Dynamics 365 Saturday in Stockholm - will be a blast!

For the first time ever 9 Business Solutions MVP:s will converge on Stockholm to share their knowledge! In the amazing Dynamics 365 Saturday event which will be held on the 10:th of November 2018 at the Microsoft Office in Kista, just outside Stockholm. As usual, the Dynamics 365 Saturdays are free.

As the main organizer, me, my company CRM-Konsulterna and the MVP Jonas Rapp, will also help out it is of course very satisfying to have so many talented people sign up to speak. A lot is happening, and version 9.1 was just rolled out today in EMEA if you didn't notice. Hence there is a lot to talk about.

There will be three tracks:

• Application - sessions on configuration and usage of Dynamics 365
• Development - sessions on development and configuration that could be viewed as programming like Flow, LogicApps, PowerApps/CanvasApps etc.
• Business/Project Management - sessions on how to best run projects, businesses, your career and other softer issues but all related to Dynamics 365.

As the host, I really hope you are able to secure a seat, we are limiting the amount to 150 and we are getting signups by the hour, so be sure to book your seat now.

Read more and sign up here: http://365saturday.com/dynamics/stockholm-2018/ 

Gustaf Westerlund
MVP, Founder and Principal Consultant at CRM-konsulterna AB
www.crmkonsulterna.se

Rumours of Yammer's terminal health

Just read a very interesting post by Wictor Wilén, a SharePoint MVP here in Sweden. He strongly argues that Yammer is planned for termination by Microsoft and lists several, very good reasons for this. Do read it.


 

Is Yammer breaking up?

Why is this important for us working with Dynamics CRM? As you might know there is a built-in integration between Dynamics CRM and Yammer, where Yammer can be used to replace the Activity Feeds. This gives the organization using the Dynamics CRM system increased use of the feed functionality, as most of the features of Yammer Enterprise can be used directly from within CRM. It will create a thread for each record. For more information on how to set it up and how it works, read this Tech Net article: https://technet.microsoft.com/library/dn850385.aspx.

Recently, in CRM 2015 Spring Update (version 7.1) it is also possible to integrate CRM to Office Groups. If you read Wictor's Post, you will note his referal to how this most likely is the informal successor to Yammer internally within Microsoft. The Office Groups integration makes the collaboration Picture in Dynamics CRM even more complicated as there now are Three different ways of collaborating;

- Activity Feeds
- Yammer
- Office Groups

However, if Yammer really is to be deprecated, then this Picture clears a bit.

Another interesting fact is that there has been nothing done to the Yammer integration in CRM for several versions. It was released for CRM 2013 and it still has a lot of basic features missing, like if it is enabled for an organization, it cannot be removed. (https://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/jj945277(v=crm.6).aspx)

If Yammer was to be officially terminated, do note that Wictor (and I in this post) are just speculating, migrating the existing data from Yammer to ActivityFeeds or OfficeGroups is also a non-trivial issue. As Wictor mentions briefly in his post, the Yammer API:s have some areas which can be improved.

So, based on this. I would not advice any current CRM system owners to enable the Yammer integration unless Microsoft starts investing in Yammer and/or the CRM-Yammer integration.

I would also be more than happy to have a discussion on this subject in the comments section below.

Gustaf Westerlund
MVP, Founder and CTO at CRM-konsulterna AB
www.crmkonsulterna.se

4:th MVP Award!

And again it is the time of the year of waiting...

First of July has for the last three years been horrible. Have I been active enough? Maybe I should have blogged a bit more? Maybe written another book or presented at another seminar... and the clock ticks... and you know that the time in Seattle is a bit later than in Sweden so you just have to be patient, usually the mail doesn't show up until late in the afternoon.

But I have got a trick, look at the MVP site and see if the profile has been updated, so I checked, and it did say that I now was on my forth year. But, the email. You need the email. Some loose it in their junkmail. The email is the final proof, The site might be wrong.

And the clock ticked. Tock.

4 pm. Maybe I'll see more if I logg in to the MVP-site.

Aha, Award end date, next year! That looks good. Maybe I did make it after all. 

Then. PLING. You have mail.

The feeling is just great every year!

Congrats to all my fellow MVP:s who got renewed and if there are any new CRM MVP:s out there, a hearty Congrats, renewing is great but the first time is best!

Gustaf Westerlund
MVP, Founder and CTO at CRM-konsulterna AB
www.crmkonsulterna.se

The CRM 2013 Field Guide is out

After a lot of work a huge amount of MVP:s have now managed to achieve the second CRM Field Guide. I have this time had the honor of being among the authors of this very comprehensive title which goes into details of many areas that very few other books do. At almost 1000 pages it is something that you just have to have with you if you are a CRM expert, or claiming to be one. As Bob Stutz, said in his keynote here at eXtreme CRM today, it is impossible to keep all this information in the head, so we have helped you out, we have tried to destill it poured it into this book.

The book is for CRM 2013, which might seem strange, now that CRM 2015 Update 1 is about to be released but keeping up with Microsoft's cadance is not easy. The absolut majority of the things in the book are still true, yes, there might be some new features in CRM 2015 that can be revised in the book, but I guarantee you that if you know the book by heart, you will be one of the best experts in the worlds on Dynamics CRM, even CRM 2015.

