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Tag: crm

  • How to Adopt Change Management Best Practices into your Dynamics 365 Project: Understand Change as a Process

    How to Adopt Change Management Best Practices into your Dynamics 365 Project: Understand Change as a Process

    • Understand Change as a Process
    • Create a Change Management Team
    • Assess change readiness
    • Include a Communication Plan as part of your CRM project
    • Incorporate Change Management into your Training Plan

    This blog kicks off a series on Change Management in Dynamics 365 projects and enhancements. When you are planning for a Dynamics 365 project or enhancement, change is coming to your organization. That change won’t be a one-time thing and then your users simply move on. To properly address change, you will need to be able to adapt and accept change as a process and not a one-time event.

    Let’s look at a standard, simple CRM project life-cycle and overlay it with a standard Change Curve:

    Dynamics 365 Project life cycle applied to a standard Change Curve
    • Project Kick-off: You’ve invited stakeholders, end users and management to help kick off the project! Expectations are all over the place: excitement, fear, confidence, uncertainty. Performance and motivation are at the start of the standard Change Curve.
    • Requirements: You’re being heard by your Partner and Project team! All of your wish list items are being captured. Excitement is high!
    • Development: Your partner and project team are busy building the system per requirements in the prior stage and working off of a mutually-approved project plan. As development begins and continues, you wonder if the requirements gathered were correct? Confidence begins to wane.
    • UAT & Testing: You’re in the system doing User-Acceptance Testing. You’re running through test scripts, documenting where items pass and fail. Why are there failures? The Change Curve reaches its lowest point in performance and motivation for users.
    • Training: As users go through training, they will increase the confidence with the CRM system, learning new areas and seeing new features. If you have followed some basic User Adoption tips, you have successfully used the technology of Dynamics 365 to create a system that will aid users in their daily job, building confidence. We’re heading back towards our starting point in the Change Curve of performance & motivation.
    • Go Live & Beyond: You’ve returned to your starting point on the change curve and surpassed it!

    Remember – change is a PROCESS. It is continuous. While the graphic above represents one cycle, be prepared for the curve to ebb and flow as your team continues to use and enhance your Dynamics 365 system

    Stay tuned for more blogs in the Dynamics 365 – Change Management series! The next articles will focus on the following topics:

    • Create a Change Management Team
    • Assess change readiness
    • Include a Communication Plan as part of your CRM project
    • Incorporate Change Management into your Training Plan

    Ready to learn more? Contact Reenhanced today to learn how we can assist with your project!

  • How to embed Audit History directly into an Entity Form

    How to embed Audit History directly into an Entity Form

    Recently, I helped a CRM Developer learn how to embed a view of his Audit History directly into his form. Keep reading for a step-by-step process explaining exactly how this is done and find a code sample you can download and use to power the same behavior inside your entity forms as well.

    First, let’s look at what we’re inserting. Our view of the audit history will be the same view that you see when you select Audit History from the Form Navigation. If you’re using v9, it looks like this:

    The Audit History that we want to show inside our form.

    The Audit History that we want to show inside our form.

    Now that we’re on the audit history page, let’s take a closer look at how this is displayed. If you use the Developer Tools for your browser, you’ll find that this view is shown inside an IFRAME which is how a lot of the components in Dynamics are displayed.

    So now what we need to do is grab the URL for the IFRAME that’s showing the audit history. We will use this to build a web resource that we’ll be able to embed into our form. From the Audit History page, if using Chrome press Control + Shift + J to open the developer tools, then scroll to the iframe in the elements tab.

    2-15-iframe.gif

    This IFRAME source will look something like this:

    /userdefined/areas.aspx?formid=e3b6ddb7-8df0-4410-ac7b-fd32e5053d38&inlineEdit=1&navItemName=Audit%20History&oId=%7b5D5C1423-DEB2-E811-A96A-000D3A37062B%7d&oType=4&pagemode=iframe&rof=true&security=852023&tabSet=areaAudit&theme=Outlook15White

    Hold on to this, because we’ll be using it to customize your web resource that will handle the embed of this IFRAME.

