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Question:
How do I setup a workflow to automatically notify my sales people when a customer’s support contract is approaching expiry?
Answer:
Assuming you are using the contract entity within CRM to manage customer support contracts, you can use CRM’s built in workflow engine to automatically notify the account owner when a contract is nearing its expiry date. If you have rights within CRM to setup new workflows, navigate to Settings, Process Center, Processes within Microsoft CRM:
Click New on the toolbar to create a new workflow, and fill in the new workflow form similar to this:
Then click OK.
When the Process window appears, ensure that the scope of the workflow’s scope is set to Organization and that the ‘Start when: Record is created’ checkbox is checked.
Now we need to add the steps to the workflow; so click the Add Step button and select Wait Condition. An empty wait condition will be added, so the first thing to do is enter a description. To do this, just replace the text “Type a step description here.” with your own description.
Then click on 
to edit the definition of the wait condition.
When the Specify Condition screen appears, set the condition up as follows:
In order to set the date condition (in yellow above), put your cursor into the date field and then from the right hand side select 3 in the Month dropdown, ensure Before is selected in the field below, Contract is selected in the Look for: field and then click on Contract End Date. This will then populate the date field with the dynamic value of ‘three months before the contract’s end date’.
Click Save and Close to save the changes.
The workflow’s steps should now look like this:
Now we need to add a step within the wait condition/timeout to send an email to the account manager. To do this, highlight the very bottom line in the steps by clicking on the text ‘Select this row and click Add Step’ and then click on the Add Step button and select Send E-mail.
Again, enter a description for the step by overtyping “Type a step description here.”. Then click on Set Properties to setup the email. When the Email screen opens, you can setup whatever you wish in here, but given that this is to be an internal email, the important fields to get right are the To and Subject fields.
To set the To field so that the email is sent to the owner of the customer account record, put your cursor into the To field and from the right hand side, from the Look for: field choose Customer (Account) (under Related Entities) and then choose Owner from the field below. Click Add and then OK to add the value to the To field as above.
For the Subject field, you can enter free text in here, however you can also use dynamic values to setup a context sensitive subject line. Above, I have set the line to read something like ABC Ltd Support Contract Expiry: 14 January 2012. All the dynamic fields are setup in the same way as the To field using the panel on the right hand side. You can setup something similar in the body of the email if you wish.
Once you’re happy with the contents of the email, click Save and Close to save your changes.
When you return to the Process screen, you can add more steps if you wish, for example you might want to create a new opportunity record for the account manager. Once you’re happy, click Save to save your changes, but for now don’t click Save and Close. Before the workflow becomes active, you will need to Activate it. To do this, click on Activate in the toolbar and click OK in the confirmation dialog. The Process screen will now be set to read-only because once a process is activated, you cannot change the structure of content of the workflow without deactivating it first.
Close the process screen and you’re done. For any new contracts that are setup in CRM, the owner of the customer account record will be automatically sent an email notifying them when the contract is three months from expiry, giving them plenty of time to get in touch with the customer and arrange the new contract with them.
There are three ways of upgrading an on-premise CRM 4.0 environment to CRM 2011, each with their own pros and cons.
Similar to the upgrade method for v3 to v4. Download the CRM 2011 media onto the CRM server and run the setup.
Prerequisites: Your in-place CRM and SQL servers need to compliant (64-bit etc.).
Advantages: No additional server costs.
Reasonably quick and straightforward.
Disadvantages: Risky; if it goes wrong there’s no going back.
In this scenario, you install the CRM 2011 application on a new server with the necessary supported components and during the install, point CRM at the existing CRM 4.0 SQL environment. Clearly the SQL environment also has to meet the minimum requirements for CRM 2011. The main gain here is that if there is an issue, then the rollback process is to restore the SQL databases as the CRM 4.0 server remains in place.
Prerequisites: Your new CRM server needs to meet the requirements.
Your existing SQL server needs to meet the requirements.
Advantages: Only need to buy a new CRM server, no SQL server.
Reasonably quick and straightforward.
Slightly less risky than a standard upgrade as rollback is easier.
Disadvantages: More costly as you have to buy a new CRM server.
Not entirely risk free.
Any components in the ISV folder needs to be copied across manually.
