Happy Valentine’s Day.

If you are like me, you love CRM. But as with any relationship, sometimes there are things that can cause issues with the relationship. The following are some good tips on how to make the relationship between your Microsoft Dynamics CRM environment and its users more harmonious.

1. Make forms easier to navigate. Place lesser used fields and sections in collapsed tabs. This will make forms load faster and provide easier access to the most important parts of the form without scrolling, while still providing easy access to lesser used fields when necessary.
2. Move all required fields together on your form. This will get rid of “popcorn” forms where every time you click “save” a warning pops up saying that there are required fields that need to be populated before the form is saved.
3. Make unused fields non searchable. This will make advanced find significantly easier to use. You can do this in bulk by selecting multiple fields in customization and clicking the edit button to edit multiple fields, or use the excellent XRM Toolbox Searchable Property Updater.
4. Clean up your sitemap. Prioritize the order of subarea links based on frequency of use, remove links to unused entities (or remove them from the user’s security role).
5. Re-evaluate your security model and customizations periodically. Remember that automated process that you created 3 years ago to automatically create 25 tasks when an opportunity closed? is that process still fit the way that your sales people work? Chances are if you have been using CRM for more than six months that some of the configuration choices you initially made may need to be tweaked or revisited. Were those requirements really a requirement? Do you have any user constraints that are unnecessarily limiting what users can do? Are the fields that you added being populated by users?