In the first entry in this series, “Getting the Most Out of You CRM Online Trial – Getting Started,” we took the first step towards maximizing the effectiveness of our CRM Online Trial. Now that we are starting to familiarize ourselves with Microsoft Dynamics CRM Online by practicing some tasks we’ve learned from the Success Portal, we are ready to take the next step in our evaluation.
As the primary evaluator of our CRM Online trial, we probably want to see how our employees will interact with CRM. The trial does allow up to 25 licenses to be assigned, and we can start adding real users and inviting our employees to experience the trial. Ideally, real people in our organization would take the time to evaluate CRM Online using the modules and functions that are essential to their tasks. But, what if they are too busy to take the time to evaluate a trial? We can always put ourselves in their shoes and explore CRM Online as a typical sales, marketing, or service user.
A simple way of doing this would be to create some “dummy” users. By creating a dummy user and signing in as that user, we can examine CRM Online from the perspective of another security role. For example, if I were to sign up for a trial, I might add three users and name them “xRM Sales”, “xRM Marketing”, and “xRM Service”. We can then assign them the default security roles of Salesperson, Marketing Professional, and Customer Service Representative, respectively.
What if we need to make some changes to the organization when we’re signed in as xRM Sales? We’d have to sign out and then sign back in as the administrator. Once we finished making our changes, we’d have to sign out, and then once again sign back in as xRM Sales to see how the changes affected the dummy user. That seems like a lot of unnecessary work.
Never fear, we have created three separate security roles that copy the basic rules of each of these default security roles, except they have all of the administrator privileges. This way, we can explore the functionality of the Marketing Professional security role, yet be able to make administrative changes to the organization as needed. We’ve shared them on the xRM.com Blog SkyDrive for your usage. The file containing the security roles is called TrialSecurityRoles_1.0.zip.
To import the security roles after you’ve downloaded and saved the file, in CRM Online, navigate to the Settings> Customization> Solutions. Click Import in the toolbar and then select the file.
Once the solution is imported and we publish the customizations, we can assign these security roles to our dummy users. We can disable the dummy users once we are done evaluating CRM Online.
Hopefully, this will further assist you in getting the most out of your CRM Online trial.
In our next post, we will discuss sample data, how we can augment it, and how we can remove it to make way for our company’s real data.
Good luck and check back soon!