In this approach, you create an entirely new CRM 2011 environment including both CRM application and SQL servers. You install CRM 2011 onto the new environment and once you’re happy, you can then restore a copy of your CRM 4.0 database onto the new SQL server and use the CRM 2011 deployment manager to import it.
Prerequisites: A completely new CRM and SQL environment.
Advantages: Low risk; if there are issues, your CRM 4.0 environment is still in place and untouched.
The advantage of starting with a nice clean install of CRM 2011.
Disadvantages: Most costly approach as you have to create a whole new server environment.
Any components in the ISV folder needs to be copied across manually.
Now that Microsoft has released all the versions of Dynamics CRM a lot of clients will be considering their upgrade options.
Now whilst there is a whole wealth of information on the technical aspects of an upgrade I want to focus on a far more mundane aspect; the data in your systems.
Many of the systems that I come across have a long history. Usually starting out as a spreadsheet or Access Database and then migrating through products and versions.
With each change the previous data is diligently imported to the new format. What 
rarely happens is that businesses take a step back and look at just how good that data is.
So this time, if you are upgrading it may well be worth looking at, not just the technical system aspects of the upgrade but the quality of the data you are bringing across.
There are a number of good companies that will work with you to not just clean and update your data but also extend the data. In this way you can actually increase the value of your data and really take advantage of the analysis, segmentation and actionable opportunities offered by Dynamics CRM.
Charlie
There are a number of things you can do to improve the performance of your Microsoft CRM deployment, be that on-premise or online/hosted.
Most of this will happen at the client level. Microsoft, of course, handles (nearly) all of the performance optimization at the server level. The “nearly” part really applies to things you can do to with respect to your customizations and form designs.
First, we highly recommend you download the white paper, Optimizing and Maintaining Microsoft Dynamics CRM 4.0 (Keep in mind there is a lot of content in this paper that applies to on-premises deployments of CRM, and what can be done at the server level). You’ll want to focus on the section entitled, “Optimizing and Maintaining Client Tier Performance.” This post will reference several items from this white paper.
Microsoft CRM makes a number of round-trips to the server to retrieve forms and data. This has real implications when it comes to latency. Even a high bandwidth connection can appear slow if the connection has a high degree of latency (Satellite links are an excellent example of this). A typical broadband internet connection has latency of less than 100 milliseconds, and better still would be 25 milliseconds. A satellite internet connection normally suffers from latency above 500 milliseconds.
When you have a lot of latency in your connections, you rarely “fill the pipe” with the amount of data it could theoretically handle.
There are a number of simple tools out there to measure bandwidth and latency, such as ping and traceroute. You may also want to consider Visual Round Trip Analyzer and httpwatch.
If your users are on high latency connections it is critically important to optimize your forms and customizations. Review the Microsoft CRM Team blog post on Customizing Microsoft Dynamics CRM 4.0 for High-Latency and Low-Bandwidth Environments.
In this section we’ll share some ideas on what end-users can do to improve performance with the CRM web client and the CRM for Outlook plug-in.
Microsoft publishes monthly updates to the service that include performance improvements, bug fixes, and other general maintenance. While most of this is transparent to the users of the service, some of these monthly updates include updates to the CRM for Outlook plug-in. Please make sure you are accepting and installing these updates when Microsoft publishes them.
As detailed in the “Optimizing” white paper, configuring client-side caching is a simple way to improve performance over slower connections. Increasing your cache size will reduce the number or required round-trips CRM makes to retrieve frequently used elements. To increase cache size in Internet Explorer (IE), go to Tools > Internet Options > Browsing History Settings. Change the disk space to 200-300MB.
Rather than simply duplicate information, we encourage you to review this section of the “Optimizing” white paper.
The “Optimizing” white paper has a good section on this, and we’ll add on a few things. The white paper discusses options for synchronising only the record types that you require, managing synch intervals, and setting up Address Book synchronisation.
In addition, you may want to disable automatic email tagging. This is especially helpful for those with lots of email in their inboxes. When automatic email tagging is enabled, each received email will result in email tagging cycle processing, and when email background promote is enabled, each received email will be processed to see if it should be tracked in CRM.
