How to enable interactive experience in Dynamics CRM

Microsoft Dynamics CRM 2016 and CRM Online has an interactive experience to offer. You can notice this on the notification bar at top of CRM.

To enable the interactive experience in Dynamics CRM, you can either click on Experience it now from the notification bar as shown here:

Or you can input the URL directly in your browser. The URL would be different for CRM Online or CRM (on premise).

Microsoft Dynamics CRM (on-premises) : In your browser, type //engagementhub.aspx, and then press Enter. For an Internet-facing deployment (IFD) use https://< hostname[:port]>/engagementhub.apsx.

If more than one organization is available, and you don’t specify one, the default organization will be used.

Microsoft Dynamics CRM Online : Type https://. crm#.dynamics.com/engagementhub.aspx, and press Enter.

You can always go back to the original main experience by replacing https://..../engagementhub.aspx to https://..../main.aspx

Understanding email marketing quotas in Microsoft Dynamics Marketing

This is my first post on Dynamics Marketing and I would like to address the quotas and limits for email marketing.

While this is critical for customers to know, let me also introduce you to the buying process and how to set up Microsoft Dynamics Marketing.

Getting on to the quotas:

For trial instance : Monthly quota is 30k emails / month and daily quota is 50 emails. (I don't know how this makes sense though because if you do the math, you can never reach the monthly quota)

For paid instance : Monthly quota in 50k emails / month and daily quota is half of your monthly quota. Which means you can send 25k emails on a day.

Additional email quota : can be bought in multiples of 10k emails / month.

Monthly bulletin on Dynamics CRM - September 2016

We've wrapped up September and here are a few things I thought were worth sharing:

ADXstudio vs SharePoint for Dynamics CRM: Why would you prefer ADXstudio over SharePoint and vice versa - https://mscrmnovice.blogspot.ae/2016/09/adxstudio-vs-sharepoint-for-dynamics-crm.html

HP prefers Microsoft Dynamics CRM over Salesforce: Microsoft has secured a deal with HP to host Microsoft Dynamics CRM Online and Microsoft Cloud services for thousands of HP employees across sales, marketing and services operations - https://techcrunch.com/2016/09/12/microsoft-snatches-hp-crm-and-services-business-from-rivals-salesforce-and-oracle/

Tracking and synchronizing Contacts and Activities between CRM and Exchange
https://blogs.msdn.microsoft.com/crm/2016/09/06/tracking-and-synchronization-of-communication-activities-and-contacts-using-outlook-and-exchange-integrations-in-crm/

How server side sync works?
https://blogs.msdn.microsoft.com/crm/2016/09/06/interested-in-learning-how-server-side-sync-works/

This post came across sometime ago and I thought was worth sharing. Would really help someone from a Business Consulting role.

Dynamics AX vs. Dynamics CRM
https://www.ebecs.com/microsoft/dynamics-ax/microsoft-dynamics-ax-vs-microsoft-dynamics-crm

ADXstudio vs SharePoint for Dynamics CRM

Microsoft buys ADXstudio. I believe this is a known fact to all.

How does it compare to SharePoint. Why use ADXstudio over SharePoint and why not? I'll try and answer these questions here.

Grant McLarnon wrote a great post on why use ADX portals over SharePoint providing you six reasons. It's a great place to give you a head start. What I'm going to focus on is not the technical bit but from a business stand point.

ADXstudio is a great portal solution which provides OOB customer portal, partner portal, community portal, content management and profile management features. All these features are licensed under a single license. You only need to license per CRM organization and not user based. On the other hand, SharePoint is user based licensing and all these features mentioned above have to be manually developed which is time consuming and increases cost.

ADXstudio however, doesn't offer rich document management features like version control, metadata definition of documents, document collaboration and sharing between team members, views and filtering options. With a powerful search engine on SharePoint, looking for documents is much easier even if you don't remember the location of the document within SharePoint. Now it's even better with Office web apps, one can open and edit documents online without having a desktop client for word, powerpoint or excel.

