To discourage users from sending unsolicited bulk messages, Exchange Online has restrictions that prevent users and applications from sending large volumes of email. Customers who send a lot of e-mails will need to understand the limits to how many messages can be sent from a single account in a period of time in the different Office 365 plans.
The recipient rate limit applies to messages sent to recipients inside and outside your organization. After the limit has been reached, messages can’t be sent from the mailbox until the number of recipients that were sent messages in the past 24 hours drops below the limit. Multiple messages sent to the same recipient are counted separately. For example, if a user sends 10 messages to the same recipient in a 24-hour period, these 10 messages count as 10 recipients towards the recipient rate limit.
The upper limit of the recipient rate has been one of intense discussions since Office 365 first launched. This month the limit (more or less quitely) was raised from 1,500 to 10,000 emails per day (P1 as well as E plans)
See also
Soon we will release the new CRM Online - also known as the Microsoft Dynamics CRM December 2012 Service Update. The release will feature lots of exciting news in the feature set, user interface and the Software Developer Kit (e.g new bulk data upload API).
To learn more about the Microsoft Dynamics CRM December 2012 Service Update Microsoft partners can now
Read more and sign-up here - link
Live Webcast
Microsoft Dynamics CRM December 2012 Service Update Preview
When: December 4,11,18 2012 and January 8 2013)
What: No compromise cloud-based, cross-platform, social intelligent CRM application—coming to a device near you! This 30 min. webcast outlines the next set of Microsoft Dynamics CRM innovation to be released in the December 2012 service update. This continues our journey of rapid innovation with Microsoft Dynamics CRM addresses customer demands and aligns with industry trends.
Webcast Topic include:
On Demand Webcasts
Microsoft Partners with access to PartnerSource can access the launch page here, If you are not a Microsoft partner you can read more about the upcoming release here
Are you an Office 365 customer or partner? Then I'm sure CRM Online will be a plus for your organisation. See for yourself. Try for your self.
The unified offering of Microsoft Office 365 with Microsoft Dynamics CRM Online combines familiar Microsoft Office applications with a powerful customer relationship management solution accessed over the Internet to
In a newly published trial guide we demonstrate how to setup and leverage the integration between Microsoft Office 365 and Microsoft Dynamics CRM Online to improve office collaboration, staff productivity, and make your organization more agile.
The guide is intended for administrators and technical decision makers in your company who want to gain experience with Microsoft Dynamics CRM and Office 365 to evaluate better their benefits for your company. You can create up to 25 user accounts for other decision makers in your company who want to experience Microsoft Dynamics CRM Online.
Download the guide here
Process Control Customization Tool
In the upcoming December 2012 Service Update of CRM Online, the new forms include default predefined processes for sales and service. These processes are surfaced through the Process Control, commonly referred to as the Sales Process or Service Process control, which appears on the Lead, Opportunity, and Case entity forms just below the header.
The Process Control is provided as a guide to suggest certain actions to the user to keep the sales or case record on target towards completion. In the sales entities, a new option set attribute called SalesStage stores the current stage of the lead or opportunity record. The stage attributes are populated automatically as the user advances through the stages of the record, and do not appear directly on the form
You can use these processes as is or you can customize them to include the stages and steps that meet your needs. The tool used to edit the process is referred to as the Process Control Customization Tool. To access the Process Control Customization Tool, follow the steps below:
The Process Control Customization Tool provides the following capabilities:
Changes to stages or steps will appear in all existing and newly created records.
To Rename Stages or Steps, open the Process Control Customization Tool -> Click on the name of the Stage or Step you want to rename -> Type a new name and then click OK to save your changes.
To Add a Stage, open the Process Control Customization Tool -> Click the + button next to the word STAGES. A new stage is added and appears as the first stage in the process. See Reorder Stages or Steps (below) for information on how to reorder Stages -> Type a name for the new stage -> After you add any necessary Steps, click OK. At least one Step is required to save the new Stage.
To Add a new Step to a Stage, open the Process Control Customization Tool -> Select the Stage where you would like to add the Step -> Click the + button next to STEPS. A new Step is added and appears as the first Step in the selected Stage. See Reorder Stages or Steps (below) for information on how to reorder Steps -> Type a name for the Step -> Select a Field to associate with the Step and then click OK.
