Microsoft Dynamics CRM UK Reseller: CRM Diary

The CRM Diary (Week 8)

Tue, 30 May 2006 13:47:58 GMT

Tuesday 30th May

Back from holiday in Kephalonia, Greece. A lot of emails to follow up and a couple of quotes to send out.

The CRM Diary (Week 7)

Tue, 30 May 2006 13:38:38 GMT

Monday 15th May

Working with a customer to migrate from Achiever. There was one outstanding issue around Notes which in Achiever are held in binary format in the SQL database. It took a complex command to extract the text so that it could be imported into CRM via DMF.

Tuesday 16th May

A demo to a customer. The first who has expressed an interest in CRM Mobile which we haven't had chance to test ourselves yet. The prospect is a specialist in mobile technology and have their own direct link to the UK mobile infrastructure. Very interesting.

Wednesday 17th May

Working on a call centre system for a customer in preparation for a new stream of business from 1st July. Lots of configuration and testing required and I will be revisiting this over the next few weeks.

Thursday 18th May

I will be on holiday now until 30th May.

The CRM Diary (Week 6)

Sat, 13 May 2006 03:33:37 GMT

Monday 8th May

Dealt with a couple of support issues regarding change to British Summer Time on CRM 1.2 and SQL Reporting Services. CRM holds all dates/times in GMT format and in the platform it adjusts for timezone and daylight saving adjustments.

We have for one customer put in a solution for service level management and escalation of cases based on contracted hours and we had to take care that we correctly handled the daylight saving time correctly in C# when writing to the SDK. It's not difficult but easy to get wrong. The customer emailed to say the dates were a day out.

I spent what seemed like ages looking at the code trying to spot where the problem was and even wrote a little console utility to check out the various time settings. Download the Visual Studio project from http://www.vigence.co.uk/downloads/GMTBST.zip. You will need to update the code to point to your CRM server and update the GUIDs for two activity records.

The problem was not in the code, all the dates and times looked OK. Finally I realised that it was in a SQL Report, the Job Sheet that gets printed and handed out to engineers. This was the clue. What was happening is that for example the target date of say 8th May is stored in the database as 7th May 23:00. In the CRM forms which was OK as the platform adjusted for British Summer Time and added an hour but the report was simply taking the date part. Once I realised this I simply added an hour to the date and then took the date part. Needless to say this is CRM 1.2 and in CRM 3.0 there is a lovely function in SQL to correct dates/times based on the user's timezone settings.

In the evening I gave a talk to the London Small Business Specialist User Group on CRM and real life experiences on selling and implementing it. Around 25 people were there which was good and I went on a bit I think as I am passionate about CRM but there was some good feedback and thoughtful questions. Afterwards we retired to a pub and I talked with several of the attendees and found one person who went to the same school as me!

I have been asked to talk at the Thames Valley meeting in August on a similar theme.

Tuesday 9th May

As I was in London I took the opportunity to visit a couple of customers. The first of these I had never met before in person as we had done everything over the phone, email and live meeting. The initial work was to simply install and configure CRM for sales leads with an email parse to create and populate leads. They now want to expand on their use of CRM and especially reporting.

The other customer is in the financial services industry and has a big need for producing letters from within CRM. The CRM mail merge from Outlook just doesn't meeting their requirements as it does not work on custom fields s whilst it is OK for general marketing i.e., name and address it is no good for customer information. I had pointed them at a third party www.mscrm-addons.com as this is provides the ability to access all fields and also to attach the word document to the activity but they had a number of problems with it.

The errors were different but one was easily sorted by clearing out temporary files but the second came up with a user login error when used from within Word but was OK when initiating a mail merge from from within Outlook. Nothing I tried could sort it and I emailed the ISV for help but have not had much help other than check permissions which I had already done before contacting them. This illustrates why I don't like third party ISV add-ons as if they don't work I have the problem of sorting it and their support generally doesn't match that of Microsoft's plus I have an unhappy customer. It doesn't help when the problem PC is that of the MD!

