediately visible in the dialog. Instead the error detail actually contains the profile the tools uses to allow you to playback execution.
• Click the Download Log File button and save the details to your computer. This is the profile that the Profiler will use to allow you to playback execution.
• Open your Visual Studio solution and attach to debut the process named PluginRegistration.exe and set your desired break point in the code.
• Back in the Plug-in Registration Tool, click the Debug button, the below dialog will be presented.
  
• In the Step #1 box, browse to the file we downloaded in step 7.
• In the Step #2 box, browse to the location of the debug version of your plug-in assembly. The plug-in type (field labeled “Plug-in”) should default if you’ve selected the correct log. Note that if you get an error here stating it could not parse the organization service fault, that you probably don’t have profiling enabled correctly.
• Once you’re ready to debug, click the Start Plug-in Execution button on the dialog. This will allow you to step through your plug-in as you would normally when attached to the actual service.

Note that while it’s an awesome and powerful tool, the Profiler isn’t perfect. One thing to be aware of: errors with partial trust do not seem to be caught when attached to the profiler. You will need to debug those another way. You’ll notice that in playback of these types of issues, the profiler will throw an exception (generally on service calls) basically telling you that you’ve stepped through the execution past the point where the actual exception occurred.

Other than that one caveat however, the tool is excellent and I highly recommend checking it out.

Previewing Yammer for Dynamics MSCRM 2011 Online

Posted by Peter Majer on March 25, 2013  |  Comments (0)

Microsoft announced the acquisition of Yammer back in June of 2012, and rumors spread throughout the blogosphere about what that possibly could mean for their suite of products, including Dynamics CRM.  Recently we all found out.

A handful of features trickled out for CRM Online after the December Update or Polaris release.  Both the iPad Sales Experience and now an integration with Yammer were released in what we’re calling “Polaris Plus”.  These two new features, along with the  Polaris release, are available for CRM Online only.  These components should be available for On Premise deployments when Orion is released later in 2013.

We recently got our hands on an CRM Online org with the Yammer integration, and wanted to share our thoughts. 

First off, you must have a Yammer Enterprise account to be able to enable the Yammer integration with CRM.  I can see this requirement going away in the future, but for now, the Enterprise account needs to be obtained first which comes with a $3 per user per month price tag.

Another important thing to note is that if you enable the Yammer integration, then Activity Feeds for user posts go away.  Activity Feeds are still used for system posts, but for user posts, Yammer will replace the Activity Feeds that used to display.  Also, once you enable Yammer, you cannot disable it and go back to using Activity Feeds for user posts.  Therefore, be absolutely sure you want to update your organization to integrate with Yammer before you do so.

One limitation is that there currently is no migration plan to move the old Activity Feed User Posts to Yammer User Posts.  User posts in Activity Feeds will still be in the CRM database, but will not display in the CRM UI.

To enable the Yammer integration, in CRM go to Settings –> Administration –> Yammer Configuration.  Enter in your enterprise account details and you should be good to go.

When individual users hit a Yammer page for the first time in CRM, they’ll be prompted to log in.  The Yammer email address used to log in must match their CRM User’s email address

Yammer has a similar look and feel to many other popular social networking sites such as Facebook so the user adoption should be very high.   Some of the features that you can perform with Yammer within CRM are:

• Like and reply to messages
• See where the message was created from
• Click on the thread to view within Yammer.com
• Preview docs, download docs, and even add comments to certain documents (such as Word) that other users will see when they preview the document.
• Follow / Unfollow specific records (e.g., Opportunities) from CRM – This will automatically follow and unfollow the record in Yammer
• Post to specific Yammer Groups or Users
• Mention Users in posts using @

Some limitations of Yammer, and and functionality you currently cannot do within CRM with Yammer, but you can do on Yammer.com are:

• Upload documents to posts
• No migration path currently defined for old User Posts in Activity Feeds to the new Yammer User Posts
• View Recent Activity (e.g., who’s followed records recently
• Creating Polls
• Praising another Yammer User
• Following / Unfollowing in Yammer does not automatically follow and unfollow the record in CRM
• Yammer search (searches conversations, people, groups, files, and different pages that are created in CRM)
• Yammer posts will not appear when viewing CRM on an iPad (only system posts will show).  However, you can use the Yammer iPad app to get around this current limitation.
• Yammer only supports English.
• Cannot reply / like System Posts (if Activity Feeds are used instead of Yammer, this functionality is available)
• “More” options on conversations (Add Topics, Stop Following, View Conversation, Bookmark, Email Me, Delete)
• Cannot mention records on posts, only other users (if Activity Feeds are used instead of Yammer, this functionality is available)
• No Lync integration currently with Yammer

