Tag Metadata to your Notes documents and organize them in folders just like SharePoint – Introducing Notes Manager 3.0 from XrmForYou.com

It gives me great pleasure to announce the new CRM add-on from XrmForYou stable – Notes Metadata Manager utility from XrmForYou stable.

Well Notes (Annotations) have existed in CRM since pre-historic times. And perhaps one of the most widely used feature in Dynamics till date since its inception. After all it gives a nice way to store your documents along with some notes and description which can be read by CRM users.

However with my many years in consulting, I realized the pain points of customers using Notes as well as it has so many shortcomings when compared with SharePoint.

• Can I have additional metadata for my uploaded documents as I can do in SharePoint?
• Can I organize my notes using folder just as I can do in SharePoint?
• Can I upload multiple attachments at one go with Title and description?
• Can I add new fields in my notes entity (Annotation) to capture some extra information along with Note Title and Note Description?
• Can I put notes are separate from my timeline control? May be in a separate tab?
• Can I drag and drop multiple documents in Notes section so that it will automatically upload?
• Can I create more than one Note record at a time with attachments?

We have progressed leaps and bounds but even with the latest version the answer to most of the questions above is “NO”. Also traditionally since inception, Notes entity was not customizable to add new fields and users were just limited to using only two field “Note Title” and “Note Description”.

For trial and pricing, write to us at info@xrmforyou.com

Well, we have understood the pain and hence we have released this Add-On for you. Works perfectly on UCI in web browser and on Dynamics 365 App on tablets. Not compatible on Phones.

Step 1: Configuration

It comes as a Managed solution. Once you install the managed solution and open up the solution configuration page, you get a screen like one below.

The top section is the license information which will be provided by our team.

The section below that shows all the entities which have been enabled for Notes. This is the area where you can configure additional metadata for your Notes records corresponding to each entity.

I click on Account entity and the existing metadata account shows up as shown below.

You can create up to a maximum of 10 additional metadata records as per the current release of the tool. The metadata currently supported are of type text and optionset.

Above is the way to create a text metadata. Also you can make the additional metadata mandatory to be entered during record creation by setting the Required? field to checked.

Below is the way to create an optionset metadata for your note record.

As you can see from above you can configure any global option set and map your Optionset Metadata with that global optionset for the list of possible values.

You save your metadata and that’s all from the Configuration Page.

Step 2: Setting it up on your form

The next step is setting up the custom notes control on the form.To do that you just need to include the custom web resource that comes with our solution on the form where you want to show the control. Detail on the web resource control follows in our actual documentation on our website. www.xrmforyou.com

Once the webresouce is inserted on the form, this is how it looks as shown below. Below are the screenshots in the Unified Interface environment.

Create and Organize into Folders

Inline editing of Note title, Description and metadata.

Inline new record creation:

Inline search

Attachment Upload

Bulk Upload

For trial and pricing, write to us at info@xrmforyou.com

Hope this helps!

Debajit Dutta

(Dynamics MVP)

For consultation/ corporate training visit www.xrmforyou.com or reach out to us at info@xrmforyou.com

Our product offerings:

Role based views for Dynamics 365 (http://www.xrmforyou.com/role-based-views.html)

CRM-Sharepoint Attachment uploader and metadata manager (http://www.xrmforyou.com/sharepoint-integrator.html)

Record Cloner for Dynamics 365 (http://www.xrmforyou.com/record-cloner.html)

Multiselect picklist for Dynamics 365 (http://www.xrmforyou.com/multi-select-picklist.html)