Atrio loves Click Dimensions for Web Analytics and more…

With ClickDimensions you discover who is interested in your products and services because you will see the actual web activity of anonymous and identified visitors on your web site. Interested in which companies and organizations are browsing your site and what interests them? Want to know what a specific prospective customer has viewed on your site before making the opening call? ClickDimensions allows you to do all this and more.

Connecting visitors to your CRM records
ClickDimensions tracks every visitor on your web site, attempts to discover the company/organization from which they are visiting and reports this information to you on our marketing dashboard. When the visitor becomes identified, by completing a form or clicking on a link in a marketing email (or an email sent from Outlook or other email software), all his or her past anonymous browsing activity is available on their CRM record with their identified browsing behavior.

Get a complete visitor picture
Profile screen gives CRM users a complete view of the visitor Lead or Contact including their web browsing details, lead score, email interaction, social networking information and web site form completion data.

See site visits, page views and form captures in real time
The ClickDimensions service operates in real time thus showing you site visits, page views and form captures often within a second of when they occur on your site. The data is brought into Dynamics CRM so you can immediately trigger workflow from it and/or include it in CRM reports and Advanced Find Views

Identify companies that visit your site
As anonymous visitors browse your site ClickDimensions identifies the organizations from which they are visiting as well as their location. ClickDimensions tracks all visits to as many of your web sites, blogs, etc. that you want to track.

Campaign Tracking
ClickDimensions emails, web visits, page views and form captures records can be linked to CRM campaign records. This is very helpful when you want to track all interest, traffic and/or conversions to specific web pages, landing pages or micro-sites.

Click Dimensions – E-mail Marketing too!
ClickDimensions built-in email marketing capability provides an intuitive experience that allows users to create and send bulk emails with all send, open, click and bounce data reported at the mailing (aggregate) as well as individual recipient level. An easy to use block editor or HTML editor makes creating an email simple for anyone. Their built-in library includes pre-formatted email templates that are pre-tested to look good no matter what email client your recipients use. Send bulk email, email individuals or trigger email from workflow. ClickDimensions Email Marketing works with Microsoft Dynamics CRM 2011 & CRM 4.0 in online, on-premise and partner hosted environments.

Microsoft CRM 2011 for iPad and more

Microsoft has announced the Q2 2012 Service Update …  Microsoft is branding it as the Microsoft Dynamics CRM Anywhere release.   The two that are generating a lot of excitement are the iPad and multi-browser support.  This service update is expected to be available Q2 2012 and promotes 6 areas of interest:

• Mobility
• Multi Browser Support
• Social Improvements
• Industry Templates
• SQL Server 2012
• Certifications

Mobility
The launch of a new product titled Microsoft Dynamics CRM Mobile, which will enable CRM Online, partner-hosted and on-premise customers with IFD to use CRM on up to three devices per user. There will be native clients, which mean offline support, on all the main mobile platforms including.
• Windows Phone 7.5
• iPhone & iPad
• Android
• BlackBerry
This is a subscription service for $30 per user per month.

Multiple Browser Support
• Internet Explorer 7 or above on Windows 7, Vista and XP
• Safari 5.1.1 or above on Mac OS-X or iOS5
• Firefox 6 or above on Windows 7, Vista and XP or Mac OS-X or iOS5
• Chrome 13 or above on Windows 7, Vista and XP.

Social Improvements – Activity Feeds
Microsoft released the new Activity Feeds feature in November 2011 which provided Social features into CRM 2011. CRM Anywhere introduces a series of enhancements to the Activity Feeds feature including:
• like/dislike
• enhanced filtering (e.g. @me, types of records I follow, record views)
• an updated mobile activity feeds client for Windows Phone 7.5.

Industry Templates
• Wealth Management
• Non-Profit
• Health

The templates will include data model customizations, dashboards, workflows and sample data. They’re designed to help customers in these specific industries visualise how Dynamics CRM can help their business, and speed up an implementation without necessarily being a fully-packaged vertical industry product.

SQL Server 2012
Microsoft’s have already been upgraded their data centers to SQL Server 2012 and this service update will bring official support for partners and customers wanting to upgrade their own deployments to SQL Server 2012. Additionally, there will be some new CRM features that make use of SQL Server 2012 new capabilities including:
• Performance improvements
• Enhanced database recovery
• Next generation BI

 

Change the max length of a field in Sharepoint 2010 User Profile

I have a Sharepoint portal that uses the User Profile Service in order to store user properties.  I created custom fields to hold address data such as Street 1, City, State, Zip.   When I created the fields I didn’t notice that Street 1 was defaulted to 25 characters.   After using the portal for a few weeks I came to realize that 25 characters isn’t large enough for a street address and wanted to increase it to 100 characters.  If you edit the property in the User Profile the length setting is grayed and cannot be changed.   A requirement I had was the name of the field needed to stay the same since I had a custom Sharepoint webpart using the field.

