What are the different access levels we have in MS CRM?

The privileges you are assigned regulate the functions you can perform on particular Records or objects. Your access levels determine which Records these privileges apply to. In other words, although your privileges may include the capability to delete Account Records, it is your access level that determines exactly which Records you are able to delete.

Microsoft CRM includes four distinct access levels presented in order of increasing authority.

USER (BASIC)

User Access is the most restrictive of all the access levels. With User Access rights, a User can perform actions on the following:

• Records he owns

• Records owned by another User but which have been shared with him

• Records owned or shared by a Team of which he is a member

BUSINESS UNIT (LOCAL)

Business Unit Access is a step above the basic User level. It includes all the User Access rights, but it also provides access to Records that are owned by or shared with other Users who belong to the same Business Unit. The term local really corresponds to one distinct Business Unit of which the User is a member.

For example, if Moe has local Opportunity read rights, he can review the Records for all prospects interested in signing up for the beta tester program at his company. If Moe had only User Access, he could see only those Records that he had created himself or Records that other Users had decided to share with him.

PARENT: CHILD BUSINESS UNITS (DEEP)

A User with Parent: Child Access rights has Business Unit Access plus the ability to access objects or Records from any Business Unit that’s subordinate to the unit he is assigned to. If you think of an organizational chart for the divisions of your company, a deep view enables you to see your Business Unit and all those directly below it.

ORGANIZATIONAL (GLOBAL)

Organizational Access rights are the least restrictive of all the categories. With Organizational Access, you can perform actions on any Record within the system, regardless of the Business Unit you belong to and regardless of sharing issues.

Organizational Access rights should be reserved for a small group of system administrators who have the overall responsibility for the integrity of the database. At least two people in your company should have these rights (one for backup purposes), but probably not many more than that.

It should not be a foregone conclusion that the CEO or the director of IT should have complete Organizational Access. With the privilege also comes the responsibility and the possibility of unintentional damage done by the weekend warrior or by those who view themselves as technogeeks. Individuals’ job requirements and their knowledge of the system relate directly to their getting this level of access.

DEFINING ROLES

The concept of roles marries privileges and access rights. Microsoft CRM comes with eight predefined roles that are typical of a mid-sized organization. Making use of these predefined roles saves a lot of time that would otherwise be spent setting up specific access rights for each user. These roles are as follows:

• CEO-business manager

• VP of sales

• Sales manager

• Sales rep

• CSR manager

• CSR

• Marketing professional

• System administrator

Each of these eight roles has a complete set of predefined privileges and access rights. The prototypical sales manager is given a default set of privileges and access rights. To see the settings for each of the default roles, follow these steps:

1. From the Home Page, select Settings from the panel to the side of the main display.

The Settings display with its seven subcategories appears.

2. Select Business Unit Settings from the Settings window and then select Security Roles.

The Security Roles List View Grid (shown in Figure 1) appears, showing all existing roles.

Figure 1: List view of all existing security roles.

3. View the sales manager’s role by clicking on his line in the List View Grid.

The Sales Manager’s Core Records tab, shown in Figure 2, appears with four other tabs along the top. The Details tab, which is the default, has very few details. The Core Records tab contains all the toggle switches to turn access rights on or off and is the central storehouse for role information.

Figure 2: The sales manager’s rights regarding Core Records.

4. View the Core Records Tab and then click the rest of the tabs to see all the objects that can be accessed at various levels for the existing sales manager profile.

5. Click Save and Close from the blue Actions Bar to return to the List View Grid.

The easiest way to create a new role is by cloning an existing one. To do this, follow these steps:

1. From the Home Page, select Settings from the panel to the side of the main display.

The Settings display with its seven subcategories appears.

2. Select Business Unit Settings and then select Security Roles.

The Security Roles List View Grid appears.

3. Click the Copy Role button from the blue Actions Bar.

The Copy Role dialog box, shown in Figure 3, appears, asking which original role you want to copy and what new name you want to use.

Figure 3: Copying a new role from an existing one.

4. Select the role you want to copy from the drop-down list in the Role to Copy field. In the blank New Role Name field, type a new and unique name for the new custom role.

5. Check the Open Role When Copying Is Complete box.

This immediately brings up the window for the new role with all the settings from the original role. If, by some chance, the Core Records window does not appear, select that tab to display all the role settings. Toggle any of the settings to change them for the new role you are creating. You can continue to toggle each setting to go through each of the five possibilities. Make sure to review each of the five tabs: Details, Core Records, Sales, Service, and Business Management.