Whilst I was there, I also noticed that the crmaddin.dll had become disabled and the CRM Toolbar was greyed out and the standard Mail Merge option was missing. To solve this; from within Outlook select Help from the menus and then About Microsoft Office Outlook and then click on Disabled Items. If crmaddin.dll is listed, highlight it, click on Enable and then OK twice, exit and start Outlook.

Wednesday 10th May

Spent the day finalising the configuration at the customer where we did the data migration last week. As with all CRM projects the solution evolves and the customer had had a rethink over classifying contacts which required some changes to the forms and I added some javascript to a picklist to set various flags on the the contact record to aid data entry.

I then went over the Advanced Find capability of linking two entities together e.g. Account and Contact to get all contacts in a particular industry sector. Then we created a dynamic pivot table in Excel to report on the number of contacts in the database and role for a sector.

There is a limitation on Advanced Find in that only attributes from one entity can be returned either to the list on into Excel. So if you want data fields from more than one entity you are into writing SQL Reports which to be honest with SQL 2000 is beyond most people even many IT companies. However one of the classification code's is needed for both account and contact orientated outputs pretty much most of the time so we had to duplicate it on both entities. I created a mapping from Account to Contact which works on Creation but not on update. Updates will be rare but will happen so we had to make sure they would e kept in step. In CRM 1.2 I would have done with with post callout.

Now it so happens this field is determined by rules (actually postcode) not user entered so what I decided to do was create a manual workflow rule to set it on account, disable the field on account and contact, and write a .NET assembly to be called from workflow to cascade the value from account to contact.

Also written quickly was a .NET assembly to deactivate contacts linked to an account when the account is deactivated. I aim to post on this later and upload the code.

I also wrote another .NET assembly to update account when a campaign response is created for the account. This was more difficult as the link from campaign activity to account is through activity party and this is very poorly documented in the SDK.

In CRM 1.2 we tended to write a lot of post-callout code (which I am comfortable with) but I am finding with CRM 3.0 that quite a lot can now be done with .NET Assemblies in workflow and Javascript (possibly calling a web service) on the front end. I prefer this approach as debugging post-callouts when a lot of events have been fired is difficult and this way assemblies provide smaller more reusable code.

Thursday 11th May

Back to my old customer to look at finding a new supplier for their web sites. I have been shocked by the costs quoted for a straightforward content managed site. Web design/development seems to be the last refuge of bespoke solutions and expensive packages. CRM is positively cheap by comparison.

The customer has decided to implement a document management system but the supplier is having problems getting the client software to talk to the servers which are hosted and connected by a VPN link. It appears they are using DCOM which seems to have problems over VPN and firewalls. I an not an expert in all of this but I have picked up a lot of knowledge over the years managing projects and putting in call centres and I am surprised the supplier has not hit this before as it is an enterprise solution.

Friday 12th May

Sales visit in the morning to review a quote. I had provided a quote to a customer which was an ideal solution based on our discussions. I had broken everything down into a 'shopping list' as I, and they, knew hey had not finalised anything. However, the quote was quite high. This does tend to happen

The customer is IT literate and has installed CRM themselves and we talked about them taking on a lot of the basic configuration work and we will mentor them through this. With CRM 3.0 often people just need to be shown how to start.

We will provide this assistance and more detailed expertise e.g. data migration for a day a week over a period of a few weeks. I like this way of working as it the solution evolves with the customer and it makes best use of our resources. However, I would not recommend this approach for all customers as sometimes it is very important to make it clear up front what the customer will and won't be getting and it does require a significant input from the customer in terms of effort.

In the afternoon I had a meeting about hosting CRM and look out for an announcement from us on this very soon

Later on I have received a response on the Word Mail Merge issue from Tuesday and as I was 120 miles from the customer I used Microsoft Live Meeting to share their desktop so I could try what was suggested. Unfortunately, the problem is still there and I fired off another email to the ISV. However, Live Meeting is very useful and boon in these situations.

