Thursday, November 19, 2009

External Team Emails in Outlook

A customer of mine is using the Events Management Accelerator, and wanted an easy way to create an Outlook email to the External team Members for a Campaign. So we developed a little utility in Outlook to enable this functionality:
We added a toolbar in Outlook:


and clicking the button shows a form which displays the current Campaigns

and then clicking a campaign loads all the External Team Members for that campaign




Clicking a name in the Team Members list adds it to the Email list, or clicking the "Add all" button adds all the team members to the email lsit



Clicking the Email button creates a new Outlook email with the To field populated with the Team Members.


Tuesday, September 15, 2009

Accounts Gadget for Windows 7

Hi all:

Here is a link to my CRM Accounts gadget for Windows 7....

http://thestraumanns.mine.nu/win7_accounts_gadget.zip




Please note if you download the gadget, in the files Accountsv4 and Contactsv4 the references to my server and CRM org must be changed to yours...

Here is a link to the CodeProject article

http://www.codeproject.com/KB/gadgets/DynamicsCRMGadget.aspx

Thursday, September 10, 2009

XRM Accelerator 2 - Financials

Hi all:

Here is a screen for another XRM accelerator, this one is for financial services. This XRM package can aid your deployment of CRM if your business is in the financial services market.



A click-through PPT demo can be found on my SkyDrive:

http://cid-c986ac6b4918eaed.skydrive.live.com/browse.aspx/XRM

If you would like more information please contact us at john@straumanngroup.com. Cheers.


Cheers,


John.

Wednesday, September 02, 2009

HUH?!?!?

In trying to find a solution to a particularly irksome programming issue, I decided to download and check out the Silverlight SDK to see what might be. As part of the process I was asked to install the “Microsoft Web Platform Installer 2.0”…sure why not. However imagine my surprise when in the menu of applications I can install through this gizmo, appeared Sugar CRM!!

I realize Microsoft is a huge company and it is not always possible for everyone to know everything everyone else is doing, but should a Microsoft install program REALLY give users the option to install a competitor to one of its fastest growing products?!?! What’s next, an option to install Linux???


Friday, August 21, 2009

XRM Solution 1 - Staffing

Hello all:

I have been developing vertical solution accelerators on top of Dynamics CRM for years, and now this has an actual name in “XRM”. In the next series of articles I will be posting about Vertical Accelerators I have developed either alone or jointly. These accelerators can greatly aid a CRM deployment as they give us a head-start on deployment and can cut down on the overall configurations/customizations required for the project. Please contact us at john@straumanngroup.com if you would like more information on one of our accelerators.
In the next few weeks I will be posting articles on XRM for:

Staffing
Call Center
Financial Services
Insurance
Manufacturing
Municipals
Professional Services

This first post is for the Staffing/ Human Resources vertical, allowing a user to track candidates, job orders, resumes, etc.


I posted a “click-through” demo on my LiveDrive which shows some of the solution,

http://cid-c986ac6b4918eaed.skydrive.live.com/browse.aspx/XRM

and if you would like more information please contact us at john@straumanngroup.com.

Cheers.

John.

Wednesday, July 29, 2009

XRM: Sports Team Management

I help coach an Under-18 rugby team, and one of our challenges is compiling lists of players who are available for games. So I have started developing an XRM solution to help with this process. Eventually this is something that could be used by any amateur sports team to manage players, communications, etc. Here is a screen of the portal WIP…


Thursday, July 23, 2009

CRM News Headlines

Hi all:

A customer recently asked about having a scrolling news headline display in CRM, so I mocked this up...