CRM 2011 Online: Experience UR12, new UI
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Thursday, January 24, 2013 3:58 PM
Hello Forum
I am a little bit confused about UR 12 in Online... How is your experience? Mine is quite bad, no significant improvements, just disadvantages like:
- no longer the ribbon
- no switch back from the standard form the new ones
- if upgraded, all fields are shuffled or gone (new customizing of the form)
- color contrast very poor
- opportunity process not user friendly and too many textfields
- opportunity process flow not self explaining
- if you don't use social stuff, the form is overfilled with that "empty" space if not used....That my quick things I recognized and find negative!
Please tell me your experience, thanks!
- Changed Type JLattimerMicrosoft Community Contributor, Moderator Thursday, January 24, 2013 5:53 PM
All Replies
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Thursday, January 24, 2013 9:28 PMModerator
I think you are not alone in your views.
The new type of form is only used for some entities. You can switch to the previous form style by clicking on "..." at the top of the form and then click Switch to Classic. Then select the Information form instead of the form that has the same name as the entity.
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Thursday, January 24, 2013 9:43 PM
I had mainly the same "initial" experience.. but there are some very very interesting options in the new process forms.. such as the inline editing of child records. On account level to create and relate a new contact.. you dont need to open an empty contact record and fill it out and click Save.. Now you can create a contact directly from the parent account form. (this only works for certain custom entities.
I havent checked it out yet.. but if this is the case for orders and orderlines etc.. Wow.. this will bring a huge benefit to how salespersonel are able to create orders, offers etc... as it will cut the time to fill out an order to 1/3.
Rune Daub Senior Consultant - Dynateam CRM http://www.xrmmanagement.com
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Thursday, January 24, 2013 9:45 PM
I think the new process forms with the huge "activity area" in the middle will make alot more sence once the Yammer integration gets here...
CRM consultants need to get used to.. CRM is no longer just CRM.. it is a company wide solution that needs to be integrated to ERP systems, websites, portals and now also intranets.
Rune Daub Senior Consultant - Dynateam CRM http://www.xrmmanagement.com
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Friday, January 25, 2013 6:59 AM
Hello
Thanks for your reply!
@Feridun: And how you go back from classic to new? The form link has gone...
@Rune: I have to check those features
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Friday, January 25, 2013 7:01 AMModerator
Try this, open a contact. Change to the Contact form (instead of information). Save & Close the contact and then open it. For me, this opens in the new UI.
Repeat for other entities.
If you find a quicker way do let me know.
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Friday, January 25, 2013 7:35 AMThanks Feridun. I know that way, but don't want to reopen... Seems to be that they missed the "backwards" button... :-(
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Sunday, January 27, 2013 11:21 AM
Rune, in which form/subgrid did you find the inline quick create form for adding new contact records? The only place I've seen the inline editing of related record fields is the built-in subgrids on opportunity, where you can edit the role field of a stakeholder inline after you've linked an existing record. The case record does have the ability to quick create new contacts, though. (I've included this in my "What's New in Microsoft Dynamics CRM Polaris Release" slides, alongside other observations on the new UI).
I agree that once the inline editing of related records has been fully introduced into Dynamics CRM, this could potentially be a huge improvement in usability for the order entry process. Unfortunately the experience in the Polaris version is quite far from this goal still, as inline editing is not available on custom subgrids. On the new opportunity Flow form the sections for opportunity products are actually hidden by default, as they do not work well at all with the new UI yet. Adding line items is done through the same popup windows as before, but as an added limitation, there's no way to actually update the total amount of the opportunity to reflect the figures entered into opportunity products. The command bar that has replaced the ribbon doesn't have a "recalculate" button, so now you need to either close & re-open the opportunity form to see the total, or update an arbitrary field on the opportunity form and get the system to refresh the values once the auto save is triggered.
There's a lot to like about the new UI, but be very careful with the current limitations and pitfalls before suggesting an existing customer to migrate into using these new forms. A lot work remains to be done still by the CRM product team, but hopefully the Orion release will deliver a more complete feature set.
Jukka Niiranen - My blog: Surviving CRM - Follow @jukkan on Twitter
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Sunday, January 27, 2013 5:04 PM
What is even worse with the new grids is that I can't actually create a Contact from an Account, I can only add an existing Contact, and in the lookup I can choose to create a New one. This means there is no connection between the new Contact and the Account so I don't get any fields mapped at all.
I can't see any obvious way to create a new Contact which copies (for example) the address fields from the parent Account. It seems as if the parameter for "CreateFromID" which used to be passed in the URL when creating a new Contact is simply not there.
