543 – Dynamics CRM and Outlook

Posted on August 14, 2020 (Updated August 27, 2020) by ewand

Customer Relationship Management or Customer Engagement, whatever you call it, is a huge part of the IT industry, powering repeated companies to multi-billion dollar valuations. CRM gives companies a way of tracking customer touch points and connecting people together, powering sales teams to track their opportunities and leads, as well as a way of managing GDPR compliance with respect to contact information.

Evolving from personal and then group contact management software in the 1980s, CRM came of age in 1995, with Oracle refugee Tom Siebel establishing Siebel Systems as the early market leader, and eventually acquired by Oracle.

Microsoft deployed Siebel in the late 1990s, initially requiring a “fat client” installation complete with a local Sybase SQL Server on everyone’s PC, so they could sync data from the central Siebel system, then eventually moving to be browser-based. One MS sales manager coined the moniker “IIIInSIDE” – If It Isn’t In Siebel, It Doesn’t Exist – giving sales people nowhere to hide when it came to reporting pipeline of opportunities they were tracking.

Mark Benioff, another ex-Oracle exec, set up Salesforce.com in 1999 to not only establish SaaS as a viable way to deliver “line of business” systems (as part of the first Application Service Provider boom, which was largely wiped out by Dot Bomb), but to ultimately eclipse his former employer in terms of market value. Time also moves on – now that Salesforce is the big dog in the CRM world, there are lots of competitors snapping at its heels… Pega, Zoho and many more.

Not least, Microsoft – the Dynamics CRM business (now part of Dynamics 365 Customer Engagement) is growing fast, and even courted the “Father of CRM” to choose D365 for his new enterprise. If you use Microsoft’s Dynamics 365 CRM as part of your job, and use Outlook on your PC for mail, calendaring and contacts, there’s a handy way of connecting the two.

Dynamics Connector for Outlook

There have been several versions of a way to link Outlook and Dynamics together; the latest, Dynamics 365 App for Outlook, will fully supplant earlier versions in October 2020. See the admin guide for more on what the connector does and how it works. The installation can be a little clunky first time, though – you’ll need to install the connector software from here, which starts by downloading and extracting the setup files to a folder on your PC.

Make sure you’re getting the right version for your copy of Office – to check, in Outlook, go to File | Office Account | About Outlook and look to see if you have 32 or 64 bit version installed.

If the latter, download the amd64 version of the client and the first major update package, otherwise download the i386 one.

Once you have the base version installed (a process which takes a good few minutes: you also have the option to enable offline usage, which means setting up a local database to hold the content), don’t bother starting it yet – go straight ahead and run the update to the current version (strangely, a larger download than the original install). Once that’s downloaded and installed, you’ll need to restart Outlook if it’s running.

On first run, enter the normal URL you’d use to access CRM – after a few minutes of configuring the addin you should be good to go.

You’ll see a new Dynamics 365 tab on the main menu, offering a variety of CRM-specific activities.

Arguably, one of the most useful and obvious (given that you use this data all the time in mail) is managing contacts for your customers – Outlook is a great way of pushing them into CRM.

Start with an email – the Dynamics 365 app adds context-sensitive commands to the Outlook UI, so with a couple of clicks you can track an email in CRM – copying its contents into the Account record, so others can see that you sent or received it.

If you right-click on an email address in a message, calendar appointment etc, and Add to Contacts, you can then sync that with Dynamics in a couple of clicks…

… meaning there’s no excuse to not have your important contacts listed in CRM.

You can even match the contacts’ LinkedIn profiles, and create an org chart of all the listed contacts.

539 – Outlook calendaring fun

Posted on July 17, 2020 (Updated August 7, 2020) by ewand

Pretty much everyone who uses the Office productivity suite probably relies on Outlook for not just the daily splurge of email, but for organising their activity either by tasks, flags or just putting stuff in their calendar.

