We've just launched a new feature in Capsule that makes it easy to find your contacts on social networks like Twitter and LinkedIn. To get this working, you first need to link your Capsule account with your social network accounts so that Capsule can search those networks on your behalf. You can do this by clicking on your username in the top menu bar > My Preferences > Social Integrations. Once you've done that you'll start seeing a notification icon when you view a contact in Capsule that indicates Capsule has found social profiles for your contact. Click on the icon to see the matches and add the social profiles details to your contact. As part of this release we've also added Google+, Flickr, YouTube and GitHub to the list of social networks that you can record on a contact in Capsule. We take privacy seriously and Capsule honours the privacy controls of each network when searching for profiles. As a result you'll only see matches where the contact has made their profile public. I'd love to hear how you get on with this. In particular, if you spot matches that are for the wrong person I'd be grateful if you could email support@capsulecrm.com so that we can take a look at fine tuning our search algorithms.

Where there’s smoke, there’s fire. That’s for sure this month at Infusionsoft– we’re cooking up number of great things this month that users will enjoy. You can download this new wallpaper in preparation of all the exciting changes.

Here are a handful of things we have cooking this month for you:

InfusionCon 2012 – It’s just weeks away and will be the biggest user conference to date featuring more than 30 speakers on dozens of helpful sessions that will help you set your marketing in motion. Gary Vaynerchuk, Chris Brogan and Pam Slim will be keynoting the conference. You can’t miss this!

Our Next Big Software Release – The next version of Infusionsoft is just around the corner. More details will be revealed at InfusionCon. (One more reason to go and register!)

New Infusionsoft Virtual Academy – Our training team came out with a free course for new users to get the basics of Infusionsoft under their belt. It’s free and will help you get comfortable with the only all-in-one sales and marketing software for small business.

Upcoming Infusionsoft Tweetchats – We will soon host regular Tweetchats. We need your help! Tell us what time works best for you to join us. These will be live chats from users, team members and special guests talking about small business marketing tips and advice.

Download the Infusionsoft March Wallpaper:
1680 x 1050 (larger size)
1440 x 900 (smaller size)

Upgrades of CRM databases from V4 are much faster in CRM 5.0 UR6 release. We've made improvements to the most time consuming parts of CRM upgrades that should significantly reduce the upgrade time for large CRM databases.

I wanted to share some options to make upgrades even faster. These options are more relevant for higher end hardware common to large production deployments of CRM. Since these options are hardware and deployment specific, they are implemented as registry key options(DWORDs) under HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Microsoft\MSCRM.

1. MaxDopForIndexCreation - CRM recommends that the max degree of parallelism (maxdop) SQL option be set to 1, to avoid the potential pitfalls of allowing SQL to generate parallel query plans. But those concerns are not valid for upgrades, which usually happen in single user mode. Index creation is a lot faster when SQL is allowed to parallelize index creation. The MaxDopForIndexCreation registry key hook allows you to specify the maxdop value used for index creation. We got pretty good results using a value of 4 for this setting in internal testing.

2. SortInTempDB -- For indexing large tables (tens of millions of rows), SQL has to store intermediate sorted rows on disk. The SORT_IN_TEMPDB option makes the index creation go along much faster, assuming you have dedicated hardware for tempdb. For the upgrade, you may specify SortInTempDB registry key (set it to 1) to allow SQL to use tempdb for sorting index data on large tables.

3. NumThreadsForIndexCreation -- Production SQL machines for large CRM deployments tend to be very powerful, typically with 16 cores or higher. In addition to specifying the MaxDopForIndexCreation option, you can specify that the index creation happen in multiple threads. We got pretty good results, again, using 4 for the number of threads in internal testing.

The above registry key options greatly speed up the "Upgrade indexes" step of a CRM deployment (you can look at the upgrade logs to see where time was being spent if you weren't paying attention during the upgrade process). Index upgrade can take several hours for a large CRM database, and we've seen reductions of over 75% through the combined application of these options.

4. BatchAddAttributeUpdates -- This is an internal optimization that allows us to reduce the number of SQL queries we issue while adding non-nullable columns to existing tables. It will help if the metadata changes (DiffBuilder) stage of the upgrade is taking a long time. You may set this to a value of 1 for it to take effect.

These are all upgrade specific improvements, and aren't useful when the system is in normal use. We released these changes in UR6 because they were significant pain points for our larger customers, and they have not undergone comprehensive testing that happens with a full CRM release. We recommend that you leave them on only for the duration of the upgrade, and only if your upgrades are taking a long time. You may remove them once the upgrade is complete, to avoid any unintended consequences. Other settings you may experiment with as part of your upgrade planning include turning off high availability modes for your CRM database, and switching to simple recovery mode, again, only for the duration of the upgrade.