Please vote for this issue on Connect here:
https://connect.microsoft.com/dynamicssuggestions/feedback/details/777618/field-mapping-from-account-to-new-contact-cannot-be-used-in-ur12-polaris-releaseOf course, I refer to it as a grid, although it has none of the most useful features - I cannot choose a view, change the sort order or customise what columns appear here.
@Jukka - also bear in mind that the inline editing of stakeholders, sales / pursuit team etc on Opportunities is stored as Connections, and the edit just changes the Role on the Connection, it does not update the Contact record itself.
Right now there is no way I could suggest a customer upgrades to this new UI, there is far too much of a learning curve, and plenty of bugs and/or major changes to functionality to trip them up. Bad luck to any new customers who sign up without being given a choice, or to prospects who sign up for a trial and can't get things to work.
Hope this helps.
Adam Vero, Microsoft Certified Trainer | Microsoft Community Contributor 2011
Blog: Getting IT Right -
Sunday, January 27, 2013 5:34 PMAdam, the inability of adding related records for a parent in any sensible way is one of the biggest issues with Polaris (apart from architectural things like the lack of form scripts support). I've logged this as a Connect item already during the Polaris preview program and will definitely encourage everyone to go and vote your entry on the public CRM suggestions site.
I'm quite puzzled by why such a limitation has been introduced into a CRM platform that by definition is all about managing the relationships between records. I'm sure most of us have always taught the users to go and add new records from the parent record form instead of the main window, as this has been the best way to ensure the correct records are linked and that relationship attributes are inherited from parent to child. With Polaris we should now go and tell them to forget about all that, as the path has been either broken (only related records with subgrids can be added) or narrowed down significantly (no inheritance of data).
I can only guess that the usability research MS carries out has indicated that users prefer to just type ahead the company name for a new contact record and select a suggested entry from the list of matching options presented to them. However, I'd say such an assumption is flawed due to the complexity of real world customer data and only really works in a happy path scenario that ignores common data integrity and quality issues that A) typically exist in the system prior to the data entry and B) are only going to get worse as a result of this new data entry UI.Jukka Niiranen - My blog: Surviving CRM - Follow @jukkan on Twitter
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Sunday, January 27, 2013 5:55 PM
I just discovered another area where the "broken relationships" feature of Polaris affects data integrity & usability. When using the process form of an opportunity, creating a new quote for the opportunity does not bring along the opportunity products. Before saving the quote for the first time you do still see the correct total amount on the form, as the fields appear to inherit from the parent opportunity to the quote. However, once you actually create the new record in the database by saving it, everything is back to zero/null (except the discount), because no quote products are created.
Sure, there's a workaround for this. The user can click the Get Products button on the Quote form ribbon (luckily this entity still has it) to retrieve the missing line items from the opportunity. In practice I would recommend not to use the new process forms if the customer's sales process involves working with products and prices prior to creating a quote record.
Jukka Niiranen - My blog: Surviving CRM - Follow @jukkan on Twitter
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Sunday, January 27, 2013 6:12 PM
"I'm sure most of us have always taught the users to go and add new records from the parent record form instead of the main window"
- absolutely! This is "using CRM properly and efficiently 101" as far as I have ever taught it!
I thought I could do some useful research to see if there had been any change / upgrade / downgrade to the way Activities roll up to Accounts via sub-Contacts, Opportunities and so on but I am struggling to do this either without creating every Activity from the "home" screen, and then fill in all the fields to link it to activity parties and "Regarding". If I create a phone call on an Opportunity form, for example, it assumes I want to have it completed - so I can't add a phone call there to remind me to follow up on something, I can only use it to record what I already did. "Let's make CRM seem like a chore and an overhead for sales people and not give them any ability to take advantage of it to plan their workload and make sure they don't forget those vital calls".
Activities in the 'grid'*only show the Description, not the subject, which is hopeless for many implementations I have worked on. Usually users fill in the subject when they create a planned activity as a reminder roughly what it is about, and fill in the description when they complete it as a record of what happened. eg phone call to John "Ask if board meeting came to a decision on our proposal". Description added later to add notes from that phone call. Automation to build standard reminder or courtesy follow-up calls almost always use the subject rather than description to say what the call is about.