The Post Configurations are still used to enable / disable an entity for Yammer.  Certain entities cannot have Yammer enabled against them (e.g., Appointment, Phone Call, Recurring Appointment, Dialog Session).  Remember that after you enable / disable an entity from the Post Configurations, you need to publish the entity for the changes to stick.  Post Rule Configurations are still used for Auto Posts as well (e.g., Opportunity is Won).  Workflow rules can be created to create Auto Posts as well, but for now, these will only be displayed in CRM and not in Yammer.

A huge benefit of the Yammer integration is that now external users of your CRM environment can see posts created from CRM, and also respond to them.  Therefore you can send out information about product updates through Yammer, and see responses that come back from clients, partners, etc. that have access to your Yammer account.  You can view and create Yammer posts from CRM, Yammer.com, or any mobile device like an iPad or iPhone (Yammer supports Windows Phone, iOS, Android, and Blackberry).  The posts will even tell you what the source of the message was so you can see who frequently uses a certain medium over another.

Here’s how the same post looks in CRM, Yammer.com, and the Yammer iPad app:

In case you run into any issues with your Yammer to CRM integration, there are a couple things to try initially.

• Visit http://status.yammer.com (Yammer’s site status)
• Verify your CRM URL and Yammer.com are in the same security zone (e.g., Trusted Sites)

All in all this integration with a social networking site such as Yammer is a big step forward for Microsoft and should close a gap that was missing for some time.  As the integration matures and additional releases of CRM are made public, I can see a lot of the limitations listed above become features within CRM.  Therefore, I feel things can only get better from what should be a huge improvement to their previous solution.

Convergence 2013 Keynote Recap

Posted by Blake Scarlavai on March 22, 2013  |  Comments (0)

The Convergence 2013 Keynote kicked off Tuesday with some exciting news of a new version of MarketingPilot that has a new UI with a Windows 8 look and feel as well as the ability to integrate seamlessly with CRM.  Microsoft then announced a Netbreeze acquisition for social tracking and analytics seamlessly within CRM as well as unveiling a glimpse into a Sales Experience app for Windows 8.

Sales Experience Windows 8 App

Towards the end of the keynote, Fred Studer gave a great demo with Revlon on a Sales Experience app for Windows 8.  They talked about a “tablet view of the world” that only focuses on what the sales teams need and not the other “noise” in the system.

The landing page is shown below, allowing easy and quick access to key information, accounts, tasks and account performance.

Drilling into an account displays important information such as related tasks, notes, stakeholders and cases.

Fred noted that the Contoso account had a related task to call Reuben to discuss a new product launch.  Fred was quickly and easily able to click a Phone icon on Reuben’s contact information from the Contoso account to launch a Skype call with Reuben.  He was then able to dock the Skype call to the left while writing notes against the Contoso account based on their conversation.  Very slick! 

Netbreeze

Fred then jumped right into a Netbreeze demo.  He drilled into a campaign which showed an overview of “Share of voice” which displays how the campaign is doing by language, channel and docs.  

Fred then drilled into the sentiment for a product.  The sentiment displays how well people are responding to campaigns.

Drilling down even further, you can look at individual tweets which are highlighted based on positive or negative feedback.  Positive feedback is highlighted in green as shown below, while product names are highlighted in yellow.  This will be a very powerful tool for measuring your campaigns and provide the ability to quickly react to the responses of your campaigns.

Fred then announced that everyone who has CRM will be able to get this as part of the product, great news!

So there you have it, another Convergence in the books!  Overall we are pleased with the new announcements and we can’t wait to get our hands on the new functionality.  The social tracking should be a great addition to help with campaign management while a Sales Experience app will help power sales teams with everything they need to succeed and grow the company. 