The CRM Diary (Week 5)

Sat, 13 May 2006 02:09:47 GMT

Monday 1st May

Bank Holiday in the UK so not in the office which is just as well as I had been clearing the garden over the weekend and had trouble walking and bending.

Tuesday 2nd May

Followed up the data migration from Achiever from Friday with the customer.

There were a number of problems with the migration which were to do with how Achiever handles the link between accounts and contacts. It does this through the address record, i.e. Account links to address which then links to contact, which I can see is a valid way of looking at the relationships but was a pig to morph into Microsoft CRM structure especially as there is no concept of primary address or primary contact.

The other issue is that the notes in Achiever are held in some sort of binary encoded format which I have not figured out how to extract. The customer has a call into Achiever on how to extract this and I am waiting on some hint as to how to handle this.

The data in Achiever had previously been migrated from Telemagic and there was a clear difference in the data that had been entered directly to that migrated. I often find that functionality/requirements come out when you start digging into the data and I found a few more status values and lookup fields that had not been discussed added to some incomplete/incorrect data. We took the opportunity to cleanse the data and set missing data where we could e.g., setting contact role based on job title.

I was impressed with the new data migration wizard which allows matching of data in source fields into the CRM picklist values - this saved much time over the 1.2 method of calling a stored procedure for each value.

A couple of things I discovered that I am unhappy about in the 3.0 data migration framework:

no support for custom entities
missing standard entities such as campaign and campaign responses
performance is still not stellar

Still DMF is a good tool if you are happy manipulating data. Look out for a post soon on data migration using the DMF.

Wednesday 3rd May

Now that we had data loaded we spent some time looking at reporting using Excel pivot tables to analyse and segment the data. The dynamic pivot table Excel link is really powerful and the level of reporting it can provide is amazing. The customer will be able to use this for most of its reporting needs.

Discovered an issue with Advanced Find; some of the picklists in Account are not available in Advanced Find for filtering such as customersizecode, accountclassificationcode and territorycode. Now we had used these for critical market segmentation. Apparently this is a known problem and one solution is to export the entity and edit the XML and set UseInAdvancedFind to true and re-import but this is a) risky and b) not guaranteed to work. I took the easy option and created new attributes to get around this. One to watch out for I am will be checking each entity to make sure the fields I want to use in future are there in Advanced Find.

Thursday 4th May

An increasingly rare day in the office and was spent generating a few quotes and following up leads.

Ordered new laptops for CRM 3.0 development and demos. We settled on the Acer Travelmate 8204WLMi with dual core processor, 2Gb RAM, 160Gb hard disk and 15.4" widescreen display.

We also purchased some 250Gb USB 2.0 External Hard Drives so we can hold multiple virtual images.

Friday 5th May

Up to one of our oldest customers for whom we implemented all their IT about three years ago. When I set this up is was a new organisation which has now grown to around 50 staff. The original vision I am undertaking a review of their IT and telephones and looking to create a sustainable IT infrastructure to support them for a further three years.

The CRM Diary (Week 4)

Tue, 25 Apr 2006 14:39:01 GMT

Monday 24th April

Building virtual PC images for development and demo of CRM 3.0. The plan is to have a suite of VPC images containing different software which we can copy and use depending on the circumstances.

Tuesday 24th April

Continued with the virtual PC images. I am ordering a new server with stacks of disk and RAM to run these images using virtual server. This will give us greater flexibility and we will be spending less time later when we need a new environment for new customers.

Wednesday 26th April

Off to London for a workshop for one of our customers in the financial services industry

Thursday 27th April

A day off! I am taking my Dad to Silverstone for the Formula 1 Tyre Test.

Friday 28th April

Data Migration for one of our customers extracting data from Achiever and will be using the Data Migration Framework.

The CRM Diary (Week 3)

Tue, 25 Apr 2006 14:11:33 GMT

Monday 17th April

Easter Monday saw me preparing for a customer visit on Tuesday. They have been on 1.2 for about 18 months with a heavily customised customer service solution but have just rolled out to Telesales and there were a number of little issues which were affecting user adoption and which needed to be addressed.

