Skip to main content
search
Category

CRM

Jan 29

Dynamics 365 – Sorting Activities in the Social Pane

By CRM, Microsoft Dynamics CRM

As you are probably aware, Dynamics CRM is undergoing some changes and one of them is a new name, Dynamics 365. My blog posts this month will focus on some of the functionality updates available in v8.2 and our next meetup will review them in more detail. Be sure to sign up and join us!

If your organization uses the activities entities (tasks, appointments, phone calls, etc.) then you are likely familiar with the social pane view that is available on the main entities. You may also know that the social pane is barely customizable so I’m very excited about this update. You can now determine how you want to sort activities in the social pane. By default, they are sorted by modified date and in most cases this might be fine but having the ability to change how the activities are sorted is very helpful.

Open the form editor and double click on the activities section to see the properties. Go to the Activity Wall to change how items are sorted.

You may also notice that one of the options is to sort by a field called Sort Date. This is a field that can be set in a workflow so each activity type can use a different sort date. For example, you may want to sort emails by their sent or received date while sorting appointments by their end date. If you set the sort date field accordingly, then you’re able to sort activities by the different dates.

Jan 24

ZOHO CRM – Activities, Notes and Emails all in one report!

By CRM, Zoho, Zoho CRM

Salespeople can use a variety of ways to log their interactions with Leads and Contacts.  Some put information in Notes, others log events or calls and others carry it all out in emails.  Now you can pull an “Interaction” report that will extract data from all three of these sources to see all sales activity in one report!

When selecting the data for your report (step one in report creation), choose, Activities, Notes and Emails as the three related modules, Choose tabular (or summary and group by Lead Owner if more than one salesperson), and select the following columns shown:

  Set the timeframe in the filters section to correspond with how frequently you plan on monitoring the activity.  If you’ll look at activity weekly, you can set the Lead last activity time to “Last week” and have the report delivered on Monday.

Jan 24

Zoho CRM – how do I set or change the “From” field for an Email template in Zoho 2016?

By CRM, Zoho, Zoho CRM

Before the 2016 release, you would set the ‘From’ field in the email template itself.  You could chose a specific user, or select from merge options (Record Owner, Current User).  In the new template interface, that field isn’t there anymore, so where do you define who the email is from when sending an email with a template?  … well it depends on how you’re sending it…

If you use workflow to send it, the From field can now be found in the Alert definition, just below the template selection:

If you’re sending it via the zoho email client, as before, you use the dropdown (present only if you have multiple email addresses associated with your account.

Jan 08

Salesforce.com – Working with formula fields

By CRM, Salesforce CRM

I will get requests all the time to add fields to child objects (i.e., contacts) that belong on the parent account, but because we want to see it at the child record they want it there too.  For instance, you have account type (Customer, Prospect, Competitor) and when looking at a contact you want to see that account type at the person level, giving you the quick snapshot instead of navigating to the contact’s parent account.

I think you can do this (haven’t tried) in the process builder where you would add a field on the contact levels, then create a process to update the contact when changing the account’s type field.  You would also have to create a process to update the parent account’s type as well if changed on the contact (which would fire the first process to update all the contacts).  Confused yet?  I think you may even need a trigger.

So let’s go simpler shall we?  What I ALWAYS do is just try to teach my users that certain data belongs here and certain data belongs there.  For instance, customer type or account type is not something that belongs at the contact level.  It may be nice to see at each contact, but it belongs at the account level since it’s company data.  To DISPLAY the data at the contact, you can use a formula field – very easy to do.

To start, find your object or just search for it in the setup area (click Setup, then start searching – again, don’t hit enter as I always warn, just type).

Once I see what I need, I go to “Fields”, which I’m going to then scroll down and create a new field called “Account Type”.  When in the type of new field area, just choose “formula”.  Click next.

On the next screen, give it a name (label), the API name and choose the type of data that will be displayed.  When in doubt, choose text.

In this case I’ll just build the formula quickly, but I use the formula builder to insert the right field.  When you find it, click “Insert” to see the value.

