CRM 2015 Review

CRM 2015 Review

Microsoft have released CRM 2015 which rather than being a complete look and feel update that we saw with CRM 4, CRM 2011, and CRM 2013 is instead an update on the changes that were included in 2013.

The release is more focused on functionality updates rather than the design updates many CRM users are useful.  This is obviously some good news as there is nothing more annoying than training business users in one look and feel only to have it completely change every 12-24 months.

This article is my observations of the differences between two vanilla instances of CRM (One 2013, one 2015).  There is probably a fair bit of information I have missed which can be discovered via Microsoft’s documentation.  However onto the article!

CRM Ribbon

The first difference when logging into 2015 is there is a new search box and icon clearly visible on the ribbon.

CRM 2013 - Ribbon

CRM 2015 - Ribbon

Entering a keyword(s) into the search box returns the results found by the query.  Currently it appears to be limited to Account, Contact, Lead, Opportunity, User, Competitor, Activity, and Case entities.  This is a bit of an issue if you have a CRM implementation with a lot of custom entities however for now I’m presuming it might be a configuration I haven’t found yet.

The icon beside it is the Advanced Find icon which pops up the standard Advanced Find window.  Advanced Find could often get lost in CRM2013 and having it in such and easy to find place will definitely help regular business

Colours and Theming

The colours of some of the OOB entities have changed which seems like a slightly odd decision (I don’t recall anyone really complaining about it) however the standard ribbon functionality seems to be the same.

CRM 2013 - Entities Menu

CRM 2015 - Entities Menu

The forms also appear to have had minor changes to colours however if you have clients using CRM 2013 then they should be able to continue navigating around the system easy enough.

CRM 2013 - Account Form

CRM 2015 - Account Form

Navigation Changes

The areas are generally the same as CRM 2013 however some slight changes include the splitting of the old Administration area within Settings.

CRM 2013 - Administration

CRM 2015 - Administration

CRM 2015 - Security

The new setup is probably a more logical design as the Security items now have their own area including the new Positions and Hierarchy Security items.  Hierarchy Security seems like it needs its own post so I won’t go into any detail here.

The Administration area also has the Microsoft Social Listening Configuration which allows you to use Microsoft’s Social Listening solution to track Facebook, Twitter, YouTube etc. information which can then be linked back into Accounts and Contacts so you can see how clients and the public are relating to your company.

Business Rules

An interesting addition to CRM 2013 was Business Rules.  The concept was fantastic as it in theory reduced the JavaScript required, however in practise the reality was a two basic limitations made them almost unusable.

Consider these scenarios:-

Scenario One

So you have a client whose preferred method of contact is Email.  Then logically they need to provide an email address.  However what if there preferred method is Phone, Fax, or Mail?  Programmatically you want the following:-

·         If Preferred Method of Contact is Email Then

o    Make Email Mandatory

·         Else If Preferred Method of Contact is Phone Then

o    Make Phone Mandatory

·         Else If Preferred Method of Contact is Fax Then

o    Make Fax Mandatory

·         Else If Preferred Method of Contact is Main Then

o    Make Address 1: Street 1 Mandatory

In CRM 2013 you could not do If/Else so the above required four separate Business Rules which becomes difficult when you have to start doing this for multiple fields.

Scenario Two

If you want to ensure you capture either a Home or Mobile phone for a client then you would like something like:-

·         If Home Phone or Mobile Phone do not contain Data Then

o    Home Phone or Mobile Phone are mandatory

·         Else

o    Home Phone or Mobile Phone are not mandatory

In CRM 2013 all conditions were “and” so the above wouldn’t work.  We could reverse it and say where Home Phone and Mobile Phone don’t contain data however what if we want something more complex? CRM 2015 opens up this functionality by allowing and/or.

CRM 2015 - Business Rule

Combining the If/Else and And/Or allows for a lot more customizability for the Business Rules which should greatly reduce the need for a programmer to develop JavaScript solutions leaving them to worry about more critical functionality.

Calculated and Rollup fields

CRM 2015 allows for fields to be of three types:-

·         Simple

The standard type from previous versions of CRM for data entry.

·         Calculated

Allows for Conditions if required (similar setup to Business Rules) and then allows actions using either a current field or one of the following formulas:-

       ADDDAYS

       ADDHOURS

       ADDMONTHS

ADDWEEKS

       ADDYEARS

       CONCAT

       SUBTRACTDAYS

       SUBTRACTHOURS

       SUBTRACTMONTHS

       SUBTRACTWEEKS

       SUBTRACTYEARS

       TRIMLEFT

       TRIMRIGHT

This is useful if you want to create a description for a record for example by combining multiple existing fields.

CRM 2015 - Calculated Field

·         Rollup

Rollup uses a related entity to do one of the following functions:-

       SUM

       MAX

       MIN

       COUNT

This is good to see how many contacts an Account has, or the total of child currency fields.

CRM 2015 - Roll up Field