Today’s guest blogger is Jacob Cynamon-Murphy, a Sales Engineer at Sonoma Partners.
Don't get me wrong… I love getting paid. However, with the economy still lackluster and IT budgets quite tight, CRM administrators are feeling the pressure to get creative. Thankfully, there are a lot of great free tools and utilities available for administering and enhancing Microsoft Dynamics CRM… if you know where to look. Clearly, you do and that is why you are here. Below, I have indexed a short list of useful tools and enhancements for Dynamics CRM that you can get for the most excellent price of $0 (also available for £0, €0 or ¥0, depending on currency of choice).
While I acknowledge that there are plenty of other free tools out there, these are the short list that I find the most useful across projects and customers.
Administration
- Microsoft Dynamics CRM SiteMap Editor (Microsoft) - This is my go-to site map editor. It's a managed solution, so there's no configuration necessary - just import the solution and you're in business. The configuration page exposes a tree structure and a simple form, so you can choose site map elements and edit their most common properties. Hands down, this is the fastest way to modify the site map.
- Ribbon Workbench for Dynamics CRM 2011 (Develop1) - Like the site map editor, above, this is a great tool to put in your belt. Also deployed as a managed solution and exposing a configuration page as the user interface, Ribbon Workbench makes ribbon modifications and enhancements substantially easier than manually editing XML (i.e. the old way).
- Sonoma Partners Dynamic Forms Community Edition (Sonoma Partners) – Would you prefer to define form rules – validation, calculation, hiding and showing fields – visually or by writing and testing JavaScript? If you are in favor of the former, check out Dynamic Forms – you define rules that have conditions and actions to manage common form behaviors. NOTE: Requires CRM 2011 UR8 or higher.
- Diagnostics Tool for Microsoft Dynamics CRM 2011 (Tanguy Touzzard) - If you used the CRM 4.0 Diagnostics Tool, you will find this very familiar. Not only does it make it easy to toggle tracing on and off when troubleshooting user issues, the tool also provides additional ways to capture meaningful server details that can be reviewed directly or shared with your IT department or Microsoft Support.
- CRM Trace Log Viewer (Stunnware) - An excellent companion to the diagnostics tool (above), Stunnware's Trace Log Viewer turns trace files - those horrible streams of meaningless gibberish - into human-readable log files that can be productively analyzed for useful system insights.
Application Enhancements
- Sonoma Partners Universal Search for Dynamics CRM 2011 (Sonoma Partners) - Ever since the early days of Dynamics CRM, one glaring omission was a means to easily search across tables when you don't know the entity type of a record that you are seeking. We saw a need for a simple, free tool to empower user-driven universal search and this was the result. Tapping into existing configuration, like system views, Universal Search is an easily-deployed, quickly appreciated managed solution
- Sonoma Partners Editable Grid (Sonoma Partners) – Do you ever wish Dynamics CRM offered inline grid editing capabilities like you can get in Excel? Sonoma Partners has created a free solution for Dynamics CRM 2011 that can turn your existing views into editable grids, with just the click of a button
- CRM Workflow Manipulation Library (Carlton Colter/Engage) - Carlton Colter's workflow manipulation library augments the native workflow activity options with a slew of additional capabilities, ranging from date manipulation to string manipulation and even to complex math capabilities to enable more powerful workflows for administrators and power users
- Customer Portal for Microsoft Dynamics CRM 2011 (Microsoft) - Although the reviews slam the customer portal, I have found it to be a great starter application. If your organization needs to provide a web portal that surfaces CRM data and makes it available to non-CRM users - customers, partners, employees - this is a great foundation. Once deployed, this portal is a content management system (CMS) that can be edited in real-time and administered through the CRM application.
Mobile
- Mobile Express (Microsoft) - Free and available out of the box, Microsoft's CRM Mobile Express is a great lightweight offering if you are just beginning to dabble in mobile empowerment for your work force. Easy to configure - enable entities for Mobile Express with a checkbox, then customize the mobile form for the entity - and supported on all devices that consume HTML4+ (read: virtually any mobile device purchased in the last decade), this free option is an excellent read-only mobile experience for your connected users.
- Resco MobileCRM (Resco) - Resco offers a compelling off-the-shelf mobile solution that takes your users well beyond Mobile Express. The app can be downloaded from all of the major app stores - Apple, Android, Windows Phone, Windows 8 - and provides a rich native app experience that takes advantage of the respective capabilities of each platform. Think of it as CRM on your mobile device. NOTE: The app is free on the app stores, which is why I showcase it here; however, if you want to customize the app - reconfigure the options, enable custom entities, write your own code - you have to license the configuration or development tools.
- EZ Opp for Microsoft Dynamics CRM (Sonoma Partners) - EZ Opp was designed to be a free app to make it easy for salespeople to do two things: update their sales opportunities and get the insight they need to close those opportunities as won. A novel, and simple-to-use, touch interface makes it easy for salespeople to drag their opportunity "bubbles" around on a grid to change the probability, opportunity size and expected close date. By drilling into an opportunity, the salesperson gets a full view of the opportunity, including sales stage progress, open and closed activities, wall posts, related opportunities and more.