This week was extremely busy for me soaking up knowledge at CRMUG Summit in Tampa. It was a great conference with lots of information. I had hoped to be posting all week but due to an unforeseen computer dropping incident needed to be postponed. I hope to get all my notes posed very soon. When I get through this I will also probably have some links to other blogs that were discussed at the conference.
In other news the CRM 2013 Mobile Client was released this week. Conference buzz implied there have been a few issues with the release but I have not tried it myself. You can read a bit more on Sonoma Partners blog: Dynamics CRM 2013 Phone App Released.
Also Microsoft announced a Partnership with InsideView. InsideView is a product that integrates with CRM and can provide data and social insights about your Accounts/Contacts. This partnership means that CRM Online customers at the Professional level will receive the Social Insights of InsideView at no additional cost. A broader rollout will be coming sometime next year. The press release also talked about some Industry Templates that Microsoft will be releasing. These are solutions that will be available on the Dynamics Marketplace to help businesses get up and running quickly with CRM 2013.
The Microsoft Dynamics CRM Team was also very busy this week posting several exciting blogs:
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Form Merge Post Upgrade – When you upgrade your CRM 2011 system to 2013, your classic forms will be left as they are as the default form. To move these into the new 2013 style you will need to use the “Merge Forms” button. This will simply move everything on your classic form on to the new 2013 entity form. Then you can adjust as necessary.
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Fluid Forms – The new forms for CRM 2013 were designed with Responsive Web Design in mind. This means that the layout adjusts for different resolutions and window sizes. So you do not need to worry about data being cut off or odd formatting issues that sometimes arose in old versions.
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Using the Business Process Flow Designer – This articles gives some deeper details into the Business Process Flow we have been hearing so much about. The important pieces to note are that the flow can include a maximum of 5 entity switches and the process can only be linear with a maximum of 30 steps (per entity I believe). Note: users can change the process manually right now in 2013, but automatic branching logic should be included in future releases.
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Composite Controls – This is the new functionality that allows you to enter data into one field and it will split into separate fields (think of full name and address).
For those more technical than I, you should check out CRM in the Field’s How to Debug JavaScript in CRM 2011 post-UR15. Non-technical summary: in UR 12 the way JS scripts loaded changed to improve perceived performance; however this meant they may not load in the intended order. This was “fixed” in UR 15 but it is still different than pre-UR 12 and needs to be debugged using a new method. So, if your forms are doing weird things, check this out in case it applies to you.
PowerObjects posted some screenshots and information about new CRM 2013 features: Business Rules and Auto Save. No real new information here but some good screenshots/examples if you haven’t seen this functionality yet.
Sonoma Partners demonstrated the 2013 Inline Editable Grids. Check out the video demonstrating some of this functionality. Keep in mind this will be available for some system entities in 2013 but will not be available for all entities (including custom) until a later release.
That’s all the news I have for today. Hopefully I will be back soon with Summit news. Have a nice weekend!