Dynamics CRM Advanced Find is great, but it can be a little intimidating for new users. As one of them said to me in a recent training session, “There’s just so much stuff in there!”
Well said. There is a lot of stuff, but you can customize it down so that only the fields you really need to search on are presented to your users, and create an easier search experience.
Take the account entity, for example. It’s got close to 150 fields, most of which your users will never want to search…and most of which have their Searchable property set to “Yes”, accounting for all that stuff in the default Advanced Find experience. You can set the property to “No”, but in CRM 4.0 you can only customize the properties of one attribute at a time. In CRM 2011 you can select multiple fields in the customization UI…click the Edit button…and Boom! … change the Searchable property for all of them in one go. Sweet!
Here’s my first official YouTube video on CRM 2011, dedicated to whoever on the CRM product team got this feature in there, allowing me to create an improved search experience for my users in five minutes rather than five hours.
P.S. In the video, when I said I didn’t even know what the UTCOffset field is, I was kidding. In fact, I search on that all the time! But there is one field that by default is turned off for search when it really should be turned on: the DoNotAllowBulkEmails field is what’s conventionally used to opt out records for e-mail marketing, and if you want to create marketing lists that exclude contacts who don’t want marketing e-mails, the Searchable property of this field will need to be set to Yes.
