by Gustaf Westerlund | Oct 4, 2015
Just read a very interesting post by Wictor Wilén, a SharePoint MVP here in Sweden. He strongly argues that Yammer is planned for termination by Microsoft and lists several, very good reasons for this. Do read it.
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| Is Yammer breaking up? |
Why is this important for us working with Dynamics CRM? As you might know there is a built-in integration between Dynamics CRM and Yammer, where Yammer can be used to replace the Activity Feeds. This gives the organization using the Dynamics CRM system increased use of the feed functionality, as most of the features of Yammer Enterprise can be used directly from within CRM. It will create a thread for each record. For more information on how to set it up and how it works, read this Tech Net article: https://technet.microsoft.com/library/dn850385.aspx.
Recently, in CRM 2015 Spring Update (version 7.1) it is also possible to integrate CRM to Office Groups. If you read Wictor’s Post, you will note his referal to how this most likely is the informal successor to Yammer internally within Microsoft. The Office Groups integration makes the collaboration Picture in Dynamics CRM even more complicated as there now are Three different ways of collaborating;
– Activity Feeds
– Yammer
– Office Groups
However, if Yammer really is to be deprecated, then this Picture clears a bit.
Another interesting fact is that there has been nothing done to the Yammer integration in CRM for several versions. It was released for CRM 2013 and it still has a lot of basic features missing, like if it is enabled for an organization, it cannot be removed. (https://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/jj945277(v=crm.6).aspx)
If Yammer was to be officially terminated, do note that Wictor (and I in this post) are just speculating, migrating the existing data from Yammer to ActivityFeeds or OfficeGroups is also a non-trivial issue. As Wictor mentions briefly in his post, the Yammer API:s have some areas which can be improved.
So, based on this. I would not advice any current CRM system owners to enable the Yammer integration unless Microsoft starts investing in Yammer and/or the CRM-Yammer integration.
I would also be more than happy to have a discussion on this subject in the comments section below.
Gustaf Westerlund
MVP, Founder and CTO at CRM-konsulterna AB
www.crmkonsulterna.se
by Gustaf Westerlund | Sep 20, 2015
CRM 2016 – The Preview is under way! If you havn’t checked it out already, the Release Preview Guide is here: http://t.co/iH5IoBbF9Q! It is loaded with hot new features some will be available for both on-prem and online but some only for online, I am sad to say.
So why is this? Perhaps you have heard or seen “Cloud First, Mobile First”, Satya Nadella’s new Mantra, it is hence not only the Dynamics CRM mantra, but the entire Microsoft Mantra, with a large and very bold M. What that spells for on-prem is unclear at the moment. Microsoft are still, as we can see developing new versions of On-prem, and there are some very large customers running CRM On-prem which cannot so easily be moved to the cloud for many reasons. I’ll get back to that further down. So, I do Think we will see on-prem being kept alive for several more years but the trend that the we are seeing in the CRM 2016 Release Preview Guide and have seen previously as well, that some features will be release first or only for online, is probably going to be even stronger. This will probably be more true in regards to integrations with integrations to aquired Products such as MSE, MDM, Power BI and so on. If you are currently thinking of starting up a CRM Project, the choice of CRM on-prem or Online needs to take this into consideration.
Ok, so there are a lot of cool new features, any of these that I especially like? Yes, of course there are!
Document Generation
One of the most common problems we have with CRM that we cannot fix without huge amounts of development or Mscrm-addons excellent Product Document Core Pack is to simply generate a Word document (Quote document) from a quote wiht a couple of quote lines. It needs to be very Quick, just a few clicks, and also modifying the template needs to be simple enough for a reasonably skilled sales manger to handle. This is something that is coming in CRM 2016, maybe not to the full extent of DCP, but at least to the basic need, and I am one of many who have asked for this since CRM 3.0. I just hope it is all I wish it is!
Guided Help
The help functionality in CRM has previously been rather hidden away and not used that much by most users. This has resulted in poor user adoption and increased cost of support and training. The Guided Help is an overlay help which can help the user along as he or she uses the system which makes it very natural.