And from our perspectives as authors, most of us, like me, are CTO:s, Techical directors, CEO:s, or senior consultants and developers, we take a lot of our time to write this book, as we partly like to share our knowledge, and partly, I guess to be totally truthful, to feed our pride a bit :). However, the CRM market for books is very limited, and the time frame a book is current is very short, making piles and piles of money off a CRM book is almost impossible, it is probably better to go about your daily job. I would hence say that the best way that you can encourage us to write the next version of this book, is to tell us, the people who made it what you thought of it. What is good, what can be made better? Tell us what is useful for you when you are working with a customer, tell us what you lack. The more people showing interest in what we do, the more we feel inclined to make the next version.

To buy your copy, click on the image below. I have 25 discount vouchers, to my readers, so the first 25 people can use the code "Gustaf2013".

Gustaf Westerlund
MVP, Founder and CTO at CRM-konsulterna AB
www.crmkonsulterna.se

Collation and MVP Renewal

When working with CRM systems in non-English countries you often need to take certain aspects into consideration that might have very dire consequences if set incorrectly, one of these is the database collation.

The collation of the database is simplified how it orders characters. For those of you not used to working with multi-language installation with odd characters this might not be something you have considered. As I am Swedish let me give you an example. The Swedish alphabet looks as follows:

abcdefghijklmnopqrstuvwxyzåäö

However using the collation that is default when using English as language in an on premise installation, which is "Latin1_General_CI_AI" (CI= Case Insensitive, AI = Accent Insensitive) the Swedish alphabet would be sorted as follows:

aäåbcdefghijklmnoöpqrstuvwxyz

This is why when installing an organization that is to be used in Sweden, despite the fact that you might have chose to have English as base language, that you need to select the collation that sorts the Swedish characters correctly which for CRM is "Finnish_Swedish_CI_AS".

On-premise setup of CRM - ability to select Finnish_Swedish_CI_AS collation
despite using English as base language

When setting up an organization in CRM online, you cannot chose the collation explicitly which is regrettable and I hope there will be some advanced setting in the future which will allow for this when provisioning new organizations. Check out what happened when I provisioned a new organization in English indicating that I was in Sweden.

The first pick list is for country - I selected "Sweden", the last is for language and I changed from "Swedish" to "English", which were the two only options.

After going through all the three steps you are shown a last instance configuration step.

In the instance configuration screen you can select the base language but there is no selector for collation. I selected "Engelska", which if you have any imagination, means "English".

After, a few seconds, yes, the new installation process is great and really fast, my org is up and running and I jump in to contacts and create to contact and check out the sorting. Any bets?

As you can see selecting English language will also implicitly select Latin1_General _CI_AI as collation which is incorrect from a Swedish perspective, I would have liked to see Östen Svensson at the end of the list, not sorted as "O". 

Collations are integral to the configuration of the SQL database and there are many features of the database like ORDER BY and indexes that depend on the collation why changing collation of a database is very very tricky. It is actually so tricky that it is not supported if you manage to do it with an on-premise, which I have heard rumours of that some people have managed to do. On an online you cannot request it. You will be recommended to migrate the data from the old org to the new.

So let's hope Microsoft will enhance the provisioning experience for CRM Online so that it includes a selector for collation. In the meantime, if you need a special setup, like the one I tried to set up above, English with Finnish_Swedish_CI_AS collation on CRM online I would suggest contacting Microsoft Online support to get their assistance in setting up the instance correctly. Hopefully they can assist in this.

And on another note, I was awarded the MVP award for the third year! A great honour and this very article is dedicated to the very award as two of my fellow MVP:s Shan McArthur and Niel Benson provided with background information to this article. I extend to you a humble thanks!

Gustaf Westerlund
MVP, CEO and owner at CRM-konsulterna AB
www.crmkonsulterna.se

Bugs and suggestions

What might be unknown to many CRM people is that Microsoft has a tool for managing bugs and suggestions called Connect. This can be found on connect.microsoft.com. So if you have any suggestions on how you think CRM should be enhanced, don't keep it to your self, add it to connect, and tell your friends, blog about it. After you have added a suggestion, other people can vote on an item and the more votes and item gets, the more attention Microsoft will give it.

I added two suggestions today, so feel free to go in and vote!

First, I think it would be a good idea to be able to supportedly change the logo in the left hand corner. This is done by companies today in an unsupported way which of course is bad, so it would be better to do enable a supported way to do it. Not that it is something I generally encourage, but many companies find this important.

https://connect.microsoft.com/dynamicssuggestions/feedback/details/809029/ability-to-customize-crm-main-logo

I also think that the logic when using multiple forms of the latest form being used, to be the defaulted the next time a record of the entity is opened often is not what is required, why a default form for each role per entity would be very good.

https://connect.microsoft.com/dynamicssuggestions/feedback/details/809017/add-default-form-for-a-role

Connect is also the Tools which is used for bugs during the TAP and beta programs if you are part of these.

I am currently in Bellevue close to Seattle on the MVP Summit, meeting the other MVP:s and the CRM Product team which is great! Joel Lindstrom and I held a presentation to the Product team today and they are a great crowd who are really interested in listening to our opinions. We are lucky to have them and they are really working hard to give us an excellent Product so giving them good input on things we feel the Product can be enhanced, is really a just doing our part of the development. It is easy to complain about something not being as you would like it to, but try to be constructive and formulate that into a suggestion instead and register it on connect and you may get it. Do keep in mind that they have a lot of things to try to triage and it might take some time, but if they don't know, you might never get it.

Gustaf Westerlund
MVP, CEO and owner at CRM-konsulterna AB
www.crmkonsulterna.se

MVP Renewal

First of July might mean different things to different people. For MVP:s the first Award you get, sets you the phase (beginning of a quarter). As I got mine on the first of July 2012, my nerves we on high today.

When I received my first MVP Award, it arrived in my inbox at about 11 am CET. Hence I naturally was looking very keenly in my inbox at that time, and the following hours.

For those of you not very familiar with the process, if you are awarded, you are sent a letter, however, if you are not renewed, you will be sent nothing. No "you-will-not-be-an-MVP-any-more-email" or similar. You will just not get anything. On top of this, the MVP Award emails are notorious for getting stuck in spam filters, so you had better keep checking there too.

Hence, I was checking my inbox, and my spam-inbox, every 5 minutes, or every 3 minutes, or maybe it was every minute to see if I got any email. But nothing, I got some leads, some new customers, someone wanted to come worked at my Company, someone wanted to send me huge amounts of Money, who cared, no MVP letter.

The time reached 3 pm CET. They say that you can sometimes see the nerves on the outside of someones skin, well, that wasn't the case anymore, my nerves had crept out like Trichinella worms, made a nest in a nearby tree, fallen down, been eaten by a hungry panda and then shot by a crazy Russian on killing Spree. Close enough.

At about 4 CET, I managed to rewire my brain (like T2 in Terminator) and remembered that I could check the MVP website. Which I did and my surprise was palatable, this is what I saw:

 



Now most of you might have noticed the really stretched image of me or the fact that I look almost bold (which I am on the front part of my head). But what I noticed was the small "2" just below the Picture where it says "Awards since 2012". Hurray! I had been renewed! But why hadn't I received the email? Which was answered about 5 seconds later when the email arrived.

So if you are looking for a more exciting July 1:st, I would suggest contributing to the CRM Community and sending me an email describing why I should nominate you for an MVP, then you might very well have just as exiting July 1:sts as I, with Pandas, crazy Russians and Everything!

I am also very happy that Jukka Niiranen got awarded the MVP Award as I got the honor to nominate him. It is a a great honor for me to be able to nominate someone that gets awarded the MVP Award as that is a great confirmation of my judgement which is very gratifying. Jukka has been a great contributor to the Community and very well deserves the Award. The NDA that you are required to sign as an MVP due to the fact that you get to see a lot of classified information, put us under a lot of restriction on what kind of news we are allowed to blog about. Jukka has been very good at drawing out the bleeding edge info from hazy photos from Convergence, eXtremeCRM and similar and I hope he will be able to continue this without too much hindrance from the very strict NDA.

Do read his blog about his MVP Award if you have not done so already!
http://niiranen.eu/crm/2013/07/mvp-award-why-communities-rock/

Gustaf Westerlund
MVP, CEO and owner at CRM-konsulterna AB
www.crmkonsulterna.se

SharePoint & Exchange Forum 2007

If you live close to Sweden or close to Europe for that matter, make sure not to miss SharePoint and Exchange Forum 2007 in Sweden, the 14:th and 15:th of May. It is THE place to be for all SharePoint (and Exchange) professionals, decision makers, developers, administrators and powerusers. I will be the presentor for one of the tracks and I will also be holding a seminar on SharePoint and Microsoft CRM integration.

There will be a host of very prominent speakers, some of these will be:

Patrick Tissegheim, SharePoint MVP & author, Belgium
Michael Noel, SharePoint MVP and expert on MS ISA, author, USA
Nick Swan, SharePoint MVP, USA
Göran Husman, SharePoint MVP & Author
Eric Legault, Outlook MVP and author, USA
Scott Schnoll, Exchange expert, Microsoft, USA
Micke Nyström, Windows Server MVP
Lasse Pettersson, Exchange MVP
Peter Andersson, Microsoft Sweden
Kalle Becker, Microsoft Sweden
Pontus Haglund, Microsoft Sweden
Magnus Danielsson, Microsoft Sweden
Christer Olsson, Exchange expert, Microsoft Sweden
Michael Jansson, SharePointexpert and trainer, Humandata

So invest in your social network and knowledge from the worlds most competent SharePoint and Exchange Experts! Not to be there is not an option...

There are a limited amount of seats so make sure you get one! Go to www.seforum.se for more information!

Gustaf Westerlund
CRM and SharePoint Consultant

Humandata AB
www.humandata.se