| Frank Lee님의 프로필Workopia Microsoft CRM &...사진블로그리스트 |  도구  도움말 |
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2009-10-25 CRM Online: Chinese East Asian Multi Language SupportAs of date (10/25/2009) - Microsoft Dynamics CRM Online is available for United States (U.S.) and Canada. Existing and potential customers have asked me about support for other global regions such as China. The quick answer is that it is somewhat supported, however, it isn't officially supported at this time. Microsoft is planning to support other regions in the future.
Hare are some details on what I mean by somewhat supported:
1. Microsoft Dynamics CRM Online is accessible ANYWHERE in the world - as long as the user has an internet connection, s/he can connect to Microsoft CRM Online. And with the Microsoft CRM Online Professional Plus edition - the user can take advantage of the Offline Synchronization capability without an internet connection.
Note: Latency maybe an issue depending on your geographic location if outside of U.S. or Canada. The only way to check is to test it out via the FREE 30 Day Trial
2. Anyone or any business can subscribe to Microsoft Dynamics CRM Online with a valid U.S. or Canada credit card and secure access is immediately available - that is one of the advantages of an On Demand software. If you are interested, check out the FREE 30 Day Trial
3. Multi Language data entries from any global regions are currently supported. It is only the Microsoft CRM Online display messages that are in U.S. English for now - Microsoft is planning to support display messages for other regions in the future.
 4. CRM Online server and personal level display format for number, currency, time and date CAN be set for different global regions such as Chinese (People's Republic of China), Indonesian (Indonesia), German (Germany), etc.
 5. As with most modern On Demand software - Microsoft CRM Online supports UNICODE - which means it can store data entries from any language region. CRM Online can store, display, search, etc. on any mix or match language data entries. That is the power of UNICODE support. For example - if we have a U.S. based company with regional offices in the city of San Francisco, Seoul, Hong Kong, Beijing, Tokyo, Bangalore, London, Paris, and Brasilia - we can track all the contacts and companies information from all those regions in their native language
 More technical details:
1. The main challenge with mix languages support is with data display ordering/sorting. The way Microsoft CRM controls this is via their SQL Collation setting. The SQL Collation used on CRM Online is SQL_Latin1_General_CP1_CI_AS - case-insensitive, accent-sensitive, kanatype-insensitive, width-insensitive for Unicode Data. Check the following link for more information on SQL Server Collation and Unicode Support: http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/ms143503(SQL.105).aspx
Note: Display sorting doesn't impact searching. CRM Online can search and find any of its data entries from any global region
2. The SQL_Latin1_General_CP1_CI_AS SQL Collation is the standard default for most U.S and Canada users. This SQL Collation sorts non-English characters based on their Unicode value (hexadecimal). For example the Unicode for letter "A" is "0041" and the Unicode for "上" is "4E0A". Check the following link for more information on Unicode value: http://www.unicode.org/charts/
 3. The common issue I'd encountered is that some users can't see the East Asian data in their CRM Online program - only seeing squares. The resolution is to enable the East Asian languages setting in Windows XP, Vista or Windows 7. This is can done via (on XP) Windows's Control Panel >> Regional and Language Options >> Languages tab:
  I would like to thank Matt Cooper at Microsoft for his good feedback on this article.
2009-04-20 CRM Online: Contact Us Web Form Made Easy!The Microsoft Dynamics CRM Online's March 2009 Service Update introduced a very nice feature called "Internet lead capture" that is very useful for most small medium businesses (SMB). It can save a lot of time by automatically capturing ANY web form entries and loading them into Microsoft CRM Online.
 Here is a video about it in more details:
We had updated our Workopia website's Contact Us web form to utilize this new Microsoft CRM Online Internet lead capture feature. It was really easy to setup and works the very first time. It took only about 30 minutes from start to completion and now anyone that submits our Contact Us web form, the data will go directly in to our Microsoft CRM Online system. Very cool.