    Open your favorite text editor and paste in the following in a file called web-resource.html:

    <!DOCTYPE html>
<html style="height: 100%">
<head>
    <meta charset="utf-8" />
    <title></title>
</head>
<body style="height: 100%">
    <iframe src="" id="areaAuditFrame" name="areaAuditFrame" scrolling="auto" isarea="1" frameborder="0" style="width: 100%; height: 100%"></iframe>
    <script>
        let auditLoader = window.auditLoader || {};

        auditLoader.setIframe = function() {
            const search = new URLSearchParams(window.location.search);
            const recordId = search.get('id');

            let element = document.getElementById('areaAuditFrame');

            // TODO: Modify this with your url from the iframe
            // Make sure you modify it to add ${recordId} where needed
            element.src = `/userdefined/areas.aspx?formid=e3b6ddb7-8df0-4410-ac7b-fd32e5053d38&inlineEdit=1&navItemName=Audit%20History&oId=${recordId}&oType=4&pagemode=iframe&rof=true&security=852023&tabSet=areaAudit&theme=Outlook15White`;

        };

        auditLoader.setIframe();
    </script>
</body>
</html>

    Note: For the script above we have all of the code and display components in the same file. It’s a good idea to do this when possible because it will be easier to maintain the system if each modification is self-contained. If you ever need to remove this, you can remove the web resource and there are no further steps. Always think about how to minimize dependencies as you build your modifications.

    What the code above does is the following:

    1. It creates a blank IFRAME that takes up 100% of the space in the displayed Web Resource
    2. It uses parameters passed to the web resource to set the src attribute of the IFRAME to the Audit History page, customized to load the correct record for the form where it is embedded.

    You will need to change the element.src line to match the IFRAME url you copied above, making sure to replace the oId= section with oId=${recordId}.

    Once you have your file, save it to your local machine. The next step is to upload this into your entity form. In our example, we add a section to the bottom of our form that will hold the Audit History because this component requires a lot of space to display.

    insert-and-upload.gif


    Some things to note when you do this:

    1. Mark the Web Resource type as HTML so that Dynamics knows the right way to display it.
    2. Make sure you click the box inside Web Resource Properties to Pass record object type code and unique identifier as parameters. The script uses this to know what audit records to show.

    You can reuse the script above to display any iframe you like into any entity form, all you need to do is change the element.src property.

    Happy Modifications! If you liked this, please leave a comment.

  • How to fix Dynamics 365 File download apostrophe bug

    How to fix Dynamics 365 File download apostrophe bug

    View in Chrome Store

    The Problem

    Starting in Chrome 72 the way the file download process works has changed. For Dynamics users, this means that files are currently being downloaded with a ‘ character surrounding the files.

    What this means is if a user downloads a file called Report.xls what actually happens is the file is downloaded as ‘Report.xls’ which causes the file to be unknown. There is no problem with the file itself, but this is very confusing for users.

    The Solution

    To fix this, users may rename the file to remove the apostrophe or if you like, I wrote a Chrome Plugin available for FREE that will automatically remove the apostrophe before download.

    Download the extension from the Chrome Web Store here or click the button below.

    View in Chrome Store

    What our users say…

    I am new to CRM (under a year) and have been super frustrated with the single tics on downloads that were happening in Chrome.  Today we got a Help desk ticket that i researched and found your chrome plug in…. [link to store]…  It worked…  Helped the customer right away…  Thank you so much for this. I have a very tenured developer  on my team that actually worked for Microsoft on the CRM team and he didn’t know how to fix this.   Made me look like a rockstar for the day!!!   Great plug in! Thank you,

    Steven T. Parsley

    Our firm is a heavy user of Dynamics CRM. We have been dealing with the CRM/Chrome export to Excel issue for a year. Our “solution” was not ideal. We either instructed users to use Internet Explorer or to associate .xlsx’ files to Excel. Nobody wants to use IE and the file association workaround was too difficult for users resulting in lots of Helpdesk tickets.

    This extension worked exactly as described. We were able to immediately roll it across our firm via our Chrome Group Policy.

    Thank you so much for providing a fix to a problem that should have been resolved by Google and/or Microsoft by now. Your firm is our hero!

    Aaron Appelbaum, Laird Norton Wealth Management

    To whom Concern,
    I have added extension which is provided by your company to chrome to fix download problem of Chrome on CRM 365. It is great and useful. thanks for your solution

    Bahram T.

    Have a great experience? Share a message with the hashtag #reenhancedtotherescue

  • Reenhanced Enhances CRM Services & Offerings

    Reenhanced Enhances CRM Services & Offerings

    Hello world! I am thrilled to be joining the Reenhanced team as the Director of CRM Projects.

    Reenhanced has been rescuing struggling software and Dynamics 365 projects for 14 years. I’ve always loved CRM rescue projects – stepping in when a project is nearing failure and helping an organization to turn it around. This is a wonderful opportunity to help more companies embrace their CRM systems and use the technology within Microsoft CRM to streamline their business processes and help achieve greater user adoption.

    I have more than ten year’s experience in Microsoft CRM technologies that I am bringing to the Reenhanced team. I have personally worked with Microsoft CRM from version 4.0 all the way up to my current role using Dynamics 365 online.

    If your company has a failed CRM implementation or just needs a little help optimizing the technology to meet your organizations’s business needs, contact us today at (215) 804-9408! We can help you get your system back on track.