Increased support for high demand customers in CRM Online
I Work with several high demand customers and have also trained several others and have discussed the pros and cons of CRM Online. Most of these are very hesitant to move to CRM Online due to some of the following reasons:
– Backup/Restore functionality is not granular or on-demand to their requirements. Cannot be downloaded.
– Performance tuning cannot be done
– They need to make sure/prove that the data cannot be accessed outside their network
– Data warehousing with large data – for instance tables with 10M-100M records – charts break at 50k
There are several parts of the 2016 release that address these high demand Customer needs, like
– First versions of TDE, Transparent Data Encryption – which will allow encryption of CRM data. Do read the details of this, not ful ownership of key by Customer yet.
– Data performance Dashboard – enable admins to understand what is using system Resources to better optimize system.
– New data centers, a closer data center will decrease latency, an important factor in CRM performance.
– Bulk Data Loader – Allows for bulk data import and export to CRM. Still early version, but promising.
There are still things to do in this area though and I Think that some customers may still choose on-prem over on-line.
Making Carina (7.1) features availble for on-prem
This isn’t actually in the document, but one of the greatest things of the CRM 2016 release is that all (most anyway) of the awesome stuff from the Carina or 7.1 release will be made available for CRM On-premise. The most noteworthy of these features are (please yell in the comments if you don’t agree!)
– The new navigation – The navigation in Carina is so much better than 2015 RTM or 2013. So if you are running any of those versions, this single feature is reason enough to upgrade!
– Turbo forms – Weird name by the way. What will they call it when they make these faster, super ultra forms? 🙂 Anyway, they are great. Especially if you are have many users accessing CRM with high latency (use /tools/diagnostics/diag.aspx to check from their computers). You might need to redesign your js-code in your forms, put all libs in one per form as you cannot Control the sequence it loads, but it is worth it from a user perspective.
– Theming – Colors are nice. Make your users feel at home with some custom colors and their own logo.
That’s it. Summary over. Read the document yourself and make up your own mind and leave a comment if you feel something or not. Always nice to have a discussion!
If you are a CRM User, you can drop by CRM UG Sweden Chapter meeting on Wednesday and discuss this and Other stuff as well, 3 pm CET at Microsoft in Kista outside Stockholm.
I’d also like to thank Gus Gonzales, Donna Edwards and Adam Vero for the input for this article, it is based partly on the conversation we had yesterday on the CRM UG Medic Friday Online Event. If you are interested in attending next time we have one of our sessions, it is on dec 18. If you don’t know the concept, we sit there and you ask us impossible questions about your CRM systems and we try to answer them as best we can without looking like fools. 🙂 It is usually fun!
Otherwise, I hope to see you at the CRM UG Summit in Reno in October or at Techdays in Stockholm.
Gustaf Westerlund
MVP, Founder and CTO at CRM-konsulterna AB
www.crmkonsulterna.se
by Gustaf Westerlund | Aug 25, 2015
When using federated users in a CRM Online, we encountered an error where accessing the CRM worked fine, but accessing the system using the Outlook client (configuring it) or accessing it via the tablet client did not work. It seems that some additional settings were required on the AD FS server.
We we working with a customer who had set up a CRM Online with federated users to their AD via their AD FS. When accessing this via the web client, it all worked well, but when trying to configure CRM for Outlook we just got an error “An error has occured. Please contact the system administrator”. Our customer’s IT manager started a premier support case as I felt this was most probably a AD FS related issue (there were no problems with the non-federated users).
After a couple of screen sharing sessions we got some great help from Pedro R at Microsoft Support and I learned something new which I thought I’d share with you and that is this;
When using federated users in CRM Online and when using IFD CRM with AD FS you have to enable the Outlook and Tablet authentication to pass through the AD FS, otherwise it is blocked.
There is a Technet article on this which can be found here: https://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/library/hh699726.aspx#BKMK_WS2012R2
I think this is often something that might be overlooked why I thought sharing it with you would be a good idea. Maybe you’ll find it and save yourself some time!