Here are a few simple tricks to remember when working with your calendar:

You can move to Calendar in Outlook by pressing CTRL+2 anywhere in Outlook – if you’re trying to organise meetings for lots of people and need to keep flicking between mail and calendar views, this can save you so much time (CTRL+1 for mail, CTRL+3 for contacts etc – try the rest of the numbers out for a trip down memory lane). Even the clunky old Notes function in Outlook now synchronises with Sticky Notes.
CTRL+T always takes you to Today, or if you have the Ribbon showing, you can click Today there – though an update to Calendar’s UI which was shipped to M365 subscribers in March, also added a Today button at the top left of the main calendar view, as well as a few other tweaks.
CTRL+G launches an old-school dialog that lets you jump to a specific day – and lets you choose from a date picker, or type the date in if you prefer. Like lots of other old-school date dialogs in Office apps, you can enter certain natural language phrases too – some like next month, 3 weeks, will be relative from today’s date, others like June will take you to today’s day in that month (try it out; it’s easier to see than to explain) and there are certain special days like Christmas where it will jump to the next occurrence. See ToW #291 from nearly 5 years ago for more date tips. For multi-lingual dates and other stuff, see here.
Manage Time Zones – at this time of year, some of us would ordinarily be planning holidays involving travel to foreign climes, but not so much in 2020. There’s every likelihood of planning online meetings in other time zones while you’re sitting in your own office in the middle of the night – so it’s worth adding multiple time zones to your Outlook Calendar view and labelling them. Right-click on the time bar to the left of your calendar view, and choose Change Time Zone to manage the display of time zones, or even switch your whole PC between them quickly.
The rather nice Windows 10 Alarms & Clock application (WinKey+R then ms-clock: if you don’t like to click) has a nifty display of multiple time zones if you like to see at a glance where and when everyone is.
Colour-coding appointments is another favourite tip the super-organised use. You can right-click on any appointment to colour it by setting a Category, or you can use Conditional Formatting on a view to colour appointments based on category – like who sent it, or what location it’s in, etc. See more here.
If you’re feeling extra-brave, you could install a special form that lets you differentiate mail – and therefore, appointments – which originated from an external source, by exposing a hidden property. This allows you to automatically colour them differently.
Delve into ToW #275 to install the form, then set up a Condition under the Calendar view in much the same way.

528 – Shorten your meetings (again)

Posted on May 13, 2020 by ewand

Last week’s tip talked of the philosophy around 22 minute meetings, and shared a way of forcing Outlook to adjust the start and duration of meetings by default, to help you enforce the discipline.

Eagle-eyed reader John Westworth pointed out that a simpler way of doing much the same thing exists within Outlook already, if you’re on the Microsoft365 subscription. The feature arrived back in March 2019, in version 1902 (Build 11328.20146). Note: to find the version of the Office suite, go into Word – not Outlook itself – and under File | Account you’ll see what version you’re currently using.

This year-old but hitherto little-known feature is called “End Meetings Early”: it lets you choose a value to over-ride the default meeting duration, so if you create what is ostensibly a 30-minute meeting, I’ll actually end some number of minutes early.

In Outlook, go to File | Options and look under the Calendar section on the left, to set your favoured options.

If you create your appointment or meeting – remembering that a meeting is just a special type of appointment, to which other people are invited – either by using the New… option on the menu or by double-clicking on a gap in your calendar, the adjustment will be applied after the item is created (and before it’s sent, if it is a meeting).

With most of the world still WFH, it’s a handy way of making sure you don’t get in back-to-back meetings during the day, with no chance to get away from your screen. Assuming, of course, that everyone obeys the finish time rather than just over-running to the next half or full hour boundary…

If you use the Teams client to create meetings, it doesn’t currently have the functionality to shorten them, so for now, it’s best to stick to Outlook for setting the meeting up.

527 – 22 minute meetings

Posted on April 24, 2020 (Updated April 24, 2020) by ewand

One observation of the C-19 lockdown has been that as many of us are living in Teams, it’s quite easy to end up with back-to-back meetings lasting for hours, with no opportunity to get refreshments, go to the bathroom etc.

The old excuse of walking in 5 minutes late to a meeting because you were in a different building, is no longer available. “Sorry, my other call over-ran” is about the nearest you can get.

This behaviour gives cause to revisit and update a ToW from the distant past – October 2013, to be precise (though it was published online in December 2013, it was sent via email a couple of months earlier).

Ex-Microsoftie Nicole Steinbok built a great and prescient short presentation on having better meetings, even covering the basics of handwashing. Like the “how to wash your hands” posters, Nicole produced one for summarising how to hold a better meeting, starting with making it only 22 minutes long.

See http://22MinuteMeeting.info.

