Marketing Pro? You need to read this!

I've been working in the Microsoft Dynamics CRM industry for, oh, seven years now. Since Microsoft first released the product. The first implementation of CRM that I did for a customer was with version 1.2 way back in 2004. In very short order, my customer and I found that there were, shall we say, gaps in the product's functionality. Back in those early days the options for filling these gaps were pretty limited.

There was one fellow that was doing some pretty smart work, and whose company's products made my life as a systems integrator that much easier. Fast forward to 2011, and the Microsoft CRM ecosystem has matured along with the product itself. But that same gentleman is still offering solutions that make my life easier - and making the CRM projects I work on able to deliver that much more value to my clients. That person would be John Gravely, who last year started a new company called ClickDimensions.

ClickDimensions is a great example of a cloud-based, seamlessly integrated solution that delivers real value to CRM marketers. If you're familiar with Google Analytics, imagine having that data driven directly into your CRM system and tied to existing leads or contacts. And wouldn't it be great if you could generate rich, HTML emails for CRM marketing campaigns? Imagine being able to see when someone clicked on an email you sent, visited your site and spent some time reading a few pages - right inside CRM.

Want to know if your social media campaign is paying dividends? What about if it's the right time to call an important prospect? Or if several of your competitors are lurking on your website? Would that be valuable to you as a professional marketer?

(A diagram of ClickDimensions' integration with your website's forms - tying the power of the Cloud into your marketing!)


(They also have a great blog: http://clickdimensions.typepad.com/clickdimensions/)

Full disclosure: I need to point out that my company, C5 Insight, is a reseller partner for ClickDimensions - but we wouldn't be reselling their solution if we didn't believe in its value and power.

Email Router Fun

A couple of quick tips for setting up queues and workflow-generated emails with CRM Online. These are two separate things, but I ran into them recently:

1) If you create a Queue in CRM Online, such as support@mycompany.com, and you want that Queue to be able to send and receive email, make sure the owner of the queue is able to also send and receive email, and that the owner's user account is "approved" for email, if your System Settings require this for email to be processed.

2) If you have an administrative account set up in CRM and you want this account to be the sender of workflow-generated emails, make sure to log into CRM as that administrative account and, in the user settings, check "Allow other Microsoft Dynamics CRM users to send E-mail on your behalf."

CRM 2011 Online Released!

Microsoft today announced the immediate availability of CRM 2011 Online. According to the press release, CRM 2011 will be available for on-premise and partner-hosted deployment on February 28.

This is exciting news for those of us who have participated in the beta testing of this version of Microsoft Dynamics CRM 2011. CRM 2011 has a new solution framework to package and distribute customizations, an extremely enhanced Outlook client, and many more improvements.

The company is also offering significant incentives to customers who make the switch from salesforce.com. Having conducted several side-by-side comparisons of Microsoft CRM and salesforce.com for my clients, I feel very confident in saying that CRM 2011 offers a compelling and hard-to-beat solution that raises the bar for the entire CRM marketplace.

Two LiveIDs for two different CRM Online orgs?

I've got two LiveIDs that I somehow accumulated over the years, and I also belong to numerous Microsoft CRM Online organizations for CRM 2011 beta testing, development, and client work. As a company, we sometimes set up a LiveID for our clients when we sign them up for CRM Online, as well.

So it's not unusual that I'll need to be signed into two different CRM Online orgs that require two different LiveIDs.

The problem is that Internet Explorer caches your authentication, so after you sign into the first online org, when you go to sign into the second one, you won't have a chance to enter your second LiveID credentials.

The solution? Very simple: Open an "InPrivate" browsing session for the second org. In IE8, click on Safety > InPrivate Browsing (or press Ctrl + Shift + P).

InPrivate browsing launches a new IE session that doesn't communicate with the first session's cached credentials. So you can be logged into two CRM Online orgs with two different LiveIDs at the same time.

CRM Grid Editor - All done with Javascript

It's not very often that I see something new for Microsoft CRM that really impresses me to the point where I feel like I need to tell everyone about it. After all, CRM 4.0 has been out in the wild for more than 2 years now, and in that time many people in the CRM community have contributed the add-ons, tricks and code snippets to fill in short-comings in the product, or generally improve it's useability.

Today, however, is different. A colleague brought a blog post to my attention that really blew me away. The post is from Dave Berry, on his CRM Entropy blog, and it includes the code and instructions for implementing a feature that I've been missing in CRM since the v1.0 days: the ability to edit records in a list view, or grid.

We've built similar functionality using server-side technologies that have worked quite well. But they are complex and can be a challenge to implement. Dave's code is built completely in javascript and is embedded behind buttons via the ISV.Config XML. We've tested it out on some dev machines, and it's fast and very intuitive. Because it's all handled via the ISV.Config, I believe this will work on CRM Online as well.

I can easily foresee this client-side extension becoming a staple of every CRM project we do. Congratulations, Dave, on a job well done!

A CRM Wish List

I was recently asked to name the one improvement that I'd like to see made to CRM. I had a hard time limiting my response to one item. Don't get me wrong - I love working with Microsoft CRM. Even after 5 years, I'm still amazed at the product's flexibility to address business needs. But the question got me to thinking, and it's been a while since I compiled, in one place, my wish list for product improvements. So here they are, in no particular order. Leave your suggestions for CRM improvements in the comments section!

1. More frequent releases of product improvements. Probably the biggest thing I would change about the last 5 years of my career if I were given supreme power over the universe and Microsoft would be to have the CRM Product Group make more frequent releases of feature enhancements and functional improvements. We had a version 3.0 and now we have version 4.0, but there should have been 3.1, 3.2, 3.3, etc. in the interim with little improvements made and new features added along the way. I'm not talking bug fixes or update rollups - those are a given with any product. But to really stay competitive and keep delighting your customer base, I think it's important to show that innovation doesn't take 24 months to surface.
2. Search: the ability to search across entities from one place - ie, a quick find that isn't limited to one entity.
3. Ability to select a piece of Sales Literature and send it to a CRM Contact/Account/Lead via email
4. More robust editing of HTML in Email templates (with CSS support)
5. Actually release the Mobile Express client already
6. Built-in ability to expose fields from related entities on a form
7. Field-level security!
8. Ability for workflow to update attributes on inactive records (version 3.0 could do this!)
9. Email Activity enhancements: a) Ability to select secondary email addresses to send email; b) Email to custom entities; c) Associate tracked email activities to all matched records (if a duplicate email exists in the system, the email is unresolved rather than being associated with both); d) Aggregate email threads in History; e) Email preview panes
10. Combo boxes (multi-select picklists)
11. Recycle bin like MOSS
12. Reusable or linked picklists (across entities - so they keep in synch and don't need to be manually edited multiple times)
13. GUI/Drag and drop sitemap customizations
14. User-selected default views

Leave your suggestions for CRM improvements in the comments section!

Update to CRM Online Includes Keyword Ad Integration

Microsoft today released an update to its Dynamics CRM Online service that includes a fully-integrated, end-to-end keyword advertising management utility. The free tool, imaginatively called "Internet Marketing," allows CRM Online users to design search engine marketing campaigns by helping them select and bid for keywords with major search engines, track click-throughs and landing pages, track leads generated from keyword campaigns, and report on conversions into opportunities and closed sales.

CRM Online users now have a true, end-to-end online marketing tool that allows them to report on actual revenue generated by their search engine marketing investments. And best of all, it's free to Dynamics CRM subscribers!

To activate the service, CRM Online users need to go to the Settings area of CRM, click on Business Management, and click the new "Internet Marketing" link to launch the activation wizard.