Creating Surveys in Microsoft Dynamics CRM with the all New! eSurvey

Soon to be released is the latest fully integrated solution for Microsoft Dynamics CRM from MyCRM.  eSurvey is a full functional Survey, Poll and Data collection solution that can be used for Customer and Prospect Surveys, Competitions and even has the option to be used for running online Quizzes and Training, resulting in response scores and total scores.

Data capture has never been so easy, as all questions can be created in CRM and all responses to the questions asked if stored against the contact.
We have taken the opportunity although there are other no so functional options available to extend Microsoft CRM Marketing even further.
With a drag and drop flexible user interface creating surveys has never been so easy the screen shot details the main survey screen in CRM.

With the rise in popularity of Social media and platforms like Facebook, LinkedIn and blogs, you now have the ability to track in CRM where the responses came from. So if you were running a Poll or a Competition on Facebook and LinkedIn you could record the success and data from the individual responses, and trend the response rates.

All the Survey responses are recorded directly in the CRM and this is a great way to also record prospect data that has contributed to an individual survey or entered a competition.

Each of the responses is stored within CRM can be used in workflow, so if certain questions are answered in a certain way then a work flow could trigger a call or an activity in CRM, increasing return on investment and coherence  between Marketing and Sales functions within the organisation.
 
Each Survey, Poll or Competition will create a landing page for recipients outside of the organisation, this page can be branded to you company colours and you can add a default logo directly from CRM

 
After configuration the page might look like this, although this is just an example of colour change and adding logo’s

eSurvey will be accessible for demo via the MyCRM Download Centre detailing current on-premise price points for 2012.
Please email Sales@mycrmgroup.com for further information

Here is our latest Demo solution for Event Invitation tracking within Microsoft CRM

This solution is designed to work with eCampaign to enable organisations to track Events and Event responses directly in #CRM2011 after send the related Accept and Decline Links via an email marketing campaign. 

For more information on eEvent and Invitation tracking please contact sales@mycrmgroup.com or register with http://downloads.mycrmgroup.com/

Thanks Alisatir

We have recently been working with a number of our eCampaign customers to develop a complete solution for Event Invitation Tracking in CRM.

So what is Event Invitation tracking, in some circumstances your organisation many want to send customers an invitation to attend a webinar or an event that is being held, and track the responses in CRM to create a list of contacts that wish to attend,

We have done this in the following way by adding new entities to CRM for Event and Event responses

PIC EV 1

On the creation of an event in CRM, two URL’s are created for the Accept and Decline process and these can be used in eCampaign to send a bulk email with event invitations.

When a recipiant recieves the email they will have two options, below is an example of an email for an event in eCampaign

PIC EV 2

When a recipient selects the Accept button from the email they will be taken to your event page which details the event and will display a message saying they have opted to attend

PIC EV 3

Likewise if the recipient Declines a similar page is displayed with a message saying they are not attending.

PIC EV 4 

For more information on eEvent and Invitation tracking please contact sales@mycrmgroup.com or register with http://downloads.mycrmgroup.com/

Thanks Alisatir 

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/

Since the release on Microsoft CRM 2011 and the release of the Microsoft Online platform we have had many prospects and customers come and ask the same question and that is

Oh can I do that in Workflow?

To date the answer has been you can if your deployment is on-premise but not if you’re online, which usually starts of a conversation with the words “Are You Sure” and the “Sales Person told us it was exactly the same software”
So to clear that initial question or statement “Yes it is the same code build or same software” but and there is always a but, till now or until R8 is released you have not been able to run what are “Sandboxed” custom workflow plugins within CRM online.
Enter R8, R8 has many changes and support for different things but one little snippet we really liked was:-

"CUSTOM WORKFLOW ACTIVITIES IN CRM ONLINE
With the Microsoft Dynamics CRM Q2 service update, developers can build custom .NET Workflow activity assemblies for Microsoft Dynamics CRM Online. These custom assemblies can be developed and deployed as part of a Microsoft Dynamics CRM solution package. Once a custom workflow activity has been deployed, it can then be utilized within the workflow engine for business process management. These new capabilities ensure parity in the developer experience between Microsoft Dynamics CRM Online and on-premises. It also empowers organizations to bring external data, custom actions and integrations into their standard CRM business processes."

