In an earlier blog posting I discussed what CRM Accelerators were and highlighted a few of the free offerings from Microsoft. In this post, I want to expand upon the Notification Accelerator with a step by step guide for an end-user. As you’ll see, the process is very simple, and the results are fantastic.
Before getting into the steps, its worth mentioning a little bit about what the accelerator is all about. As the name suggestions, it will give CRM users notifications of particular items in CRM. This runs off RSS Feeds, similar to many news or blog websites on the internet today; these can be managed in a web browser, in dedicated RSS reader applications or even in desktop gadgets for Windows, for instance. There is certainly a great deal of flexibility with this product in viewing data outside of the CRM website, much of which may be useful to you and your organization.
*Note: The Accelerator will still take CRM security into consideration so only data which you can view in CRM will be visible in the RSS feed
Lets get started
- First, ensure you have a CRM view already created in whichever entity you are looking to see data. (i.e. My Open Leads in the Leads entity)
- On the top menu of CRM, select RSS and click Choose Subscription
- This will open a dialog box allowing you to select the Entity and View (in our case, Lead and My Open Leads, respectively)
- Finally, click the RSS red icon to the right. This will open a new web browser page with the RSS feeds displayed within
At this point you can do several things
- Highlight and copy the internet address and keep it handy
- Depending on the application, you’ll need to paste this address in order to see your data
One of the advantages to using Internet Explorer as your viewer, is the ability to change the sort order of the records and to easily search the data. This can be done in most RSS readers as well. As I mentioned above there is a RSS Reader windows gadget if you’d like to have the data right on your desktop. And of course, as with all RSS Feeds, they are always updating so clicking the refresh button (depending on application) will give you the most up to date results.
Further customization is possible if your organization has custom attributes in CRM. Simply add them to your view in CRM and then run through the steps above to have them included as well.
I encourage people to try this product as it is free and allows users to step away from being so tied down to the CRM website and still retrieve their data. Please be sure to check out for additional Accelerators as well as if your organization would like assistance for this or any CRM or Dynamics related product.
Posted By ERT Group -
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