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How To Get Support With Sales Force Automation

by Timothy Sanderson on January 25, 2012

When businesses are seeking the entire tool kit that will enable them to connect better with their customers and obtain the most from their sales reps, they could do with considering something such as sales force automation. This sales application gives managers, sales reps and executives everything they have to help them to boost sales whilst simultaneously reducing the amount of administration work they’ve got.

Salesforce automation puts everything required when you need it, enabling sales personnel to close more deals and connect better with their customers, plus this information is made available to the user instantly and can be accessed by more than one person at once without disrupting data, so that it is perfect for use within organisations of all sizes.

The processes and techniques that are already set up in this software allow the individual to be more proactive and more productive, that will always benefit not merely them but the organisation as a whole.

Tools such as Sales Force automation also enable you to plug into making the most of social networking – this can help you to keep in touch all the time and keeps you current with the latest goings on. This tool enables you to manage and track campaigns and see where clients are coming from including those that come via social media. This can assist businesses to make smarter decisions about where to invest and to enhance their business bottom lines.

Salesforce automation is just one of the sales force products provided to help businesses connect better and interact better with their customers and employees. There is training offered on all packages to help businesses make sure they are having the most from their new purchase. This training can be performed either at the trainer’s venue or in the workplace to minimise disruption to the working day and ensure more staff members may take part.

To discover more about sales force automation why not check out the CRM SOS website where you can find out more about what these salesforce automation consultants can offer you.

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Canadian Feds announce DTAPP to Fund Technology for Small and Medium Businesses

by Mike Kelland on November 21, 2011

The Canadian Industry Minister recently announced an exciting new program for Small and Medium Business (SMB) named the Digital Technology Adoption Pilot Program (DTAPP). The Digital Technology Adoption Pilot Program (DTAPP) delivers funds, as much as $99,999, meant for companies to build and implement systems that were designed to improve their power in the global market. The qualification specifications will be rather straightforward. To meet the criteria, your company will have to:

employ less than 500 people;

be a corporation, operate for a profit and be inside Canada;

be in growth mode;

present intentions to complete a project meant to implement digital technologies; and

be in a position to modify their current procedures, to optimize the benefit of taking on digital technologies on its productivity

This will be a brand new, $80M investment over 36 months from Industry Canada that\\\\\\\’s focused on producing digital technology intended for SMB\\\\\\\’s that will motivate additional differentiation in the industry. The mention from Industry Minister, The Honorable Christian Paradis, has been that \\\\\\\”Canadian firms invest at approximately 60 percent the rate of their U.S. counterparts on a per-worker basis.\\\\\\\”. The intention with the investment is to raise that substantially making Canadian businesses even more differentiated on the worldwide marketplace, whilst producing work and pushing Canadian innovation.

Filling out an application to receive financing from those types of agencies is often difficult and generally takes a amount of expertise in engineering related to it. Long before you\\\\\\\’ve gotten too seriously into the application process, make sure that you have the technology affiliate ready to aid on the application. You probably like to have a great concept of which technology you want to deploy. Having a engineering company by your side who knows the program, the prerequisites with its difficulties can be excellent. You may additionally wish to incorporate your accountants to understand any tax ramifications for instance qualification requirements with regard to SRED along with influences for every tax inducement programs your company is currently taking advantage of.

If you are looking at requesting the Digital Technology Adoption Pilot Program (DTAPP) to get capital designed for technological innovation projects inside your small or medium company, we will support you! Tindr.co could be the execution engine and your software development and software outsourcing affiliate on the creation as well as execution for business-impacting technology. We will even work with you to get your application prepared as well as approved at no cost.

To learn more about the Digital Technology Adoption Pilot Program and obtain assistance with your application, please see our software outsourcing services at Tindr.co. We are very excited about this new program and are looking forward to helping as many companies as possible with their applications.

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Almost the Oscars: Introducing the Octie Awards

June 30, 2011

Posted By: Ruthie Miller

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Power User Tip: End Series for Recurring Appointments

June 15, 2011

Microsoft Dynamics CRM 2011 introduces the capability to create recurring appointment in CRM and its bi-directional synchronization support with Outlook. In this blog I am going to discuss about one of the enhanced capabilities introduced by CRM which …

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Ruby Gem for SugarCRM: Advanced use

May 27, 2011

This is an article about “advanced” use of the SugarCRM Ruby gem. We’ve previously covered using basic gem functionality, and building a simple rails app using the gem to make a CRM portal, so you might want to take a … Continue reading →

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Great Features of a Small Business Financial Software program

April 27, 2011

Most people who venture into a small business do not really have a hint as to how it is done the appropriate means. Tracking inventory, products, orders and cash flow is usually easy only at the start. Once the company starts growing, the processes get more and more complex. Thanks to a variety of business ERP software that are available now. There’s not much to fret anymore.

