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Welcome from the CEO
In 2009, our focus has been on continuously improving our products and processes by creating more effective customer-centric response programs. Over the course of the months to come, our team will be reaching out to incorporate customers into our newest program, the DefenseReady Customer Advisory Board (CAB). The program will allow visionary customers to provide direct towards product updates and developments. CAB members will play a key role in the strategic planning for products and their long-term development.
The scope of the DefenseReady CAB will cover the entire application suite including the Workforce and Mission Line of Business applications. Customers who participate will benefit from an enhanced user experience full of new and more relevant features and updates.
Functional Account Managers will be extending invitations to key customers over the next few months. In the meantime, please contact us with any questions about the program.
Ryan Millett
President & CEO
Permuta Technologies
Quarterly Update
Message from the CTO
For the Q3 release of DefenseReady, we've continued to strengthen our baseline with improvements to core capabilities, and we've added some specific features that resonate with our current customer base. This release includes enhancements to recruit management, order generation, and more pre-built security roles. Our reports library has grown considerably, allowing much quicker turnaround for custom reports, and our reports installer allows for easy installation.
As always, DefenseReady is continually evolving, and customer feedback is the greatest catalyst in the process for Permuta. As your organization continues to search for efficiency gains, stay in touch with your Functional Account Managers, as your feedback is the single greatest factor in our product roadmap.
Dave Milton
Chief Technology Officer
Permuta Technologies
New Features
- Strength Projections - Recruits in DefenseReady can now be projected into a billet as well as a workforce assignment, making strength projections much more accurate
- Military Orders Log - All special pay orders now create an entry in the central orders log, making it simple to produce reports across all types of orders.
- Duty Status Events - Using the duty status calendar, users can bulk insert conflicts for multiple contacts at once, easing data entry.
- Security Roles - DefenseReady now ships with a suite of pre-configured security roles meant to streamline the process of assigning permissions to users based on their functional area.
- Reports Installer - Our new reports installation utility makes it easy to mass-deploy reports to new environments in a matter of minutes. Permuta's reports library contains over 100 pre-configured workforce reports as well as templates for Sharepoint dashboard web parts.
CRM Development: Common Challenges
At Permuta, we've been building solutions with Microsoft Dynamics CRM since version 3.0, and while the product has come a long way, we still encounter plenty of challenges working in a team environment with this platform. Here are a few of the lessons we've learned over the past 3 years:
Source Control:
As with any development project, implementing a good source control solution is essential to developer productivity. For managing plug-ins and custom ASPX pages, traditional source control products work very well (we use Team Foundation Server here at Permuta). However, managing entities and other CRM customizations can prove challenging in a team environment, as the traditional tools are not necessarily effective on their own on the CRM platform. For the DefenseReady development team, it was necessary to adopt formal processes to ensure changes were not being made to the same entities by different developers at the same time. It also includes involvement from our QA team and testers to verify schema and form changes. Every development team is different, but I can say with confidence that CRM development takes additional discipline from your team to ensure that the efficiency gains of the platform are not wiped out by configuration management troubles.
Design Considerations:
Most of our developers have backgrounds in data-driven web development, and are used to traditional schema and application design. When moving to the CRM platform, however, we've all had to make adjustments to the design patterns we were accustomed to using in the traditional web development world. A great example of this is how, in certain cases, DefenseReady de-normalizes data to allow easier use of platform features, such as Advanced Find. Another design consideration is the built-in CRM security model. Because there is no field-level security in CRM, it is vital that developers lay out their entities' schemas in such a way that supports the CRM security model and the way the users intend to interact with the application.
Supported/Unsupported Customizations:
Over the past few years, the Dynamics CRM community has grown considerably, and there are a lot of blogs and forums focused on Dynamics CRM customization and development. It's important to examine the solutions offered on these sites very closely, as many of them include unsupported customizations. The Dynamics CRM SDK includes guidelines that describe the types of customizations that are supported and unsupported. While the DefenseReady development team is required to stay within those boundaries, your development teams are not necessarily constrained to do so. The implications to implementing an unsupported customization range widely: some may cause some headaches when it comes time for CRM 5.0, others may cause crashes and instability.
-Dave Milton, CTO
Training Tips: How to Detect Duplicates
Data quality is a key factor in accurate reporting and higher user adoption of DefenseReady. A large threat to data consistency is duplicate records; common duplicate examples include:
- A country lookup entry is entered in both capitals and normal case, ex: UNITED STATES and United States
- A name is entered in a slight variation, ex: David Smith and Dave Smith
In this article, we will explain how to use the Duplicate Detection Rules to set up rules in order to identify duplicate records. We will also explain how to use the Duplicate Detection Wizard to identify existing duplicates.
