There are many new features in the CRM 2011 Outlook Client and here I’ll point out some related to the views within CRM.
1. Reading Pane – this is a pane that shows in the lower portion of your Outlook window and contains certain fields from the record selected in the list above. The big question to me on using the Reading Pane is real estate – your monitor and Outlook window size play a large role in this. Showing or hiding the reading pane is part of the entity configuration and can be easily toggled in the customization area.
Screenshot of the contact reading pane
Screenshot of where to turn off (or turn on) the Reading Pane
2. Tabbed views and the ability to ‘Pin’ views – the CRM 2011 client allows the users to have multiple views of an entity open in tabs. Each tab can contain a System or My (saved advanced find) view. A great feature of the new views in the Outlook client is 'Pinning’. Pinning views allows you to save views so they are always available when you log in to Outlook. To pin a view:
a. Open the desired view in a tab by clicking the tab to the right of the active tab, and select the view
b. Click the push pin and it will turn vertical
c. The Active Accounts view is now ‘pinned’. In this example the next time I log in the Active Accounts view will be there and the My Active Accounts will not.
3. Searching within views – users now have the ability to do a quick search in a particular view. This was an often requested feature with CRM 4.0. It was not evident (in that version) that the quick search at the top of a view always searched across all active records. When searching in the CRM 2011 Outlook client, the search is always being performed against that view. In the screenshot above you’ll notice the ‘Search My Active Accounts’ box. The text makes it clear that you are indeed searching that particular view.
Post written by: Matt Putnam,
UR6 is slated to remove all caching associated with pinned views. Happy pinning!
Keep in mind that pinning a view will pull down all the data within that view to the local cache stored at "%localappdata%\Microsoft\MSCRM\Client\{Org Id}False.sdf". The data will be encrypted as it is pulled down. That means the bandwidth strain is not trivial if many users pin views or if views with many records are pinned. You can observe the traffic with a client tool like Fiddler.
Hi,
Can you please let me know about links are not available in grid in outlook . like in contact grid if you have Parent Customer then without opening the contact you can go to Parent customer by Contact grid . this feature is not coming in outlook client . Is this the bug or feature missed by Microsoft Team.
Do the fields you are searching on have to be in the view? Is there a power-search where you can search over any field in the database? I have only found filters/searching to be successful when the field I am looking for is actually in one of the views. Please advise.
I definitely miss the Contextual formatting in the top 3....