Using the upgrade performance improvements that are part of UR6, and some of the registry hooks described in this post, we were able to speed up upgrade of CRM from V4 by over 60% for a large internal deployment of CRM (over a terabyte in size). We hope UR6 with these options help with your upgrade planning to CRM 5.0, and significantly reduce your downtime windows for the upgrade.

CRM Upgrade Team

Atul Shenoy

Here’s a fun way to integrate some Social into your salesperson’s life. Say I have a new account assigned to me. What do I do? I research it. To research the business data, I will probably go to some of the business data sites that are out there. To see what’s happening on the Social sphere, it would be nice to see all the combinations of news about this account in one place, in a fun and interactive way. Microsoft Fuse Labs has Project Montage that allows you to just that.

Here’s a quick set of screenshots showing the final results of this blogpost.

1. Open your account form. Say it’s called U2. Click on ‘Research this company’

 

 

2. See the social information about U2 with a choice of layouts. Pick a layout (I like newspaper#2).

3. Save your favorite layout.

4. Spend time you want reading the news, twitter feeds about this account and looking at other’s curated news about the topic by searching for it on Montage.

To do this, here’re the components and changes:

-     Create two web resources with the montage images – 16 px and 32 px.

All these are, is scaled PNG files of this:
http://montage.cloudapp.net/Content/Images/logtagleft.png.

-       jScript web resource that will be used by the ribbon button

Script code

function openMontageCompanyUrl() {          

var attributeValue =

Xrm.Page.data.entity.attributes.get('name').getValue();

var url = 'http://montage.cloudapp.net/edit/?topic=' +

attributeValue;               

window.open(url, '_blank');

}

-        Updates to the account form Ribbon (see this article for the step-by-step on adding a ribbon button).  For the purpose of a demo, the button is added to the ‘process’ group on the form. But one can add it to any other group or create a new group.

Ribbon XML for this button:

<RibbonDiffXml>

<CustomActions>

<CustomAction Id="MontageButton.CustomAction"

Location="Mscrm.Form.account.MainTab.Workflow.Controls._children" Sequence="30">

<CommandUIDefinition>

<Button Command="MontageCommand" Id="MontageButton"
Image16by16="$webresource:new_Montage_Image"
Image32by32="$webresource:new_Montage_Image_32.png"
LabelText="Research this company" TemplateAlias="o1" />

</CommandUIDefinition>

</CustomAction>

</CustomActions>

<Templates>

<RibbonTemplates
Id="Mscrm.Templates"></RibbonTemplates>

        </Templates>

<CommandDefinitions>

<CommandDefinition Id="MontageCommand">

<EnableRules>

<EnableRule Id="Montage.NotNewEnableRule" />

</EnableRules>

<DisplayRules />

<Actions>

<JavaScriptFunction
Library="$webresource:new_Montage.ResearchCompany"
FunctionName="openMontageCompanyUrl"></JavaScriptFunction>

</Actions>

</CommandDefinition>

</CommandDefinitions>

<RuleDefinitions>

<TabDisplayRules />

<DisplayRules />

<EnableRules>

<EnableRule Id="Montage.NotNewEnableRule">

<FormStateRule State="Create" InvertResult="true"/>

</EnableRule>

</EnableRules>

</RuleDefinitions>

<LocLabels />

</RibbonDiffXml>

In Summary – I added a button that reads some data from the form, and launches the Montage to explore.

Manisha Powar

 

A while ago the Zoho Invoice iPhone app V1.7 was released in the iTunes. And now, our android app development team has something fascinating to share as well – Release of Version 1.3.

Dim says – (Zoho Invoice …

We hear from customers daily that are looking for ways to integrate their merchant processing with order management and back to QuickBooks for accurate reconciliation.  We have done over a dozen integration with companies including QuickBooks’ own Intuit Payment Solution.  With the PCI / PA-DSS compliance requirements changing daily and with the need to keep your business protected from credit card theft, merchant providers are providing more and more secure technology integration options.  We recently rolled out an incredible integration with Mercury Payment Solutions.  Last October, the CEO of DrivenCRM, personally flew out to Mercury to see their operation and explore our integration options. We had heard incredible things with regards to their quality of support and the API platforms they support.  After that site visit and through the integration options, we are proud to support MPS within the recent release of DrivenCRM (V 4.2).

