International Microsoft Dynamics 365 Consultant
This short video by Microsoft shows a few tricks with the Microsoft CRM for Tablets App (Windows 8)
These tips are also available as an eBook 5 Cool things you can do with CRM for Tablets (PDF)
You can find a link to the Microsoft CRM for Tablets app on our Microsoft CRM 2013 Resources page.
Based in Huddersfield, West Yorkshire ABR Sheet Metal is one of the North’s leading Sheet Metal and Fabrication workshops. ABR used POP3 email. With the proliferation of Mobile devices, the same emails were received on Office computers, mobile phones and tablet devices which led to duplication of effort and data.
ABR Sheet Metal worked with Microsoft Cloud Accelerate Partner Optimal CRM who recommended the Microsoft Office 365 MidSize plan. Office 365 Midsize gives ABR Exchange Online enterprise grade email, cloud based file storage and the latest version of Microsoft Office for use on up to 5 devices per user, all for a manageable monthly fee.
Managing Director, Rod Dyer said “now, if I read or delete an email on my iPad it’s also marked as read or deleted on my office PC”
Citing customer feedback, Microsoft are changing the Office 365 Small Business, Small Business Premium and Midsized Business plans from 1st October 2014. Enterprise plans will remain the same.
The new plans are:
The core cloud services for running your business including business class email and calendaring, Office Online, online meetings, IM, video conferencing, cloud storage and file sharing. (£3.30 per user per month)
The full Office suite including Outlook, Word, Excel, PowerPoint, OneNote and Publisher. OneDrive for Business with 1TB of cloud storage to access, edit and share your documents across your Windows PC, Mac, iPad, Windows tablet and smartphone. (£5.20 per user per month)
Everything from both the above Office 365 plans. (£8.40 per user per month)
Existing Small Business customers will see the maximum number of seats raised from 25 to 300 seats whilst Midsize business customers will see their subscription price reduce to £8.40 per user per month.
Microsoft will provide more information to affected customers via the Office 365 Message Centre in September.
The table below gives a breakdown of the features of each plan:
For more information or a free trial, please Contact us
If you have installed Office 365 ProPlus (Professional Plus), you may have noticed that it installs differently to other versions of Microsoft Office. This is because it uses a technology called Click-to-Run.
When you install Office via Office 365, Instead of downloading the entire office suite in one go, Office downloads a small file around 500k called a “bootstrapper”, this then “streams” down the rest of office in tiny bits directly from Microsoft’s servers. The installation has been designed so the most used features of office are downloaded first meaning office is ready to use in record time. If the user launches a program, for instance Microsoft Word; the stream dynamically changes to download that application.So, just how fast can you install Office ProPlus? The Office Garage team find out!
Dashboards are one of the best features of Microsoft Dynamics CRM. They give managers and users a quick overview of what is happening in Microsoft CRM as well as allowing users to slide and dice the data.
Microsoft have recently published a free eBook on how to create customise dashboards in CRM as well as working with lists, charts and tips on how to extend dashboards using web resources to pull in information for other sites.
You can download the eBook here
If you would like more information on dashboards, please drop us a line
The Office 365 for business public roadmap lists updates that are currently planned. It provides details of new features, enhancements, and major updates happening in the next 30-90 days. In certain instances, Microsoft may show updates farther in advance than a few months, such as new services like Codename “Oslo” and the Office Graph. Microsoft will show updates that are in development, in the process of being rolled out as well as updates which have been launched and are available.
You can visit the Office 365 roadmap at http://office.com/roadmap
In addition to the public roadmap, Microsoft has also announced a new program called First Release. Opting in to First Release gives users a small selection of significant enhancements to the Office 365 user experience, SharePoint Online, and Exchange Online first (Lync Online, Exchange Online Protection and Offie ProPlus are not included in first release at the current time). Once opted-in, tenants will receive qualifying new feature updates first, a minimum of two weeks before the standard release group. This is great news for Microsoft Partners who previously have sometimes received updates to their own Office 365 tenant after their customers.
If your organisation is interested in opting into the release group, an Office 365 administrator can log into http://portal.microsoftnline.com and select “First Release” from Service Settings -> Updates.
Microsoft Dynamics CRM 2013 Service Pack 1 (SP1) is now available.
(Referred to as CRM Online Spring ’14 Update in Microsoft Dynamics CRM Online)
The build number for this release is 6.1.0000.0581
New features in this release include:
Important Microsoft Dynamics CRM 2013 SP1 includes all updates that are contained in Microsoft Dynamics CRM 2013 Update Rollup 2 and also contains new updates. CRM 2013 SP1 will be required for any future update rollups that are based on CRM 2013 SP1.
