Mark Margolis's Blog

Those that know me, know how much I like visuals, visualising information in a meaningful way can not only help foster  user adoption it can also give you real insights into your business. I was talking to the team at The XRM Consultancy recently about data visulisation and in particular about two of by favorite books “The Design of Everyday Things”  by Donald Norman and a “Practical Guide to Designing with Data” by Brian Suda (you can see other books I recommend here). We talked at length about the amazing tools that are available to enrich the user experience. Bruce showed me a fantastic open source timeline called Timeline JS and how he wanted to turn this into a component for Microsoft Dynamics CRM. A few weeks later he was ready to show me the CRM activity history timeline they had built and that he was going to provide it or free!

Here is what it looks like:

Here is a video of it in action!

And here is the solution file for download. (*Update* The solution file has been updated to support Outlook. Timeline_1_0_0_6_managed.zip)

Please note: :

• At the moment, it only shows activities where the regarding object is populated (it will rollup in the future)
• Only shows top 100 records for performance considerations
• Email, Task, Phone Call, Appointment entities are supported. Other entities such as opportuntiies and other activity types will be added soon
• It works in mobile devices such as iPad (safari), Surface etc. I believe its based on HTML5
• It is free, contact XRM Consultancy for more information.

Remember Thursday 16th of May is the next CRM User Group Meeting at the Microsoft offices in Reading, UK. A few of us are meeting up the night before for a few drinks. I hope to see you at both!

This posting is provided “AS IS” with no warranties, and confers no rights.

Next time on Mark Margolis’s Blog: Opportunity and Deal Analytics with Microsoft Dynamics CRM