IE6 Error in CRM - Update Released

In August an update to Internet Explorer was released that caused CRM to throw errors in the mshtml.dll. Specifically, when using the menus in CRM, users would get an error message from Internet Explorer saying it needed to close. Microsoft had made a hotfix available shortly thereafter, but you had to contact them and ask for it to be emailed to you. They have now released a publicly available update at microsoft.com.

Update 10/10/06: The update is going to be a part of October's Windows Updates distributed to all licensed Windows users via the Microsoft Windows Update website.

Customizing The Quick Find View

I saw a post in the newsgroups today looking for advice on looking up cases by data contained in fields other than the title. Microsoft CRM 3.0 has some great functionality enhancements to make the Quick Find very useful. (The Quick Find is the little box at the top of lists in the CRM web interface that is labeled "Look For:")

You can edit the view that results when you use the quick find -- for cases the view is called "Quick Find Active Cases." (Go to Settings > Customization > Cases and look at the Forms and Views list.) There is an option on the right to "Add Find Columns."

Click on this and add the description column or case title column, save the view and then publish your changes. Now, when you go to the case view, you will be able to type the first few letters from one of the fields you added in the "Look for:" box and get back results from active cases that have data in any of the columns selected in the "Add Find Columns". You can also use asterisks as wild cards, so if you add the description column, and want to find a case that has the word 'desktop' in the description, you could do a quick find on '*esk' and find that case (without the quotes, and assuming the case was still active).

If you need some more power in your searches, then you will want to use the Advanced Find. A great feature of 3.0 is that the Advanced Find is context aware, so if you are looking at the case list and at the My Resolved Cases view, when you click on Advanced Find, it will have the filter criteria for that view pre-loaded in your query. If you can't see the details of the view in Advanced Find, click the "Show Details" button. You can then add different lines to your query to find just what you need. And you can save your query as a custom view that you can share with your co-workers! Very cool!

Auto-Suggest Fields in CRM

Excellent example by Joris Kalz on how to create an auto-suggest function for CRM fields:
http://blogs.msdn.com/joris_kalz/archive/2006/07/14/666225.aspx

The Power of Choice

Microsoft has already begun marketing CRM Live, which is planned for a mid-2007 release. Gotta love the marketing machine ;-)

http://www.microsoft.com/dynamics/crm/live/default.mspx

Microsoft Plans 'Live' CRM Service For Mid 2007

MS CEO Steve Ballmer told attendees at the WWPC (Worldwide Partner Conference) that Microsoft Dynamics CRM Live will debut sometime next year. CRM Live is being developed as part of the next release of CRM, code-named Titan, and will be an on-demand "software as a service" offering.

Many in the marketplace see this as a response to salesforce.com and other hosted CRM solutions. A significant departure from previously discussed hosted offerings, CRM Live will reside in Microsoft's own internal data centers, potentially cutting partners who have invested in the CRM product and their own hosted solutions out of the equation.

From my perspective, I don't think end-users or business managers much care where the application resides. While many partners may feel the loss of revenue opportunity because of the reduced necessity for customers to invest in infrastructure with a hosted solution, I think this will really allow CRM consultants like me to help my clients focus on the real issues at hand with a CRM project: developing business processes and mapping the application to those processes.

A big portion of the failure of CRM projects can be attributed to the fact that companies often think that once they have CRM installed, the project is over. With the ease of installing CRM 3.0, I've seen many companies install the product themselves, play with CRM for a few weeks, and then abandon the project altogether when they can't get their employees to use it, or can't figure out how it is supposed to make their businesses run better.

A hosted solution that let's a company deploy CRM simply by signing up online may help them see the forest for the trees and focus instead on the fundamentals of customer relationship management: clear goals that are well-communicated, well-trained end users, and an application that maps to a business's specific way of working. Clearly Microsoft CRM has the potential to do all that, and a hosted or on-site offering shouldn't make much difference -- if the partner has the customer's business interests in mind instead of their own.