Most default Steps are associated with Fields from the entity. However there are some special Steps that exist in the default sales and service processes. This includes the Identify Contact and Identify Account steps within the Lead sales process and the Identify Customer, Identify Issue, Solutions, and Resolve steps in the service process. These default steps can be removed.
To provide a way to add them back to a process, a drop-down list appears next to the + button next to STEPS.
To Reorder Stages or Steps, open the Process Control Customization Tool -> Select the Stage or Step you would like to reorder -> Use the up or down arrow keys on your keyboard or click the up or down arrow buttons in the lower left of the Process Control Customization Tool and then click OK to save your changes.
To Remove Stages or Steps open the Process Control Customization Tool -> Select the Stage or Step you would like to delete -> Click delete (X) - a warning appears with the message: This action will delete the selected stage and all its steps. Are you sure you want to continue? -> Click OK and then click OK to save your changes.
If you remove the first stage in a process, any records that were previously in that stage will now be in the new first stage.
Limitations
The list below details some of the process limitations to be aware of for this release:
Permissions
The ability to edit processes with the Process Control Customization Tool is controlled by permissions to Process Configuration. The Write privilege on Process Configuration is required to edit a process. By default the System Administrator, System Customizer, CEO-Business Manager, Vice President of Sales, Sales Manager, and CSR Manager security roles have this privilege. You can modify other security roles to include this privilege as illustrated below.
Localization
The Process Control Configuration Tool is not accessible to a user in any language other than the base language. When you attempt to open the Process Control Configuration Tool with a language other than the base language, you will see the following message:
You can only edit processes definition when the user interface language matches the base language. To change this setting, click the File tab, and then click Options. On the Languages tab, change the user interface language.
To localize the display names for Stages and Steps use the Export Translations option within the Customization area. The display names are available on the Localized Labels tab of the exported translation file. The display names related to the sales and service processes can be found under the Entity names of lead_salesstage, opportunity_salesstage, servicestage, and complexcontrol.
If your organisation have more complex document management needs than merely being able to attach a document to a CRM Online record, the integration between CRM Online and SharePoint Online offers great additional features and benefits.
The following table compares the differences between using file attachments and the SharePoint Online integration for your document management needs in CRM Online.
Green is Yes, Red is No, please see notes below the table.
Notes
The December 2012 Service Update Release of CRM Online will feature an optional brand new forms experience for the Lead, Account, Contact, Opportunity, and Case entities.
If you opt-in you will see redesigned forms with a new set of controls added to the forms for these entities. In this example I'll describe the controls of the Lead and Opportunity form.
(click to enlarge)
Microsoft Dynamics CRM Online became available on the Microsoft Online Services portal as part of the Q4 2011 release. This meant that CRM Online is managed on the same billing and provisioning platform as Office 365. In the current release you can only have one CRM instance (aka organisation) associated with the same Microsoft Online Services tenant.
Needing to create multiple tenants to have multiple CRM Online instances meant that you could not access two different CRM instances using the same credentials. This limitation has been removed with the coming release scheduled for december 2012. This opens up new enterprise customer scenarios such as departmental, regional, development, and test CRM Online instances.
Additional instances will be charged at a monthly rate per instance and do not require additional CRM user licenses. Each user with a single CRM license can access all of the instances that are part of the subscription for their Microsoft Online Services tenant.
Security Groups
However, if your company has multiple CRM instances, you may not want each user with a CRM license to be a member of every CRM instance. For example, you may have 100 users with a CRM license but only want a limited number of users to be a member of your instance that is intended for development.
To provide a way to control which users are created as users in each CRM instance, a new feature was added to be able to associate a security group with each CRM organization.
If a security group is not associated with a CRM instance, all users with a CRM license will be created as users in the instance. If a security group is associated with an instance, only users with CRM licenses that are a member of the instance security group will be created as users in the CRM instance.
When users are added to the group, they are added to the CRM instance. When users are removed from the group, they are disabled in the CRM instance. When an existing instance with users is associated with a security group, all users in the instance that are not members of the security group will be disabled in the instance.