Also found an odd behaviour of Opportunities - if you set new Contact field only, then "Potential Customer Contact" is used and set to same value. If you set new "Account" field, then "Potential Customer Account" is set, regardless of whether Contact is set or not. So a B2B customer who currently uses a model where Potential Customer is always set to the Contact who is the decision maker will find their new Opportunities do not fit this model. (they might have also had a second field for "Customer Account", but that does not play a part in activity roll-ups)
This means advanced finds, saved views, dashboards and reports they have built could be very badly broken, and will not be easy to fix to include all old and new Opportunities correctly (you can't do an OR around two joins using FetchXML). Do we really need to add a workflow to switch the Customer back to the Contact? And will this even work and not get broken again?
It also means that if I add a Task against the Opportunity it will not show up in the activity roll up for the Contact, ever, and nor will the Opp Close activity when I close the Opp. So the Contact no longer shows a complete history of interaction with them. And when Activities do show up, they are displayed in Created On order (it seems), and display the Modified On date/time. They do not show the Due Date at all, just a grey highlight if already completed. So incomplete activities are not displayed in the Order they need to be done, you would need to open every single one to figure out what needs doing and when - I though this UI was supposed to need fewer new windows to be opened?
I'm totally losing patience with it now. I can't see anything remotely beneficial yet which could possibly outweigh the amount of functionality which is broken or badly thought out. I need a couple of weeks off normal work just to figure out all the things which might not work if one of my clients were to upgrade and how they should work round them or build shims to fix them up. Saving grace is that they only pushed the cross-browser front end and the database schema changes, and held back on publishing the new forms as an "option", otherwise there would be mutiny right now.
*we need a better word for these malformed widgets which are not really grids - I propose "panes". Especially because it sounds like "pains", which is what they are
Hope this helps.
Adam Vero, Microsoft Certified Trainer | Microsoft Community Contributor 2011
Blog: Getting IT Right -
Monday, January 28, 2013 2:36 PM
I lost it as well, Adam. The entity relationship side of this is total Codswallop.
Apart from the issues highlighted above I cannot believe there is no option to add a new email activity to a case or opportunity with the new Flow UI (or should that be Flawed UI?)
It is probably some clever MS engineer who thinks that we are all so 'social' now that no-one uses email anymore.
Cozy
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Wednesday, January 30, 2013 11:20 AM
The new UI feels really good at first sight, but then I saw there is no Ribbon anymore! Uh!!!
I have the same interrogations as Cozy, we used to add leads to Marketing List by using the ribbon button. I'm not sure how to do this now.
Basically this new UI adds 2 more clicks
Click on "..."
Click on "Switch to Classic"
Then you can start to work !
Consultant at BSE Consulting Korea www.bse-c.co.kr
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Monday, February 04, 2013 7:01 PMi'm not sure why these are missing from the new UI
Navigation to Next/Previous Record - User have to close current record and open the another record on the list view
Save/Close Button - User have to click X on windows or tab to close new related record
Remove Record from Associate List View (Only Delete) - User will accidentaly delete record instead remove a contact change jobs shouldn't be remove from the system
No symbol to indicate (Dropdown/Toggle/Text only for Lookup) - User would edit toggle by accident
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Thursday, February 07, 2013 5:03 AMOpen form in classic mode ->select entity name instead of "information" as form type in left navigation pane header for eg. for case form choose "case" in place of "information". save from next time onwards form will open in new mode and not the old classic mode
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Thursday, February 07, 2013 8:29 AM
@Dinesh I think what you are saying is basically right, but we need to be careful about mixing up terms here. "Classic" is a way of displaying new forms, it does not refer to "old" / "legacy" forms.
There are new "flow UI" forms which have the entity name as the name of the form. You can view these in full mode, or in "cassic form" mode, which shows the Ribbon and full left navigation, supports scripts etc, but the layout of the form area remains that of the new form although individual components are shown in the old way eg inline grids; boxes round fields; lookups, picklists and bit fields showing display 'hints' as to how to use them.
"Switch to "Classic" is temporary, just like using the "edit" button on Read-Optimised forms was. When you close a record, next time you open you get the same form (a new one) and it defaults to full "flow UI" mode again.
While in Classic 'mode' you can change forms to an old form, called "Information" by default. When you next open a record of this entity, it opens that form, which by definition is not a flow UI one. You can change forms back to the <entity name> one, close and re-open to get back to "flow" style.
Hope this helps.
Adam Vero, Microsoft Certified Trainer | Microsoft Community Contributor 2011
Blog: Getting IT Right -
Thursday, February 07, 2013 10:13 AM
Just a quick tip for everyone that doesn't really feel like using the new forms: You can disable them by removing the assigned security roles of the form.