I figured that there were 2 options to make the field larger.
Use a temp field and recreate the orginal field (I did not use this method)
1. Create a new temporary field.
2. Move the data to the new temp field
3. Delete the original field
4. Recreate the field with the correct size (100 characters)
5. Move the data from the temp to the correct field
6. Delete the temp field

Modify the Sharepoint SQL database and change the length (Used this method)
1. Ran the following SQL statement on the User Profile Service Application_ProfileDb_… database
update dbo.PropertyList
set length=100
where PropertyName = ‘Street1′
2. Do a iisreset
*** It is not recommended by Microsoft to modify the Sharepoint SQL databases directly, but sometimes you just need to get things done ***

CRM 4.0 Email Router not deleting Forward Mailbox emails

I have had it happen in some cases that the CRM 4.0 Email Router Mailbox just fills up and never deletes the incoming emails.   Here are the steps that I take in order to fix this issue.

1. In the CRM 4.0 Email Router Configuration Manager, goto Users, Queus, and Forward Mailbox tab -> click Load Data button -> select Forward Mailboxes tab -> select the Forward Mailbox user and click Modify -> verify the setting Delete messages in forward mailbox after processing is checked.
2. Goto the Forward Mailbox user’s mailbox using OWA or Outlook and check and see if the emails are being deleted from the Inbox.  If they are not being deleted it means that CRM is not processing the emails.  Sometimes restarting the Microsoft CRM Email Router service kick starts the processing and everything starts working again.   If the emails are still not being deleted after restarting the service, then check the Eventlog.  Normally the eventlog will have an error that states which email is causing it problems.  Find that email in the Inbox, delete it, and restart the Microsoft CRM Email Router service.
3. If you find that the emails are being deleted but not being cleared from the Deleted Items, you can set the Storage Quotas in Exchange to automatically clear the Deleted Items daily.   Go to EXchange Management Console -> Recipient Configuration -> Mailbox -> select the properties of the Forward Mailbox user (CRMMail) -> select the Mailbox settings tab -> select properties of the Storage Quotas -> in the section Deleted item retention uncheck the Use mailbox database defaults adn set the Keep deleted items for (days) to 1.  Exchange will now clean out the Deleted Items for the Forward Mailbox user daily.

Can’t connect to CRM with Dynamic Pivot tables

Today I was testing dynamic PivotTables for a client in a CRM 2011 test environment. When I deployed them to production I changed the connection string and then added the report to CRM, on the production server. When I tried to open the PivotTable and refresh the data, I got an error “Unable to open https://crm.company.com/_grid/print/print_data.aspx?tweener=1″.

Long story short, I should pay more attention to the first line in the spreadsheet; ”To view and refresh dynamic data, Microsoft Dynamics CRM for Outlook must be installed. If it is already installed and configured, click “Refresh from CRM” to sign in to Microsoft Dynamics CRM. If you do not want to be prompted again to sign in, click “Save my e-mail address and password” on the Sign In page.”. I need Outlook and the CRM Outlook client to run my reports.

The moral of the story is that dynamic worksheets and dynamic PivotTables in an IFD environment use Outlook with the Outlook client installed to handle CRM user login credentials for the CRM database that Excel is using.

www.atriosystems.com

Error Synching Contacts with Outlook in CRM 2011

I experienced a strange problem with the synchronization of CRM contacts to Outlook that I want to share with the community. After I customized my CRM Outlook filters for contacts and synchronized with CRM, my Outlook contacts lost the CRM icon that indicates they are tracked in CRM, and reverted back to the normal Outlook icon. Also, when I performed a manual synchronization in Outlook I would sometimes get the error “You cannot link this item to Microsoft dynamics CRM. Synchronization with this record or activity type has been turned off.” I deactivated and re-activated the Outlook filter and even reconfigured my Outlook client but each time I got the same result.

One of the changes that I made to the filtering before the problems started was to deactivate the default filter, called My Contacts, and create and activate a new custom filter for contacts. After some trial and error, I discovered that by re-activating the My Contacts filter the synchronization started to work properly again, with the CRM icons showing up on my synchronized Outlook contacts. Once I realized this, I modified the My Contacts filter according to my preference for contacts and the synchronization with Outlook is now working as expected. I am also able to use a custom filter along with the default filter, to synchronize additional contacts as well.

I recommend to always modify and use the default Outlook filters and only create custom filters when you need to synchronize additional records of the same type.

Atrio Systems

CRM 4.0 Slow to respond

Every now and then I get a question/complaint from a client stating that CRM is slow.   Here are some things that I check:

1. Is Internet Explorer running slow when going to a non CRM related site such as cnn.com.   If getting to that site is also slow then it isn’t CRM it is something to do with your network or internet connection.
2. Do any other applications have databases on the same SQL server?  Are they running slow also?  If so, take a look at your SQL server processing.
3. Verify DNS is working correctly.   I have seen problems where 1 of the DNS servers was failing intermittently and causing CRM to take time loading.
4. Verify the Asynchronous table isn’t too large.   This knowledge base article helps you clean it up, http://support.microsoft.com/kb/968520.
5. Has a new antivirus software been installed recently?  Some antivirus software can cause CRM to slow to a halt due to the analyzing of the html traffic.   If this is the case, temporarily disable the antivirus and see if CRM starts running faster.
6. Is it all, a few, or one user that are having the slowness?   If it is just one user, look at their computer specifically.

Atrio Systems