In this case, because it’s a picklist I get an error when I save it.  So, I have to add the “text” formula function to just grab the value.  Now it looks like this:

Click next to add to the correct layout (and edit who can see it) and you’re all set.  Go ahead and move the field to where you want it on the contact record.

Your users can all now see the right account type at the contact level, however, to change it or modify they still have to navigate to the account record – again, the place where it belongs.

Dec 04

MSCRM: Automate Tax on Products

By CRM, Microsoft Dynamics CRM

The out-of-the-box tax field on opportunity and quote products is a write-in field which means that users have to manually calculate the sales tax for each item and then type it in. This method is error prone and adds many steps to the user’s process so why not automate it?

If only some of your items are taxable, you should create a checkbox so that users can control when sales tax needs to be added. For this example, I’m assuming that all products are taxable at a rate of 6%. Create a calculated currency field and for the calculation use the Amount field. This is the price per unit multiplied by the quantity. If you’re using item discounts, make sure you calculate the tax based on the total after the discount is taken. See the setup below.

5

The final step is to set the out-of-the-box tax field to your new calculated tax field. You need to do this because the final total calculation uses the out-of-the-box tax field. I used JavaScript – tune into the next webinar to see how this is done. (Or check it out on YouTube depending on when you’re reading this.)

 

Dec 04

MSCRM: Change Your Sandbox Theme

By CRM, Microsoft Dynamics CRM

If you regularly develop in a CRM sandbox instance, a good tip is to change the theme of  your sandbox so that it’s different than your production instance. Our production instance has the standard dark blue navigation bar across the top so we like to change that to bright orange for the sandbox. This way it is very obvious that you’re currently working in the sandbox. It’s an easy visual cue to remind yourself which instance you’re in.

3

Change your theme by going to Settings > Customizations > Themes.

4

Dec 04

MSCRM: Business Rules & Composite Forms

By CRM, Microsoft Dynamics CRM

The address composite forms are used to quickly edit all fields of the address and present all of the fields together in a visually appealing manner. The trouble is that you can’t customize these forms at all. You can’t add or remove fields so when I wanted to use an option set for a customer State/Province field, I had to figure out a workaround.

1

Luckily, business rules can be applied to all forms of an entity so I set up a rule to hide the out-of-the-box state at all times. Then my custom option set state field is placed on the main form. I have another rule that sets the out-of-the-box state field to the option set value so that the full address appears correctly. In the business rule, just remember to set the scope to entity so that it applies to all forms.

2

Dec 02

Salesforce.com – How to Define Custom Fields and Objects in Salesforce Lightning

By CRM, Salesforce CRM

If in the lightning experience, customizing Salesforce is a bit different but all the object changes are still there.  To get there, click on set-up home -> Explore Objects

1-1

On the top right corner, you will find a link to create objects and workflows.

1-2

If you want to change some things in existing objects, just click the links to the object on this screen as well.  Here you have the ability to work on all details of that object from a single page.

1-3

 

If you would like to search the setup area (as I always do), use the search box in the upper left.  This is a very useful piece to jump quickly to what you need (such as “users” shown here).

1-4

Written by Prabha Krishnamurthy and Corey Babka

Dec 02

Salesforce.com – Working with Multiple Approval Processes

By CRM, Salesforce CRM

On the other screen that we jumped (to activate the approval process, you also had the option to set additional approval processes.  Once activated you’re not able to add other steps (unless you deactivate the process first).

3-1

You can either do the additional steps from here or skip and save as one-step approval and later modify the approval process.  Here we’re going to just add another approval process based on probability (so as to not throw off the forecast).  Other examples might be a state code or a country value where accounting has to approving shipping rates, taxes, etc.

After we run through the same “create approval process”, we end up with a new one like so:

3-2

After we activate it and go back to our approval processes, for the opportunities there are now two listed.  Here we can adjust the order if is matters.  Simply change the number, then click Re-Order.

3-3

Then you’ll see it reordered.

3-4  

Written by Prabha Krishnamurthy and Corey Babka

Skip to content