Dynamics CRM 2011: Diving into the sales pipeline – Polaris Addendum

With the release of Dynamics CRM 2011 Update Rollup 12 (UR12, also known as Polaris), Microsoft introduced a lot of new features such as cross-browser support and new forms based on the modern interface (formally known as Metro).

One particular new feature has been driving a lot of traffic to this site, and people emailing me asking for advice: the sales pipeline editor. This new feature allow system customisers to specify the stages within the sales process the steps within through the use of an online editor. Unfortunately, this editor lacks the flexibility and features required to customise a sales process like I have I have discussed in my Diving into the sales pipeline series for Dynamics CRM 2011. The purpose of this post is to serve as an addendum for the series when considering the Polaris update.

Dynamics CRM: Workflows revisited

In the third post of my Diving into the sales pipeline series, we covered the creation of workflows to handle the different stages (i.e.: pipeline phases) of the sales process. If you followed the series from the beginning, you would recall that in that example, we did not want users to be able to jump back and forth through the pipeline phases. For example, a user with an opportunity located in the first pipeline phase shouldn’t be able to jump forward without first passing through the second stage, or be able to move backwards in the sales process.

There are a number of reasons why I stuck with this requirement. First, the whole article series is based on the real requirements of one of my past clients, and the client strictly required users not to be able to move back or jump steps forward. Second, this requirement introduced a nice JScript (the bonus JScript in the second post of the series) which handles the hiding of options within an option set based on conditionals. There is a third reason, however. I must say that I was quite comfortable with such “inflexible” requirement: It made my job easier, and thus easier to document it in order to share it as part of the sales pipeline trilogy of articles.

There is a degree of mea culpa here. In the third post of the series, which covers workflow design, I asserted that the online workflow designer for Dynamics CRM doesn’t handle jumping back and forth through workflow stages, like the GOTO statement found in many programming languages. Although this statement is correct if we considering an orthodox view of what “GOTO” means from the mindset of a developer, it doesn’t mean that we couldn’t achieve similar results using the online workflow designer for Dynamics CRM. In this post I will be explaining how we can achieve such results using the online workflow designer. Read more >>

Dynamics CRM: Disabling the selection of contacts for opportunities all the way

I recently got a requirement for a Dynamics CRM implementation that all recorded sales should follow the B2B (business to business) and therefore, opportunities should only able to be related to accounts, and not contacts as well.

This is a common scenario which can be easily covered with some simple JScript in the opportunity form. However I found out that in some circumstances, an opportunity could still be created for a contact, thus violating the requirement and even worse, breaking some of the implemented processes and business logic. Here is how I fixed this issue.

Dynamics CRM 2011: Diving into the sales pipeline – Part 3

In my previous post of this series we discussed how to apply our previously defined sales pipeline through the customisation of the Opportunity entity form. We went through the design of the Opportunity form, which included the addition of fields built-in fields which aren’t part of the default form, and we added some scripts for the calculation of our probability matrix.

Important Update: This article series has been written before the release of Dynamics CRM 2011 Update Rollup 12 (also known as Polaris). You might continue to read the articles in this series, but it is strongly recommended that you read this addendum before performing any customisations suggested in the series.

In this final post we will go through the creation of some workflows that will be part of our sales pipeline process.

Dynamics CRM 2011: Diving into the sales pipeline – Part 2

In my previous post of this series, we discussed some fundamental concepts of the sales pipeline and how Dynamics CRM handles the sales process. While considering the requirements of ACME (a fictitious company), we defined the stages of their sales pipeline, and started to outline the functional specification of the opportunity entity, including the elaboration of an opportunity probability matrix.

In this post we will discuss how to apply what have been defined so far by covering the customisation of the Opportunity entity form, including some scripting.

Dynamics CRM 2011: Diving into the sales pipeline – Part 1

No matter how orthodox and customisation-free you want your Dynamics CRM implementation to be, there is always one aspect of Dynamics CRM that must be customised: The Sales Pipeline. Such customisation is required if you want the default sales pipeline to work properly, as well the sales pipeline report.

The issue at hand is, how can we set-up a functional sales pipeline with charts and reports, yet keeping Dynamics CRM as close as possible to its out-of-the-box functionality? Which fields should we use and how should we design our workflows?

Because there’s so much to discuss here, I’m going to break this up into multiple parts. And in this first part of the series, I’d like to address the fundamental concepts of the sales pipeline and introduce some key points on how to conduct a requirement assessment.

Dynamics CRM: Sales pipeline funnel bug

Not sure if I should be happy about it, but a couple of months ago I discovered my first bug in Dynamics CRM 2011. I am confident I am not the only one to have bumped into this issue. Microsoft just confirmed to me that this is in fact a bug.

I noticed that when viewing the sales pipeline funnel chart while user has another currency selected that it is not the base currency, the funnel is not rendered and the user is presented with a blank chart.

I opened an incident with Microsoft and they managed to replicate this issue. It seems that when the user selects a default currency that has a conversion rate lower than 0.5, the values in the sales pipeline funnel chart seem to round to zero; thus rending the chart useless.

At the moment the “workaround” (note the quotes here) is to set a conversion value equal or higher than 0.5 (not really a workaround if you ask me).

The feedback I got from Microsoft is that this issue will be fixed in the Update Rollup 4, which is scheduled for mid October/2011.

I raised this issue on Microsoft Connect (ID 665233) on 27/April/2011. Here is my original post about this issue on the Microsoft forums.