Useful Links
Microsoft CRM Spring 14 Release Preview Guide
Microsoft Dynamics CRM Customer Centre – Get ready for the next release
Microsoft Dynamics CRM Readme
TechNet Article – Update Microsoft Dynamics CRM 2013
Download – Microsoft Dynamics CRM 2013 SP1
The Office 365 Trust Centre was set up by Microsoft to provide transparency about how Office 365 is run, including Microsoft’s commitment to security, compliance and privacy.
As part of the Office 365 Trust Centre, Microsoft have launched a new video blog series titled “From inside the Cloud” in which Microsoft Cloud Engineers show how Office 365 is designed, built and run.
The first video aims to answer the question, “Why Trust Office 365?”
The second video explains how Microsoft protect customer data at rest.
This video explains how Microsoft manage who has access to your data in Office 365.
You can access the Office 365 Trust Centre at http://trust.office365.com
If you have questions about Office 365, please contact us
As we previously mentioned, Microsoft are transferring all Microsoft Dynamics CRM Online subscriptions from the legacy Microsoft Account (Live ID) platform to Office 365.
We have a number of customers who already have an office 365 account. In which case, Microsoft assign a Transition Manager to help you merge your account into your existing Office 365 account.
The High Level steps for the transition process are as follows:
If you would like help with your Microsoft CRM Online Transition to Office 365 or would like us to manage the transition on your behalf, please drop us a line!
Have you received the following email?
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Storage Limit Reached |
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Dear Administrator, |
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Your organization, <organisation name>, has reached 80% of its storage limit. When the storage limit is exceeded, people will be unable to add data, such as records, to Microsoft Dynamics CRM Online. To avoid exceeding the storage limit, we recommend the following approaches: |
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Thank you, |
If so, as the email states, you have reached 80% of the available space within your Microsoft Dynamics CRM Online Organisation.
Note: the following email discusses deleting data from Microsoft CRM. If you are in doubt, please call us to discuss, we take no responsibility for loss of data as a result of following this post!
Out of the box, Microsoft CRM Online comes with 5GB of storage space. The first, and easiest solution is to buy more storage space for Office 365. At the time of writing, additional space for CRM Online is £6.20 per GB per month. [price updated Dec 2015]
Additionally from CRM 2013, Microsoft will add an extra 2.5GB of storage space for every 20 Professional User Subscription Licences (so if you have 20 users, you are entitled to 7.5GB of storage space). You may have to raise a support request with Microsoft to receive your entitlement.
To review the currently used space in Microsoft CRM, go to Settings -> Administration -> Resources in use.
Microsoft have published a list of 10 ways to free storage space in CRM Online here.
In our experience, the most common ways to free storage are as follows:
Back in CRM 4, CRM kept a history of every instance of a workflow, be it cancelled, waiting or succeeded. This resulted in every instance of a workflow being logged (I’ve seen the workflow history table, internally called AsyncOperation reach 60GB!). So the first thing to check is that completed workflow rules are deleted. (From within each process/workflow rule, check “Automatically delete completed workflow jobs (to save disk space)” is ticked.
It is also possible to set up a recurring system job to delete complete workflow rules (I like to keep 90 days of history for troubleshooting)
In CRM, you can store attachments against notes. These can quite rapidly eat into your storage space. A far better solution is to integrate Microsoft CRM and SharePoint Online (storage space in SharePoint Online is only 13p per GB per month!)
You can run an Advanced Find on the Notes table in CRM where IsDocument =1 (remember to include the File Size column). This may give you an idea of where your space has gone.
When tracking an email in Microsoft CRM, attachments are also transferred into CRM and are stored in the EmailAttachment table.
Unfortunately, it no longer seems possible to access the email attachment table directly in CRM Online (if you find a way, drop me a line!) The query below will show any emails in CRM where there is an attachment > 500 KB (Note: deleting these entries will also delete the email and any attachments from CRM)
Using http://crm2011internalemail.codeplex.com Internal Email Helper by James Lattimer It is possible to create a manual workflow rule for Emails to remove email attachments without removing the email
It is also worth noting that by default, Microsoft CRM limits the maximum attachment size to 5 MB. You can change this through Settings -> Administration -> System Settings -> Email.
If you have tried all the above and you are still receiving emails about reaching 80% of your storage space, it might be time to buy more space which can be done via portal.office.com. It can take up to 24 hours for the new storage space to show up in CRM.
If you would like help assessing where you have used your storage space in Microsoft CRM Online, please contact us.