Nicole partly blames Outlook for having the default meeting time set at 30 mins, and there’s also an argument for not starting on the hour, but delaying the posted start time to a little later. Imagine if we could tweak Outlook to set a different default than the fixed 30 minute block, starting either on the hour or at the half hour?

Well, it takes a few minutes to add some custom code to Outlook, but if you can follow simple instructions and can use copy & paste, you could have it up and running in a few minutes…

Voila – ToW 196 – Change Outlook meeting duration

Open the steps for #196 up in a browser and have it side/side to Outlook (or on another screen) – they still apply to the current version of Outlook, though you may need to explicitly show the Properties dialog for the step about renaming Class1 to clsMeeting – press F4 if you don’t see Properties in the lower left of the screen when you get to that point.

The code in the sample defaults to having 45 minute meetings with a 5 minute delay to the start; if you want to be as fundamentalist as Nicole, you could substitute 22 and 4, as an example. This means that if you create a new meeting in Outlook, either by using the menu or just by double-clicking on the calendar, the start time and duration get tweaked by the code you’ve added, at the point the new meeting or appointment is created.

517 – Try the preview…

Posted on March 20, 2020 by ewand

Several of Microsoft’s standard apps within Windows ship updates regularly, and increasingly are offering willing early adopters a peek at what’s coming through a “Try the preview” or “Coming Soon” option, usually in the top right of the main screen.

You might need to force an update on your apps to get the latest version; go into the Store app and in the ellipsis menu on the top right, select Downloads and updates then hit the Get updates button. If you don’t like clicking menus, you could jump straight there by opening a run dialog with Win+R and entering ms-windows-store://DownloadsAndUpdates/

To find the name of any installed Store app, so you can run it from a command line or dialog, fire up powershell (just press the Start button and type that) then paste:

foreach ($p in $(get-appxpackage)) { foreach ($n in (Get-AppxPackageManifest $p).package.applications.application.extensions.extension.protocol.name) { $p.packagefullname + “`t `t `t -=- ” + $n } }

… and enter that. You’ll get a list of long app names followed by a one-word name that can be used to invoke the app. To run a Store app from a Run dialog or the Start menu directly, use that one word with a colon at the end – to start the Store version of OneNote try typing Win+R onenote: (for example).

The Calendar app – improbably named outlookcal: even though it has nothing to do with the desktop Outlook, other than it too can display a calendar – has recently received an opt-in preview which adds a funky new UI with background graphics reminiscent of Wunderlist, and nice icons to help you quickly switch between different calendar sources.

The preview will only show up (for now) if you’re a Windows Insider. Fortune favours the brave!

514 – tweaking Outlook’s Ribbon

Posted on January 24, 2020 by ewand

Thirteen years ago, Microsoft launched Office 2007. Back when people looked forward to new releases of office productivity suites with a mix of excitement and dread, new features arrived by the boat load. While many functions stayed in later releases as core parts of the product, others led a wafer-thin existence then vanished.

One major change was the introduction of the Ribbon – a then-new way of organising the complex menu structure that sat within the individual Office apps. Despite complaints from some users, it quickly became established as a good way of presenting, in context, useful features that might otherwise have stayed buried in some deep menu structure. Competitors copied it too.

Outlook – like other Office apps – has evolved its Ribbon over time, and introduced a simplified version that takes up less screen real estate. While your average user has moved on from squinting at a 15” CRT monitor, it’s still desirable for some to keep the less-used menu options hidden and to focus on the content. To switch between the standard and simple Ribbons, click the little caret mark at the far right corner of the main Ribbon UI.

So far, so good, but it you like the “Classic” Ribbon, there’s a lot you can do to get rid of some of the guff and keep the useful features more prominent. Looking at the first Ribbon image above, about 40% of the space is consumed with a handful of addins that might be useful, but not necessarily deserving of such prominence – your own list may differ, but the stuff on the right side tends to be a series of groups with a single, large icon in each.

To clean up the ribbon, right-click on it and choose the Customize the Ribbon… option. You’ll now get a dialog box which lets you organise things – individual commands are displayed in Tabs (like Home, View, Help etc) and on groups within the tabs (New, Delete, Respond, and so on).

If you reduce the number of groups on a tab, the remaining ones may spread out and show larger icons or more detail – handy on the Home tab, if you like to use Quick Steps, which will expand out of one column.

Let’s try moving some of the less commonly used groups from the home tab – start by creating a new Tab and then right-click on it to rename it Add-ins or something like that.

