It's your Workplace - Personalize it!

It's your Workplace - Personalize it!

In my last post, I introduced the new navigation model in 3.0 and the Workplace concept. Let’s take a look at how you can personalize your navigation experience in the browser client:

 

At the bottom of the navigation area of the Workplace, there is a “Personalize Workspace…” link providing access the “Workplace” settings in the Personal Options dialog (also available from Tools/Options). When you click this link, you’ll see:

From this dialog, the user can select additional groupings of CRM application pages as they apply to their role or job function. For example, clicking Sales, adds a “Sales” group to the Workplace with Marketing Lists, Leads, Opportunities, Quotes, Orders, and Invoices.

In a way, it’s like favorites or shortcuts, where the initial set of “favorites” are selectable from a set of options that can be configured to match the organization’s roles and desired application usage patterns. In a future posting, we’ll detail the inner workings and how your system admin can customize these groupings and the entire navigation pane in general. But, for now, let’s stick to end user personalization of the out of box options.  

One more note: The “New Record” menu button on the toolbar is tied to this configuration. The records that appear in the New Record button are filtered to the records that are listed in your Workplace.

Why blog about this? Well it’s been my observation that users don’t personalize their Workplace. I’ve observed them jumping back and forth between the Workplace and Sales areas, when a few clicks of the mouse could bring the relevant pages into the Workplace… Why not? Some admit to not having noticed the “Personalize…” link.

Why not just have a “Personalize your CRM experience” when you start CRM for the very first time? Maybe this would be a good idea – we had something like this spec’ed out, which certainly would have addressed the discoverability issue, but it found itself on the cutting room floor. In retrospect, I wonder if it would have been better to have all of the groups selected by default and let users turn off the clutter if they wanted…

Why didn’t we just build favorites? First of all, the concepts aren’t mutually exclusive. Perhaps we’ll add favorites in a future release. Second, favorites are valuable, but can be a bit tricky to get right in terms of ease of use and the manageability experience. And third, in Outlook you have Favorites…

There you have it. It’s Your Workplace: Personalize It!