Some of the considerations we took into account were the incredible US based customer support  (in fact, every support agent must have a college degree to get a job), their PCI/PA-DSS compliant integration options, their pricing for our customers and their reputation in general.  Should you desire to take advantage of this integration, please feel free to fill out the form here and a DrivenCRM rep will call you within 24 hours to go through next steps.  If you are already a MPS customer, simply follow the instructions below here.

A key element to have integration through MPS or other providers that we support is that it offers QuickBooks users the ability to take payment remotely and securely.  Payments processed through DrivenCRM are automatically recognized in QuickBooks within the Undeposited Funds feature.  Reconciliation of those transactions is the same as if you posted the payment manually within QuickBooks itself.

Sender Policy Framework (SPF) might sound complex, but it’s actually quite simple to implement and it will likely increase the inbox placement of your email marketing messages. I’ll tell you a little bit about how SPF works and offer tips on putting it into practice.

It’s all about reputation.

While content remains a major factor on whether an ISP accepts messages, the reputation of the sender, the email service provider and the domains are critical if you want messages to land in the inbox reliably. As an email marketer, it’s your objective do everything you can to ensure your recipients see your message and take action from it. Reputation is the difference between your message landing in the inbox or the ill-fated Junk folder. And with recent advances in email security (like DMARC), SPF is even more important.

SP-What?

Sender Policy Framework (SPF) is regarded as the industry standard for email servers to properly identify and confirm that a third-party sender is authorized to send mail on their behalf.

It works like this. The recipient’s ISP looks at the email message and inspects the “from” address. They are looking for explicit permission from the “from” domain that says it’s okay for an email service provider (like Infusionsoft) to deliver that message. Maintaining an SPF record shows that the sender is trustworthy and lends to higher confidence that the message is not spam.

It’s a fact that many email marketers neglect to maintain an SPF record. This is a problem and it’s easy to fix.

Implementing an SPF Record

SPF records operate at the Domain Name Service (DNS) level. Meaning, the technical area on how servers are translated from domain names (Infusionsoft.com) into numbers (199.204.136.80). All you need to do is add a DNS “TXT” record to your domain that authorizes your email service provider to deliver messages on your behalf.

Infusionsoft users should add this record below to their DNS settings as a TXT record. Literally just copy and paste and you’re done:

v=spf1 mx include:infusionmail.com –all

In English, what this says is, “We’re using SPF version one. We’re going to allow the mail server on Infusionmail.com to send email on behalf of our domain and to restrict all others from sending mail.”

If you’re not using Infusionsoft, that’s okay. Ask your email service provider for the recommended SPF settings or use this free tool to generate the SPF record that you need.

Major and minor ISPs alike look at SPF records. A majority of spam-infected email servers don’t usually have SPF, so it’s a great way to increase your reputation as an email sender. This process only takes a few moments to implement and is worth it so you can achieve higher open rates and ultimately, more conversions!

Here are links to resources on how you can update your DNS settings (so you can add SPF). If you’re not sure, simply ask your domain provider for help.

Dreamhost
GoDaddy
NameCheap
Bluehost
HostGator
eNom
Network Solutions
1&1

Want to know if your SPF record is working? Aside from sending yourself an email and checking the email headers, you can use this free online tool to verify SPF is configured correctly.

We’d like to know if you experience a lift in your open and click through rates after implementing SPF. Tell us about it in the comments below!

In an effort to integrate a custom application with a database, a software developer struggles with one CRM application, but finds solace in Zoho CRM.

Business

Pawan Jaiswal is a senior software developer that contracts on many different application integration …

Thousands of business owners made the switch to Infusionsoft for their all-in-one sales and marketing software. But what about those who haven’t switched? These questions are on the minds of business owners before they choose Infusionsoft for their sales and marketing needs.

I started working with Infusionsoft in 2009, and have been an Infusionsoft Certified Consultant since 2011. During that time, I’ve grown to realize that, as great and powerful a tool as Infusionsoft is, it’s not for everybody. To see who they are for, watch this short product overview video.

These five questions will help you figure out if you’re ready to join the marketing automation revolution and invest in Infusionsoft!

1. What do you want to achieve?

Business owners come to Infusionsoft for lots of different reasons.

For some, although they want to grow their business, they can’t afford to take on more staff right now, and they already feel “maxed out” with everything else involved in running their business. For others, it might be they’ve successfully grown their business… but there’s a distinct lack of consistency in the experience that prospects and customers have of their business.

What is your primary, clearly-stated, desired outcome for investing in Infusionsoft?

