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Connect to Microsoft Social Engagement

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Applies To: Dynamics CRM 2015

Your customers and stakeholders are talking about you on Facebook, Twitter, or blogs. How do you learn about it? In Microsoft Dynamics CRM, you can get powerful social insights by connecting Microsoft Dynamics CRM to Microsoft Social Engagement. Microsoft Social Engagement collects data from social media websites and presents it to you in charts and graphs that you can use to spot emerging trends in people’s comments, whether they’re positive, negative, or neutral. You can drill down into the data and see who is mentioning you, where they posted the comment, and exactly what they said. Armed with these insights, you can pinpoint what you’re doing right, and address potential issues before bigger problems arise.

With social insights, you bring social media data directly into CRM dashboards and entity forms. As an administrator, you configure the connection to Microsoft Social Engagement and add the Social Insights controls to the entity forms and system dashboards. You use the Social Insights controls to specify what social data you want to see and in what form you want this data to be presented to you. When you set up the Social Insights controls, you choose a search topic or search topic category and visuals. For the search topic you may choose your company name to listen to what is said in social media about your company or your product. Or, you may want to know what is being said about your accounts; if so, choose the Accounts search topic category. After you choose the search topic or search category, you pick the visuals. It can be a graph or chart, or some other visual representation of data. You can find a lot of interesting, useful, and easy to follow information about social listening and social insights in CRM in this book: eBook: Microsoft Social Engagement for CRM.

Note

Before you can set up the Social Insights controls in CRM, you have to add search topic categories and visuals for your CRM organization in Microsoft Social Engagement. You can add search topics in Microsoft Social Engagement directly from within CRM. See the Microsoft Social Engagement Help Center

In This Topic

Connect CRM Online to Microsoft Social Engagement for Social Insights

Connect CRM on-premises to Microsoft Social Engagement for Social Insights

Reset Social Insights

Add the Social Insights control to a CRM entity form

Add and set up Social Insights controls on the system dashboards

Connect CRM Online to Microsoft Social Engagement for Social Insights

To configure the connection, you need to have a subscription to Microsoft Social Engagement, be an authorized Microsoft Social Engagement user and have a Microsoft Social Engagement instance provisioned for this CRM instance.

  1. Make sure you have the System Administrator security role or equivalent permissions in Microsoft Dynamics CRM. 

  2. Go to Settings > System.

  3. Choose Administration > Microsoft Social Engagement Configuration.

  4. You’re presented with the legal disclaimer. To accept the disclaimer, choose Continue. You’ll then proceed to the configuration page.

    Note

    You’re asked to accept this disclaimer when you connect for the first time.

  5. On the Microsoft Social Engagement Configuration page, in the Select the Microsoft Social Engagement solution to connect to dropdown box, choose the Microsoft Social Engagement instance to which you want to connect. Choose the Select button next to the dropdown box. The Select button becomes grayed out to indicate that the selection is confirmed.

    Microsoft Social Engagement configuration

     

Warning

If you want to switch to a different Microsoft Social Engagement instance, you are asked to confirm it by clicking or tapping the Confirm button. Changing the Microsoft Social Engagement instance, may cause any existing Social Insights controls on forms and dashboards to display error messages, because the new instance may not have matching data. All existing Social Insights controls may need to be reconfigured. Also, the existing Social Insights data in CRM may need to be reset to remove references to the old instance data.

Note

In Microsoft Dynamics CRM Online Spring ‘14, only one Microsoft Social Engagement instance is provided for connection to the CRM instance.

Connect CRM on-premises to Microsoft Social Engagement for Social Insights

To configure the connection, you need to have a subscription to Microsoft Social Engagement and be an authorized Microsoft Social Engagement user.

  1. Make sure you have the System Administrator security role or equivalent permissions in Microsoft Dynamics CRM. 

  2. Go to Settings > System.

  3. Choose Administration > Microsoft Social Engagement Configuration.

  4. You’re presented with the legal disclaimer. To accept the disclaimer, choose Continue. You’ll then proceed to the configuration page.

    Note

    You’re asked to accept this disclaimer once, when you connect for the first time.

  5. Follow the directions on the Microsoft Social Engagement Configuration page.

    Microsoft Social Engagement configuration

     

Warning

If you want to switch to a different Microsoft Social Engagement instance, you are asked to confirm it by choosing the Confirm button. Changing the Microsoft Social Engagement instance, may cause any existing Social Insights controls on forms and dashboards to display error messages, because the new instance may not have matching data. All existing Social Insights controls may need to be reconfigured. Also, the existing Social Insights data in CRM may need to be reset to remove references to the old instance data.

Note

In Microsoft Dynamics CRM Online Spring ‘14, only one Microsoft Social Engagement instance is provided for connection to the CRM instance.

Assign Microsoft Social Engagement licenses to CRM users

Microsoft Dynamics CRM Online customers with a minimum of 10 Professional users automatically have access to Microsoft Social Engagement as part of their subscription at no additional charge. Customers who have an Enterprise subscription also have access to Microsoft Social Engagement but with no minimum user requirement.

Use the Office 365 admin portal to assign and verify Microsoft Social Engagement licenses.