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Demystifying Recurring Appointment update recurrence logic: How history of past instances is saved in CRM

April 25, 2011

Microsoft Dynamics CRM 2011 supports creating and managing recurring appointment. It also supports its bi-directional synchronization support with outlook calendar just like normal CRM appointments. In CRM 2011 user can create recurring appointment from web client user interface also.

Recurring appointment look and feel is almost similar to outlook recurring appointment. This is designed to provide user a similar experience. But there are two major differentiators as pointed in this blog also.

1. Outlook Recurring Appointments follow Rule based On-Demand expansion model while in CRM instances get created and persisted in Database as individual Appointment records. This expansion based model allows other components of CRM to work seamlessly on individual appointments records.

2. Unlike Outlook, CRM allows us to update recurrence rule of recurring series and still maintain past history of recurring series. On every update of recurrence information, past appointment instances of recurring series are preserved and they can be viewed from a common grouping link in recurring series records.

In this blog I wanted to share more detail on recurring appointment update series logic. At the end we will walk through an example to get more clarity on this.

How past instances are saved in CRM

In CRM when recurrence information is updated for a series we still keep the past instances of series. Unlike in outlook where all existing instances are deleted and new ones are created based on new recurrence pattern. It helps in preserving valuable information which might be associated with past instances. First let’s understand recurrence update. Update of any recurrence attribute (which can change recurrence definition) like occurrence, start date, end date, pattern end type, pattern type etc. comes under this category. From UI any update on recurrence dialog comes under this category.

An important thing to note here is that in CRM we only save history of past instances. If user updates any future instance the information will not be saved. Before starting on how actually past instances are saved in recurring appointment lets understand what could be various cases of recurring appointment series based on today’s date when user do recurrence update on series. There can be mainly three cases based on today’s date on which we do update series.

Case 1: Whole series lies in past

Case 2: Whole series lies in future

Case 3: Series starts in past and continues in future

Like the image shown below. In case 1 and case 3 only we need to save past history. As mentioned earlier in case 3 we will simply delete all instances and new expansion will happen based on new recurrence information.

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Figure 1: Different cases of series based on Today’s date

I will like to give a brief introduction on metadata related to recurring appointment. For more detail please refer SDK documentation. We have introduced a new entity RecurringAppointment. For preserving instances of series we use same Appointment entity. Before going into logic of update recurrence we should be aware of two fields which play crucial role in update recurrence.

1. SeriesID – This is a new attribute in appointment entity. All instances are associated with their corresponding recurring appointment through this field. SeriesID of all instances is set to ActivityID of their recurring appointment master.

2. GroupID – This is a new attribute in recurring appointment entity. To save history of past instance we create a new recurring appointment master and associate past instances with it. All associated recurring appointments are linked through this field. There can be couple of recurrence update for same series. These all recurring appointment master share same groupid which is set to activityid of first recurring appointment master.

Now let’s start with recurrence update logic. This is what happens when recurrence information is updated for a series.

1. All future instances are deleted

2. If there are any past instances

      a. A new recurring appointment master is created in closed state with GroupID same as activity ID of current recurring appointment.

     b. SeriesID of all past instances is updated to this recurring appointment.

3. Current recurring appointment master recurrence info is updated which does expansion based on new recurrence rule with effective start date as today.

Below diagram explains it in detail.

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Figure 2: Recurrence update series logic

As you can see after recurrence update a cloned recurring series is created and past instances refer this cloned master as their SeriesID. New instances created in future based on new recurrence information refer to same recurring series (with updated recurrence information).

A quick walkthrough with an example

Let us walk through this logic with an example. In this example we assume that today’s date is 10th March 2011.

User creates a series with

Start Date: 7th March 2011 End date: 12th March 2011

Pattern time: 10:00 AM – 11:00 AM Pattern Type: Daily

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Figure 3: Recurrence definition of an quick example

On calendar it will look like:

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Figure 4: On calendar expansion of series before update

A1 to A6 represents six appointments (instance) of series. R1 is the recurring appointment master. All instances have seriesID set as activityid of R1. Now let’s say user update recurrence pattern by changing appointment time to 11:00 AM – 12:00 AM (initially it was 10:00 AM -11:00 AM).

