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I have a website, but my web analytics indicate I am getting a consistently low volume of web traffic to my website and not many users are staying long on my website, what can I do to re-energize and engage user’s to my website? Simply put, gamification!
Many people when they here this instantly think, am I hooking up an Xbox to my website? Whereas this sounds a bit off the wall, there is a part of this that is somewhat true. Gamification is the use of game design techniques, game thinking and game mechanics to enhance non-game contexts on websites.

Typically, the concept of gamification applies to non-game applications and processes, in order to encourage people to adopt them, or to influence how they are used. Gamification works by making technology more engaging, by encouraging users to engage in desired behaviors, by showing a path to mastery and autonomy, by helping to solve problems and not being a distraction, and by taking advantage of humans’ psychological predisposition to engage in gaming. The technique can encourage people to perform chores that they ordinarily consider boring, such as completing surveys, shopping, filling out tax forms, or reading web sites. Available data from gamified websites, applications, and processes indicate potential improvements in areas like user engagement, ROI, data quality, timeliness, or learning.

Engage Relativity offers a gamification function called Motiv8 ™. Relativity Motiv8™, an extension of Engage, Inc.’s Relativity™ Platform, provides a framework integrating ‘Game Layer’ functionality with line of business application logic, transforming the result into a system for tracking, incenting and rewarding site member and/or employee behaviors through assigned or arbitrary status symbols(i.e. badges, levels and the like) – i.e. ‘behavior-steering game dynamics’. The baseline features focus on the tracking and management of achievements while other components may optionally surface this data on a community portal, within SharePoint, Silverlight or other similar dashboards.

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This is part of a four part series on CRM and object oriented Javascript. Follow the links to parts I, II, and III.

Last post we did a detailed walkthrough of our object oriented form handler . At the end, we promised an explanation of why you might want to take this approach rather than the traditional giant “if-then-else-if” block. Well wait no longer. Here we’ll list a whole host of reasons to take the object oriented approach

Testability

One of the real hassles of CRM javascript development is the edit-publish-debug-edit-publish round trip that happens with every change. With a lot of changes, the time can really add up, especially since it’s easy to make typos in javascript. So one significant advantage of the OOP approach is that we can’t test most of our javascript without a CRM server. Take a look at our code again. Of those four sections we organized the code into, how many of them directly reference CRM fields or objects? One, CreateXrmFormRulesMethods. What we’ve managed to do with this code is separate out the CRM specific stuff from the stuff that deals with the business logic of our application. Which means that we can actually do some basic testing of those parts of our code without a CRM Form.

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This is part three of a multi-part series on CRM and object oriented javascript. Follow the links for parts I and II

In this post, we will digg a little deeper into the functions we outlined last time. We’ll tackle the code in the order it’s written.

FormHandlerBaseClassSetup

Last time we mentioned that this section was responsible for setting up the equivalent of an abstract class for our form handlers. There’s actually a little bit more going on here than that. This function also handles setting up our namespace. Recognize this bit of code here? Read more »

This is a continuation of a series on using Object Oriented Javascript with Dynamics CRM. For Part I, go here

Okay, so now that we’re all experts on Object Oriented Javascript, let’s try to apply this problem to the matter at hand; showing and hiding fields on a CRM form. Let’s start off by establishing some requirements and context around this task

Requirements

1. Let’s assume we’re dealing with the native CRM account form. Our requirement is to display a different form depending on the value of a crm field with the name new_type.
2. For each value of new_type, we’re going to make a slew of different form changes. Fields will show and hide, move around, and may even have different names.
3. You’re business users are always requesting the addition of new choices to that type field, along with custom forms. You need to make sure it’s easy to add a new type and customize it’s form.

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Javascipt inside of CRM has historically been essential, but a bit of a messy affair. Things have improved in CRM 2011 with the advent of form libraries, but I think most CRM developers will admit they’ve worked on CRM projects where they wrote some scary spaghetti JavaScript. Sure, it got the job done, but it wasn’t pretty, and there was always the fear that the code was far more fragile than your well architected C# plugins and services; with there always being the hassle with CRM’s test-change-publish javascript debugging module, making javascript often something CRM developers actively look for ways to avoid.

The good news, is that with a little bit of object oriented magic, it’s possible to take a lot of the pain out of using Javascript and CRM, especially now in CRM 2011. Over several of our next few month’s posts, we’ll be walking you through using object oriented javascript to achieve a fairly common CRM goal: showing different forms for an entity based on the value of a certain field.  We’ll start out this post by looking at the basics of object oriented javascript.

Object Oriented What?

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Adding a Game Layer for Better Participation

All of those hours spent in an arcade were not wasted. Can you believe it? If you reflect on your playing habits and reflect on why you did what you did or if you put your sociology hat on and go and visit Las Vegas you can improve the data in your CRM system and improve your customer participation in your website / blog or Facebook site.

