The helpful pane can be minimized by clicking the little up arrow on the lower border and that will conserve some screen space while you’re still using it.

But what happens when you’re ready to ride on your own and the helpful feature becomes a real estate hogging nuisance?! Well, the answer depends on if you’re asking as an individual user or as a Sys Admin for an organization!

To turn off the Get Started panes as a User, just go to your CRM menu and select Options and the Personal Options Dialogue Box will appear. The Get Started pane checkbox is right at the top and by de-selecting it, they will be removed from your view.

If you want to turn it off for the entire organization and have Sys Admin privileges, go to Settings->Administration->System Settings and turn them off for all Users.

The Get Started pane can be turned back on again in the future, but unfortunately it’s either all or nothing. If, for instance, you hired a new employee and wanted to give them the training wheels for awhile, you’d have to turn the option on for everyone. So the possible, but cumbersome answer there would be to leave it enabled for the system but turn off the individual User settings. Then you could activate them for a new User.

For experienced Users, the extra real estate on the screen is well worth turning this feature off because of course you never forget how to ride a bike…. right??

Here’s the simple way to get them there…

Once you’ve connected, open the contact’s profile and click on the vCard icon at the bottom of the overview section.

Tell the download dialog box that you want to open the vCard.

Now, from the newly created Outlook contact, you can just save it if it’s not a contact that meets your criteria for the CRM database.

However, if you want to add the contact to CRM, all you have to do is click the “Track in CRM” button in the menu ribbon and it will be added. Furthermore, if you already have the contact’s company in your Dynamics CRM system, you can select “Set Parent” and select the company. Now the contact will be added to CRM and be associated with the company it belongs to.

That’s it! A couple of clicks and now your new LinkedIn connection is a contact in CRM. As a result, it’s also a contact in Outlook and will be synchronized to your mobile device. It’s that easy!

So, I want to provide you with access to an overview of CustomerSource as well as some instructions on how to get access to it if you don’t have it now.

First of all, CustomerSource is available to all Dynamics customers. Whether you have access to it is determined by your organization’s administrator. For CRM Online this would be the Billing Administrator. If you already have access, just navigate to the log-in page and enter your Windows Live ID.

If you don’t have access, you can request it from your administrator. If you don’t know who your administrator is, send an email to itmbssup@microsoft.com and include your organization’s Microsoft Dynamics Account number, your legal company name, your first and last name, and your email address.

For a very detailed overview of CustomerSource and areas like training, support, and documentation, you can watch this Demo Overview.

One of the first questions people ask when they begin using the Microsoft Dynamics CRM 2011 Outlook Client is “how can I control what CRM data appears in Outlook”? Syncing too much data can reduce performance, but you also want to have information at your fingertips when you need it.

In Microsoft Dynamics CRM 2011, the Outlook Data Filters feature allows users to take control of what CRM data appears in Outlook. In CRM 4, users had the ability to specify what data they wanted to take Offline (i.e. when they weren’t connected to CRM), and in CRM 2011 we’ve expanded this feature to also allow users to specifically control what data syncs to Outlook’s own folders, like the Calendar and the Tasks pane.

This blog post explains what the filters are and how to use them effectively. You should read it if you would like to see additional CRM data in Outlook or Offline mode, or conversely, if sync is taking longer than you’d like.

The Filters Dialog

The filters dialog can be accessed in Outlook 2003 and 2007 by navigating to CRM->Outlook Filters, and in Office 2010 by going to the File backstage menu, then clicking CRM, pressing the ‘Sync’ button dropdown and selecting the ‘Outlook Filters’ option.

Office 2003 & 2007	Office 201

After you open the filter dialog, you’ll see something like this:

You can see that the dialog contains a list of rows (these are the filters) for different Outlook entity types, such as Contact, Task and Appointment (note that email is synced with CRM differently and is not managed by this feature). There is also a dropdown which lets you change the view to show Offline Synchronization Filters … what are these? Time for some definitions:

You also might be wondering what that ‘System Filters’ tab is referring to:

Modifying a Filter

Filters work cumulatively – each filter defines a set of data which will sync to Outlook. For example, click on the ‘My Outlook Contacts’ filter and a new dialog will come up showing the filtering conditions for this filter. You can see that we’ve specified that any Contact which is owned by us and which is set to be Active will be synced to our Contacts folder.