6. Click Save and Close after you’ve completely tailored the new role.

A User can have more than one assigned role. Someone could have a role as a systems administrator and as a mailroom clerk. When a single User has multiple roles with different privileges and access rights, the role with the less restrictive privileges takes precedence. So, even when your systems administrator is functioning as a mailroom clerk, she will have the maximum levels of access rights.

Can you explain the difference between Share and Assign in MSCRM?

Assigning Records

Assigning records is the act of changing the owner of the record.  Depending on security settings, assigning records may impact who can view or edit the record.  In order to assign records to a new owner, you can either

1. Change the Owner on the record on the form.
2. Click Assign on the Command Bar while viewing a record.
3. Select one or more records from a grid view, and on the Command bar, click Assign.

Assigning records can also trigger workflows, such as a notification that a record has been assigned to you.

Sharing Records

When security settings prevent some users from seeing or editing all records in the Dynamics 365, it may be necessary to share records that require collaboration across teams.  When sharing, you can share the view, edit, assign, or delete rights as long as you have them yourself.  In order to share records,

1. While viewing the record or while selecting one or more records on the grid view, click Share under the ellipsis on the Command Bar.
2. Individually select the rights that the users will have to the shared records OR select Toggleon the left to toggle on/off all rights.
3. Click Share.

The individuals who have rights to see the record are not visible on the record.  In order to see them, you must click Share again on the Command Bar.  From there, you may add or remove rights.

Explain the difference between Append & Append To MSCRM?

Append and Append To are two privileges that most user are not very clear about regarding their functionality. In this article we try to explain the difference between “Append” and “Append To” Privileges and how it affects the user access.

Append and Append To basically deal with the entities that are parties to a 1:N relationship or N:1 relationship.

Append: When an entity has the lookup of another entity on its form. It is important that the user have the “Append” privilege on this entity so that it can set the values for the lookups on this entity. For eg: Contact has the lookup of Account on its form so here the user needs to have the “Append” privilege to be able to set the parent account.

Append To: When an entity is available as a lookup on another entity form. It is important that the user have the “Append to” privilege on the entity that is referred to in the lookup so that it can set the values for the lookups of this entity on any other form. For eg: Account has the lookup of primary contact. So here the user needs to have the “Append To” privilege to be able to set the Primary Contact for the Account.

Lets us take an example of Contact entity.

We have modified the Order Role and removed the “append” privilege to the Contact entity.

  

When a user with this role logs in, they would find the Parent Account lookup disabled.

  

This is because the user does not have the “Append” privilege to the contact entity. So all the lookups on the contact form are Disabled.

Now we have modified the Order Role and provided the “Append” privilege for the contact entity and removed the “Append To” privilege from the contact entity.

  

The Primary Contact on Account is disabled.

 

 It means the lookup of contact entity will be disabled on all the entities if the “append to” privilege to contact is removed.

Hope this helps decipher the mystery behind “Append” and “Append To”.

What is ‘Append’ and ‘Append To’ privilege in MSCRM? Give one example of it?

‘Append’ and ‘Append To’ privileges works together. ‘Append To’ privilege will allow other entities to get attached to the entity. ‘Append’ privilege will allow the entity to attach the records to the entity with ‘Append To’ privilege.

Let us understand this with a simple example:

Let us say that you want to attach a note to a case then note entity should have ‘Append’ access right and case entity should have ‘Append To’ access right.

Let us take one more example to understand this. Suppose you have two custom entities called ‘TestCustomEntity1’ and ‘TestCustomEntity2’. You want to attach the ‘TestCustomeEntity2’ records to ‘TestCustomEntity1’records. For this, you need to have ‘Append’ access right on ‘TestCustomEntity1’ entity and ‘Append To’ access right on ‘TestCustomEntity2’.

Now guess will I be able to attach the records? The answer is “NO” because we need to create a 1 : N relationship between ‘TestCustomEntity1’ and ‘TestCustomEntity2’.

Now the user who has above-mentioned access right in his security role will only be able to add ‘TestCustomEntity2’ records to ‘TestCustomEntity1’.

The Top Six New CRM Features in Dynamics 365 Version 9.0

December 2017 - Microsoft Dynamics 365 Version 9 includes a number of new features and enhancements in the area of CRM. We have highlighted six you should definitely know about:

1. Unified Client Interface

CRM has become part of Dynamics 365, which means that even the new Office 365 client portal provides clean navigation, crisp layout of fields and grids. A responsive unified interface for the Customer Service Hub and Business Edition applications means that users enjoy the same experience on Mobile and Tablets.

2. Web Client Refresh

The new web client interface has undergone a significant refresh: borders around containers and uniform spacing, more colour theming, field controls styling, font standardisation, and text wrapping fix.