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Figure 5: On calendar expansion of series after update

Now after update A1 to A4 are past instances as there pattern date is less than today. New recurring appointment R2 is created and SeriesID of all past instances (A1-A4) is updated to ActivityID of R2. A5’ and A6’ are new appointment created based on new recurrence rule. They still have R1 as its SeriesID. GroupID of R1 and R2 will be set as activity ID of R1. In this way we can group all recurring appointments which are associated.

Hope this example adds more clarity in the logic of update recurrence.

Cheers,

Niraj Yadav

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Web Services in Your Own Language: Part 4 – Java SOAP Client

March 23, 2011

Editor’s Note: This is the long lost Part 4 of our series to show how to use our SugarCRM web services with various different languages. In this part, Hila Shemer will show how to use Apache Axis to connect to our SOAP services with Java. Stay tuned for more examples for other langugaes in future [...]

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Convergence 2011 Concept Box Invitation

March 16, 2011

The Microsoft Dynamics CRM Team is enthusiastically looking forward to meeting you at Convergence 2011, sharing with you some of our ideas and aspirations for future versions of Microsoft Dynamics CRM, and, as always, learning from you, your experiences, your needs, and your insights during our Concept Box Sessions.

Concept Box Sessions: Influence, Insight, Shape

Between Sunday, April 10th and Wednesday, April 13th members of the CRM Research and Development Team will be hosting a series of discussion groups and forward-looking research sessions at the Atlanta Convention Center.  During these sessions, we will present sketches and ideas designed to improve the future Microsoft Dynamics CRM; we invite you to review and critique designs and present your important scenarios, your business needs and processes, so that you can directly influence our direction in a wide array of areas.  *These sessions are limited in size, so please respond early.*

Gratuity & Non-Disclosure Agreement

Participants in each Discussion Group will receive a Microsoft gratuity which must be mailed to a U.S. address.  We will have a list of gratuity choices available for you at the sessions.  We will also ask you to sign a standard Microsoft Non-Disclosure Agreement (NDA) so that we can confidentially share our ideas and present our thinking.

Audience

These Microsoft Dynamics CRM Discussion Groups are open to ALL Convergence 2011 Attendees who want to learn about and influence the future of Microsoft Dynamics CRM.

  • End Users – (for example) Sales Professional, Marketing Professional, Customer Service Representative
  • Business Decision Makers – (for example) Sales Managers, Marketing Managers, Service Managers
  • Partners, IT Experts, Developers – (for example) Implementation Partner, Solution Developer, IT Managers

Where: All sessions will be in the Atlanta Convention Center, Room A-301.

Participation

Please review the session titles and RSVP directly to me (James.Johnston@microsoft.com) your preferred Concept Box Sessions; I will send you an email invitation confirming the session date(s) and time(s): Some Sessions will be repeated so that we can accommodate your schedules at Convergence 2011.

These discussions and research sessions are specifically designed to collect feedback from our customers, users, developers, and partners on our future thinking and aspirations for Microsoft Dynamics CRM.  All Convergence 2011 attendees are welcome regardless of your product focus.   If you are interested in learning more about Microsoft Dynamics CRM 2011 Online and On Premise, our most recent CRM releases, we encourage you to take advantage of the other generally available and informative Microsoft Dynamics CRM sessions during Convergence 2011.

Thank you, as always, for the privilege of learning from your distinctive insights and constructive feedback as well as envisioning with us an evolving Microsoft Dynamics CRM.  We are eager to welcome you and look forward to hearing from you soon.

I. Sunday (Josh Chang)—1:30-2:45— Tomorrow’s Communication and Collaboration Experience

Concept Box: Join us to review and critique User Interface experiences for seeing business contact feeds, social graphs for business connections, sharing business contact information with your colleagues!

II. Monday (Manisha Powar)—11-12:15—Sales Force Automation

Concept Box: Sales Force Automation, an extensively interesting domain, will best grow when the R&D Team listens to you, understands your experiences, focuses on your scenarios, discusses with you their current thinking and appreciates your feedback. 

This multifaceted Concept Box Session will review early storyboards, and help us hone our work.

Each of these 3 Sessions will have different perspectives: Please join us for any one or all!

III. Monday (Sandhya Vankamamidi)—1:30-2:45— Integrated Agent Desktop

Concept Box: Microsoft Dynamics CRM’s Agent Desktop aims to increase agent effectiveness by unifying data and legacy applications while guiding agents through their workflows. Review the integrated Lync experience designed to provide Customer Care Agents with contextual collaboration.

