Microsoft CRM provides an easy and simple way to customize renewal entity to track domain name registration and other recurring renewal payments managed on your customer’s behalf. Follow these step by step instructions to create renewal entity and workflows: Step1: Create new entity Click: Settings>Customization>Customized Entities>New In section: “Entity definition” Display name: Renewal Plural Name: Renewals Name: ask_renewal In section: “Relationship” make sure that Notes (including attachments) & Activities are tagged (enabled) In section: “Areas that display this entity” tag the modules where you wish the renewal entity to be displayed. Click: Save. Do not close

Step2: Add attributes Attributes are the fields storing data for each renewal record. Take extra care when creating attributes as changes to the attributes at later stage is limited.

For domain registration renewal we used the following new attributes as an example: Renewal Date:  Type=datetime...

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A standard image "your logo here" is provided with the workflow's Email templates of QoS-IT default installation and should be replaced with the company's logo before the workflow is published. Follow these steps to replace "your log here" with the company's logo:

Copy to clipboard the company's logo by right click on the company logo image & select the copy option (if you copy from Word document, firstly save as HTML) In Microsoft CRM click Settings>Workflows select to open the workflow you wish to replace the "your logo here" image Click on the "your logo here" image and click paste from the Email toolbar (see picture) Note: By copying the logo image from the company's web site you ensure it is available for viewing by the public and appears correctly in the recipient's Email.�

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I received the following query on how to create SLA Contract for prepaid hours:

".... We have got a few clients that buy a set number of hours from us each month, (example 15 hours) and this gets renewed every month, however if they go over the 15 hours within the month, they get charged at discounted rates for the extra time

The other is prepaid clients, they buy a block of hours from us, and whenever that block of hours finishes, they buy a new block, question I have is, what type of contract do I create here, because I want the system to trigger an email or a warning when the block of hours is near completion so that we know to tell them to renew, but I don’t want their contract to expire, because it will then mean me creating a new contract every 20 hours"

The main difference between the two contracts is that the first contract is a perpetual contract with the customer’s commitment to purchasing fix number of prepaid hours each month and at the end of...

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Service is a set of rules for the selection of resources from resource groups. QoS-IT Users that are Customer Service Representatives (CSR) belong to resource groups. QoS-IT schedule service activities for the onsite, in-house, remote and helpdesk jobs, based on the selection rules set for each service. To ensure that cases are not neglected and jobs are assigned to technicians and engineers a case-manager service activity is created for the case manager when new case is created or when a job is completed and case is returned to case manager. There are four steps in creating services:

1. Create resource groups

2. Assign users to resource groups based on the user’s technical ability, knowledge, experience or skills.

3. Create at least one service for each of the four QoS-IT jobs and one for case-manager.

4. For each service create a rule on how to select users (and how many) from each resource group.

In the illustration are two services for onsite job: Onsite PC Repair and CISCO...

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Company Logo

The company logo must be accessible via the Internet if you wish it to be visible on documents emailed to customers. If the logo is an image on a web site, then right click on the image, select and open the properties window, highlight and copy the Address (URL) field of the image and paste it into "URL for business logo" field in QoS-IT Setting entity (in the Settings Module).

Invoices Print and Email    

Highlight and select Invoices from the invoice list view and click the button QoS-IT Actions on the toolbar to select one of the following options: Print Invoice - Print the selected invoices. Email Invoice - Email the selected invoices to the Primary Contact of the Account the invoice is billed to or Print Envelops - Print envelops with the Account address of the selected invoices.

Accounts & Contacts

An Account in CRM can have one or more Contacts. It is recommended to assign one Contact as Primary Contact of the Account. Each Contact has an Email address preferably...

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When new case is created and saved, QoS-IT plug-in calculates the Respond By time based on the SLA Response Time and the Contract Template (service days & hours). To create a workflow to customer notifying that Case has been logged and the time it will be responded by, follow these instructions:

Click: Settings>Workflows>New - to create new workflow

In the General tab enter:

Workflow Name: Notify customer that Case has been logged and the due "Respond By" date & time

Entity: Case

Publish as: Workflow

Scope: Organisation

Start when: select: "Record attributes change" Click: Select and select the attribute (field) named: Respond by

Next step is creating workflow steps:

Click: Add Step and select: Check Condition. A new "If then" is created. Click to configure condition.

A workflow condition page is opened. Select the following fields to create on condition:

Case - Respond by - contains Data



...

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Be cautious when creating new Contract Template with new set of business days and hours as once the Contract Template is in use by SLA Contract, it cannot be edited, deactivated or deleted.

Watch out for the correct spelling and definition of the fields Name & Abbreviation. We recommend using clear and short descriptions for the field Name and the abbreviation enclosed in brackets. For example:

Normal Business Hours (8x5) Extended Business Hours (10x6) Twenty Four By Seven (24x7)

QoS-IT utilizes the values stored in the fields Name, Abbreviation and Calendar only, leave all other fields in their default values. Make sure that the green dots representing opened business hours are correctly set. Common mistake is assuming the last opened hour (of a day) is at the beginning of the hour while it is actually the last minute of the hour (XX:59 and not XX:00)

In the following example,...

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Microsoft CRM & QoS-IT provide Managed Service Providers (MSP), Computer’s service centers and software developers a complete IT Services Management Solution with Sales, Marketing, Service and customer’s web portal.

There are no two MSP operating the same way. The challenge is in providing powerful, yet simple to use IT Services Management solution that caters to the different requirements of our users.

What you will notice, using QoS-IT & Microsoft CRM, that you will always find a new feature you were not aware of its existence before, a feature that streamlines the way you work or the way your business operates.

With QoS-IT user-base keeps growing and the increase functionality and new features introduced with Microsoft CRM version 4, sharing the knowledge on how to get the most out of QoS-IT & Microsoft CRM is now an integral part of our service to QoS-IT users provided in QoS-IT Blog

This blog is made of two main parts

-          QoS-IT Best Practice- techniques, methods...

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When creating a wait condition in an workflow Microsoft allows you to use two auto-generated dates. These are labelled as “Timeout” and “Execution Time”.

Timeout is always the current time (i.e. a clock). Such that if you wanted to make a workflow wait until a specific time stored in a field in the entity then you would need to use Timeout.

Execution Time is the time when the workflow started. This can be used for things such as recording the time of an event took place.