What features do you think should be added to CRM? – or what long-time feature needs to get a “little work done” to bring it up to speed? – Fortunately there’s a great way to feed that information directly into the CRM Product team.
Microsoft Connect ( is one of the primary channels for submitting and weighing in on product feedback / suggestions. – In fact, every suggestion gets logged into their bug/triage system to be tracked and considered for future releases.
Microsoft Connect allows you to search for existing suggestions for product changes/enhancements and ‘vote-up’ the ones you find helpful (and I suppose vote down the ones you think would detract from the product – although thankfully I don’t see much of that.) –
Occasionally when I’ve had a thought/suggestion, I’ve searched for it and found an existing solution; I’ll vote and also add comments describing exactly how this would help my customers.
Of course, the number of votes isn’t the final answer on what gets into the product, but when we’re meeting with the CRM Product Management team, we often hear how they weigh in on Connect feedback as they are allocating development time/effort for the next revision of CRM. (With a limited amount of time/money, they have to prioritize their resources – and this is one of the factors in that process.)
You may see people throwing suggestions into their twitter stream asking for votes. a few days ago I sent a request for votes on this feedback item:
If you click on that and you get a “Page Not Found” error – Like this:
That’s just an indication that your windows live id is not registered with the Connect site. – Fortunately the sign up process isn’t intuitive, so I thought I’d step through it and make lots of screenshots.
The instructions after the break
Registering for Connect
1. Click on the link at the bottom of the Page Not Found message – or just go to and click ‘Sign-In”
2. Then enter your Windows Live ID username and password in the sign-in page:
3. Accept the Connect Registration – (I’m not really sure what rights to your first-born you’re signing over to Microsoft, but I’m sure it’s completely benevolent.)
4. Now Create a Public Identity – This is the name that appears by your contributions and in your profile on Connect. (For the regular profile I use, I created my display name as “Scott Sewell, Customer Effective” – But since I can’t re-register with the same username, I chose something subtly different (“Scott Boom-Boom Sewell” for this demonstration registration.)
5. Fill out your name / info and complete the registration form.
6. Now you’re registered on Connect – but you still need to “Join” the Dynamics CRM program. So Search for Dynamics CRM in the product form
7. Then click “Join”
8. There will be a small delay while they run a background check against any known terrorists or mattress-tag removers and you’ll then be welcomed into the program. – Click “FeedBack”
9. This gives you a dashboard of current suggestions along with their vote tallies.
10. To ensure that you’ve got the process working correctly, go ahead and search for my name: “Scott Sewell” and you’ll see a list of feedback items I’ve submitted.
11. Open any one of them and click the Green up arrow. – See how fun that is?
You can then click on my name and again see the list of all the items I’ve submitted – go ahead and vote for them all – only a few of them are in support of any type of nefarious plan.
12. Then Search for Joel Lindstrom – and vote for his feedback – it’s even better than mine.
Post by: Scott Sewell,
