Using Advanced Find in Microsoft Dynamics CRM 4.0

An important benefit of CRM systems is the central repository of customer data that builds as sales, marketing, and customer service teams track their interactions with customers. As this store of data grows, managers face the need to report on and analyze the data to understand trends and identify areas for improvement. Microsoft Dynamics CRM provides a variety of tools for extracting data and presenting it in a simple and easy-to-use format. This chapter focuses on the best tool for this task: Advanced Find. The Advanced Find tool lets you create your own queries through a simple interface. When end users are empowered to create reports and filter the results to return a specific data set, they rely less on IT resources to do their job. In addition, this flexibility will increase an organization’s IT resources to focus on more complex business requirements.

In this chapter, you will learn to harness the power of the Advanced Find tool by creating a query, saving it as a system view that can be shared with others, and updating multiple records in the results set.

Performing Advanced Find Queries

Business needs can change frequently over the course of a project and, as a result, reporting needs also change. Therefore, ad hoc reporting has become a standard feature within most business applications, because expecting end users to define all of their reporting needs before a system is implemented is unrealistic. The Advanced Find tool within Microsoft Dynamics CRM provides a flexible interface to query, view, analyze, and update data on an ongoing basis, so that predefined queries can be saved as the system is implemented and new queries can be created as the reporting needs of your business change. Examples of how Advanced Find is commonly leveraged by end users include:

• Configuring a customized to-do list to follow up on open opportunities.

• Determining leads that fall into a specific geographical region for distribution and assignment.

• Finding all activities due on the current date for a specific customer service representative who has called in sick, so that the activities can be reassigned to a different representative.

• Obtaining a list of contacts that have not been modified in more than two years, so that they can be considered for deactivation.

Advanced Find queries rely on an intuitive set of operators that you select when building a query. The data fields you select in your query determine the operators that will be available for filtering. The following table highlights the operators available for the different data fields.

For each query, you can specify as many search criteria as you need. You must designate the primary record type you want returned in the results, but you can also include data fields from related records in your query. For example, you might search for top sales opportunities that are assigned to sales representatives in a certain geographical region. Your search could include the data fields the sales team uses to rate opportunities as well as the sales region field for the user records to which opportunities are assigned.

In this exercise, you will create an Advanced Find query to view the opportunities that have a probability value greater than 50 for accounts in the city of Chicago.

1. On the application menu toolbar, click the Advanced Find button.

   The Advanced Find screen opens.

   

   Advanced Find

2. In the Look for list, select Opportunities.

   This specifies the primary entity for which you will be executing the query.

   

3. In the Select field, choose Probability to set the search criteria for the opportunity’s Probability field.

   A second list of operators is displayed to the right of the Select field.

   TIP

   The Select field shows all searchable fields for the specified entity. System administrators can modify the selection of fields that are searchable in the database.

4. In the Operator field, select Is Greater Than. Then, in the Enter Value field, enter 50.

   TIP

   The Select field turns into a list when you click on it, and a new row automatically appears below each row you add to your query, so you can add as many rows as needed in your search criteria.

5. In the second row of the Advanced Find query, in the Select field, scroll to the bottom of the list to the Related section and select Potential Customer (Account) to add a data field from the account record type to your search.

   This allows you to filter on attributes of the account related to the opportunities.

6. In the Select field, choose Address 1: City.

7. In the Operator field, leave Equals selected, and in the Enter Value field, enter Chicago.

   

8. Click the Find button in the lower right corner of the screen.

   The results of your search are displayed.

   
   

   BE SURE TO leave the query open so that you can use it in the next exercise.

   TIP

   If you want to modify an existing system view, navigate to the view before clicking the Advanced Find button. This will open the Advanced Find screen with the criteria from the system view already set. This also allows you to easily understand the criteria used in the system views.