Anthony Milner

We’ve recently upgraded to CRM 4.0 and it went quite smoothly. Overall the product design and performance has improved and I’m looking forward using the completely rewritten CRM Outlook addin which did not behave very well in CRM 3.0.

The buggy Outlook addin meant that I had to use CRM in the browser. If you’ve ever done this you may have noticed some interesting behaviour.

As I bring up CRM in the browser I get this…

Then it tells me to close the window…

So in MS CRM Open=Close – this is a usability masterstroke.

If this is your first time you get really confused but if you happen to look at your task bar you’ll find the “real” CRM minimised there.

This has always made me chuckle. Its like MS CRM is playing a little game of hide and seek.

Picture this…

User: “Must work in CRM now”

CRM: “Go away”

User: “OK”

CRM: “Try and find me”

User: Gone home early (user happy to be home early). User happy = good usability

Boss: “Why is CRM not updated”

User: “CRM doesn’t work”

etc…

On investigation of this peculiarity I discovered a default system setting called “Application Mode”.  Application Mode removes the browsers menu, navigation and command bars presumably in order to remove the confusion surrounding navigation which does make sense. It also frees up about 115px of screen real estate so its not all bad. However in order to achieve this CRM attempts to pop a window with no chrome using Javascript.  If the script makes it through the myriad of popup blockers it still confuses the user by asking them to “close the window”. So it’s a poorly executed introduction to CRM and probably the worst possible place to have really bad usability is on entry to the application.

Enough of my complaining – how do we fix this?

Get your CRM administrator to access Settings > Administration > System Settings and select the Customisation tab and uncheck “Open Microsoft Dynamics CRM in Application mode”

Phew…CRM is so much better now

We’ve been using Microsoft Dynamics CRM for about 18 months now but we’ve only really touched the surface with respect to functionality. It’s mainly been in the domain of the telemarketing and sales team but the rest of us have been using it to track email, a useful but annoying feature. Our vision has been to store all customer information from lead to sale to project and timesheet, billing and support under one umbrella system – one view. We’d been exposed to the customisation features whilst implementing it and a few months back and we started to experiment and proof of concept project management, timesheets, and help desk functionality. We found MS CRM to be a highly configurable and flexible environment to build no code functionality. Projects and timesheets don’t exist out of the box but we implemented this without much fuss and again absolutely no code. This is all made possible via the entity customisation tool, an easy to use database and form editor coupled with a workflow manager. So far this has allowed us to collapse three disparate systems into one and modify rapidly as the need arises. “I love it when a plan comes together“. Our next challenge will be exposing this functionality in MOSS :-).