Georged CRM Blog

Now we all know that when Microsoft says "unsupported" they always sometimes mean business. Take, for example, popular CRM 3 customisation to filter lookup field data that used to work well. Until version 4, that is. Not all is lost, however, because no thanks to me but to Adi Katz, now there is new unsupported way to make it work in CRM 4 as well.

For example, to make primary contact lookup for an account record to show contacts from this account only, the following customizations are required:

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"I want to be able to open a record in CRM, push the button and import the information as a contact into Outlook. Then, after synchronising with my PDA, I'll have this contact card available while on the road."

That was, in a nutshell, the requirement from one of the CRM users.  This particular CRM deployment contained over 10,000 account and contact records imported from the industry database and taking them all offline would have been a challenge not to mention impractical. After some brainstorming the following alternatives emerged:

• Offline CRM client synchronising a subset of records. Apart from the fact that user did not have a laptop with them all the time, process of adding a selected individual account/contact would have become quite complicated. We could have built a view selecting accounts/contacts based on some criteria, e.g. custom flag  and then ask user to check this flag for the selected record and then go offline. Cumbersome and would not work that well when user was on the road.
• CRM 3.0 Mobile. Same issues as above. In addition user wanted the records to be on both laptop and PDA.
• CRM Mobile Express. Perhaps that would have worked if user had a reliable phone reception everywhere they went. Unfortunately, due to the nature of their business quite often they ended up in places which fall into unlucky 2% of Australian population without reliable mobile coverage. If anyone thinks that satellite phone is an option, just wait until your first bill.
• Export/import facility. Outlook has ability to import contact information from vCards so all we have to do is to export CRM information as a vCard. Now we were cooking...

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