NOTE: If you do not see these options on your screen, you may not have the correct permissions to set these rules. Please contact either your system administrator or your Functional Account Manager for assistance.
Set Up Duplicate Detection Rules:
- In the application menu toolbar, click Settings.
- On the left menu toolbar, click Data Management
- Click Duplicate Detection Rules.
- Click New.
- Enter a Name for the rule (required field), and a description of the rule (optional).
- Under Duplicate Detection Rule Criteria, select the Base Record Type and Matching Record Type. These are the records you will be comparing (e.g. "Contact" and "Contact"; or "Contact" and "Recruit.")
- You can specify whether these criteria must be Case-Sensitive by checking the box.
- Then select the Attribute(s) you would like to run against (e.g. "E-mail" or "Name.")
- For example, if you wanted to check contact records with the same email address, you would select the following:
- Base Record Type: Contact
- Matching Record Type: Contact
- Attribute: E-mail
- Criteria: Exact Match
- Once you have completed your rule, click either Save or Save and Close.
- From the main menu, you can select your rule, and click the Publish button when you are ready to publish the rule for all users.
Run Duplicate Detection Wizard to Identify Duplicates:
With the Duplicate Detection Wizard you can detect duplicates for all records or specify a subset of records for which you would like to detect duplicates.
- In the application menu toolbar, click Settings.
- On the left menu toolbar, click Data Management.
- Click Duplicate Detection Jobs, then click New. The Duplicate Detection Wizard opens.
- Click Next:
- The Select Records dialog box opens. This dialogue box allows you to specify which records you would like to check for duplicates, using the Advanced Find format.
- Select the records that you would like to check and click Next:
- The Select Options dialog box that opens, youcan name the duplicate detection job, specifythe start time, select a desired recurrence, and identify who should be notified after the job is completed.
- Click Next:
- The duplicate detection job will be processed. The job identifies duplicate records but does not automatically merge or delete records that are identified. The next step is to preview the results and take appropriate actions.
If there are common duplicate detection rules that you perform regularly and would like to have included in the product baseline, please contact your Functional Account Manager to see if these rules can be included in the next update of DefenseReady.
Mobility Options
Permuta is proud to partner with leading providers of mobile access for Microsoft Dynamics CRM. If your agency deploys users on mobile missions, your users can now quickly access their organizational DefenseReady data on smartphones such as BlackBerry and Windows Mobile. Select partners of Permuta Technologies now have the capability to securely extend the DefenseReady application into the hands of mission staff and trip coordinators.
With capabilities such as automatic synchronization and core functionality, even when network connectivity is unavailable, agencies can benefit from enhanced information flow and improved interagency interactions. Synchronization between the smart clients and the server is designed to be bi-directional and fully automatic, ensuring up-to-date information for mobile and stationed workers.
- Enhanced CRM Functionality
- Familiar User Experience
- Automatic Synchronization
- Seamless Online & Offline Experience
- Cross-Platform Compatibility
- Capture Live Photos
- Upload Documents and Files
Much like DefenseReady, the intuitive experience enables users to get working quickly without extensive training. By extending your DefenseReady data to a mobile device, you are providing your end users with the flexibility to access critical data anywhere and ensure accurate mission details.
For more information on DefenseReady mobile partners, please contact your Functional Account Manager.
These mobility options are just one advantage to choosing a product that is built on a common, COTS platform. Your agency is now able to harness the powerful extensions made exclusively for the Microsoft Dynamics CRM platform, which are provided by third-party vendors in the CRM community.
Training and Integration
During the 2nd Quarter of 2009, we sent a first set of surveys to key customers. Some of the valuable feedback we received regarded improvements to our training and integration programs. As mentioned in the last newsletter, we have a new program through our partner, Transcensus, to purchase the SHO Guide interactive help features.
Another training initiative we will be releasing in 2010 is a Quick Reference Guide (QRG), which will be available to existing and new customers. This guide is intended to provide step-by-step guidance on common processes in DefenseReady. Additionally, we will occasionally highlight training tips in these newsletters, to explain features that users maybe unaware of or may not fully understand. The first such training tip is on the last page, and explains how to set up duplicate detection rules.
Thank you for providing your feedback, we look forward to integrating more of your suggestions in the future.
In the next issue:
Data migration and synchronization options