Come to this session to learn about our nextGen Integrated Agent Desktop thinking and shape the product with your valuable feedback.

IV. Monday (Josh Chang)—3-4:15—On Premise to Online Migration  Experience

Concept Box: Are you an On Premise Customer or a hosting partner?  Are you interested in upgrading to the cloud?  Why or why not? Guide Our Envisioning as we consider together the opportunities, approaches, challenges, and scenarios faced in the IT Admin experience of moving from an On Premise to and Online version of Microsoft Dynamics CRM.

This multifaceted Concept Box Session will review early thoughts (perhaps storyboards), and help us design the experience.

V. Monday (Steven Kaplan)—4:30-5:15—Social Customer Care—Making Your Customer Your Best Friend?

Concept Box: As more conversations about your business happen through the Social Web, Facebook and Twitter for example, Customer Service Organizations are exploring these channels as ways of delivering new types of service.

Microsoft Dynamics CRM aims to help Customer Service Organizations by enabling you to LISTEN, PARTICIPATE, and ANALYZE the conversations from the Social Web, integrate the Social Web Learnings into the traditional Customer Service Organization to deliver more fun and personalized customer interactions.

Come to this Concept Box Session to INFLUENCE our roadmap for “social customer care.”

VI. Tuesday (Manisha Powar)—9-10:15—Sales Force Automation

Concept Box: Sales Force Automation, an extensively interesting domain, will best grow when the R&D Team listens to you, understands your experiences, focuses on your scenarios, discusses with you their current thinking and appreciates your feedback. 

This multifaceted Concept Box Session will review early storyboards, and help us hone our work.

Each of these 3 Sales Force Automation Sessions will have different perspectives: Please join us for any one or all!

VII. Tuesday (Josh Chang)—10:30-11:45—Online Organizational Management Scenario Building

Concept Box: Organizational Management Scenarios, such as user management and other scenarios are core to this session during which we will request your feedback and critiques.  This will be a broad and open-ended discussion with an Online expert to address topics of importance to you and us.

This Concept Box Session, will review early storyboards, and brainstorm with us on organizational management scenarios.

VIII. Tuesday (Sandhya Vankamamidi)—1:30-2:45—Integrated Agent Desktop

Concept Box: Microsoft Dynamics CRM’s Agent Desktop aims to increase agent effectiveness by unifying data and legacy applications while guiding agents through their workflows. Review the integrated Lync experience designed to provide Customer Care Agents with contextual collaboration.

Come to this session to learn about our nextGen Integrated Agent Desktop thinking and shape the product with your valuable feedback.

IX. Tuesday (Manisha Powar)—3:15-4:30—Sales Force Automation

Concept Box: Sales Force Automation, an extensively interesting domain, will best grow when the R&D Team listens to you, understands your experiences, focuses on your scenarios, discusses with you their current thinking and appreciates your feedback. 

This multifaceted Concept Box Session will review early storyboards, and help us hone our work.

Each of these 3 Sales Force Automation Sessions will have different perspectives: Please join us for any one or all!

X. Tuesday (Michael Guthmann)—4:45-6—EMPOWERING the IT Pro in the Cloud

Concept Box: IT is shifting to the Cloud but are still crucial in managing Cloud (Online) services.  Please guide our investments for the IT Pro in CRM Online by joining us and providing feedback that will allow us to EMPOWER your future work and shape our future direction.

XI. Wednesday (Josh Chang)—10:45-Noon– On Premise to Online Migration  Experience

Concept Box: Are you an On Premise Customer or a hosting partner?  Are you interested in upgrading to the cloud?  Why or why not? Guide Our Envisioning as we consider together the opportunities, approaches, challenges, and scenarios faced in the IT Admin experience of moving from an On Premise to and Online version of Microsoft Dynamics CRM.

This multifaceted Concept Box Session will review early thoughts (perhaps storyboards), and help us design the experience.

To participate in any of these sessions please contact: James.Johnston@microsoft.com

Kind regards, James and the Microsoft Dynamics CRM Team

James C. Johnston II, Ph.D.

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Don’t Miss “Transform Field Service Delivery with Oracle Real-Time Scheduler”

March 7, 2011

Field resources are an expensive element in the service equation. Maximizing the scheduling and routing of these resources is critical in reducing costs, increasing profitability, and improving the customer experience. Oracle Real-Time Scheduler creates cost-optimized plans and schedules for service…

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