I attended Microsoft’s Business Application Summit and was able to catch several great sessions. But one that hit home the most for me was a session on the new Microsoft Dynamics 365 Unified Interface, which covered what’s already here and what else is coming with this new functionality. This is...

What do customers like best about your goods or services? What percentage are willing to buy from you again? What are critical areas that need to be improved? What are customer priorities when shopping for your product category? In a competitive marketplace where it’s so easy to switch vendors or...

Ever have one of those days? You know those days. The kind where you cannot find any useful documentation on given functionality, i.e., currency exchange rate in Microsoft Dynamics CRM or Dynamics 365? It happened to me just earlier this week. A client of ours pushes data from Microsoft Dynamics...

Where did all that data come from? A funny thing happened to our Microsoft Dynamics 365. We started receiving alerts that we'd exceeded our storage limit. Our tenant was at a 154% usage. Ouch! How did it come to this? We use Organization Insights to diagnose Microsoft Dynamics 365 storage...

This week I had the pleasure of attending the annual conference for NAV partners, Directions North America. As a long-time Microsoft CRM guy and current Dynamics 365 Customer Engagement (CE) cloud partner, Directions North America might seem like a strange conference to attend with such a full schedule of Microsoft...

"Cloud is the future." "Move to the cloud now or fall behind." "Digital transformation requires a move to the cloud." "Moving to the cloud saves you money." Businesses have been thoroughly swamped with headlines berating them to move away from data centers and hardware, and move their operations to the...

A client of ours needed to analyze information about the duration of time users spent in the various stages of their Dynamics 365 Lead-to-Opportunity business process. Searching on the web led me to a few related posts. I used information from a post by Steven Foster to start and formulate...

Just about every client we work with looks to use Dynamics 365 email templates. There's a lot of utility and flexibility to take advantage of with Dynamics 365 email templates. Formatting the standard email templates is a wee bit tricky. But with a little training, you can quickly create handy templates...

Back in the ‘good old days’ (version 4.0 ?) if you wanted a multi-select option set on your Dynamics CRM form, you could simulate one using jscript. There were a few variations but generally, what the user saw were labels and checkboxes and then typically the results of their ‘selections’...

The evolution of Microsoft Dynamics 365/PowerApps, etc. has been swift and unrelenting. Those of us who create and implement solutions face more and more “to-do’s” with each new engagement. Not only do we need to try to keep up on the functionality changes and the expanding holistic environment, but we...

“Acquiring a new customer is 5 to 25 times more expensive than retaining an existing one.” – Amy Gallo, Harvard Business Review One of the most important factors in growing your business is minimizing your churn rate. Face it--as more and more goods and services trend toward commoditization, service after...

Dynamics 365 can help an organization manage fairly complex Service commitments to customers by using Entitlements and SLAs. However, if your needs aren't all that complex, you may want to evaluate Using SLAs instead of Entitlements in Dynamics 365. The tricky part is that by looking at the out-of-the-box Case...

You may encounter some data maintenance scenarios more easily handled by using Excel to update data in Dynamics 365. Luckily, the system allows us to export existing data into Excel, make changes to the spreadsheet, and then use that same file to import updates to the data. Here are the...

While I do appreciate having the ability to create a ‘Quick View’ form to display one or more Parent fields on another form, the truth is, the appearance of the Quick View form leaves something to be desired. It takes up a good chunk of extra space compared to just...

Everyone has them. Some are good and some are bad—or worse. What are they? They’re leads. Leads by their very nature are suspect—right? We don’t know enough about them to rightly refer to them as legitimate sales opportunities. Therefore, lead data is highly suspect as well. Let’s face it. A...

How do you increase user acceptance for any application? One way is to reduce the amount of data entry the user is responsible for. Most of us would rather spend our time ‘doing’ rather than pounding on a keyboard. There are many places you can use Microsoft Dynamics 365 workflows to...

Microsoft releases 2 major updates to Dynamics 365 each year. The latest version, Microsoft Dynamics 365 version 9.0. offers many enhancements for Customer Engagement (Sales, Marketing, Service) users. The most obvious is a new design philosophy that improves overall usability and provides consistency for users that bounce from desktop to...

List building presents challenges to both Salespeople and Marketers. This challenge can be solved using the Microsoft Dynamics 365 Sales App. Yes, you can perform your list building using tools in Microsoft Dynamics 365. Let's identify the list building challenges: Identifying new organizations suitable to sell or market to. Acquiring...

Microsoft is very big on the value of building relationships in business. In addition to the release of Relationship Insights and Relationship Assistant, there is a new SKU called Microsoft Relationship Sales Solution. Microsoft Relationship Sales Solution is not entirely new. It essentially bundles 2 existing solutions: Dynamics 365 Enterprise Sales...

A Dyn365Pros client requested integration with an external system in order to pull account and invoice records into Dynamics 365. While many integrations with Dynamics 365/CRM are real time, this request has to pull records from the system just once per day. We had to solve one tricky issue in...

Team Dyn365Pros made the annual trek to Microsoft Inspire this week. Held in Washington D.C. this year, it was a exciting if somewhat sweltering week. This conference used to be called Microsoft Worldwide Partner Conference. The name is new but the idea behind the event has not changed. It’s an...

Would you like to get more out of Dynamics 365 search? Sure, you know the basics. Who could argue that ‘Quick Find’ is an invaluable tool for getting to the record(s) you want to work with? And the same holds true for the ability to enter search criteria into a...

Selecting a new Customer Engagement System (taking a shot at coining a new term since CRM is becoming passé) can be a daunting task. Between evaluating potentially new and complex technology, and dealing with the internal pressure to “get it right”, the experience can be confusing and stressful. During my...

Part of our practice and Dynamics 365 paradigm shift in general is based on a distributed workforce accessing remote or cloud-based solutions, on the go and in the field. To help you feel confident about working safely on public networks, where and how you access your systems, Microsoft published a...

In the first Elements of Style post regarding how to customize Dynamics 365 forms, I talked about developing your own style and preferences in form design so that you have one or more design approaches in your mental toolkit to make your form work more efficient. I shared some of my...

  When you are customizing Dynamics 365  forms -- what are your Elements of Style? Back in the days even before there were pocket-sized calculators, in my high school you could identify the juniors because they all carried around a book called “The Elements of Style”. Don’t know if it’s used anymore...

Want long-term success when you’re implementing Dynamics 365 for Sales? Get buy-in from your Sales team up front. I’ve seen organizations discount or outright dismiss the need to have input from the Sales team, particularly in a scenario where IT drives the project. The risks are many: poor design, failure...

The Dyn365Pros team is proud to announce a new Dynamics 365 Training Series - Coffee with the Pros. This will be a free, regular, webinar training series full of tips and tricks. This series is geared to Dynamics 365 Users, Power Users, and Administrators.   As the name suggests, grab...

We have a Dynamics 365 client that distributes their products in the US, Australia/New Zealand and in Europe. Each geographical region is a separate division and has its own ERP system, but shares 1 instance of Dynamics 365. Not all divisions sell all the same products. Furthermore, each division may...

Yes, Dynamics 365 is an onion. I just keep peeling back the layers of this onion called Dynamics 365 and each time, I am more impressed. Even looks like an onion with all those layers. Since the release of Microsoft's CRM product back in 2002 or 2003, I have implemented 100's of...