CRM Blog

The first feature I’m going to review is the ability to create and restore backups on your own. Previously you would have had to involve Microsoft to obtain a backup of your CRM organization. Now you can create a backup on demand, although backups are still performed daily, and you can restore a backup at your leisure.

You can manage your backups in the CRM Online Admin Center which you can get to from the Office 365 Admin Center. You can only restore on-demand backups to a sandbox instance. Check out this TechNet article for full details.

Have you had the courage yet to try Zoho CRM 2016?  It can be disorienting sometimes getting used to a new user interface, especially if you’ve been using the application for a while, but I’m telling you it’s really worth it!

Custom buttons got a little bit of a make-over in the 2016 version, and this is the case whether you have switched to the new version of not…

BEFORE, each custom button would be a visible button in the area you selected (List view, View or Edit)

NOW, they are together in a drop down list with ONLY the name of the first button showing.

Also, for buttons placed in the list view, in the new version you must now select at least one record before the buttons become visible:

Two “Record History” changes in the 2016 version:

LAST ITEMS VIEWED BUTTON:
The new location of the ‘last items’ button (the one that gives you clickable links to the last 10 records you viewed) – it used to be centered off to the left on the screen, now its located at the bottom right of your screen:

At this point, we’ll now jump to the process builder to finalize our process.  There’s a lot in here and we’re only doing a brief process.  As you work with this part of the system you’ll inevitably discover more and more things that you can do with the new builder.

Go to Setup and search for “Process Builder”.  Click the resulting link and you’ll be brought to the builder itself (which in a way seems very separate from Salesforce but it’s more like diving deep into the platform).

Once it loads, you’ll see some existing processes (2 of which are just samples).  You want to click New on the right hand side of the page.

Give the process a name and description…

Once saved, you’ll now get the “flow chart” designer that allows you to define the process including the object it’s working on (triggered by), the criteria and the actions.

Click “Add object” to choose which object this is triggered upon.  Here we will chose the “Order” object (this object is fairly new and also has to be enabled – maybe a future tip on the orders….).

After clicking next, you can now select the criteria and set the criteria.  In this case, we’ve chosen the criteria to be when an order equals draft.  What I personally like is that you have the ability to have multiples like “Is Changed” and now “Equals” to actually create a “Changes to….” scenario.

Finally, add in the action or select the action of what happens when the criteria is met.  Here it is an “Email Alert” where we’ll chose the alert made in our previous tip.

Once saved, you’ll then activate the process.  To test you can create an order with status of draft and the email will be sent.  For protections, we may want to have other criteria in place to prevent the same email going out with each order edit as well.  Maybe not draft but “activated” for status and have the “is changed” flag as well.  A copy of our email is below:

Be sure to join our webinar this coming month (or see our Youtube page afterwards) as we’ll explain everything above a bit more in depth.  Until then though I invite you to explore the new builder — it’s worth a look.

Written by Prahba Krishnamurthy/Corey Babka

The tips for this month will be all based off of the new Process Builder of Salesforce that adds a whole new element to workflow in Salesforce.  Before you were limited to alerts, updates and emails with workflow, but with the Process Builder we can now create new child records, other objects and other tasks much more easily in a much more visual designer.

The PROS:

1. The Process Builder can combine multiple workflows into single process and can have chain of criteria (if-then statements).
2. It can associate multiple actions for each criteria.
3. It can have child records updated.
4. The builder can access apex code and simple tasks can be replaced with process builder.
5. Notifications can be applied to both chatter group and email alerts.

The CONS:

1. Criteria is if-else based and will not move to downstream criteria if top criteria is not met (subsequent criteria), however there is a recent change allowing for the process to re-evaluate.
2. The action cannot be re-used (with the exception of email alert) and needs to be redefined for every criteria. 
3. Editing a process (after creation) entails cloning and editing, you can not edit a process once it’s saved.
4. Some standard fields (activity due date) for instance are still not able to be updated if they cannot be updated via standard workflow.

To show how the process builder works as opposed to the standard workflows, we will create a notification or “email alert”.  However, unlike the standard workflow, you have to create the email alert before you create the process.  Before, we could create criteria and then create the email alert message.  In the new process builder, it’s much easier to add it in before and simply reference it in the process.  There is a button however to make a new alert, it just leaves the process builder which can seem a bit odd and disconnected.

Go to Setup and search for “Email Alerts” (select it).  If you have to pass by the splash page of “what is a workflow”, that’s fine, otherwise you’ll see your list of existing alerts.  Click the “New Alert” button at the top to get to the creation screen.

Here you’ll provide a description, the object that the alert performs or is triggered by and the email template that is used (you may have to create that one in the template area as well first).

Once created, it will look like this in your list.

From here we’ll now spend time on the process builder and reference this email alert based on the order changing status…

Written by Prabha Krishnamurthy

Last month I posted about creating workflows to re-open activities. This month I’m writing about a quick and dirty way to do the same thing but using JavaScript.

1. Open the closed activity that you want to re-open.

2. In the URL field of the browser, enter the following text:

A client recently came to me with a problem where they could not login to MS Dynamics CRM via Outlook. I discovered that they had a network firewall enabled so I went about researching which ports are used by CRM for Outlook. This TechNet article shows that port 80 is used for HTTP and port 443 for HTTPS. I went back to my client with this information but it turns out that they don’t block either of those ports. We learned that the problem is only with the initial login so they temporarily disabled the firewall and was able to login. Once the firewall was enabled again, it was still working.

If you have several opportunities to update, you can do it all at once using a simple view. Create a view of opportunities that includes the field Process.

Make sure the results include at least one opportunity that is using the new process. This way, you’ll be able to clearly see the ID for the new process vs. the old.

Next, you’ll want to export the results to Excel or edit directly in Excel Online. Copy the ID of the new process over the ID of the old process.

In Excel Online before changing the Process ID:

In Excel Online after changing the Process ID:

Then import your changes and all of the opportunities will now be using the new process!