In the final installment in our ‘What’s new in Microsoft Dynamics CRM Online‘ series we look at Immersive Excel and Office Groups in Microsoft Dynamics CRM 2015 Update 1.
We hope you have found this 5 part series informative. Please find links to the first 4 posts below along with this week’s content.
What’s new in Microsoft Dynamics CRM Online? 2015 Update 1
- Navigation
- Office 365 Integration Features
- Theming
- Mobile App
- Immersive Excel & Office Groups
Part 4: Immersive Excel and Office Groups
Immersive Excel
Now you can use Microsoft Excel Online to do a quick analysis right from Dynamics CRM Online, eliminating the frustration, time and effort required to switch between applications. Salespeople can view their data in familiar Excel spreadsheets, perform what-if analyses and upload changes with one click, all while maintaining the sales workflow.
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What I love about this feature is that you can bulk edit records from a view and re-import it into CRM in a matter of seconds. If you are spending some time doing CRM admin, it can take some time to open, edit, close and repeat multiple records. Immersive Excel allows you to ‘export to excel‘ the view, the view will remain the same, you will still be in CRM (no local copy is downloaded) but you now have Excel functionality. You can make your changes (or create new records) and ‘Save to CRM’ which re-imports the data, this import takes about a minute or so (depending on the amount of data). A quick ‘refresh’ of the data will show you the new changes. Brilliant time saver!
To Access this new functionality you will need to meet the following requirements:
- CRM Online (sadly no news at this point if/when this will come to CRM On Premise)
- O365 License required to access Excel Online
- Export to Excel Security Role Privilege
- Available in the Web Client only
Any analysis you do i.e. SUM/Count functions for quick analysis in the Excel will not be imported and is only stored temporarily.
Office Groups
There have been situations where collaboration has been needed on an Opportunity that involve non-CRM people e.g. technical or finance people. Microsoft have used features from Office 365 to create Office Groups. This is an area where teams can work together and share information, it allows users to share conversations and meetings from Outlook, documents from OneDrive and notes from OneNote. This data can now be integrated to Dynamics CRM and visible for CRM users.
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The best use cases are when widespread collaboration is required. For example a large opportunity requiring input from several people who may not have access to CRM. Above is an example of a CRM opportunity that needs input/documents and notes from other non-CRM users.
Thanks for reading our five part series ‘What’s new in Microsoft Dynamics CRM Online? 2015 Update 1‘. Links to the first 4 posts are available at the top of the page. For more information about Microsoft Dynamics CRM 2015 please get in touch.
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