Go to the settings area and custimize the system. Select one of the following entities that have new forms: Lead, Account, Contact, Opportunity or Case and check the forms section. The new forms have the same name as the entity. Select the tickbox in front of the form and click on "assign security roles".
Deselect the default option "Display to everyone" and select "Display only to these selected security roles". Uncheck all roles and also the tickbox and the bottom "Enabled for fallback".
Publish the customizations and there you go, you're no longer presented with the new forms.
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Thursday, February 07, 2013 10:54 AMOne piece of news revealed by the Dynamics CRM product team at the eXtreme CRM 2013 event in Rome perhaps explains why operating between the different forms is so cumbersome in Polaris: it is only a temporary solution, since starting from the Orion release there will be only "flow" forms available for all entities. No more "switch to Classic" since everything will be rendered in the new style. The Ribbon will be gone, but Ribbon XML will remain the way to customize the new Command Bar. How this works out in practice is something we'll find out once more details of Orion become available.
Jukka Niiranen - My blog: Surviving CRM - Follow @jukkan on Twitter
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Friday, February 08, 2013 2:06 PM
I really don't know why they delete the ribbon. It's good to try making something simple but they shouldn't be confused between simple and simplistic... if they miss 80% of the good stuff in the new design, what's the point ? They could hide the ribbon for simple usage, but they should provide the possibility to unhide it for users who have more complex needs with the CRM. Like they do for the developers tab in Excel for example, it's hidden by default but advanced users can unhide it if necessary.
Also I wonder what they are going to do with the lead/opportunities entities. The default sales pipeline is only based on opportunities. But they give a sales stage named "Qualify", though in the sample scenario they give us Lead at "Qualify stage", after pressing on the qualify button it will become an opportunity at "Develop stage". So the sales pipeline graph will always be empty for the "Qualify stage" since the data is in the lead entity.
@Jukka thank you for the details about eXtreme CRM 2013. After reading you I feel that they were maybe too optimistic with the schedule of Polaris and maybe they haven't done all they wanted so they will finish the work for Orion update. Polaris feels like a beta version at the moment.
Anyway we have to admit that Polaris update was a huge one.
Consultant at BSE Consulting Korea www.bse-c.co.kr
- Edited by Emile.Korea Friday, February 08, 2013 2:06 PM
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Friday, February 22, 2013 2:02 PM
Practically every CRM implementation I have seen uses a customised ribbon along with JavaScript OnLoad/OnChange/OnSave. Changing this operation, on a whim (no consultation with 3rd parties who actually deliver CRM on behalf of MS), as a "minor" product enhancement rather an major version change seems suicidal to me. There are thousands of CRM implementations out there that rely on the Ribbon, JavaScript and the forms looking the way they do. We spend a huge amount of time designing forms to meet business requirements and can't have MS come along and mess this up without due consideration to how people are using them.
Sure, Flow UI might look good for a simple sales process, but we have all bitten the CRM is now xRM and have made CRM an application platform. Flow UI doesn't work in many of these cases - we have to design a UI that works for the business, not have a UI forced on us by some marketing whim of MS.
Vote against this now!
This has to be an optional change, not mandatory.
Otherwise people will be jumping ship to another well known CRM supplier!
As it stands there is very little you can do with the current UI - open an Account or Contact form & you can't send them an email, add to marketing list, assign, share, run workflow or dialog, run report, etc. Click in a subgrid and you don't get any commands there either. The only place you can actually do any processing other than save data is from the main grid views where the standard ribbon remains. So I hope that the Ribbon will resurface in the Flow UI forms - it would be strange to have the Ribbon on grids but not on the forms.
I find it strange that MS released the new UI in full knowledge that there is no JavaScript support in the new forms yet practically all CRM implementations rely upon it.
This whole fascination with Metro, Tiles, no colour, no graphics, no styling, its just crazy. Its like going back 20 years to dumb terminals. Have MS forgotten what the G in GUI is all about? Users need the styling clues to help navigate around a screen, to know which fields they can type in and which are read only. These new forms are just full of white space, they are definitely not "Dynamic", just plain boring.
- Edited by Caratacus Friday, February 22, 2013 2:26 PM
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Wednesday, March 20, 2013 12:05 AM
Could not agree more. Both web and Outlook versions yecch. Yes, there are some fixes in this thread but, overall, very poor attempt at a UI. All show, minimal functional improvment. I paid for customizations that are now wiped out. Set up workflows and dialogs that I have to go to "Classic View" (each time!) to run and I, too, miss the ribbon. How do I "Add" Email or schedule an appointment in contact record mode?
I am shopping for better...