Tuesday 18th April

On customer site. Most of the issues were training issues but there were some security issues with some users able to see data they shouldn't. This is a particular problem with 1.2 were the security descriptors can become unreliable. These and the constant CRM toolbar issues leads me to prepare a plan for upgrading to 3.0.

Wednesday 18th April

Back on site with the customer with email problems from last week. When rebooting Exchange the Information Store was unable to start and when diagnostics were run Active Directory was not visible from the Exchange Server. The error log contained Event ID 103 for GCs not responding and when accessing the DSAccess tab under server properties an error was displayed and no GCs were listed and all the options were greyed out.

What appears to have happened is that the crm administrator user had been added into the Exchange Domain Server group when the CRM Exchange Router was installed. Simply removing it from the group enabled Exchange to start.

I have no idea why the crm administrator was added into that group and have never seen this before. I have done some tests and cannot re-create so it is an obscure problem which I hope you will not see.

Anyway, I did a full test of CRM email and all was working OK and taking the user out of the group has not affected CRM email at all so one wonders why it was placed in there.

I spent the rest of the day looking at campaigns and reporting. One issue which isn't well known is that if you generate an email campaign the emails are not sent automatically. Fortunately, a knowledgebase article describes how to create a .NET Assembly for use with workflow to auto send campaign emails.

This is a good introduction into using .NET Assemblies and workflow and follows my belief in using simple chunks of code for solutions.

On reporting the use of Dynamic Pivot tables in Excel and then loading the spreadsheet as a report for use by others answered many of the reporting requirements. However, as with views and advanced find, pivot tables can only use attributes from one entity, so if you want to report on attributes from more than one entity you need to use SQL Reporting Services and Visual Studio to create a report. This is beyond most users although with SQL 2005 Report Designer it will become easier.

Now, I have a lot of experience with SQL Reporting Services as we adopted it over a year ago even for CRM 1.2 reporting so I was able to quickly generate a report using a matrix to meet the remainder of the marketing reporting analysis requirements.

Thursday 19th April

Back in the office and generated quotes for CRM for a number of enquiries which seem to be increasing week on week.

I then packaged up and documented the charity project implemented last week before heading off early to travel ready for Friday.

Friday 20th April

Out of the office visiting a couple of prospects. Early days yet but some interesting uses for CRM.

The CRM Diary (Week 2)

Mon, 10 Apr 2006 19:48:11 GMT

Monday 10th April

First thing went to the local council to see if users happy with CRM 3.0. CRM is working OK but I have two problems:

The CRM registration wizard does not connect. They have a complex infrastructure and it is not getting through ISA server. Nothing in the MS Knowledgebase and in micosoft.public.crm the solution appears to either install a modem to dial out directly or move the server into the DMZ; neither of which are an option here. Time to contact MBS support.
Whilst CRM Reports work OK on the CRM Server and on the SQL Server all client PCs get an authentication error when trying to even view the list of reports. The only Knowledgebase article refers to different date/times on the servers which is not the case here. More investigation required I think.

Met with a call centre company looking to use CRM 3.0 for account management. They have thought hard about their processes which are well defined and want to use CRM to reinforce processes in Sales and Operations. This is the sort of customer for whom we can do a great deal and really make a difference.

Visited another customer to get CRM email working. Turns out to be another ISA related issue stopping CRM server from relaying SMTP traffic. This took a while to track down but now they have outgoing and incoming email working. the solution was on the CRM server to set the outbound SMTP server IP address in the registry. One issue remains in that the mailbox rules fails on one mailbox which I think is down to the large number of mailbox rules that user has.

Back to the office to get the customisations for the charity solution ready which we are implementing on site tomorrow evening. This is a complex release including CRM, new SQL reports, SharePoint Portal Server templates, web services within SharePoint and a custom ASP.NET app to integrate CRM and SharePoint. We have a documented deployment plan and step by step instructions so it should go well but am a little wary of the complex SharePoint live configuration.