Here’s some ideas to get you thinking…

• Increase sales
• Decrease customer acquisition costs
• Increase revenue from existing customers
• Reclaim a certain amount of time back for you personally
• Improve customer satisfaction
• Increase the value of your business by having (and automating where possible) systems and processes

2. If you have staff, have you taken account of how resistant most people are to change?

Despite what they might say, most people (at some level) fear change. This may be less true for you and your entrepreneurial peers, though is probably more of a reality for the people you employ.

If you at least recognize this before you start to implement Infusionsoft, you’ll go a long way to achieving what you want. And you’ll give your employees a boost by freeing them up to do more high-value, pro-active work.

3. Are you ready for a ton of work?

Make no mistake; the decision to invest in Infusionsoft is just the start. Yes, it’s a powerful tool; yes, it’s transformed thousands of businesses; yes, it’s arguably the #1 sales and marketing software for small business.

But it’s not a magic wand!

Here are some of the activities and tasks you’re taking on if you decide to invest in Infusionsoft…

• Planning ahead
• Thinking about new solutions
• Migrating existing contact and email data
• Writing personalized email, SMS, direct mail and other content that goes into automated sequences
• Creating attractive, lead-generating Web Forms
• Placing those Web Forms on your website(s)
• Building interactive follow up sequences
• Configuring Infusionsoft to work with your sales pipeline
• Learning new ways to do business – both yourself and your team.

And the biggest challenge here of course is that, typically, a business owner gets to the point of wanting to buy Infusionsoft because they are already overwhelmed with everything else that goes into running a business. And they are drastically short on time.

The thought of having to do all the above stuff, let alone whether they have the skills to do it, is sometimes an intimidating one.

The best questions to ask here is, “How important are the goals I want to achieve?” And, “What is the real, full cost of doing nothing?”

If it’s not yet that important, and you can accept the cost of doing nothing… the truth is you might not be ready for Infusionsoft.

That’s not a bad thing, but please be under no illusions. If you want to fix once and for all the problems of multi-system chaos that have brought you in search of Infusionsoft and similar tools, there’s a lot of work ahead to experience the full, transforming power of marketing automation.

4. How realistic are your expectations?

Infusionsoft has the ability to transform your business. There’s probably only a few areas of your business where Infusionsoft won’t be able to manage, if not automate, processes. And smart entrepreneurs know that well-run businesses rely on efficient systems and processes — not necessarily hiring the most expensive, highly-qualified employees.

You can do both, ...

First off I’d like to introduce myself. Hi I’m Tom and I’ve recently joined the team at Capsule as a front-end developer. My background was originally working with .NET, Ruby and Node.js and now I’m working in JavaScript and CoffeeScript to make Capsule’s user interface more interactive. I’ve started looking at the mobile application and the first of these updates are now publicly available.

You can now view your open opportunities by tapping the new Pipeline button on the mobile app’s main menu. Tapping on an individual opportunity will take you through, showing more information about it. Opportunities are now listed under notes and emails for individual contacts. Currently, opportunities are only available when your device has a network connection.

If you don’t see the new Pipeline link you need to update the app so that you’re running the latest version: in the mobile app go to ‘Settings’ and tap the ‘Check for Updates’ button.

 

First off I’d like to introduce myself. Hi I’m Tom and I’ve recently joined the team at Capsule as a front-end developer. My background was originally working with .NET, Ruby and Node.js and now I’m working in JavaScript and CoffeeScript to make Capsule’s user interface more interactive. I’ve started looking at the mobile application and the first of these updates are now publicly available. You can now view your open opportunities by tapping the new Pipeline button on the mobile app’s main menu. Tapping on an individual opportunity will take you through, showing more information about it. Opportunities are now listed under notes and emails for individual contacts. Currently, opportunities are only available when your device has a network connection. If you don’t see the new Pipeline link you need to update the app so that you’re running the latest version: in the mobile app go to ‘Settings’ and tap the ‘Check for Updates’ button.  

Title alone is a giveaway. You have two or more customers with duplicate records in your Zoho Invoice or Zoho Books customer list. Reason for their existence could be :

1. You recently imported accounts and contacts from Zoho CRM…

Using Zoho CRM, an outsourced sales staff shows its clients how every dollar is being used to gather leads and close sales.

The business:

Katie Berkovich is the founder and a sales executive for Contax Growth Strategies, a two-year-old …

I was recently asked about purging records from Microsoft Dynamics CRM. The company that asked the question wanted to use CRM to store sensitive information, but they wanted the records to be purged out once they reached a certain age, mainly to mitigate risk of e-discovery. Once a record was 18 months old or greater, they wanted the records to be automatically deleted from the system.