Now, let’s say that we didn’t want all of our CRM contacts to appear in Outlook, but only the Contacts from our hypothetical partner firm, Contoso. We’d add another clause to the filter condition as follows:

After adding this condition, we can Save and then close the dialogs – next time you sync with CRM, all CRM Contacts (including Outlook contacts which you’ve tracked) will disappear from your Contacts folder unless they belong to Contoso.

Creating a new Filter

So modifying filters is easy enough, but what about adding new ones? As we said, filters are cumulative, so if you create multiple filters for a single entity type, then entities which match any of the filters will be synced.

By default, Outlook will only take the accounts you own Offline, even if you have access to other accounts. Let’s run through creating a simple filter that will make sure that all accounts which were modified in the last week are synced Offline. We’ll leave the existing filter in place as well so that you’ll still get all of your personal accounts, even if they haven’t been changed recently.

To start with, choose “Offline Synchronization Filters” from the dropdown and then click “New”.

You’ll see a new filter dialog come up. Account should be selected as the default entity, but you can pick another entity type from the dropdown if you wish:

Then we can go on to define some conditions for our filter, namely that the “Modified On” date should be within the “Last 7 Days”.

We can then save the filter, which prompts us to choose a name.

Once you’re done, hit “OK” and close the filter dialog and you should see your new filter in the list!

Resetting your Filters

What if you’ve blundered somehow, and messed up your filter settings? You can go back to the way things were by opening the filters dialog again and clicking More Actions -> Reset Data Filters. This will restore your filters to the default filter set for the organization.

The downside of this is that you’ll lose all of your new filters and modifications, but that’s the point of reset, right?

But wait… there’s more

We’ve covered some basic scenarios which leverage the Outlook Data Filters feature, but there’s plenty of extended functionality. Most of the latter is targeted more towards ‘power users’, so in general, we recommend keeping things simple.

The first step is to isolate the subset of data that you want to edit. We’ll use the Advanced Find feature to do that which is located in the menu ribbon at the top of each entity list view. After defining the query for the data, you’ll want to modify the columns and include the fields that you want to work with since you’ll be exporting a static worksheet. Next you click ‘Find’ and get the results.

Now, just select all the records by checking the box at the top of the first column and click the Export Contacts icon as shown above.

The export dialogue box now displays an option that wasn’t available in CRM 4.0 which is the checkbox in the lower area that designates that you wish to prepare the file to be “re-importable”.

When you click export, save the file to your preferred location and THEN open it. Some users of Office 2010 have received errors when downloading these files which is due to a security setting. Downloading it this way will minimize this error possibility.

The resulting file, which is now editable, is an xml formatted file and contains smart features like field formatting descriptions and even picklist values so you can select from multi-select lists as you edit and know what the defined values are.

I’ve made a simple edit to add middle names for these contacts and now all I have to do is save the file, go back to my CRM ribbon menu and click Import Data. I search for my saved file and start the process. CRM is even smart enough to skip all the mapping steps for the import since this is already embedded in the file. I can opt for duplicate detection and ownership assignment and the rest is done.

The result: a group of data modified  for my purposes and done in a manner of minutes. Your experience in Excel will determine the robustness and complexity of data updates that you’ll be able to make, but even for the average user, this re-import feature in CRM 2011 is a welcome addition.

To make certain that you’ve covered the basics for enabling the core functionality of CRM Online, as well as the customizations inside the Sandler Training Framework, here’s a list of Internet Explorer settings to check or double check while you’re logged in to your company’s online instance. We highly recommend that you run the most recent version of IE and that you have checked for, and installed, the most recent updates.

