What we need is an Image Gallery!!

Having had the opportunity to work on a number of projects and see a whole range of requirements and needs for CRM, I thought I would share this one as this forms part of our new solution ePicture.
I was recently working with a customer, who had a catalogue of images for products that they sold, these happened to be images of Telephone handsets and switches. 

There was a requirement and a need to include these images into CRM so they could be used with Quotes, Orders and web site integration.  It was also made quite clear that there was no apparent budget or desire to introduce a SharePoint instance or integration into the organisation.

As an organisation they wanted to keep everything in one please, one system and one over all solution with one technology, usually a difficult ask, but this is what we delivered to meet the need

ePicture (Images Galleries for CRM 2011)

First we thought about having an area in settings, which can enable the creation of image galleries so that we could easily add images to any record type or entity with in CRM

This way the ePicture solution can be used through simple configuration, any entity in CRM can have an associated picture gallery and the example I use is Contacts and Products. 

Let me explain Why

Online Selling and Online shops is growing at a pace and the old adage “A Picture Paints 1000 Words” rings true, as when you shop online or request a quote you are always more interested when you have a picture of the product your thinking of buying.  With ePicture you can enhance the product library in CRM2011 and send your customers compelling graphical quotes, which are generated through the standard reporting in CRM 2011.
The other use for ePicture here is the use of a solution like this to capture pictures of contacts on your CRM system.

Why you might ask

Well this is great when your organisation is inviting people to an event and you want to issue an ID card you can simple take a web cam and record at registration point the person’s photo for the event purpose, this said you can also use the same feature for leisure or club membership where it is important to capture an image of the individual. 

ePicture comes with an additional resource so that you can add a primary picture to the top level record while you may capture more than one picture for the individual in the image library.

ePicture will be release toward the end of May 2012 via the MyCRM download Site,

Register here http://downloads.mycrmgroup.com/

Thanks Alistair

We are pleased to announce our first Workflow Function Library for Microsoft Dynamics CRM 2011, in this release we have added 36 new function calls for CRM Workflow that extend the business logic for Business Automation and processing of Data

eWorkflow – Marketing 

                   Function – GetLastCampaignForMember 
                   Function - GetLastCampaignResponseForMember 
                   Function – MarketingSubscribeUnSubscriberMember 
                   Function – UnsubscribeMemberFromAllMarketingLists 
                   Function – IsAMarketingListMember 

eWorkflow – Calculations

                    Function – BasicMath 
                    Function – ConvertTextToNum
                    Function – EquationSolver/SumUp 
                    Function – CalculateMaximum 
                    Function – CalculateMinimum 

eWorkflow – Dates 

                    Function – AddBusinessDaysToDate 
                    Function – AddToDate 
                    Function – DateDifference 
                    Function – DateDifferenceBusinessDay
                    Function – GetDayNameAndNumber 
                    Function – PareseDateFromString 
                    Function – SubtractBusinessDaysFromDate 
                    Function – SubtractDaysFromDate 

eWorkflow – RegEx 

                     Function – RegexMatch 
                     Function – RegexRelpace 
                     Function – RegexReturnMatch 
                     Function – RegexStringFormat 

eWorkflow – Strings 

                     Function – CapitiliseString 
                     Function – PadString 
                     Function – RemoveWhitespace
                     Function – ReplaceString
                     Function – StringLength
                     Function – SubString

eWorkflow – Web 

                     Function –WebURLDecode
                     Function –WebURLEncode

eWorkflow – Sales 

                     Function – CountRelatedRecords (Entities)
                     Function – TotalValueOfInvoices 
                     Function – TotalValueOfOpportunities 
                     Function – TotalValueOfOrders 
                     Function – TotalValueOfQuotes 

eWorkflow – Other 

                     Function – CustomerType

We will be working on a release 2 and release 3 of the eWorkflow Library and will continue to extend the Library functionality, with community and customer feedback.

For further information please contact sales@mycrmgroup.com

Release 11th May 2012, Pre-Register Here http://downloads.mycrmgroup.com/