Their expectation was that this was going to be something that required custom development or costly configuration. However, they were pleasantly surprised to see that it can be done using the standard bulk delete
functionality.

In CRM, go settings—>Data Management and select “Bulk Record Deletion.”

Click “Next”

The Bulk Record Deletion wizard is based on an advanced find query. Define the query that will retrieve the records that you want to delete. In this case, we want to delete any cases that are more than 18 months old, so we will select Cases for the entity and Created on, Older Than X Months, 18, then click “Next.”

Finally, on the options screen, check the box to run the job every X days, and enter the desired recurrence interval. This will make the job run on a repeating basis.

Now your deletion job will run as a scheduled job, and any records returned by the advanced find query will be deleted.

But let’s say that you forgot to set the job to re-occur, and you want to have a job you already ran once become a recurring job. You can do that by selecting a record from the Bulk Record Deletion menu, and selecting “More Actions” and “Modify Recurrence.”

A word of caution

Remember, deletions are permanent in CRM 2011. Be sure that in your record purging strategy that you are not diluting the effectiveness of your CRM system by deleting records that users need to do their job. The best approach is to take a balanced approach that meets your legal requirements as well as the requirements of end users.

For more information, here is another post on this topic: http://blogs.msdn.com/b/crm/archive/2010/05/12/deleting-imported-data-with-the-bulk-record-deletion-wizard.aspx

 

Joel Lindstrom, CRM Technical Specialist

 

There is so much in the terms of content and marketing with regards to this topic, it is hard to clear the clutter. Every CRM company seems to have some motivation to push you to either “the cloud” or “on premise.” The arguments on both sides are compelling.

The Cloud

The most appealing feature about Cloud (Software As A Service) is the minimum upfront cost and ease of deployment.  We find that we are gaining more and more customers in this area as the economy has made small business owners justifiably fearful of large software investments.  The ability to minimize the exposure of a purchase such as this and while also cash-flowing the purchase has made this option very appealing.  Furthermore, there is very low infrastructure / IT requirements to get a system like this operational as the majority of the infrastructure is being hosted by the companies offering the software.  Features like data redundancy, security, database setup, hardware, etc. is being paid for or supplied by the software provider.  The downside to the cloud, specifically in the small business mind-frame, is the lack of ownership.  The SaaS concept is similar to renting a home vs purchasing it.  Even though you may pay significantly more over a period of time (upkeep, initial investment, etc.) you will have ownership with most On Premise solutions and the right to chose whether or not to upgrade / maintain support contracts.  With the Cloud, to keep getting access to the software, you must pay monthly/quarterly or annual fees associated to the software and related services.

On Premise

The ability to own the application, control the environment, create custom code or integrations and have the assurances your data is local and protected has driven (no pun intended) a lot of small to medium sized businesses to looking at traditional On Premise applications as an advantage over the Cloud.  One area that most small businesses miss is the opportunity costs associated with setting up a system local.  Traditional QuickBooks users do not have a slew of IT personnel on staff which is traditionally required for successful deliveries of Enterprise style software solutions.  However, there are a stack of developers that are developing applications utilizing standardized Microsoft based technologies that can be more easily deployed within existing MS Server environments.  This coupled with a clear expectations of what the required hardware / IT infrastructure is, sets the precedence for a successful deployment.  Some of the unique offerings out there also provide more advanced customization capabilities (e.g. source code availability) and integrations through their On Premise offerings. The key metric if a business has the infrastructure in place, a clear expectation of the deliverable, a detailed scope of work and implementation plan  and investment style mentality when looking at software purchases, is that On Premise (with the right solutions) is almost always more cost effective come year 2 or 3 in comparison to SaaS.

Among the options above there are new concepts emerging such as Private Cloud, whereby the software developers hosts a dedicated infrastructure specifically for your company.  It can be safely assumed that innovations within deployment such as this will continue to accommodate business owners demands for both control and pricing flexibility.  In the interim, business owners should chose a company that offers pricing  and deployment options that fit their needs today and for the indefinite future.  A common complaint heard for SaaS users has been that they feel they have “painted themselves into a corner” as they have grown to a point whereby they wish to own their software vs rent.  Going with a SaaS provider that does not allow for purchase limits their options for cost containment and control  Furthermore, business owners that have gone On Premise and wish to migrate to the cloud painlessly are left with little options aside from migrating to another solution (traditionally).  We speak candidly about this as we offer both options due to the  needs of our customers.  Giving owners choice is what we pride ourselves on here at DrivenCRM.  We hope that this sets a trend within the software market so that all businesses can control their destiny with regards to technology.