3. Multi-Select Option Sets

Set an option set as multi-select and it renders on forms as an intuitive multi-select control.  Advanced Find has new operators specifically designed for these, plus filtering in Views. The form list is searchable too.

4. Activity Timeline

This feature combines Posts, Activities, and Notes into a single feed.  It also enables you to filter specific activity types and quickly identify un-read items.

5. LinkedIn Sales Navigator

With the LinkedIn Navigator solutions for Sales and Campaigns, you can build on existing LinkedIn functionality to view and synchronise data for your Leads, Accounts, and Contacts. As well as providing quick access to Company and Contact profile data, inMail and messages, tasks, appointments and other activities can also be tracked in Dynamics 365.

6. Virtual Entities

Virtual Entities are similar to traditional entities. However, external data are read at run-time without being stored in the Dynamics 365 database.  This is a great new feature for heavy, custom integrations. As you create an organisation-owned entity, check the metadata box to indicate that it is virtual.

Dynamics 365 CRM Entity Relationships and Behaviour

Entity relationship defines how a specific entity record is related to another entity record. In this post we will discuss what is entity relations and details about this topic. We will learn below points in this article,

• Fundamentals of entity relationship
• Relationship V/s Connections
• Types of Entity Relationships
• Relationship Behaviors
• How to create Relationships

Fundamentals of Entity Relationship

Entity relationships define how records can be related to each other in the database. When you are adding a lookup field to an entity the system creates a new 1:N (one-to-many) relationship between the two entities and lets you put that lookup field in a form. Using lookup field you can associate an entity record with another entity record.

Relationship V/s Connections

Although these two word looks like similar we have to understand when to use connections and when to use Relationships. The below grid speaks about it.

Relationships	Connections
1.    This is a formal relationship between entities	1.    This is less formal relationship betwwen entities
2.    We can configure Relationship behaviors using Entity Relationship	2.    We can configure Connection Role in connections creation.
3.    E.g. : An opportunity without a customer is not accepted so we have an entity relationship between Opportunity and Contact so that we can query and report data efficiently.	3.    E.g.: If one contact is spouse of another contact, or one contact is an employer of another contact, so for such type of relationship we define Connections.
4.    Relationships are defined as 1:N, N:N with additional relationship behavior.	4.    Two entity records are connected by a connection Role such as , Employer, Spouse etc.

Types of Entity Relationship

There are two types of Relationships while customizing entities using relationships. They are given below.

• 1:N (One-to-Many)

An entity relationship where one entity record for the Primary Entity can be associated to many other Related Entity records because of a lookup field on the related entity.

When viewing a primary entity record you can see a list of the related entity records that are associated with it.

• N:N (Many-to-Many)

An entity relationship that depends on a special Relationship Entity, sometimes called an Intersect entity, so that many records of one entity can be related to many records of another entity.

When viewing records of either entity in a N:N relationship you can see a list of any records of the other entity that are related to it.

Relationship Behavior

When a one-to-many entity relationship exists there are cascading behaviors that can be configured to preserve data integrity and automate business processes. This topic will explain some key concepts and describe how you can configure these cascading behaviors.

We have 4 types of relationship behavior as given below.

1. Parental

In a parental relationship between two entities, any action taken on a record of the parent entity is also taken on any child entity records that are related to the parent entity record. if you delete a record in the parent entity, the related child entity records are also deleted; or if you share a parent entity record, the related records from the child entity are also shared. All option are disable for Parental relationship.

1. Referential

In a referential relationship between two entities, you can navigate to any related records, but actions taken on one will not affect the other

1. Referential, Restrict Delete

Actions taken on parent will not affect child record but parent record cannot be deleted till the child record exists. i.e you cannot delete a record when related records exist.

1. Configurable Cascading

You need to specify your setting here.

We can set the cascading behavior for the operations like, Assign, Share, Unshare,Reparent,Delete & Merge. We can have one of the below cascading options while configuring relationship.

The type we are interested here is “Configurable Cascading”. It allows you to decide what type of behavior we need to apply.The useful details of different cascading rules are (note here me is referred to the user on whom you will perform actions)
• Cascade All: Perform action on all of my child records. Like if assigned my account to another user then all my activities, orders, invoices etc are assign to new user including open, completed and other user owned records
• Cascade Active: Perform action on only my active child records
• Cascade User-Owned: Perform action on all my child records which is owned by me
• Cascade None: do nothing to my child records
• Remove Link: remove link from child record
• Restrict: Applies to Delete. The delete is not allowed if there are other entity instances that reference the ID of the entity instance being deleted.

As per Microsoft the definitions of the cascading concept is given below.