People tend to be lazy or distrusting when filling in online forms. They will give you what you require if you make the fields mandatory IF the payoff is worth it. How many times did you want to see what was in a PDF but then were asked to fill out a form? Sometimes you filled it out and other times you clicked out of the site and moved on. If you trusted the site, you would have been more likely to fill in the information. If the payoff – the data in the PDF – was good enough you would have filled the form out. Now what if you were offered some other benefit to filing out the form or if you fill out the entire form you will get an additional PDF of equal or grater value. Read more »

Who to meet and what to say at Convergence 2011

When you come to Atlanta this year for another fantastic Convergence show you should have a game plan. Convergence is a big event and a great way to meet some of the most influential people in the Microsoft Dynamics CRM business. So while you are here in Atlanta enjoying all of the presentations and the showroom floor, please take some time to seek out these Microsoft Dynamics CRM industry leaders {Not in any particular order}. Here is who I would like to meet and what I would say:

1. Anne Stanton – Where to Find her – Presenting: IDCRM83-R1 Achieving Customer Service Excellence: Tips & Tricks with Microsoft Dynamics CRM 2011 What to say? – “Thanks for all of the great content and community contributions you have made.”
2. Larry Lentz – Where to Find him – Show room floor, at presentations, with the smart people. What to say? – “Thanks for all of the great content and community contributions you have made. Love your Twitter humor”
3. Todd Sharp – Where to Find him – Presenting: CSCRM37 Streamlining Citizen Services with Microsoft Dynamics CRM Online for Governments What to say? – “Thanks for all of your efforts to help our Government cut costs by using MSCRM for Correspondence Management solutions.”
4. Julie Yack – Where to Find her -Presenting: IDCRM21-R1 Microsoft Dynamics CRM Online: Your Questions Answered What to say? – “Thank you for all your hard work with the XRMVirtual Users Group.”
5. Donna Edwards- Where to Find her- Show room floor, at presentations, with the smart people. What to say? – “Thanks for all of the great content and community contributions you have made. Loved your post on SSRS Custom Reports.“
6. Erik van Hoof – Where to Find him – Show room floor in the CWR booth, at presentations, with the smart people. What to say? – “Thanks for a fantastic CRM mobile solution and for the pizza and beer.”
7. Mark Corley – Where to Find him – Presenting: CSBL03 Get Your TTV & ROI Mojo Going! What to say? – “Thanks for bringing us great products from CWRMobility“
8. Scott Sewell- Where to Find him – Show room floor, at presentations, with the smart people . What to say? – “Thanks for all of the great content and community contributions you have made.”
9. David Yack- Where to Find him – Show room floor, at presentations, with the smart people. What to say? – “Thanks for helping us extend CRM with Silverlight.“
10. Shan McArthur – Where to Find him – Presenting: CSCRM23-R1 Harnessing Cloud Technologies with Microsoft Dynamics CRM 2011 What to say? – “Thanks for all of your great content on building MSCRM solutions in Azure.”
11. Reuben Krippner - Where to Find him – presenting: CSCRM61 Microsoft Dynamics Labs: Graduating from Accelerators to Solutions What to say? – “Thanks for all of those CRM 4.0 accelerators. They saved us a bunch of time and made us look great.”
12. Joel Lindstrom- Where to Find him – Show room floor, at presentations, with the smart people. What to say? – “Thanks for all of the great content and community contributions you have made.”
13. Ben Vollmer – Where to Find him – Presenting: DDCRM62 Microsoft Dynamics CRM 2011 + Microsoft Technologies = Business Value What to say? – “Thanks for keeping MSCRM in the front of everyone’s mind when it comes to business solutions.”
14. Girish Raja – Where to Find him – Presenting: CSCRM23-R1 Harnessing Cloud Technologies with Microsoft Dynamics CRM 2011 What to say? – “Thanks for all of those great Channel 9 videos.”
15. Sanjay Jain – Where to Find him – Presenting: CSCRM37 Streamlining Citizen Services with Microsoft Dynamics CRM Online for Governments What to say? – “Thanks for all of those great Channel 9 videos.”
16. Gharun Hester Where to Find him – Presenting: CSCRM37 Streamlining Citizen Services with Microsoft Dynamics CRM Online for Governments What to say? – “Thanks for helping us keep MSCRM as the best solution for the public sector.”
17. Barry Givens – Where to Find him – Presenting: CSCRM02-R1 Advanced Analytics for Microsoft Dynamics CRM 2011 What to say? – “Thanks for pushing the developers and making MSCRM even better than before.”
18. Marc Wolenik – Where to Find him – Presenting: CSCRM85 The Social Enterprise: Real-World Customer Stories What to say? – “Thanks for keeping us informed with your CRM Unleashed books.

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I’m sure you’ve done this.  You are using a well-known application and stumble on to some ‘hidden’ functionality it has and thought “Wow, this is Cool” why didn’t I know about it earlier.  Well, that just happened to me with the Windows 7 Calculator tool.

Maybe many of you already know about these features and that’s great, but for everyone else – this is what I stumbled on.

Scenario:
Okay, I needed to do some minor addition; so I clicked Start and typed calc in search to bring up the calculator tool.  After completing my task I started looking around the View menu and found some things I never knew were there.

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What’s you’re status?

“Where are you?” and “What are you doing?”  is usually followed up with, “Do you have time for …..?”  With the simple Microsoft Office Communicator indicators you can easily tell.  Some folks call them ‘jelly beans’, but at any rate below is a guide to their meaning.

We would recommend contacting Engage, Inc for any questions on Microsoft Office Communicator and its possibilities.  Also, please see our events page for upcoming webinars on OCS, CRM, xRM, SharePoint and Business Intelligence.

Microsoft Dynamics CRM 2011 IFD and AD FS

As a Microsoft Partner, Gold certified, and experienced Dynamics CRM ISV since v 1.0, we set out to integrate one of our CRM 4.0 projects into CRM 2011 Beta. We quickly stood up a single server system to get the developers started and would follow-up with IFD afterwards. Since IFD setup is different than it was for CRM 4.0, we had to also setup an AD FS 2.0 server.

Downloading AD FS 2.0 was straightforward and seemed to install and configure by the book. The problem we ran into was deciphering the documentation for CRM 2011 Beta and Claims based authentication and IFD configuration.

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