This means you will be able to run custom workflow plugins as part of a solution.  This really does bring in line the capability and functionality of CRM 2011 regardless of deployment type.
So why the blog post, well as expected we are now seeing customers come to us with requests for custom workflow plugins and to be honest we could build this on a one by one basis or a bespoke basis, but we have opted to release our full library of workflow extensions for CRM 2011.

eWorkflow
eWorkflow like all our other products and services starts with a download licenced install of a CRM2011 solution, once deployed you can start building extended workflows with the following additional functionality

Marketing
Marketing List Subscribe (/unsubscribe)
Marketing List Remove (all)
Get Last Campaign For Member
Get Last Campaign Response For Member

Sales
Get Total Value Of Opportunities
Get Total Value Of Quotes
Get Total Value Of Invoices
Get Total Value Of Orders

General Functions
Equation Solver
Basic Math
Convert Value
Maximum
Minimum
Add Business Days To Date
Add To Date
Parse Date From String
Subtract Business Days From Date
Subtract From Date
Regex String Format
Regex Match
Regex Replace
Regex Return Match
Capitalize String
Pad String
Replace
String
Substring
Remove Whitespace
URL Decode
URL Encode

See all the new Workflow Helpers 

 
So as you can see from the list above we have introduced a number of additional functions that can be used in CRM2011 but more importantly these are tested and supported to use straight from install.

We anticipate that on release there may be other functions that get added, but this includes the first release.

The eWorkflow Helper Library will ship with a number of tested workflow functions for #CRM2011 for both on-premise or hosted either online or partner hosted and can add a new level of automation to the implementation of CRM.

You can register for a free download account with MyCRM at http://downloads.mycrmgroup.com/

Or email sales@mycrmgroup.com

Regards

Alistair

As promised we have now created a full video demo which can be watched below of the new eMAP Bing Map and Bing Search integration with Microsoft CRM 2011.

The video is about 16 minutes long but does cover all the integration points for data directly in CRM.

As this is pre-release and if you have any suggestions of what great additions could be added please let me know as a number of people from the dynamics community have already contributed with great affect.

We are also working with a number of partner data providers to enhance the experience and deliver more data and prospect information directly into your CRM, from the mapping tool.

You can email us on sales@mycrmgroup.com Quoting eMAP.

A number of our larger hosted and on-premise customers all seem to report the same problem in that they are not able to manage CRM user information effectively.   In many cases the CRM administrator from the organisation has had to remote into end users laptops or desktop to change personal settings and this increases the work load of many System administrators.

We took the suggestions made and created a wish list with the intention of creating a better user administration experience in Microsoft Dynamics CRM 2011

Our goal was to enable System administrator to have extended user settings for CRM and expose additional features that have been excluded from the standard Microsoft CRM admin area.

Introducing eUser – Extended User Settings

eUser from MyCRM Extended is an extended solution for User Management and administration of end system users which becomes a valuable add-on post a hand full of CRM users.

There are two main features sets with the new functionality and these are extended end-user settings and bulk end user settings
 
First we take a look at some of the end user extended record settings.  
As you can see from the screen shot below we have exposed a number of the options that end users can select for themselves so that an administrator can set these when adding a user account

The General tab shows how to set among other things dates and currency for the end user
 

If we now take a look at the extended activities tab you can see that extra setting have been created to allow an administrator to day and times

 
On the final extended user tab you can see a number of exposed features under formats, Email and Privacy

  
These final settings will enable administrators to set language, tracking and error responses.

We now go on to look at the new bulk setting features of the new user setting solution.