Microsoft Dynamics CRM: Product Recap & Roadmap Primer

Posted by Sonoma Partners on March 22, 2013  |  Comments (2)

At this week’s Convergence conference, Jujhar Singh (Microsoft Dynamics CRM General Manager of Program Management) presented a session titled “Microsoft Dynamics CRM: Product Recap & Roadmap Primer”. Being software geeks, of course we wanted to learn as much as possible about the product roadmap so that we can share it with our customers. Fortunately, Microsoft posted all of their Convergence sessions online so that we can really study the presentation, take screenshots, etc. Love it! Here are our notes summarizing Jujhar’s Microsoft Dynamics CRM roadmap session.

High Level Product Roadmap

This slide below outlines the key Microsoft Dynamics CRM releases. We have already spent a lot of time detailing Polaris, and the Polaris Updates related to Yammer and mobile iPad support so we won’t go into those details again. The more interesting stuff (to us) is what’s coming in the future! In particular, let’s talk about the Gemini release which is the release associated with the Marketing Pilot functionality.

Side note, this slide references “BCM” and “Orion MKT”…we assume BCM means Business Contact Manager but we are not sure what that has to do with the Dynamics CRM product roadmap. I would guess that Orion MKT is marketing-related but again we have not heard that codename before. It seems like a good guess would be that this is related to the Netbreeze acquisition? Jujhar didn’t talk to either of these, so we’re left with a little mystery there.

Gemini Release

The slide above shows Gemini releasing right at the end of March / early April so we expect to see it shortly! Microsoft announced the Marketing Pilot acquisition back in October 2012. Marketing Pilot offers integrated marketing management capabilities, complete from asset tracking to email marketing automation.

More exciting to us was that Microsoft showed Marketing Pilot functionality in action. Here are some screenshots showing a campaign and email blast. Please note that these screenshots show email tracking (open, clicks, etc) along with email creation. This is great news because in the past this type of functionality required 3rd party ISV’s.

If you pay careful attention during the demos, you can see more of Marketing Pilot functionality areas flash by. With our quick trigger finger (!!) taking screenshots, we can see they are:

• Projects
• Marketing Execution
• Assets & Media
• Finance
• Performance

Orion Release

Orion is the next product release after Gemini, and Jujhar’s slide shows it coming sometime in the “second half of 2013”. We could try and interpolate where in the second half it might land based on their line, but I think that is a little nuts even for us. Jujhar outlined the main development themes of Orion.

Jujhar gave some quick demos to give a flavor of what the Orion user experience will be like. He really emphasized the “single window” experience to reduce/eliminate the number of pop-up windows that appear. Yes!

This shows how to navigate from one area to another (moving from “Sales” to “Service” for example).

This screenshot shows how users can access recently used records.

This shows how users would access related records (such as Activities and Contacts related to an Account).

After talking through the new Orion UI, Jujhar spent a few minutes talking about mobility updates. The Orion mobile highlights include:

• Mobile client application for Sales (Windows 8 and iPad)
• Mobile browsing client for iPad for all entities (not just Sales like it is today)…plus this will be available for on-premise customers too!

After mobile, Jujhar talked through some of the planned Business Process updates. “Business Process” generally refers to the record header outlined below. Jujhar mentioned the following updates are coming for Business Processes:

• It will be available across multiple entities, including custom entities
• It will not be hard-coded anymore
• It will be solution aware

Post – Orion

Lastly, Microsoft outlined some of the areas that the product roadmap will address post-Orion. These releases have been mentioned in the past as “Leo” and “Vega” but they are not called out on the roadmap slide above…so guessing the release timing will be very difficult!

Summary

Lots of great stuff and innovation are planned for Microsoft Dynamics CRM, including a total revamp of the user interface for Orion and beyond. Also great to see that Microsoft plans to support Android phones in the future as well.

Microsoft Convergence 2013 – Sonoma has Landed

Posted by Peter Majer on March 19, 2013  |  Comments (2)

The Sonoma Partners team has landed in New Orleans and we’re ready to take the city and Convergence by storm.  We’ve got a great group of Sonomans on site in New Orleans this week as well as a decent sized booth in the Expo Hall.  We have a lot of folks from the sales team, but also a few folks from the delivery side, and a few executives all whom are excited to meet with you and discuss some of the products we’ve built on the Microsoft Dynamics CRM platform.  Please swing by and visit us at booth # 616 in the Expo Hall.

