How to streamline your Microsoft CRM 1.2 data

Updated: March 17, 2005

By Kelly Dengler

With Microsoft CRM, you can enter customer relationship management (CRM) data according to your organization’s data-formatting preferences. By standardizing data formats, your organization can define data entry styles that are unique to your business, increasing report comprehension and improving search results.

For example, if your organization deals only with domestic partners, sellers, and buyers, users do not need to insert country codes when they enter telephone numbers. However, if your organization deals with international corporations, you probably need users to enter country codes, province names, and postal codes.

This article describes two best practices for data entry in Microsoft CRM 1.2:

•	Creating and using a style guide
•	Customizing data entry fields in Microsoft CRM

Create a style guide

One way to establish standards for everyone in your organization who uses Microsoft CRM is to create a style guide. Think of the style guide as a compilation of best practices for entering, searching, and sorting data at your organization.

In the style guide, define procedures and formats appropriate for your organization’s needs. Your style guide should include instructions for formatting common data-entry fields, preferred number formats, and a glossary of frequently used words and phrases. Provide examples with format and procedure standards to aid comprehension.

The style guide should be easy to access and read, and easy for appointed users to make additions or modifications to. When you create the style guide, discuss using custom required fields with your system administrator. Using required fields, discussed later in this article, is another way to make sure that users enter all pertinent data for each record type.

Establish standards

Establish standard data formats for fields, especially fields that contain number formats, such as addresses, telephone numbers, and postal codes.

Give thought to the type of customers or vendors that your organization contacts regularly. If your organization regularly deals with international companies, include the country code in your format standard for telephone numbers.

Note When you decide what type of format to use, remember that the formatting should be both easy to enter and easy to read. For example, a telephone number without parentheses or hyphens is easy to enter, but it is not easy to read. Therefore, this format isn't ideal.

Here are some examples of different data entry formats that can become inconsistent when there is no standard for users to follow:

Telephone number

1-425-555-0100

1 (425) 555-0105

425-555-0110

State or province

Cal

California

Postal code

00000

00000-0000

List price

00.00

Owner

Karen Archer

someone@microsoft.com

Maintain the style guide

Your style guide should be a practical and dynamic document that changes with your business needs. To test whether the style guide is practical, apply the formatting styles, rules, and workflow processes to your daily business practices. Figure out what works well and what needs improvement, and then update the style guide accordingly.

Plan a meeting with your staff to discuss your style guide topics, formats, and workflow processes. Determine which reports your team uses the most. What data is in the report? Is the report easy to read, filter, and sort? Identify existing problem areas with the information and resolve the issues in the style guide.

Plan quarterly or bi-annual meetings to discuss and update the style guide. Ask the following questions:

•	Are there formats that are too difficult to enter?
•	Is all the data available when you run reports?
•	Can you easily identify what you are looking for in the report?
•	Does the report generate all the information that you need?

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Make fields required

Another way you can establish data-entry standards is to customize Microsoft CRM for the needs of your organization—for example, by changing nonrequired fields in a form to required fields. To determine the data that is most useful to your organization, run several types of reports, such as Account List by City, Case Activity, and Notes.

Ask the following questions when you examine the reports:

•	Is the data easy to read?
•	Is all the data you want on the report?
•	Is there too much data on the report?
•	Is the formatting easy to decipher?

When you have established which data fields and entities are most important to your reporting methodology, make sure that you get the correct data from your reports by making the fields that are often left blank in reports required fields.

To customize fields on a form, follow these steps:

1.	On the Home page, click the Settings tab.
2.	On the Settings page, click System Customization.
3.	From the Record Type Management list, click the type of record you want to customize.
4.	Under Common Tasks, click Customize Form.
5.	Click the field you want to make a required field. The selected field border appears as a solid green line.
6.	Under Common Tasks, click Change Properties.
7.	Click the Schema tab, and from the Required Level list, click Business Required.
8.	Click OK.
9.	To make more fields on this form required fields, follow steps 5 through 8.
10.	To save changes and close the dialog box, click Save and Close.

Important After you complete your customizations, perform the procedures outlined in the following "Publish Customizations with Deployment Manager" section to make sure that you save your changes to the database and publish them in Microsoft CRM.

Publish customizations with Deployment Manager

You must publish your customizations with Deployment Manager and reset Microsoft Internet Information Services (IIS) to ensure that your changes are saved to the database and appear in Microsoft CRM.

To publish your customizations, follow these steps:

1.	After you complete your customizations, connect to the server on which Microsoft CRM resides.
2.	Click Start, point to Programs, point to Microsoft CRM, and then click Deployment Manager.
3.	In Deployment Manager, right-click the Deployment Manager node, point to All Tasks, and then click Publish Customization.
4.	In the Publish Objects dialog box, select the check box for the form you customized, and then click Next.
5.	In the Publish to Web Servers dialog box, click Add.
6.	In the Select Web Servers dialog box, select the Web servers to which you want to publish, and then click Add. Note All the Web servers must be using the same database.
7.	Click Finish.
8.	In the Status dialog box, click OK.

After you publish the customized form, you must reset IIS to see your changes. Here’s how you reset IIS:

1.	Click Start, and then click Run.
2.	In the Open box, type IISReset, and then click OK.

You can customize Microsoft CRM while other users are working in the program. However, users may experience an interruption while the changes are published and IIS resets.

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