Introducing eUser – Extended Bulk Settings

In this part of the solution we show the new features for bulk setting user permission in CRM 2011
 
Here an administrator can bulk set how many records a user sees by default, the advanced find mode, the default tab and default pane for selected users. 

 
On the email tab as before the administrator can see options around email setting for the selected users.

The advanced find has also been configured to easily add selected users across the enterprise, so that an administrator can change setting on bulk
 

The new eUser module will be released via the download centre in March 2012 and will have a full 14 day trial.

To find out more about MyCRM Products and services please visit http://www.mycrmgroup.com

To register for a free download account please visit http://downloads.mycrmgroup.com

With kind regards

Alistair

Here at MyCRM we have now launched the latest version of our managed services for Microsoft CRM 2011, as before we have opted to add value over price per month and are pleased to offer 3 great solution packages from entry level to enterprise.

Enterprise CRM

Included in the Per User price:
• Full CRM License for access to Microsoft Dynamics CRM 2011
• Unlimited telephone and email support
• 5GB storage per CRM user
• Data Backups – Nightly
• Data Backup retention for 7 Days
• Monthly Backup Download on request
• 95.95% Network Uptime Guarantee

Extra above standard CRM

• 32 hours service time free for setup and configuration

• Fully Integrated Email Marketing with unlimited emails

http://downloads.mycrmgroup.com/eCampaign.aspx

• Integrated Document Creation with ePDF

http://downloads.mycrmgroup.com/ePDF.aspx

• Integrated Number and form auto population with eNumber

http://downloads.mycrmgroup.com/eNumber.aspx

• Integrated Tax calculation for key entities including product line override

http://downloads.mycrmgroup.com/eTax.aspx

• Integrated 360 degree of the customer with eView

http://downloads.mycrmgroup.com/eView.aspx

• Integrated Document Management with SharePoint 2010

Optional Extras:

• All CRM Extensions from the MyCRM Download Centre Supported
• Additional Data Storage £9 per GB per month
• Additional Consulting service packages from £2850

Our hosted environment is fully managed by MyCRM and is hosted from UK Data Centers.

Our enterprise offering including support retails at £95 per user per month and includes service time built in for deployment and configuration, along with full telephone and email support.

To request a Demo of a trial of MyCRM 2011 click here http://hosted.mycrmgroup.com/pricing.aspx

Or you can visit our main site here http://www.mycrmgroup.com

Here at MyCRM we have now launched the latest version of our managed services for Microsoft CRM 2011,
As before we have opted to add value over price per month and are pleased to offer 3 great solution packages from entry level to enterprise.

Professional CRM

Included in the Per User price:

• Full CRM License for access to Microsoft Dynamics CRM 2011
• Unlimited telephone and email support
• 5GB storage per CRM user
• Data Backups – Nightly
• Data Backup retention for 7 Days
• Monthly Backup Download on request
• 95.95% Network Uptime Guarantee

Extra Included above Standard

• 16 hours service time free for setup and configuration

• Fully Integrated Email Marketing with unlimited emails

(http://downloads.mycrmgroup.com/eCampaign.aspx)

• Integrated Document Creation with ePDF

(http://downloads.mycrmgroup.com/ePDF.aspx)

• Integrated Number and form auto population with eNumber

(http://downloads.mycrmgroup.com/eNumber.aspx)

• Integrated Tax calculation for key entities including product line override

(http://downloads.mycrmgroup.com/eTax.aspx)

Optional Extras:

• All CRM Extensions from the MyCRM Download Centre Supported
• SharePoint Hosting and Integration from £8 per user per month
• Additional Data Storage £9 per GB per month
• Additional Consulting service packages from £2850

Our hosted environment is fully managed by MyCRM and is hosted from UK Data Centers.

Our professional offering including support retails at £65 per user per month and includes service time built in for deployment and configuration, along with full telephone and email support.

To request a Demo of a trial of MyCRM 2011 click here http://hosted.mycrmgroup.com/pricing.aspx

Or you can visit our main site here http://www.mycrmgroup.com