Microsoft Dynamics CRM Online November 2011 Service Update includes new and enhanced features that help you to increase your organization's effectiveness and productivity.

Activity Feeds

Microsoft Dynamics CRM Online Activity Feeds provide real-time notifications and quick sharing of information through short updates. They appear on your personal wall in the What's New area of the Workplace. Activity Feeds enable you to follow and learn about important activities that take place around people, accounts, contacts, leads, and anything else that you care about.

Updates can be posted manually by you, or automatically based on predefined system rules through a workflow. Activity Feeds can also be posted to by external applications through the Microsoft Dynamics CRM Online web services API. Activity Feeds expose Microsoft Office Lync real-time presence functionality so that you can initiate communication activities such as IM, phone calls, and emails.

Using Activity Feeds on Mobile Express offers users the chance to stay up to date with their organization while on the go. From mobile phones equipped with Windows Phone 7.5, users can keep in touch with colleagues by posting and commenting on each others’ pages, as well as keeping up with the latest news on the leads, contacts, accounts, and opportunities they care about.

• Download the Activity Feeds solution
• Download the mobile application for Windows Phone 7.5
• How to install or import solutions

Auditing

The auditing feature in Microsoft Dynamics CRM 2011 lets you track changes made to your business data. Use auditing to analyze the history of a particular record, view a summary of everything that changed, or to comply with regulation standards. Keep track of the changes done to a record An entry in the Microsoft Dynamics CRM Online database that stores all the information about a specific item, such as a contact. Records are like individual index cards in an index-card filing system. You can view basic information about records in a list, and you can view or change detailed information about records in a form., a field A property of an entity with a specific data type. Fields are analogous to columns in a database table. When they are added to an entity form, they are displayed as fields that correspond to their data type., or by a user. Microsoft Dynamics CRM Online automatically creates logs for the changes that are tracked. In addition to these, in Microsoft Dynamics CRM Online November 2011 Service Update, you can also track when a user has accessed Microsoft Dynamics CRM Online.

Enhanced duplicate detection processing

The duplicate detection feature in Microsoft Dynamics CRM Online November 2011 Service Update lets you specify in a duplicate-detection rule whether duplicate detection should consider null (blank) values as identical. You can also choose to detect duplicates only from active records by specifying a rule to exclude inactive records.

Enhancements to dialogs

Microsoft Dynamics CRM Online November 2011 Service Update includes the following enhancements to the existing dialog feature:

• Support for new data types. In addition to Text, Integer, and Float, the dialog feature now supports adding variables and input arguments of the following data types: Date, Datetime, and Lookup. These new data types can also be used in Prompt and Response steps of a dialog.
• Data retention. In Microsoft Dynamics CRM Online November 2011 Service Update, during a dialog session, when you navigate between the pages of the wizard, the dialog retains the data that you have entered and notifies you when the data changes.
• Support for dynamic hyperlinks. You can now include dynamic hyperlinks in a dialog to point to any related record or a record created and available at run time (during a dialog session).

Summary

The new and enhanced features in Microsoft Dynamics CRM Online November 2011 Service Update offer new levels of user productivity and collaboration. These features help you meet your specific business needs with a low total cost of ownership. Microsoft Dynamics CRM Online November 2011 Service Update delivers familiar, intelligent, and connected experiences to increase the productivity and effectiveness of people inside and outside your organization.