Resco Mobile CRM – How to …

I have blogged about Resco Mobile CRM earlier. Here are some helpful ways and tricks how you can improve your Resco Mobile CRM project:

Mobile project

Situation: As we have different kind of projects; e.g. more sales oriented app and more service oriented app, I am developing two mobile projects, with customizations depending on the kind of app. But how can you choose which one of the mobile projects will be shown on the app when you open it?

Answer: Mobile projects are distributed to users according to the user’s security roles.  So in your case you can divide the users into “sales” security role and “service” security role and create mobile projects for each security role.

Fields

Situation: When developing in the CRM environment and the Woordford environment, I sometimes create new fields in the CRM environment. These are not synchronized to the woordford program and I need to restart it to see my new fields. Am I missing something or is this the only way to see the changes?

Answer: Once you add a field in the CRM environment, it’s required to restart the Woodford so it can read the new schemes. Just a little warning, before you remove any fields in the CRM, please disable them from Woodford and remove them from any views and forms where they are used.

Activity Feeds

Step 1: Enable your activity feed in your project

Step 2: Add your acitivity feed to your home page, save and publish.

Barcode scanning

Step 1: make a new field in CRM (single line)

Step 2: make your new field available in CRM

Step 3: Set the format of the new field to barcode

Step 4: Add it to the form, save and publish

Online VS offline mode

Online mode: you work with real data on the Dynamics CRM server. To be able to work in the online mode, you need to have connection to the internet (duh!).

Offline mode: you work with data downloaded to the local database in the device’s memory. You can define which data you want to have available offline by using Sync filters. When you make connection to the internet, the local database will be synchronized with the Dynamics CRM Server.

Automatic synchronization

Check out Resco’s blog post: How to set up automatic synchronization in Resco’s mobile CRM client for Dynamics CRM

Workflows

Situation: I have set up a workflows on the server; can they be active in the app as well?

Answer: Not in a classical sense. Because Mobile CRM app is able to work in offline mode, all business logic needs to be also implemented into the app or you can feed the app the inputs, sync it with Dynamics CRM, let the workflow run on the server itself and receive the results after another sync.

Colour code appointments

Step 1: Open a Mobile Project in Woodford –> Go to section Calendar –> click on the calendar item –> go to Rules tab, select appointments

Step 2: Click on the Define Color button. A new window will open, in which you’ll be able to create rules that will specify the color for different entities.

Step 3: Start adding conditions (In the condition, specify the name of the entity), then add a step ‘Color’ and assign a color to it. 

Remark 1: Use the entity name, not the display name. I ran across an issue with service activities, as I defined the name as “Service Activity” insead of “ServiceAppointment”.

Remark 2: The colors need to be in ARGB format (8 hexadecimal digits : 2 digits for the Alpha channel + 6 digits hex value for RGB ).

Remark 3: Make sure that the field, that is used in the rule, is available on the View. It does not have to be placed on the View, it needs to be available. If it is not, add it using the Select Fields option.

Remark 4: Specify a color for the “not specified”-option.

Adding pictures to a record (e.g. a service activity)

Situation: For a Service activity, we would like to be able to take pictures of the activity which has been mode (e.g. a reparation of a machine).  I have added the Media Tab for “capturing photo’s”, but this allows for only 1 photo to be taken. Do you need to add more tabs for more photo’s or is there another way?

Answer: In the note tab (media tab) you need to add a new Note to which you can add another photo. 1 note = 1 photo. Or you can add the notes list, which allows to make multiple notes (and add multiple photos).

Free vs Paid version

This table should explain most of the differences:

An administrator will be able to add/enable/disable users + assign licenses to them in the Woodford solution.

Geocoding

The Woodford user manual gives quit an easy explanation on how to geocode your records (e.g. accounts). But there are a few things which you should mind.

First of all, you need a Bing Map Key, it is not important which one, but you’ll need one nonetheless (I high marked it in green). It is because at this moment the Bing Maps at this moment is the service most open for this kind of activity, other services charge way too much money for this.

Second, There is a limit on the number of requests according to the Bing key you use. If it is the free one, there is a limit to 10 000 requests per 24 hours. So use the Geocoding functionality in multiple transactions.

Third, after geocoding, it will take a while if you open up the map in the Resco app, before the coordinates are loaded and the record locations are shown.

Fourth, if you receive errors, you’re in it for the long run:

Errors like these can have different causes, you’ll need to dig in the error log, but before you do that, make sure you check if your Bing Map Key is still valid (TIP!). Further cause might be a bad address in CRM (e.g. country abbreviation instead of full country name).

Routeplanning

After geocoding, you can use the routeplanner to navigate towards the records you just geocoded. Route planning at this moment is only done through an action button that calls a query to google maps and opens a browser window – to activate it you have to go to the address tab (the tab needs to be named address tab and needs to be on the Edit Form, not on the Contact Information Form) and there tap on the action button (forms have action buttons on top right; save button, the three-line button which shows other actions to perform) and choose “ Navigate To” (Android devices show a google map, iOs devices show Apple maps). As the starting position it will chose the location of the device according to the GPS and the destination would be the GPS address from the record.

Note: there are no other “route planning” features in the app yet than this (and the already existing feature cannot be modified in any way).

Adding a digital signature to your form

I could tell how you should do this, but Mark Horrocks has explained this perfectly in his blog post: Resco MobileCRM – Adding a Digital Signature to Forms