The below matrix is specifies the default relationship behavior cascading concept. In the below matrix wherever we have “cannot be changed” means we can not select to choose other option the value is pre-populated by system and can not be changed.This means for example if the behavior is parental then if we assign a record to a new user then all the child entity records will also be assigned to the user automatically due to “Cascade All” behavior.

How to create Relationship

In this section we will understand how we can create a relationship behavior for a 1:N relationship type.

Step-1: Open Dynamics 365 -> Goto Settings Area -> Select Customization->Open Customize the System

Step-2: In the default solution ->Expand the Entity option and select the entity to add relationship

Step-3: In entity -> Select 1: N relationship and add new relationship a sample snapshot given below.

 Step-4: Choose the mandatory fields and also the cascading behaviors.

Step-5: Now save it and check a lookup field in referencing entity.

Lifecyle of sales, marketing and service modules in Dynamics CRM

Sales:- It's a process of converting new leads converting them into customers(contact,account) and working on opportunity against them. opportunity itself can have stages.
While in opporunity you can go to create quotes, orders and invoices for the sales of your product.
 

Marketing:- As the name says it is the marketing of your product,services etc. You can create Marketing list for leads/account/contact and distribute the marketing activities among them in a marketing campaign. Remember each campaign has a plan, a buggeted cost. The result of these marketing activities can result into the new opportunites with existing  customers or new leads.
So the output of marketing process is basically input to the sales process.

Service:- This is the 3rd module in MS CRM which is normally used if your company is providing services for your product like maintence service or other services. You can have contract against your customer which can define how the customer are serviced (i.e. cases).

Dynamics 365 vs. Dynamics CRM

Dynamics 365 is not a single product with limited capabilities; it is a cloud-based product, combining more than one functionality into a single product where you can manage all the applications and tools you need to run your business.
Dynamics 365 is a combination of CRM and ERP, at the same time providing you with the best way to integrate your business parts and store your data in one place.

Click here to download our free ebook on Dynamics 365 and get answers to your questions!

What is Dynamics 365 providing me that Dynamics CRM does not?

Dynamics 365 is giving you the capability to administer all of your applications and services from one portal.

You can manage the following:

• Users and groups

• Resource

• Billing

• Contact support

• Services and add-ins

• Domains

• Products

• Reports

• Health

• Admin centers for your products

• Editable Grids

  This is a powerful feature that speeds up your modification data. It eliminates the time-consuming process of modifying record after record.

• App Modules

  Giving you the opportunity to create your apps in the Dynamics 365 allows you to control your apps in Dynamics 365. You can assign which app is to be displayed for certain users and each single app has its own sitemap (navigation menu).
  

• Sitemap Designer

  Dynamics 365 provides the ability to easily edit your sitemap by dragging and dropping and creating areas, groups, and entities links. From here, you can control the sitemaps of your apps and the icons for your items in the sitemap.

• Business Process Flow Enhancements

  BPF is a familiar feature from Dynamics CRM, but in Dynamics 365 the functionality has been extended. Processes now can be set to Active, Inactive, or Abandoned. Security has been improved, a drag-and-drop designer has been added, and workflows now can be run based on a certain event in the BPFs. Suggestion bubbles for the user and a timer for the BPF’s stages are also new features.

• Relationship Insights

  Still in preview, this feature connects you with Azure machine Learning, so, after giving the permission to external systems to access your application data, intelligent functionalities will applied. For example, email engagement reminds you of upcoming appointments and meetings, unanswered emails, and, after reading your emails, it tells you what you should track.
  Engagement analysis is the analysis of what the receivers of your emails are engaged in by measuring the amount of clicks and views on emails and their content.
  The Relationship Assistant Tool will help you with suggestions for your records in Dynamics 365.

• CRM App for Outlook

  CRM App for Outlook enhancements allows you to use email templates and attach articles in your email from your Outlook.

• Mobility

  Device integration gives the CRM integration with the mobile camera and your geolocation, editable grids, new layout and views, and PowerBI integration.

• Relevance search enhancements

  You can search your documents, option sets, and lookup field. This is not just for your owned records: It will search among your shared records, as well, and you can control what columns you want to see in the search result.

• Learning Paths

  Allows you to create help windows and pop-ups for your users in order to guide them through the use of the application in the desired way, and it helps to improve the user experience with the application.

Microsoft Flow is a powerful tool to integrate your apps in real time with a codeless approach.

You can integrate your cloud applications using Microsoft Flow. This tool can also be used outside Dynamics 365.

Microsoft Dynamics 365 is not limited to big companies.

It will serve you well regardless of your company size and requirements. Check the plans for the enterprise and the business editions for Dynamics 365.

Are you still waiting?! Dynamics 365 is a rapidly growing application, and will cover your needs to run your business from A to Z.

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