So, you’ve decided that you need a CRM and that Dynamics 365 is the system for you – good choice.
So can I go ahead and install and configure Dynamics myself?
These Microsoft products are easy to install and configure, right?
It’s true, you could install and get Dynamics running with a bit of know-how, time, and lots of reading of Microsoft’s guides. But what you don’t have is experience and a thorough knowledge of how to customise Dynamics 365 for your business. Without customisation Dynamics isn’t much more than a standard off the shelf CRM.
How important is expertise?
Whilst it has many off the shelf and ready to go business processes which may meet your requirements, the real way to unleash its full potential is by knowing its capabilities in full.
Once you know Dynamics’ capabilities, you then understand when you need to customise and when you shouldn’t.
This will result in a system that underpins your business and meets the requirements of your team.
Some areas of where technical expertise is required are listed below:
- Fields in the tables / entities
- Business Process Flows
- Workflows – basic, intermediate and advanced level builds
- Charts
- Dashboards
- Report building
- Security – users, roles, field level security
- Data management
Fields in the tables / entities
Some of the tables (e.g. account, contact, lead) have hundreds of fields that meet many business requirements from the outset.
Fields are of many types
Some are used in one or more views. Some are used in one or more charts.
Whenever fields are used in other parts of the system, it creates dependencies. Dependencies are a fantastic thing – from your perspective it prevents you accidentally deleting a field (or many other system components which also benefit from dependency tracking) that is used in other places. From a developer perspective it enables you to very quickly navigate the data model behind the system and understand what is being used and where.
Any good developer knows which fields exist before they create new ones.
Business Process Flows (BPFs)
BPFs provide a guided user experience through several different tables in the system without needing to navigate to those tables specifically.
For example, a Sales Process BPF may take the user from a Lead, to an Opportunity to a Quote without the user needing to manually navigate to these different forms.
Planning a BPF is the most important part and takes dedicated workshop time with the right people involved
Building and executing a simple BPF is relatively straightforward once you know how to create stages and steps.
More complex BPFs which trigger workflows or other actions to be taken, or that have branching conditions that support different logic trees – such as if a deal is above £20k then do these steps, otherwise do these steps – requires greater experience in configuring the system.
Workflows – basic, intermediate and advanced level builds
Workflows form the heart of automation within Dynamics. You can do pretty much anything with them, with no code or minimal coding knowledge, once you understand how they work.
Some examples include:
Basic
- When the status of a record changes send an email to someone
- When a certain field on a record changes create a task to follow up and assign it to someone
- Upon record creation set some default values for certain fields
- Before record deletion notify someone that the record is being deleted
- Wait 5 minutes before doing something
- Wait until a field contains a specific piece of data before doing something
Intermediate
- Joining several basic steps together when they need to occur at the same time
- Creating new records
- More complex logic with AND or OR statements
- Parallel wait conditions such as wait 5 minutes OR until the record is no longer active
- Basic arithmetic
- Date and time calculations
- Basic string manipulation
- Using child workflows
Advanced
- Combining several of the basic and intermediate concepts
- Full understanding of how and when workflows fire and why
- The most complex logic
- Using other productivity plugins to perform
- Rollup calculations
- Complex maths
- Advanced date calculations
- Complex string manipulation
- Updating child records from parent records
Workflows are a fantastic way to automate processes, improve data quality and management, and notify people of what is happening in the system.
Charts
Bring Dynamics data to life with visualisation. There are many helpful charts that come with Dynamics for starters.
You can also very easily create your own with a little knowledge of chart building and the underlying data model behind Dynamics.
Bar, Column, Line, Stacked, Funnel, multi series charts are all available to help your users better understand the data in the system
Advanced users can integrate PowerBI to go to another level of rich visualisation
Dashboards
A great way to bring together several charts and views of data from the system. You can also embed external websites (when required) and other resources into dashboards so your team gave everything they need in one place.