Once you have the new tab created, it’s simple to start dragging and dropping defunct groups from the home tab onto the new one – things you might use occasionally but they don’t need to be on the main screen. Customisations are particular to the Ribbon you’re looking at – so if you organise the Classic one then switch to Simplified, you’ll still see the old arrangement until you customize that one too. You might want to export your finished layout too.

Looking at the restyled Ribbon above, all of the groups from Delete to Tags have been stretched to show more prominent icons or reduce the menu level a little, and Quick Steps has grown from one to four columns wide. Much more useful.

If you’re a Quick Steps fan, another trick is to right-click on one of your existing steps (where you’d normally customize that step or jump into the dialog for managing the whole lot), and choose Add Gallery to Quick Access Toolbar; meaning your array of quick actions is only a couple of clicks away, regardless of what is shown on the Ribbon.

512 – Sticky Notes and Glancing

Posted on January 20, 2020 by ewand

Happy New Year! Whether it’s a way of keeping up with the NY resolutions you haven’t broken yet, or just a casual way to remind yourself to do stuff, Post-It Notes or the more generic “sticky notes” can be a useful tool. ToW # 446 talked about a handy Windows app that is now installed by default on Windows 10.

Sticky Notes has been through a number of iterations, and now in v3.7 it’s looking pared back yet really functional. Sure, you can use Outlook Tasks and To Do to track significant actions, long-term projects and the like, but sometimes you just want a simple list to get you through the morning or to take shopping.

If you open Sticky Notes, and click on the body of a note itself (to set focus to that window and start editing the text), then you’ll see the menu and close controls; clicking the menu lets you quickly change the colour of your note (so if you have several open, you can tell them apart, maybe) or jump to the Notes list that shows a summary of all the stickies you have lying around.

Another quick way of getting to the notes you have is to right-click the Sticky Notes icon on your taskbar.

You can type, write (with your finger, or a stylus), or grab pictures from camera or existing files, all into a note, then share and make sense of it later.

You can sync your sticky notes to other devices: just go to the settings icon (from the taskbar context view or within the Notes list) to configure syncing using either an Office 365 or Microsoft Account.

Sticky Notes has even replaced the venerable “Notes” function in Outlook, which has been around since 1997 – go to the Wunderbar in Outlook and you may need to click the ellipsis to see the Notes pages; it’s very old-school looking and not everything is carried over quite the same, but it’s a welcome integration that replaces another duplicate way of doing the same thing. It’s part of a long-term plan, so it seems.

Multi-device

Sticky Notes show up on the web and are also accessible on iOS and Android devices via the OneNote app…

If you set up sync between devices, it’s quite amusing to open the web client, the PC app, and then on your phone, add a new note… and see the other two update within seconds. Technology #ftw – far more useful than the kind of toot being peddled at CES in Las Vegas this week.

On an Android phone, though, the best way to use Sticky Notes is through the integration with the Microsoft Launcher – if you’re not a phone tech geek, you might not realise that with Android, you can supplant the entire home screen UI of the phone with any number of variants.

Microsoft has a mature and highly regarded launcher, that has an average review score of 4.6 across over 1 million reviews – how many apps in the Windows store can beat that…? See more tips on using Launcher.

When you have the Launcher installed, the “Glance” screen is only a swipe away – on the home screen, swipe from left to right to flick over to this summary that lets you see a customisable list (click the stack on the top right) of important or interesting info.

The Calendar summary lets you jump straight into a Teams meeting, you can show “screen time” stats, or scroll to the bottom to add more widgets from any number of apps you have installed on your phone.

Cortana integration featured in the Launcher at one point, though it’s planned to disappear for many of us.

In a “for your comfort and safety” type announcement, news came that Cortana will disappear from the phone in favour of being part of other M365 apps in time. More to follow, no doubt…

504 – Searching Outlook

Posted on November 2, 2019 by ewand

Many moons ago, Outlook search was a laborious process – you’d enter a word and Outlook would chunter through every message in turn to see if your desired text was contained within. In the days when you a few emails, that was fine, but when you have many thousands of messages, it’s not viable.

15 years ago, Microsoft bought a company that made an add-in called LookOut and since then, deep search capabilities have been added in a variety of ways, now provided through the Windows Search service.

