Product Catalog and related enhancements: The new product catalog includes the following features: product bundles, product families, product hierarchy that leverages the new CRM 2015 hierarchal visualization feature. You can setup individual products and bundles with properties that get filled in when entering opportunities, quotes, orders, and invoices. Product relationships can also be setup to cross-sell and up-sell which then show up during quotes & orders entry. Product lifecycle has been introduced with CRM 2015 that means that you can now have products go through different stages from: draft, active, under revision and inactive. You can now also copy a product using the Clone Product feature. Until now the defaulting of price list on the opportunity, orders, and quotes was something that you had to do using javascript. Now with territory based price list, you can default the price list on transactions depending on the territory assigned to a user. Another important feature being introduced is that you can invoke a custom pricing engine using custom plugins which can be helpful for organizations who can use custom entities to track pricing rules and this new feature to invoke custom pricing on opportunities, quotes, orders and invoices
Multi-entity search: You may remember this feature as being only available on the tablet app until now but with CRM 2015 it is now available even on the web app.
The hierarchical chart view will be available out of the box for Accounts, Products, and Users but a system customizer can enable it on other 1:N relationships for all other entities, even custom entities. This feature gives you the ability to view all related information in a chart view.
CRM Basics guide for new users in Sales and Service. These are 1-page views with basic instructions on how to navigate, enter data, and search for records and other common tasks. These basics guide would be relevant even if the system is customized based on business processes because it guides to the user for some basic operations within CRM.
Quick create improvements: You can now initiate a quick create within an existing quick create form that you are working on. For Example: If you were creating an opportunity using Quick Create and if you also wanted to create a new contact then you would have to do so within a new form.
New Outlook Configuration wizard: The Outlook add-in configuration has been improved to easily add CRM organizations and manage the configurations. The configuration now also supports Multi-factor authorization to make the Outlook CRM setup more secure.
A configurable outlook and CRM synchronization between Contact and task fields, sync assigned tasks and appointment attachments.
Enhancements to Business Rules to enable If Else branching and setting default values to fields on the form. We had to depend on javascript and multiple business rules to accomplish the same but now these are built-in as standard functionality.
Calculated fields: Finally!! We had to resort to javascript, workflow, plugins to create calculated fields. Now we can create them as any custom fields and refer related or other entity fields to create the calculation.
Field Level security enhancement: After numerous request Microsoft has heard us, you can now setup field level security on other fields besides custom fields. There will still be some system fields on which you cannot setup security but most of the business-related fields should be available to setup Field Level Security.
This is not the entire list but some of the highlights of the changes coming to Dynamics CRM. There have been demos of Cortana (Digital assistant introduced with Windows Phone 8.1) working with Dynamics CRM and even other digital assistants like Siri. We will cover these and other enhancements as more information becomes available.
DAVE VORA | Senior Business Software Consultant and CRM Lead
Dave is responsible for leading KTL’s CRM consultants, assuring that our solution scoping, architecting and delivery meet and exceed customer expectations. Dave has built lasting relationships with clients by understanding their business needs and providing value by leveraging their existing resources. Along with his consulting team, he has delivered effective solutions beyond traditional CRM constraints. Dave has more than eight years of experience in implementing business software for a variety of industries including service, government, distribution, not-for-profits, and manufacturing. He graduated with a Bachelors of Science Degree in Computer Science and also a specialization in Management from the University of California at Irvine. His experience includes helping companies embrace technology to fulfill their organizational needs and creating innovative solutions using CRM, GP, Scribe and other Microsoft products.