Report building
There are several tools available for building reports and an experienced Dynamics partner should be familiar with them all:
- Charts (mentioned above)
- Dashboards (mentioned above)
- Excel Templates
- SSRS reports
- Microsoft Power BI
Excel Templates let you build charts, visualisations, tables and slicers in Excel as normal. Upload the Excel file into Dynamics, and when you run this Excel Template it will contain the latest data. A great tool for experienced Excel users who want more power and flexibility that a data analysis tool like Excel provides
SSRS reports can be created using the Report Wizard in Dynamics. You can build standardised and fairly simple reports from a parent table (e.g. Contacts) and child table (e.g. All the quotes sent to those contacts). SQL Server Reporting Services is an advanced SSRS report building tool that is required for more complex scenarios and can meet the most demanding of requirements, but requires extensive and quite niche report building skills.
Microsoft Power BI sits outside of Dynamics, but within the Microsoft 365 suite of applications. This means Power BI reports can be viewed directly from Dynamics. Power BI is Microsoft’s flagship cloud based reporting tool. It is a more modern alternative to SSRS reports and arguably more flexible and powerful. It requires report building experience ranging from basic all the way to advanced, plus skills in Power BI Desktop to actually build the reports
Read our post Reports in Dynamics 365 : An Introduction
Security – users, roles, field level security
A large and business critical topic to get right. Make sure your users can only see data relevant to what they need to do their job.
Lock it down too tight and users get frustrated with the system. Don’t lock it down enough and at best users damage data quality accidentally, at worst they can do this maliciously and walk off with your business data!
Dynamics is security role driven which makes it easy to group users and administer security requirements. However the security roles themselves provide very granular and detailed access to almost every part of the system – so needs a comprehensive understanding and applied experience of using them properly.
Field level security sits on top of this structure by controlling who can create, read, or update values in specific fields in the system. Very useful when storing more sensitive data within Dynamics such as pay rates against users.
Data Management
There’s 4 parts to this:
- Understanding the data model and field types in the system
- In-system data management via data type formats
- Data Duplication
- Understanding how to manage data in bulk
Understanding the data model and field types in the system
Once you’re familiar with the different data types in the system, you’re in good shape to perform data management processes. These data types are shown below along with examples of formats in each type:
- Single Line of Text (email, textarea, phone, URL, JSON)
- Option Set (local or global)
- Multiselect Option Set (local or global)
- Two Options (Yes/No, False, True, Up/Down etc)
- Image
- Whole Number (number, duration)
- Floating Point Number (precision)
- Decimal Number (precision)
- Currency (precision)
- Multiple Lines of Text (length)
- Date and Time (user timezone, date only, timezone independent)
- Lookup (select table/entity)
- Customer
- File
Many of these data types also support rollups or calculations too.
Data management via data type formats
Once you understand the different data types and formats, you need to choose the correct formats for the purpose. Some examples:
- Single Line of Text: If it should contain a web address, make sure the format is URL
- Decimal Number: If it only needs to be 2 decimal places and between -100 and 100 then change these formats
- Date and Time: If it only needs to store a date and not a time, then set to Date Only to avoid potential timezone problems
Data Duplication
Ensuring quality data in the system ensures quality reports out of the system – avoid Garbage In Garbage Out syndrome.
You can set Duplicate Detection Rules to make sure fields such as contact phone number or contact email address are checked when adding a new contact, and the system will notify you if they exist already.
Duplicate Detection Jobs can then flag to you weekly or whatever frequency you like, any potential duplicates across the system, based on the rules you create.
Understanding how to manage data in bulk
You can import data into Dynamics via several methods, but most commonly Excel or CSV. There is a Data Import and Export wizard to assist you in mapping the file to a specific table/entity along with field mappings.
An understanding of the data model is key to ensuring you know how to import lookup fields vs optionset fields for example.
Good data management practices come into play then
If you export an Excel template which contains existing records, you can then import updates to those records. Experience in Excel with VLOOKUP and other functions comes in very handy when preparing your data in Excel before uploading changes back into Dynamics.