Some notes about setting up:
1. The Landing Pages setup wizard is very user friendly, since this is an initial release, the choices are pretty basic but should be enough to get the job done
2. There are only 32 CRM Lead fields (last name, first name, company, title, email, business phone, address, etc.) that are available for use on a landing page. Currently, it doesn't support adding other CRM Lead fields to this list. Again this works for most landing pages. Update: All Lead custom fields are available with latest version.
3. In case you do need to capture data that is not a direct map to any of the 32 CRM Lead fields - I would suggest picking one of the un-used 32 CRM Lead fields to capture the data and then use a CRM Workflow rule to move this field's data to the proper CRM Lead field after it is in CRM Online. Update: All Lead custom fields are available with latest version - so use a custom field instead.
4. I would prefer the "Use your own site" option for most cases. This allows for total control of our Contact Me Request web form looks and feel. However, for a quick and simple web form to capture data, I'd suggest trying out the "Lead capture pages" option. Using this option, the web form is automatically generated and hosted by Microsoft CRM Online. Here is an example of our CRM Statistic Online FREE Registration web form using this option
5. I want to be email alerted whenever someone submitted our Contact Us web form, however this option is not built-in. Instead here is a good "keep it simple" work-around: we had our web site developer customized the Landing Page's Submit button URL page with the functionality to send an email alert. Any good web administrator or programmer should know how to perform this work-around
2009-04-14 CRM Online: Reporting OptionsMicrosoft Dynamics CRM Online is a fantastic CRM platform for most small medium businesses (SMB) - it is so easy and inexpensive to get started. However, one area of challenge for Microsoft CRM Online is custom reporting. Some background on this. Unlike Microsoft CRM On-Premise, Microsoft CRM Online does not support uploading of SQL Report Services (SRS) custom reports (.RDL) or accessing the SQL Server Database filtered views. CRM Online does not allow users to directly access the CRM Application Server or Database Server - this is a good thing to maintain security and the 99.9% uptime for all the companies that are running on Microsoft CRM Online. In fact, I'm not aware of any other major On-Demand Business Application vendors allowing their users to directly access the application or database server.
Start with the "Out of the Box" options such as Default Reports, Advanced Find / Export to Excel, Mail Merge, and Report Wizard to meet your CRM Online reporting needs. If none of them are "good enough" then go with custom report development (SDK). Here are some good references/links to the reporting options mentioned above: Default Reports: Advanced Find / Export to Excel: Video: Using Advanced Find - Time: 10:02 minutes Mail Merge: Blog: Microsoft Dynamics CRM Mail Merge Templates Blog: Printing Quote for customer Video: Mail Merge - Time: 08:03 minutes
Video: Reporting Overview - Time: 15:29 minutes 2. Utilize an integration tool to extract CRM data to a local data source and then use a corresponding reporting tool. For example, you can purchase and setup the Scribe Software Insight to integrate between Microsoft CRM Online and the local SQL Server database. The local SQL Server database will mimic the needed CRM Online tables so you can use the Microsoft SQL Server Reporting Service (SRS) report development tool or other reporting, Business Intelligence (BI) tools tools to build the custom report against the local data Custom Development (SDK): Here's a case study regarding custom report development for Microsoft CRM Online: One of our Microsoft CRM Online clients in the high tech engineering services industry had a need for several reports, some of those reports are used as "summary printouts" to be given to the customer upon service completion. These reports contain very specific formatting, layout, calculations, graphics, and data content from various Microsoft CRM related areas, more than two levels of data relationships. We had tried to use the "Out of the Box" options to see if it is "good enough", but none of them were acceptable for this case. The Client loves Microsoft CRM Online but without their critical reports, they will have to either switch to Microsoft CRM On-Premise or to another CRM system. We decided to build their Microsoft CRM Online reports via custom report development - this worked great! The Client can now click on a report button from either their CRM Online Web Client or Outlook Client to access these custom reports. The Client got the EXACT reports they are looking for and was able to stay with Microsoft CRM Online without switching to another CRM system. The effort to build these custom reports was about the same as if we have to build them via SRS custom report development for an On-Premise environment. In summary, if you have data in Microsoft CRM Online that you would like to report on, and none of the "Out of the Box" reporting options are good enough, then try custom report development.
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