This feature uses the Security Groups feature that is available within the Microsoft Online Services Portal. Any security group available within the Microsoft Online Services Portal can be used to control access to a CRM instance. You can view and create security groups within the Microsoft Online Portal. If you have configured your Microsoft Online Services tenant for Active Directory synchronization, security groups you create in Active Directory will appear in the Microsoft Online Portal and can be associated with your CRM instance
Storage Management
In the coming release the storage purchased for a Microsoft Dynamics CRM Online subscription will be shared across all CRM instances. If 5GB of storage is purchased, that storage can be consumed by any of the CRM instances.
Post General Availability notes:
Important
We have updated the Remote Connectivity Analyzer tool, a tool for troubleshooting an Outlook client having trouble connecting to the email server, verifying email configuration and much more.
The available tests will help you validate ADFS configurations, Autodiscovery settings, EWS accessability and much more. Please find below a brief description of each of the tests in the Remote Connectivity Analyzer:
Microsoft Single Sign-On (BETA)
Microsoft Exchange ActiveSync Connectivity Tests
Microsoft Exchange Web Services Connectivity Tests
Microsoft Office Outlook Connectivity Tests
Internet E-Mail Tests
Free/Busy Test (New)
Microsoft Lync Tests (New)
Happy analyzing :-)
Microsoft Dynamics CRM Online allocates an initial 5 GB of storage. This storage is pooled and shared by all service users. In addition, a company may purchase more Microsoft Dynamics CRM Online storage in gigabyte increments charged monthly, currently USD 9.99 per GB per month. Storage is shared across the organization and is not a per-user add-on.
To check the database storage usage:
If you get close to the limit of your storage space, several ways to reduce the amount of space used exists:
Read more in this article: 10 ways to free storage space in Microsoft Dynamics CRM Online
Note
Dynamics CRM is at its heart an ASP.net web application built and deployed on Microsoft’s Internet Information Services (IIS) and SQL Server.
Its available for you to run in your own datacenter (CRM On-Premises) or to consume out of Microsoft's public cloud (CRM Online / multi-tenancy model). The two are pretty identical in features, but some variations can be considered.
In the current setup, to ensure you have the latest Service Description when you need it, you'll actually need to download the Word document in question - and many of you have suggested to us that we provided at more userfriendly way to ensure an easier way of consulting the most recent Service Description.
Along with the next version of Office 365 we will update how we deliver the Service Descriptions - from Word documents to TechNet articles.
Please find the new service descriptions here
Whether you are working with CRM from the deployment, implementation, configuration, administration, customization or optimization side - whether its on-premises or online - this list of useful links will hopefully save you some time and effort:
Installation and Deployment
Application
Configuration and Customization
Extending
Performance
Misc
Thanks to my collegue Jarrod Williams, Sr. Support Engineer for putting together the bulk of the above list.
CRM Integration with Office 365, Benefits and Installation
If you are experiencing performance issues in your CRM Online, a first step in identifying the source of a performance issue is to determine whether or not network factors (mainly bandwidth or latency) seem to be part of the problem.
Low bandwidth and high latency will negatively impact the end-user experience in Microsoft Dynamics CRM Online, so be sure to get a baseline reading of WAN performance at the initiation of the troubleshooting process.
The Microsoft Dynamics CRM Product Group has developed a Microsoft Dynamics CRM Online Network Performance tool to gather client network configuration data. The tool provides insight into the network conditions under which Microsoft Dynamics CRM client is operating.To run the Microsoft Dynamics CRM Online Network Performance tool:
Microsoft Dynamics CRM is designed to work best over networks with latency under 150 milliseconds.
Whitepaper
You can read much more about optimization in the white paper from Microsoft "Optimizing and Maintaining Client Performance for Microsoft Dynamics CRM 2011 and Microsoft Dynamics CRM Online"
Note - determining the instance and unique organisation name:
Depending on the which part of the world your CRM Online tenant is hosted in the crm instance is either crm, crm4 or crm5:
To determine the unique organization name of your CRM Online - goto to Settings -> Customizations -> Developer Resources