Tuesday 11th April

Implemented the charity solution on both the test and production CRM environments.

Had a number of problems with Sharepoint on the test environment as Sharepoint Portal Server wasn't working properly which prevented testing of the integration with CRM so the decision to go live was taken knowling that production Sharepoint didn't had this problem.

In the live environment the CRM-Sharepoint integration works when run on the Sharepoint server but not from the CRM server or from a client PC. Fails with 401 Authentication error. Actually the user is prompted for credentials when trying to access Sharepoint from within CRM. There are some kerebos authentication problems with the c360 addons on the live environment as well so I believe there is an underlying problem somewhere in the AD/server/user configuration which is prevented my code from working. I need to investigate further and have started reading:
http://support.microsoft.com/?kbid=832769
and
http://www.microsoft.com/technet/prodtechnol/windowsserver2003/technologies/security/tkerbdel.mspx

Wednesday 12th April

Back in the office and the customer for whom I got CRM email working on Monday is now having problems with their Exchange Server which after reboot is hanging at 'Applying Computer Settings'. They had been having problems with the SMTP service stopping since the CRM Router had been installed.

UPDATE: Thanks to Microsoft Critial Business Support they are now up and running. The CRM router installedtion had added the CRM Administrator's account into the Enterprise Exchange Security Group. AS the CRM Administrator had lower priviledges than the domain admin it prevented Exchange from starting. Removing CRM Administrator from this group got them working. I've not seen this before and it isn't documented in the knowledgebase but it sounds like this isn't the first time this has happened.

Another customer called to say an email sent from CRM 3.0 had not been received. Update: Tracked it down to the user being being Offline.

I thought CRM 3.0 was meant to be easier to setup and configure!

Thursday 13th April

Spent the first half of the day discussing our hosting offering and ideas for vertical solutions.

Rest of the day was spent investigating the issues above that have arisen this week and addressing issues customers have raised through our support line - emailing our support address automatically creates a case in our CRM system.

Friday 14th April

Bank Holiday here in the UK but like I suspect many other small business owners I was working on CRM customer systems.

The CRM Diary (Week 1)

Sun, 09 Apr 2006 19:09:07 GMT

Monday 3rd April

A pre-qualification questionnaire for a public tender was due at 12 noon today and as I had not been in the office all of last week I had not printed out our response or any of the supporting documentation so I had a frantic rush to find copies of accounts and package everything up. The organisation in question is only 10 minutes walk away so I delivered it by hand with an hour or so to spare.

We don't generally respond to tenders, especially local government, but there are some which we fit well and it seems a shame not to try. In a past life I was involved in many tenders on both sides of the fence so I know how to do a good response. The difficulty for us as a small CRM specialist is getting past the first sift. Fingers crossed.

After delivering the document it was off to Microsoft offices in Reading, known as TVP, for a meeting. It is a long drive there and back and despite is being an excellent meeting I was very tired after 5 hours driving.

Tuesday 4th April

A final demo of the completed charity solution was due later this week and although we had the integration of CRM with Sharepoint Services working I was still having problems with Sharepoint Portal Server. There are many differences between WSS and SPS and a distinct lack of documentation.

In the end I figured it out mainly thanks to a comment on Mad Nissen's blog on how templates are stored against the root site in SPS. We now have a solution that allows an entity in CRM to have its own document library and/or image library in WSS or SPS.

Wednesday 5th April

A day spent at an ERP reseller where we have already installed CRM and are working with them to define how they will use CRM for Telesales. We spent a lot of time on campaigns and how to distribute campaign activities. I think the campaign functionality is great and a lot of thought has gone into it but there is an issue over allocating/balancing Telesales calls. We developed a way of working that suits their business model and which follows the CRM way of working as closely as possible. I now have an idea for an add-on for campaigns.