If you weren’t able to see my colleague Jacob Cynamon-Murphy’s session Monday afternoon, we encourage you to stop by the booth as we have a bunch of great mobility products to show off.  Our messaging and areas of focus this year are Enterprise Mobility and Professional Services.  Therefore we’ve showed up with a slew of devices loaded with some red hot applications that our team of expert developers have been working on over the past couple of years.  We’ll even have one of our senior developers on site who worked on an app for Permuta Technologies that runs on the Windows 8 device so swing by and be prepared with questions to try and stump us!

We have the following applications on a variety of Windows and iOS devices (IdeaPad Yoga 11, ASUS Taichi 21, Samsung ATIV, Dell Latitude 10, Surface Pro, iPad/Mini) that we’re ready to show off.  These apps vary between applications that we built to address specific customer needs,

• Permuta Technologies – Manage Troop Readiness Levels (Windows 8)
• New Belgium Brewery  - Field Sales and Quality Management (Windows 8)
• ABB Concise – Field Sales and Appointment Management (iOS)
• Medline – Field Sales and Appointment Management (iOS)

We’re excited to get the chance to speak with you and show off all the cool tools we’ve been busy building, as well as hearing updates from Microsoft throughout the week.  With Microsoft’s recent releases, we’re excited to hear more about their Mobile direction, MarketingPilot integration, changes to the CRM UI with enhanced forms, and much more!

The Convergence Mobile Party App is Here!

Posted by Sonoma Partners on March 8, 2013  |  Comments (3)

We're super excited to announce that the first-ever Convergence Mobile Party App is now available! We designed this app to be platform independent - meaning you can run it on your iPhone, Android, Windows Phone, BlackBerry, or any other mobile device. 

What does it do?

• Shows you all parties happening at Convergence
• Provides party details, including any registration links
• Lets you know which parties your friends are interested in

It's perfect for people who are looking for parties to attend, and designed for party organizers to make their public events advertised (for free, of course!) to the Convergence attendees. 

How Do I Get it?

• Visit www.convergenceparty.com from your mobile device
• Log in using Twitter or LinkedIn
• Enter your company name and email

That's it! From there you can check out all of the bashes going on during Convergence from March 17-21.

Translating Ribbon and Site Map Labels for Managed Solutions

Posted by Blake Scarlavai on March 7, 2013  |  Comments (0)

Have a managed solution that you love but the ribbon and site map are not translated for your required languages? You came to the right spot! Thanks to my colleague Nick Coolidge, with a few easy steps you can have any custom ribbon buttons or site map links translated in minutes.

Create a New Solution

• Create a new Solution (Settings –> Solutions –> New).

• Add the Application Ribbons and/or Site Map to the solution.

• Export the solution as unmanaged

Extract and Edit the XML

• After the solution has been exported, extract the customizations.xml to edit it.

• For each supported language, add a Title to each LocLabel section.  *NOTE: Make sure to include the base English (1033) version and one to match your organization’s base language.

Re-Import the Solution

• In CRM, navigate back to the Solutions grid (Settings -> Solutions) and re-import the solution.
• Click Import

• Browse for and select your solution file.
• Hit next twice. The solution will import.
• Then hit Publish All Customizations once it imports successfully.
• Clear browser cache and reload CRM. Your label changes should show up in the ribbon.

CTI is Not Just for the Big Guys Anymore (Part 2 of 3)

Posted by Sonoma Partners on March 6, 2013  |  Comments (0)

This is the 2^nd in a 3-part series covering Computer Telephony Integration (CTI) with Salesforce.com.  If you haven’t read the first post yet, I encourage you to do so and you can find that post here.  In today’s post, I am going to be doing a brief walkthrough of 1 of the 2 main options for integrating your telephone system with Salesforce.com.  This method has been around for quite a few years now, and is a desktop adapter that is installed on each client machine.  This software then runs behind the scenes and acts as an intermediary between the telephony server and your Salesforce.com instance.

The name of this series is ‘CTI is Not Just for the Big Guys Anymore’.  So, if you aren’t a ‘Big Guy’, what key items of functionality might keep you from attempting a CTI project?  Obviously, the first would be budget!  Small and Mid-Tier businesses definitely need to get the greatest value for their IT dollars.  Second, typically you need a system that can be maintained by you!  I work for a consulting firm and I am quite aware of the need for specialized knowledge and experience, especially when embarking into new territory.  However, at some point the organization needs to be able to manage the system themselves without perpetually engaging outside help.