A feature that was added into both Outlook is the “Top Results” section in search results – essentially providing what the search engine returns as the most relevant content, rather than necessarily the most recent.

How useful this is might depend on how and when you use Outlook search – if you’re looking for a way to return very specific results, it might be more of a distraction than a help (ie if you’re a natural piler, you might use Search as a normal way of retrieving stuff rather than an occasional tool for finding something in particular).

Should you find the Top Results section annoying and/or distracting, it can be easily disabled by going into Search Options within the Search tab on Outlook’s ribbon, and clear the “most relevant search results” option.

Do so, and normalcy returns.

Top Results also appears in Outlook Web App (outlook.office.com), in the consumer Outlook.com and in Windows Mail – and it doesn’t appear that you can disable it: much to some users’ chagrin. Turn to Uservoice or Feedback Hub if you feel similarly.

To get more out of Search in the desktop Outlook app, it’s worth understanding how to be more specific – even using just a few keywords will help you narrow the results. Search for from:bob, for example, and all results will be mails that originated from someone who had “bob” in their display name. Narrow the search even more by adding terms like sent:yesterday, about:pricing or messagesize:enormous as well.

You can use various tools in the Search bar to filter your results, too – it might even be quicker clicking the big paperclip than typing hasattachments:yes. To discover more search terms, click the + More option in the search bar and have a play.

Tip o’ the Week 498 – Go do, To Do (you do so well)

Posted on October 3, 2019 by ewand

The Microsoft To Do desktop and mobile applications and services (all available from https://todo.microsoft.com/) had a major update recently, which included being slightly renamed. Instead of “Microsoft To-Do”, the core app is now simply “Microsoft To Do”, and it has a new logo (well done if you noticed)… instead of a blocky light-blue and white tick on a blue background, it’s a slightly rounded and shaded blue tick on white background.

Still, To[-]Do’s functionality has stepped forward greatly since its first release a couple of years back, taking more than a few leaves from the Wunderlist app that preceded it. The new v2 of the To Do app includes background images that can be shown behind task lists, including one of the Berlin Television Tower which was synonymous with Wunderlist.

After Microsoft’s acquisition of 6wunderkinder (the company that made Wunderlist), it was announced that, at some stage, the Wunderlist application would be retired but still there’s no confirmed date or anything, with back-end engineering apparently taking a good bit longer than was first expected.

When the To-Do app was launched, it was a somewhat poorer cousin. Now, the story is that To Do v2 has enough of the functionality of Wunderlist, and lots of new capabilities (such as Cortana integration), that it’s time for Wunderlist users to transition.

See more of the detail here. See what’s new in versions of To[-]Do. For further To Do tips, check the help center.

The founder of 6wunderkinder has taken to Twitter to offer to buy back Wunderlist before Microsoft shuts the service down. It remains to be seen if the offer is being considered or not…

Tip o’ the Week 496 – Dark Mode marches on

Posted on September 13, 2019 by ewand

Back in the olden days of computing, wage slaves sat in front of terminals with black backgrounds and lurid green text writing. The advent of the graphical user interface relieved this tyranny with a paper-white background from a bitmapped screen to write your WYSIWYG text, to showcase colourful graphics (and Fonts!).

Fast forward 30+ years and it seems every app and OS is running away from black text / white backgrounds, and heading for monochrome graphics and oppressive white text on a black background again.

Using Dark Mode, either in apps or in the operating system on your computer or phone, promises a variety of benefits – less noticeable flickering, reducing eye strain, avoiding bright lights in a dark environment, perhaps better readability and therefore productivity, and even lower energy costs.

Dark Mode has existed in Windows for a while – but ultimately, apps need to support the theme, too, and more and more are doing so – like new Edge browser, or Office apps (where you can set the Office Theme).

Microsoft recently put out a groovy video to highlight Dark Mode across a variety of apps and device types, and some commentary about why and when. It’s even come to Outlook.com as well.

The announcement on Microsoft 365 functionality adds for August 2019 highlighted additional Dark Mode support coming to Outlook mobile apps and Outlook.com, saying, “Dark Mode is not only easier on the eyes and may extend battery life, it also enables you to comfortably continue using your device in places where the default bright mode isn’t appropriate, like darkened airplanes and movie theaters.”

So kids, next time you want to go and watch a movie & catch up on your email, make sure you’ve Dark Mode on!