We then went through their geographical classification system and how we would manage this in CRM. Like many companies in the UK they use Postcodes to manage their sales areas. The idea was to map the postcode onto the territory and use Workflow/.net assembly to allocated new suspects/customers to territories automatically.

I created a new entity to hold the list of postcodes but then found it is not possible to create a relationship from the territory entity - in fact there are many system entities which cannot be used to link to custom entities. This restriction along with the fact that you cannot create new relationship between system entities (a good example of where this is necessary is a second contact to case relationship to cover the situation where the person who reports the problem is not the person who needs to be contacted) can be a major hindrance when developing CRM 3.0 solutions. I am now using a custom picklist for territory instead of the inbuilt territory list so the solution will lose something in reporting.

The rest of the time was spent trying to figure out why email was not being sent from CRM. [The issue is the SMTP service on the CRM server was set for the wrong IP address and the Exchange server does not allow relaying from the CRM server - in some ways CRM 3.0 can be more fiddly to configure than 1.2].

Thursday 6th April

Delivered a demo. The lead came from a Microsoft partner with whom we have talked for over a year. The demo went well and is only a small solution at first. We also discussed integrating their quote/order system with CRM so that account managers will be able to have read only access of sales history and gain useful CRM account reporting. Quick Campaigns will prove very useful an example being to generate appointments close to the location of another appointment.

Interestingly the company had a requirement for postcode based territory management and after Wednesday I knew exactly how to present this. Unfortunately, the PC running the Virtual PC Image on had 1Gb of RAM (our main demo system being used elsewhere) and it struggled a little on performance.

Got the go ahead to quote and I felt it was an encouraging response. If go ahead is given will start straight away.

Came back and carried on building our new VPC images.

Found out we had lost a joint bid for a combined CRM, Navision and Sharepoint solution. This was on a hosted basis as Navision was already being run as a managed service. The reason it was lost is that the customer wants to bring everything back in house. So just when we have a hosted offering it isn't wanted!

Friday 7th April

One of our pre Microsoft CRM customers, for whom, I am undertaking a full IT review at the moment, is looking for a reporting solution so I have introduced them to one of our partner companies, Strategic, who specialise in data warehousing and business intelligence. A really good meeting and I hope an answer to their reporting issues.

Off to a local council to upgrade their CRM system to 3.0. I had already used the Redeployment Tools to copy their 1.2 to a separate test server and upgraded that and the custom code and run through full testing. Last week I moved their production SQL database off a named instance on SQL 2000 to a new dedicated SQL 2005 server so all should have gone smoothly.

Had a number of errors all of which were AD/permission related and the upgrade failed halfway through being unable to run the xp_cmdshell on the SQL server. CRM had half upgraded and trying to re-run the upgrade in Repair mode led to lots of warning that could not find the AD groups. I had backups of everything but getting AD restored was not going to be possible as everyone was leaving for the weekend and the backups were now running. Not ideal to say the least as the system was not going to be usable on Monday morning.

Knowing I had backups I ran the uninstall option, set SQL 2005 to allow the xp_cmdshell in the Surface Features configuration and re-ran CRM installation using the existing databases. This time CRM installed I got an RSPublish error when trying to load up the SQL Reports. Clicked on Ignore and the setup completed and after a quick check CRM appeared to have been successfully upgraded. I had now run out of time and had to leave the offices. I was also informed I could not installed the CRM Router on the Exchange Cluster as this had to be done out of hours.

Saturday 8th April

Before leaving on Friday I had obtained the VPN details and dialled in and continued with the diagnostics/upgrade. The problem with SQL Reporting was permissions related and using the command line I was able to install the CRM reports. I upgraded the custom code that linked in with Infopath and BizTalk and ran through tests. All OK now but this should have been easier and relying on the pre-upgrade advisor to spot problems is not enough. This does show that despite testing as much as possible there are little things that can catch you out in a big way. More to add to my pre-upgrade/install checklist.

I will be onsite at 8am Monday to check everything is working OK on the client PCs.