Archive for the ‘CRM Online’ Category
Microsoft Dynamics CRM not so secret plan
February 13th, 2012As a CRM Partner since 2003 we receive many official public announcements and announcements under NDA regarding the Dynamics CRM product roadmap. At Convergence each year we get updated insight into the business and marketing plans for the product. We love where the product is being taken as our financial future and the success of clients depends on it’s success in the marketplace.
So recently I was pleased to see how the CRM Team (at least the HR component) is positioning itself to new hires when I stumbled on this job posting for a Senior Product Marketing Manager – Dynamics CRM.
I really like their ultimate position against SFDC along with the reference to being a ‘game changer’.
I have inserted the entire jost posting below. Or if you would like to apply for the position you can view it online.
Migrating from CRM Online to CRM OnPremise
February 8th, 2012One of the really great features of Dynamics CRM is the power of choice – on-premise, online, or partner hosted.
Very often companies say “I would like to give this ‘cloud thing’ a try but if I change my mind can I get the data so I can run CRM on our own server?” The answer is YES!
To initiate a migration, request an export of your organization’s data from Microsoft Dynamics CRM Support. Requests for trial exports are processed every Tuesday using the latest existing backup. There is no constraint on your continued use of Microsoft Dynamics CRM Online. New data will continue to be captured until you go to the final export stage. Continue to use it while your CRM partner or your company does a trial re-deployment of the CRM data into your CRM 2011 on-premise environment. Don’t proceed from this step to the final export until you have thoroughly tested the new on-premise environment. Like dear old mom used to tell you ” A word to the wise is sufficient”.
When you are ready to make the real switch to get the final export file, Microsoft Dynamics CRM Support will disable your CRM organization and make a full backup of the data. The process of the final export requests starts on a Thursday; the data is prepared and published the next day – Friday. Therefore your total business week downtime will be approximately one to two business days.
Once you get the final export, restoring the data to a partner-hosted or your on-premises deployment should take less than a day. Then you will be back up and running on Monday. This presumes that you did atleast one successful trial migration.
There aren’t any fees charged to create the trial or final export files. Cancellation fees are waived when you migrate to another Dynamics CRM platform.
Additional information is available online – Microsoft CRM Online Data Migration to Microsoft Dynamics CRM 2011 on-premises
How to Avoid Human Induced Catastrophe in CRM
January 26th, 2012Often the weakest link in protecting the security of the CRM system is the user and not the technology infrastructure. There are some basic steps you can take immediately after installing CRM 2011 or signing up for the CRM Online service to protect your users from themselves. It is all about adjusting the security roles in CRM and taking some other basic precautions to minimize the risk of user induced catastrophe to the CRM system.
1. Never assign the CEO-Business Manager role to the owner of the company. This role has extensive privilege’s and without proper perspective and insight it can do a lot of damage. How often does the Owner get CRM training? Not very often. Unless that is you.
4. Turn on Auditing for all company critical records – Accounts, Contacts, Leads, Opportunities.
9. Besides running the ‘nightly disaster recovery backup’ for the SQL database, you might consider automating the scheduling of periodic onsite backups during the business day if the database isn’t too large.
These are the first 9 steps we perform on every CRM installation we implement.
CRM 2011 Online Test Site Setup
January 25th, 2012As a CRM partner that creates solutions to enhance the functionality of CRM we regularly have the need to spin up a clean CRM Online instance for our own internal product testing or for client testing purposes. In almost every one of these situations we just need to run the 30 day trial and then let it expire. Typically we would often get emailed or called by the Microsoft CRM Online Sales Team about how the trial is going and are we ready to convert to a paid account. That turned out to be wasteful of their time and it didn’t seem fair to keep answering the phone and saying – hey we are just testing and won’t be converting that instance to paid.
So it took us a few times before we cracked the code on how to eliminate these calls. The solution is to un-check the Phone and E-mail boxes at the bottom of the Complete Sign-up form. When you submit it with boxes un-checked you won’t receive any sales emails or phone calls. You will just receive administrative notifications.
Happy testing!
