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Design considerations for main forms

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Applies To: Dynamics CRM 2013

Main forms are the primary user interface where people view and interact with their data. Main forms provide the widest range of options and are available for most clients, the exception being Microsoft Dynamics CRM for phones.

One of the main design objectives for main forms is that you design them once and deploy them everywhere. The same main form you design for the web application is also used in Microsoft Dynamics CRM 2013 for Microsoft Office Outlook and Microsoft Dynamics CRM for tablets. The advantage to this approach is that you don’t have to integrate changes in to three different forms. However there are several important factors to consider in designing these forms.

In This Topic

Custom forms for different groups

Presentation differences

Form performance

Upgrading forms

Custom forms for different groups

Because you can create multiple main forms and assign different security roles to each form you can present different groups in your organization with a form that is optimized for how they use the application. You can even provide each group with different options so that they have different forms to choose from. More information: Control access to forms

You can expect that managers and decisions makers will want forms that are optimized to provide quick reference to key data points. They will like to see charts more than lists and they may not perform a lot of data entry.

People who interact directly with customers may need forms tailored to tasks they perform most frequently. They may want forms that allow for the most efficient data entry.

You’ll need to find out what people in your organization want and need. This is frequently an iterative process where you gather input, try different things and build forms that people can use. Keep in mind that you have a variety of tools available to you and that not everything has to be done within the form. Use business rules, workflow processes, dialogs and business process flows together with your forms to provide a solution that works for your organization.

You’ll have to balance this with the amount of time you want to spend managing forms. Creating and editing forms is relatively easy, but as you create more forms, you have to manage more forms.

Presentation differences

Although you don’t have to manage multiple forms for each presentation, you must consider how differences in the presentation can be accounted for in the main form. Main form presentations describes the different ways that the main form may be presented. The primary things to take into consideration are:

  • CRM for tablets doesn’t support image, HTML, or Silverlight web resources to be added to forms.

  • The layout of CRM for tablets forms is auto-generated based on the main form. There is no special form editor for CRM for tablets forms. You need to verify that the form presentation works well for both clients.

  • If you have unsupported scripts that interact with DOM elements found in the web application, those scripts won’t work in the CRM for tablets forms because the same DOM elements aren’t available.

  • Microsoft Dynamics CRM 2013 for Outlook Reading Pane forms don’t allow for scripting. The visibility of form elements depend on the default settings and can’t be changed at runtime using scripts.

Form performance

Forms that load slowly or don’t respond quickly are sure to affect productivity and user adoption of the system. Optimize form performance provides a number of recommendations you should consider when designing forms so that customizations don’t adversely affect form performance.

Managing auto-save

Most people will welcome the simplified interaction they have with auto-save enabled. However this is a significant change from the save model in place for earlier versions of Microsoft Dynamics CRM where the record needed to be explicitly saved each time data was updated. Some organizations created customizations that assumed that saving a record meant that the person was finished editing it. Best practices for customizations are to treat each save as an update and to design automated tasks so that they fire only when specific data conditions occur. This change will require some time for organizations to adapt to, so there are options to control how auto-save works for your organization. More information: Manage auto-save

Upgrading forms

Microsoft Dynamics CRM 2013 and Microsoft Dynamics CRM Online introduces a significant change to how entity main forms look and behave. Forms designed for earlier versions of CRM were designed in the context of a very different user experience. When people upgrade they will find that their forms should still work, but they won’t have the optimum layout to work well with the application. Because the forms used by organizations are different, we didn’t try to programmatically apply changes to their designs. Instead we have provided a path to allow people to easily merge their existing forms into the new form presentation. More information: Update your forms to Microsoft Dynamics CRM 2013 or Microsoft Dynamics CRM Online Fall '13

See Also

Create and design forms
Use the form editor
Create and edit mobile forms
Create and edit quick create forms
Create and edit quick view forms
Main form presentations
Optimize form performance
Manage auto-save
Update your forms to Microsoft Dynamics CRM 2013 or Microsoft Dynamics CRM Online Fall '13

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