This is where the Salesforce.com vision and approach to CTI becomes a key differentiator.  Salesforce has created a solution by which you may integrate practically any telephony provider with your CRM system.  By using the Softphone functionality that is embedded within Salesforce.com, the Force.com platform allows organizations to quickly configure the appearance and functionality of the end-user experience.  Additionally, it allows you to configure the way the screen appears depending on the type of call (Incoming/Outgoing/Internal).  And it does all of this without requiring ANY code.

Installing the Adapter

CTI desktop adapters for Salesforce.com must be designed to integrate with the specific telephony system that you use in your business.  This means that just as there are many different telephone systems, there are many different adapters.  Several of these can be found on the AppExchange that Salesforce provides for partners to deliver add-on services.  All of them run as an installer on your client desktops and require a minimal amount of configuration to set them up.  Because there are so many, I will choose not to get into the detail of describing each of them, and instead focus on the thing that they have in common: the Softphone.  The Softphone is a component within Salesforce.com that provides users with an interface for making and answering phone calls, as well as jotting notes about the call.  As I said above, the Softphone with Salesforce.com allows a great deal of configurability in the way you want your users to interact with the phone and CRM system.  It is the primary user interface for call center users or service users when interacting with customers.

Configuring the Softphone

Salesforce provides for a great degree of configuration when displaying your softphone, and I won’t be able to go over them all, but here are the key points:

You can modify the information that is displayed to users by editing the Softphone Layout.  You do this by navigating to Setup -> Customize -> Call Center -> Softphone Layouts.  Here you select the layout that you wish to modify, as show to the right.  In this screenshot, I only have a single layout to modify.

(click to enlarge)

Once you have entered the Layout Editor, the administrator is provided with a series of options for modifying the layout of the softphone.  As you can see from the image below, the configuration page also provides a real-time Preview of what the softphone will look like depending on the context of the call.  In this example, we are modifying the Inbound call type to display the Caller ID and Dialed Number, as passed through from the telephony system.

(click to enlarge)

The ability to configure the softphone to display practically any object or field within Salesforce.com within the context of the call is where we get our true value.  In this example, the softphone searches the Contact, Account, Lead and Case objects for the phone number in question.  If a match is found, we can configure the system to display whichever fields we deem valuable.

I don’t want to search for Leads within my call center, so I’ll drop that object.  Simply select Lead in the Selections box and click the remove button.

(click to enlarge)

If a Case is found, I want to make sure that the Priority of the case is displayed.  So you simply expand the bullet for ‘If a single Case found, display:’ and perform the same action in reverse.  Find the Priority field under ‘Available’ and click the Add button.

(click to enlarge)

Administrators also have the ability to set a series of parameters that control how Salesforce.com manages specific scenarios related to phone calls:

(click to enlarge)

As you can see, you can control whether Screen Pops open within the current window or open a new window.  You can also direct Salesforce.com on what actions to take depending on No-Match, Single-Match or Multiple-matching records

User configured options

System Administrators aren’t the only ones who get to configure how the softphone works.  Individual users have certain capabilities at their disposal to individualize the system as well.

Users may navigate to Setup then under Personal Setup: Call Center Settings à My Softphone Settings.  Here the user can set Salesforce.com to automatically log them into the call center when opening Salesforce.com.  Also, a user can override system settings for when a single record is found and set that record to automatically open or not.

What does it look like when I’m done?

Here are a few shots of what the Softphone looks like in action:

In this screen I have just logged into the system and have not yet identified myself as ready for any calls.

This example shows me answering a call with the softphone configured to automatically pop individual cases.  As you can see, Salesforce found two contacts that matched my incoming phone number and so it displays both of them.

(click to enlarge)

This last screenshot was taken after I configured the layout to show the Status and Priority fields on the Case entity.  When the call came in, the system automatically popped the appropriate record and shows me the relevant information.

(click to enlarge)

How is the desktop adapter different from Open CTI?

That is going to be the topic of the final post in this series.  The nice thing about using the desktop CTI adapter within Salesforce.com is that it can be purchased as a readily available product, it can be configured fairly easily using out of the box Salesforce tools and it is a stable technology as integrations go.  What we will see in the next post is that Open CTI removes the PC from the integration chain, and uses JavaScript and HTML 5 to communicate directly between the Salesforce instance and your telephony server.