  1. Browse to the Office 365 admin portal (https://portal.office.com) and sign in using Global administrator credentials.

  2. Choose Users > Active Users and select a user to assign a license.

  3. On the right side of the page, under Assigned license, choose Edit.

    Choose Edit to assign a user license

     

  4. Expand Microsoft Dynamics CRM Online. Select the check box for Microsoft Social Engagement and choose Save.

    Choose the Microsoft Social Engagement check box

     

    Note

    If your subscription is not eligible for Microsoft Social Engagement, see Microsoft Dynamics Social Solutions.

Reset Social Insights

Warning

This action deletes all existing data in CRM for the search topics, search topic categories and visuals for Social Insights.

  1. Make sure you have the System Administrator security role or equivalent permissions in Microsoft Dynamics CRM. 

  2. Go to Settings > System.

  3. Choose Administration > Microsoft Social Engagement Configuration.

  4. On the Microsoft Social Engagement Configuration page, choose Reset Social Insights. The Reset Social Insights Confirmation message box appears, choose Confirm, if you want to proceed, otherwise choose Cancel.

    Confirm you want to reset Social Insights

Add the Social Insights control to a CRM entity form

To add Social Insights controls to an entity (record type) form, you have to use the form editor provided in the CRM Customization area. You can position the Social Insights control anywhere on the form and resize it, just like you would do with the iFrame controls. You can make the control bigger by increasing the number of rows and spanning the control over several columns. This is important if you want to make a graph or a chart in the control appear larger and be more readable. More information: Use the form editor.

  1. Make sure you have the System Administrator security role or equivalent permissions in Microsoft Dynamics CRM. 

  2. Go to Settings > Customizations.

  3. Choose Customizations > Customize the System.

  4. In the Navigation Pane, under Components, expand Entities.

  5. Expand the entity that you want to add the Social Insights control to. Choose Forms.

  6. In the grid view, choose the entity’s Main form. The entity form opens.

  7. Select the Insert tab. At the top of the form, on the ribbon, click the Social Insights icon. In the setup dialog box, fill out the required fields, such as the unique name of the control and the label name. Choose OK. The Social Insights control is now added to the entity form. You can resize the control or move the control to another location on the form.

    Add the Social Insights control to the form

     

  8. Switch back to the Home tab. Choose Save and then choose Publish to publish the added customizations. The control called Configure Social Insights appears on all records based on this form. The search topics, search categories and visuals can be added to the control.

Note

You don’t need administrator permissions to set up Social Insights on the entity record.

Add and set up Social Insights controls on the system dashboards

Note

You don’t need administrator permissions to add and set up Social Insights controls on the personal dashboard.

You can add the Social Insights controls to the existing system dashboards or to a new dashboard. Let’s create a new dashboard and add the Social Insights control to it. We’ll use the Set Up Social Insights wizard to lead us through the setup. Shortly after the setup is finished and customizations are published, the charts and graphs with social data will appear on your dashboard.

  1. Make sure you have the System Administrator security role or equivalent permissions in Microsoft Dynamics CRM. 

  2. Go to Settings > Customizations.

  3. Choose Customizations > Customize the System.

  4. In the Navigation Pane, under Components, choose Dashboards.

  5. Choose New on the command bar. Choose a layout and choose Create.

  6. On the dashboard form, enter the name of the dashboard in the Name text box and choose Save.

  7. To add the control, choose Insert Social Insights icon in the center of the section on the dashboard form, or choose More Commands (More commands button) on the command bar and then choose Social Insights in the dropdown list. Set Up Social Insights wizard appears.

    Set up Social Insights in Dynamics CRM

     

  8. In the Set Up Social Insights wizard, choose Advanced. The Add Social Insights dialog appears. Fill in the required fields and choose OK. You can also use the default values and choose OK or Cancel to close the dialog box.

    Add Social Insights to the Dashboard

     

  9. In the Set Up Social Insights wizard main window, choose Search topic or Search topic category, and then choose Next.

  10. To pick the search topic or the search topic category, in the dropdown list, choose the topic or the category, depending on what you chose in the previous step and then choose Next.

    Note

    You can create a new search topic, instead of choosing a search topic in the dropdown list. Choose Create a new search topic, fill in the required fields and choose Next.

    Select a search topic

     

  11. In the visuals drop-down list, choose a graph or a chart you want, such as Analytics summary, Recent posts or Trends. You can add as many visuals as you want and move them up and down the list using the MOVE UP and MOVE DOWN arrows. You can also delete a visual by clicking or tapping the delete icon displayed to the right of the visual. Choose Finish.

    Select the Social Insights visual

     

  12. On the command bar, choose Save and then choose Close.

  13. To publish the customizations, choose Publish All Customizations on the command bar. After the customizations are published, you can see the social insights on your dashboard.

    Social Insights in dashboard in Dynamics CRM

Privacy notice

By enabling Social Engagement, you consent to share your data with an external system. Data that is imported from external systems into Microsoft Dynamics CRM Online is subject to our privacy statement, which you can access here.

See Also

Administering CRM 2015
Microsoft Social Engagement Help and Training
Control social data
eBook: Microsoft Social Engagement for CRM
Microsoft Social Engagement Help Center

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