Now, from the Tools menu select Internet Options at the bottom of the menu. As shown in the following diagrams, select the Security tab and then Trusted Sites. Push the Sites button and then push Add. Your CRM site is now recognized by the browser application as a “trusted” location.

After clicking Close on the Trusted Sites dialogue box, stay in the Security area and click the Custom level… button. Scroll down to the “Active X controls and plug-ins” to the last item in the section: “Script ActiveX controls marked safe for scription” and choose Enable. The scroll down to the Miscellaneous section to “Display mixed content” and choose Enable. Finally, in the Miscellaneous section again find “Use Pop-up Blocker” and choose Disable. Click Ok twice and exit the editor.

Note that some settings will not take effect until you close and restart Internet Explorer. Once you’ve put these settings into effect, though, you should have a much cleaner experience with your CRM Online application!

Members of this elite partner club have demonstrated dedicated commitment and success in extending the Microsoft Dynamics platform to drive business advantages in companies worldwide.

President’s Club recognizes the top five percent of Microsoft Dynamics partners worldwide and honors their constant dedication to delivering solutions that meet their customers’ unique needs, active pursuit of product and technological advancement, and impressive sales performance.

PSC would like to thank all of our customers and strategic partners who over the past year have made this achievement possible.

Let’s take an example of editing en masse and show how easy this is to do.

Say, for instance, you have a bunch of account records that are missing the field for state. This would make an automated direct mailing somewhat difficult to manage since you couldn’t use the mail merge function from WORD very well.

The first step would be to run an advanced find using an area code, zip prefix or other designator that you could attach to the state to which the record belongs. You could combine that criteria with another looking for state fields that do not contain data. Your query might look like this:

After clicking ‘Find’ and getting your list, you select the checkbox in the upper left hand corner of the list to select all records in the list. Then under the “More Actions” menu selection, select “Edit”.

This will open up a dialogue box with a blank form for that record.

Just populate any new data that you want– in this case, the state value– and click save. The records are now all updated!

You can also select a row from the list, hit shift and click to select multiple rows if you don’t want the entire list for some reason. You could also select an individual record from the list and do one at a time. While not the ultimate in productivity, it’s still probably easier to do from this list than searching for the records individually.

As a footnote, some examples of fields in the Sandler Training Framework that are ripe for this trick are the Relationship and Industry fields on Account, and the Lead Source field on the Lead record.

I know if you’ve got 49 Contacts then this isn’t a huge issue for you. Your huge issue is that you need to talk to more people!

Many CRM users, however, would like their lists longer for the convenience of seeing more at-a-glance. Here’s how to do that.

From the CRM menu at the top of Outlook, select Options. Alternately from the web client, you can find a Personalize Workspace link in the Workplace area right above the Workplace navigation button. It brings you to the same place.

From the General Tab on the Personalize Options window that opens, select the drop down for Records Per Page and pick a number from 25 to 250. Click OK and you’re done.

Now, when you view items in a list you aren’t having to page down/over as often. Also, if you’re exporting a list to Excel and want to select the “All Records From This Page” option, the number of records exported will match this setting.

Apparently, the Blackberry smart phone has two browsers– one is Blackberry’s and one is an Internet browser. So, if you’ve tried or plan to configure Mobile Express to access your CRM application, read Joel’s blog and avoid scratching your head– and wasting a bunch of time.

Your path to success will depend on whether you’re using a Blackberry Enterprise Server (BES) or not.

Mobile Express is one of the features that was added to CRM Online with the November feature release. On Premise Dynamics CRM users can configure their server(s) for Internet Facing Deployment (IFD) and download this feature, too.

 While typing in data from a smart phone to CRM isn’t everyone’s cup of tea, being able to access and read CRM information beyond the contact info you’d already find on your phone is a great convenience.

So, if you haven’t set up Mobile Express, I’d recommend it. With the Online version, it’s a pretty simple point-and-click Admin process. If you need assistance, give us a shout.