Author: Dave Vora

CRM ISV Spotlight: Dynamics CRM 2016 Workflow Tools

Dynamics CRM has come a long way to become an established, and at the same time an evolving platform. There are several ISV solutions that have extended Dynamics CRM beyond a traditional CRM and provided many vertical solutions. One of the ISV solutions I would like to highlight today is “Dynamics CRM 2016 Workflow Tools” by demian_rasko on CodePlex. Like a lot of CRM add-on solutions on CodePlex, this one provides additional functionality at the CRM platform level; and the best part – it is free. This solution is available for Dynamics CRM On-Premises and Dynamics CRM Online, as well as a managed solution. Besides all these benefits, the source code behind this solution is open source, so if you are a developer then you can certainly extend it further to your requirements and add/contribute to this community.

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May 24, 2016

Prelude to KTL UC 2016 – Benefits of Moving to CRM Online

In the upcoming KTL User Conference 2016, we will have a session on the benefits of moving to CRM Online. You will get all the details on the ease of the move, plus details on the additional features you will get just by choosing CRM Online. As I type this blog, Microsoft has already released the preview guide for what’s coming as an update to CRM in Spring 2016.

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April 12, 2016

Best Practices in Properly Preparing Your Company for an Upgrade

At KTL Solutions we have worked with a lot of upgrade projects involving Microsoft business products, including Dynamics GP, CRM, SharePoint, Exchange, etc. In today’s post we will discuss the preparation you can do as a system administrator to prepare for an upgrade of Dynamics CRM. An upgrade project starts early on when we first investigate/review the existing state of the CRM environment. In most cases, we perform an upgrade by migrating to a new instance of SQL server. In case of multiple version upgrades, we do a migration, and then do an in-place upgrade.

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March 24, 2016

How to Set Work Hours for Dynamics CRM Users

The most overlooked setting during CRM user setup are the work hours. Setting up the work hours for a user/facility/equipment record has always been an afterthought (at least for me). Then again, this setting becomes more relevant and important to setup when you are scheduling resources., This is especially true in setting up the service module or as part of any project management/field service module where appointments are being setup for tasks.  For those who may not know where this setting exists, it can be found by navigating to ;Settings->Security->Users.'  Open any user record, and in the navigation for the user record, you can find the “WORK HOURS” navigation tile. You can access the resources work hours by navigating to ;Settings->Business Management -> Facilities/Equipment.' The resource entity still uses the old CRM form layout so the work hour navigation can be accessed from within the form.

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December 18, 2015

How to track projects using CRM

 

Before I present the options and the different ways to track projects in CRM, let’s look at the different aspects of project management that would be needed in any organization. 

  1. Resource Scheduling 

  1. Project planning &tracking 

  1. Time & Expense entry 

  1. Ap

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November 24, 2015

Strategies to keep your CRM data clean

With most CRM systems or for that matter any enterprise systems we often hear this saying “Garbage in Garbage out” about the data that resides in these systems. The reality is that most systems do have garbage data and each organization uses different methods to maintain/scrub/cleanse their data. Some organizations use a data warehouse where data is synced from different sources and normalized, the data warehouse is used as the master data source for all reporting and transactional data still remains in the same state. In another situation an ERP would be the source for the master data and all other systems like CRM would sync and integrate with the ERP data. But each system has its users and they too would like to maintain good data. In a modern system like Dynamics CRM, it provides a lot of methods to maintain your data. The following methods can be deployed to keep you data clean:- 

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June 23, 2015