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New Microsoft Dynamics CRM 2015 Multi-Entity Search

  • Artikkeli

Editor’s note: In partnership with Microsoft Press, MVPs have been contributing to an ongoing guest series on their official team blog. Today’s article is from Dynamics CRM MVP Gus Gonzalez which is the 48th in the series.   

Find Customer Records Faster and Easier with the New Microsoft Dynamics CRM 2015 Multi-Entity Search.

When the Mobile Companion Application (MoCA) was introduced for Microsoft Dynamics CRM 2013, the Global Search capabilities instantly became my favorite feature on the application. So how do you think I felt when it was announced that Global Search - a.k.a. Multi-Entity Search, Global Quick Find, and a few other names - was going to be available for Microsoft Dynamics CRM 2015 web and Outlook clients?

If you said “I bet Gus felt very excited” you would be partially right – I was also concerned. I was concerned about the performance we would get when searching a keyword on a large Microsoft Dynamics CRM 2015 organization.

Those concerns were eliminated when I got my hands on a Microsoft Dynamics CRM 2015 organization. Performance was amazing, and I’ll tell you why.

The reason why Global Search works is due to the very smart guys working on the Microsoft Dynamics CRM product team at Microsoft. They based Global Search on a well-known platform used to search for keywords, Quick Find. Instead of creating a brand new way of finding data in CRM, they decided to utilize the conditions set on Quick Find views for the entities selected for Global Search. With the improved performance features of Microsoft Dynamics CRM 2015, doing a quick find in the system is faster than ever before, so conducting multiple quick finds feels like running a single quick find in CRM 2013. Very impressive work.

Performing multiple quick finds for a keyword at the same time can cause problems if you have for example 120 custom entities on top of the out of the box entities in CRM and you were trying to search all those entities at the same time right? – Well, the product team added a safeguard to CRM limiting Global Search to a maximum of 10 entities which takes care of that problem. A System Administrator can configure which entities are used by Global Search on the System Settings. I’ll show you how later.

So this is how it works, if you need to find information regarding a customer, a case, a phone call, etc. You can type a keyword on the Top Search box and let Global Search compile the results for you:

 

Because the Global Search is based on Quick Find views configuration and capabilities, the user can also use an asterisk (*) as a wildcard character to search for partial text!

Let’s use *Ski as an example. I enter *Ski as a Search Keyword, and then press Enter:

 

Here are the results that I get:

 

Global Search found one Account that contains the word “Ski”, and two contacts that also match that word. In this case those two contacts’ parent account is Alpine Ski House. Notice the (+) sign next to each entity name, this allows you to “Quick create” one of those records directly from Global Search results.

To do more sophisticated searches, the user can click the new Advanced Find icon, which the product team has placed permanently on the navigation bar!  Continue reading full article here 

 

About the author

Gus Gonzalez is a 3-time Microsoft Dynamics CRM MVP. He has over 10 years of consulting experience in the IT Industry, designing and implementing Microsoft Solutions ranging from enterprise to small environments. Worked as a full time Microsoft Certified Trainer from 2005 to 2009 teaching Microsoft Official Curriculum classes regarding Microsoft Windows Server, Exchange Server, ISA Server, and SMS Server along with Citrix, Cisco, EC-Council, and CompTIA official curriculum. A CRMUG All Star, and Microsoft Dynamics CRM Community Guest Columnist passionate about User Adoption, he believes in simplicity rather than complexity when implementing Microsoft Dynamics CRM at organizations of any size to drive User Adoption. Follow Gus on twitter @GusGonzalez2 

About MVP Monday

The MVP Monday Series is created by Melissa Travers. In this series we work to provide readers with a guest post from an MVP every Monday. Melissa is a Community Program Manager, formerly known as MVP Lead, for Messaging and Collaboration (Exchange, Lync, Office 365 and SharePoint) and Microsoft Dynamics in the US. She began her career at Microsoft as an Exchange Support Engineer and has been working with the technical community in some capacity for almost a decade. In her spare time she enjoys going to the gym, shopping for handbags, watching period and fantasy dramas, and spending time with her children and miniature Dachshund. Melissa lives in North Carolina and works out of the Microsoft Charlotte office.

Comments

  • Anonymous
    February 05, 2015
    For search results that may yield 20-50+ records, is there a condensed (spreadsheet) view or will the results remain in a tile view format as shown in the press release? Thanks