Gustaf Westerlund
MVP, Founder and CTO at CRM-konsulterna AB
www.crmkonsulterna.se
by Gustaf Westerlund | Aug 14, 2015
I received a question per email today and as I Work as a Consultant, Selling my time by the hour, while at the same time sharing my knowledge and experience on this blog and in Other places, I thought I might share my general view on how I separate the Community Work from the Work that puts food on my table.
I am a strong believer in the notion that we need to share knowledge with each other to be able to all grow and be stronger. This is why I started the blog, started CRM User Group Sweden, run Techie After Work (with Allan Varcoe and Peter Björkmarker), present at Conferences where I do not get paid for speaking. If we all do this in the Dynamics CRM Community, it will grow large, new people will quickly learn from the more experienced, and our CRM system, will prosper to all our benefit.
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| We all have to put food on the table |
But, I also have to put food on the table, so when people ask me to help them by contacting me by
email or phone, they do actual ask me as a Consultant and I can and will charge for the time I help out. Typically an agreement, including NDA, is signed so that I can help out in a more direct manner, which of course, is different than somebody asking something general in the comment on a blog post.
So, if you have a question to me, regarding a post, I recommend leaving a comment. Sadly, there are a lot of comment spammers out there, looking for some links to their sites, why I need to moderate all comments, as I respect you as readers and I do not want to waste your time with crap comments and irrelevant links to companies trying to sell training or otherwise.
So, on to the question I got, as it was clearly directed as a comment, will answer it in the form of a blog post instead of an email reply, so that others in the Community can also benefit from it.
“I was reading your blog post on sending emails from a queue (http://gustafwesterlund.blogspot.com/2013/02/sending-emails-from-queue-with-email.html) and had a question. I’m using CRM 2015 and trying to set up a queue for sending and I was wondering if the generic address needs to point to a mailbox on the server or if it can be a distribution list or mail-enabled public folder. I’ve tried setting up an existing distribution list address for the email address, but I get errors because it can’t log on to a mailbox, so I didn’t know if it was possible or if there’s something else I need to do instead.”
It is a good question. It is not obvious why you cannot use one type of email address or Another, but if you refer to the implementation guide (yes, I know, it is a very large document(s) and hard to navigate, but try to find your way around it) you will see that it says that the email address that you indicate in a queue has to be a user mailbox. It cannot be anything else. There are several different ways of logging in to this, the simplest is to set the credentials in the queue, but this will require you to change the password in the queue every time you change it in the AD. I wrote the Synchronization overview chapter in the CRM Field Guide (http://gustafwesterlund.blogspot.se/2015/04/the-crm-2013-field-guide-is-out.html) and I would strongly recommend that you read this or the similar parts in the implementation guide for more detailed information.
Gustaf Westerlund
MVP, Founder and CTO at CRM-konsulterna AB
www.crmkonsulterna.se
by Gustaf Westerlund | Jul 1, 2015
And again it is the time of the year of waiting…
First of July has for the last three years been horrible. Have I been active enough? Maybe I should have blogged a bit more? Maybe written another book or presented at another seminar… and the clock ticks… and you know that the time in Seattle is a bit later than in Sweden so you just have to be patient, usually the mail doesn’t show up until late in the afternoon.
But I have got a trick, look at the MVP site and see if the profile has been updated, so I checked, and it did say that I now was on my forth year. But, the email. You need the email. Some loose it in their junkmail. The email is the final proof, The site might be wrong.
And the clock ticked. Tock.
4 pm. Maybe I’ll see more if I logg in to the MVP-site.
Aha, Award end date, next year! That looks good. Maybe I did make it after all.
Then. PLING. You have mail.
The feeling is just great every year!
Congrats to all my fellow MVP:s who got renewed and if there are any new CRM MVP:s out there, a hearty Congrats, renewing is great but the first time is best!
Gustaf Westerlund
MVP, Founder and CTO at CRM-konsulterna AB
www.crmkonsulterna.se
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