Individual users can disable this. Just go to Start > All Programs > Microsoft Dynamics CRM 4.0 > Diagnostics. When the Diagnostics window comes up, click Support Mode. Remove the mark from the Automatic E-Mail Tagging box, and other services you may want to disable.
Alternatively, you can provide a registry update to your users or implement this through Group Policy. The registry values for disabling email tagging are
HKCU\Software\Microsoft\MSCRMClient
DWORD: TagDisabled
Value: 1
By default, Internet Explorer 7 and earlier versions limit the number of files that you can download at one time to two. Internet Explorer 8 limits the number of files that you can download at one time to six. This change reflects the faster connection speeds that are now typical for most users.
You can now increase the number of files that you can download at one time to 10. Just navigate to KB Article 282402, and click the “Fix it” button. The KB article also details how this can be set via Group Policy.
One last end-user tip. This one won’t really improve performance, but it will improve the overall experience. This is simply to take advantage of tabbed browsing in Internet Explorer.
As mentioned above in the Bandwidth v. Latency section, we recommend you read the CRM Team blog post on Customizing Microsoft Dynamics CRM 4.0 for High-Latency and Low-Bandwidth Environments.
There are a couple of things you can do as you design your forms that will optimize performance:
We hope these simple tips and tricks will make Microsoft CRM a more enjoyable experience for you and your users.
If you are a CRM and a GP (Great Plains) customers then Microsoft has created a FREE integration programme.
The integration programme provides fully bi-directional on the Account/Customer; Contact/Customer and Order/Sales Order record sets. Please see below for full list of integration points:
The majority of our customers take advantage of integrating Microsoft CRM with SharePoint. Most of these customer want to take advantage of SharePoint document management capabilities.
One of SharePoint most useful features is the ability to check in and check out documents. This feature works automatically with Microsoft Office so you can open a document stored in a document library on SharePoint , check out the document, work on it offline, then check it back in. Others will see the document is checked out (as shown with the green arrow attached to the word document as shown below) and have the option to download a read-only version.
Even with these safeguards, it is possible to overwrite a checked in version of a document with older version. SharePoint has a solution for this – Document Version Control.Enabling Document Version Control:
Document Libraries in SharePoint support version control at multiple levels. The SharePoint Site administrator has to enable versioning in document library settings, as it is not enabled by default. It’s very easy to enable as follows:
1. Go to the document library:
In this screenshot I have clicked on Shared Document link to navigate to the Shared Documents library.
2. In the document library, click on ‘Settings’ in the document library menu, and select ‘Document Library Settings’ option, as shown in this screenshot below:
3. In the document library customization page (‘Customize Shared Document’ in the screenshot below), select ‘Versioning Settings’, under the ‘General Settings’ sections:
4. The version settings page will open as shown in the screenshot below:
Before configuring the settings, understand that SharePoint versioning has built into it the notion of publishing drafts and major versions. Drafts may or may not be visible to others browsing the site – that’s controlled by you with these settings. Major versions are considered “published” versions are visible to others by default.
Require content approval – Before you publish a major version, you can elect to have it approved. This is a great feature for tightly controlled documents that you need to insure are reviewed before they published.
Document Version History – this is what turns on the version history feature
Once set, when you check in a document, a user will see :
In addition, now when you right click on the document, you will see additional options:
So you can now select the Version History and view any version you want:
If you’ve ever had to untangle the mess that happens when the company has multiple version of a document floating around, you’ll quickly recognise the value in the version control features built into SharePoint.
See below a link to the latest Statement of Direction for Microsoft CRM, dated April 2010.Some of my highlights from the document are:
CRM ’5′:
This one is a bit technical for me, but I can understand the performance hit!
The good news: When your Microsoft CRM database file runs out of space, SQL Server by default expands(grows) your database file.The bad news: By default it is 1 MB at a time.
Just imagine, you are entering a lot of data (multiple users or doing an import), and after you enter 1 MB of data, which is easy to do, the database basically needs to stop everything and grow by 1 MB. A little dramatic in the description, but basically this is what the database is doing. Wouldn’t it make more sense if the auto grow was by a percentage or set size.
Most people like to grow the database by 10% of its current size.
Here is how to change the setting:
