Congratulations to Panduit!

This is a huge deal. For those of you not familiar with Convergence it’s one of Microsoft’s biggest events of the year. This year Microsoft, partners, and clients took over Atlanta for a few days.

Microsoft presents clients and their partners with different levels of awards based on projects they’ve worked on together. I’m not sure how many partners Microsoft has but I would guess in tens of thousands. Of all of the clients and partners out there our client Panduit, along with Hitachi Consulting, were presented with one of the highest level awards for Overall Excellence – Microsoft Dynamics CRM.  And Panduit is a Chicago area client. How sweet is that? 

Here’s a case study for the Panduit and Hitachi Microsoft Dynamics CRM project:
http://www.microsoft.com/casestudies/Case_Study_Detail.aspx?casestudyid=4000007014

And I’m not done yet. Another Hitachi Consulting client, T.D. Williamson, took home an award for Excellence in Innovation – Microsoft Dynamics AX.

Two major awards for our Microsoft Dynamics practice!

Here’s the list of winners on Microsoft’s Convergence site:
http://www.microsoft.com/dynamics/convergence/atlanta10/about_excellence.aspx

There’ve been some recent updates on Microsoft Dynamics CRM 5 release and availability but no solid dates yet. The standard answer has been “second half of 2010”. But it now looks like “end of the year” was mentioned at the Microsoft Convergence event.

Here’s a press release from Microsoft where it says “Availability of the new product will begin in the second half of 2010”.

SearchCRM narrows it down a bit further stating “Meanwhile, the next release of CRM Dynamics on-premise, referred to as “CRM 5″ internally at Microsoft, will be released around the end of the year.”

I’ve updated my Microsoft Dynamics CRM Product Info page to include links to information and videos about CRM 5.0.

 The Online version of Microsoft Dynamics CRM includes a pretty nifty tool called Internet Lead Capture. This feature is really handy for companies who get lead emails from their website contact page. Below is a typical email from a website submission form:

From: administrator
Sent: Tuesday, April 27, 2010 5:49 PM
To: website_leads@yourcompany.com
Subject: New website lead

First Name:             Paul
Last Name:             Velgos
Company:               Hitachi
Business Phone:     (219) 561-7180
Email:                    pvelgos @ hitachiconsulting.com
Description:           Hi, I love Microsoft CRM

Whoever handles these frequently uses a manual process to manage them. Maybe they forward the email leads to other employees and hope the person does something with them. Or if they do track the leads they might copy and paste each line into a spreadsheet. For companies getting more than a handful of emails a day this gets to be a time consuming process and leads can fall through the cracks.

Wouldn’t it be nice to have a method of automatically capturing the lead data from your website and also be able to easily track communication history and progress?  This is exactly what Internet Lead Capture does. No more copy and paste!

Internet Lead Capture is a wizard-based tool that enables you to create a website contact form, called a Landing Page, and add fields from CRM Online such as Name, Email, and Phone. When someone fills out and submits the form the information they enter gets converted into a Lead record within CRM Online and the data is automatically copied to the appropriate fields. Pretty slick.  Here’s how it works.

Selecting the Internet Lead Capture option loads the Get Started screen. In this area you can create new landing pages and view your leads. To create a new form click Create a new landing page.

This opens the Landing Pages window where you can create a lead capture page or a lead capture form. What’s the difference?

The lead capture page is hosted by Microsoft, offers a handful of color options and themes, and can be created by someone with zero technical knowledge.

The lead capture form gives you HTML code you can use to add the form to your existing website. This allows you to keep your website layout and appearance so the form looks totally seamless. 

In this example I’ll create a lead capture page by clicking the Create Page icon.

This opens the Create New Landing Page window. Here you can pick a name for your website address, page layout, and theme.

Clicking Next opens the Edit Lead Capture Page window. Here you can enter details about your company and also choose the fields you want to appear on the form. You can select from most fields that exist in the Leads entity. The default is Company Name and Last Name. I added First Name, Email, Business Phone, and Description. You can also choose which fields to make mandatory.  I chopped off some of the form because it’s a bit long but there are more options to add your company logo and privacy statement.

Then comes the Review and Confirm page that lets you see the final result and also go back to make any changes if needed. Clicking Finish brings up a page (not shown) that provides a summary and also the website address of your contact page.

When you enter the website address in your browser it displays your submission form. I filled out the form and submitted it.

When you go back to the Internet Lead Capture Get Started page there’s a link to View all leads. Here you can review the Leads and decide who to assign them to.

Once assigned they show up in the main Leads area of CRM Online. Here’s the Lead I submitted. Notice that the form data is copied to the correct fields. From here you can manage this Lead, store communication history, and determine if they’re a fit to do business with.

Microsoft Dynamics CRM includes a lot of tools to automate processes. This is just another small feature that can add up to some serious productivity gains.

I’m a bit behind on keeping things up to date around here. Interest in Microsoft CRM seems to have been very high so far this year so more projects has meant less blogging. I’m working on doing more frequent updates that are short and sweet. So here goes… 

KB 979347 Update Rollup 10 for Microsoft Dynamics CRM 4.0 is available for download at http://www.microsoft.com/downloads/details.aspx?displaylang=en&FamilyID=5da4d352-1d3f-4426-9c17-b256c30afdb9

Update Rollup 10 contains a cumulative set of updates and hotfixes. For more information see Article ID 979347 at http://support.microsoft.com/default.aspx?kbid=979347

I’d suggest reading the article before getting started so you understand what’s involved. There are prerequisites such as needing to have Update Rollup 7 installed before going to higher version including Update Rollup 10.

As always, I’d suggest doing a full backup of MSCRM databases and even exporting customizations as a precaution. Update Rollup 10 can be uninstalled but it’s better to be safe in case the uninstall has a meltdown. Also, I’d suggest installing this in your test environment and then testing for server and user issues before implementing it in your production environment.