While ADXstudio provides you with certain portal features to meet specific business requirements, SharePoint on the other hand is a clean slate where your imagination is the limit.

In this blog I'm not trying to promote ADX portals or SharePoint, but only helping you make informed decisions. You would really need to vet the options before implementing one over the other.

Where is my CRM online data?

Short answer, in a Microsoft datacenter located somewhere on planet earth.

Long answer, here's how you can know for sure:

• While signing up for CRM Online, you are signing up for a public cloud where your data is hosted in one of Microsoft's datacenters.
• The datacenter is determined by the region you're in. Here is a table that Microsoft has released for your reference. Courtesy Microsoft.

• This gives you an idea where your data will be hosted however, once you have provisioned your CRM online environment, your URL will clarify the region for you. See the below table for details. Courtesy Peak Engagement

• Now where is your CRM online data, really? Login to CRM online and navigate to https://.crm<4>.dynamics.com/home/home_debug.aspx
• Look for server name. The first 2 letters determine your data location.

Now I know, where my data is residing.

What's next in Dynamics CRM?

Want to know what's new in Dynamics CRM or what's in preview or in development? Microsoft makes this easy with the CRM Roadmap website.

Now keep yourself up-to-date!

Monthly bulletin on Dynamics CRM - August 2016

Here are a few things I thought are worth sharing this month:

Now you can backup and restore your CRM Online instances (for both production and sandbox). Microsoft has provided us the ability to perform backups on demand:  Backup and restore your CRM Online instance

FantasySalesTeam update 1.4.6 is now available. Microsoft has improved the process for Metric Feed. FantasySalesTeam update

Collect feedback and rate records in CRM Online and Dynamics CRM 2016. Collect feedback using the Feedback entity

New data type for CRM fields called Customer added in CRM Online. Now you can include the Customer data type in system and custom entities.

Mid week post: Power BI + Dynamics CRM

Here are 2 things I would like to highlight to you this week:

• SQLBI explains how many-to-many relationships in Power BI can be handled more efficiently now.

• Increase your data fetch speed from Dynamics CRM into Power BI by making a slight change to your Power BI query by Scott Sewell.

I don't want you to miss this awesome visual added to the Power BI visual gallery called Pulse Chart. Read more about it on Microsoft Power BI blog.

Monthly bulletin on Dynamics CRM - June 2016

Here are a few things I thought were worth sharing this month:

Microsoft has announced deprecation with Dynamics CRM Online 2016 Update 1 and Dynamics CRM 2016 Service Pack 1: Deprecation Announcement

Dynamics CRM Tip of the Day shows how you can use Agreements in Dynamics CRM Field Services: Agreements in Dynamics CRM Field Services

I wrote how you can embed Power BI tiles in Dynamics CRM: Embed Power BI tiles in CRM Online

Embed Power BI tiles on Dynamics CRM Online

Great feature that was recently included with Microsoft Dynamics CRM Online 2016 Update 1 was the ability to embed Power BI tiles on CRM dashboard.

You first need to enable Power BI feature on CRM. To do this:

Enable Power BI tile embedding for your organization in Settings > Administration > System Settings > Reporting tab > Allow Power BI tile embedding.

• Have a Power BI account and have created at least one Power BI dashboard.
• You cannot embed Power BI tiles on system dashboards.

To add a Power BI tile to a Microsoft Dynamics CRM personal dashboard, you must:

1. Go to Dashboards in CRM under Sales, Service, or Marketing.
2. Select an existing personal dashboard or click New to create one.
3. On the dashboard, click an area where you want the tile to appear, and then click Power BI Tile on the toolbar.
4. In the Add Component dialog, select the Power BI dashboard and Power BI tile that you want to display on your dashboard, and then click OK. You may be asked to sign in to Power BI to complete this step.
5. Click another area of the dashboard and repeat this step to add another Power BI tile, or other component, such as chart or list, to your dashboard.\
6. Click Save to save your dashboard.

Oh! This is so cool :)