Mobile Offline Support With Dynamics CRM 2016: Back to the Future

Globalization has led to a surge in the number of remote workers across a variety of industries. As more employees work from field locations, around-the-clock connectivity and access to business critical information is becoming all the more essential to carry out tasks to make crucial, data-driven decisions. While mobile solutions help enterprises stay connected with their on-site sales teams, there is always the problem of low or no connectivity in extremely remote locations. Such a situation impedes business processes, restricting remote employees from efficiently doing their jobs and completing tasks.

Microsoft Dynamics CRM 2016 incorporates an efficient mobile strategy that extends CRM capabilities to deliver more information in a more consumable fashion, enabling remote workers to make informed decisions through dashboards, charts, and KPIs. The new global search offered in the mobile client allows users to search across multiple entities. What’s more, fluid-forms are designed not just by resizing the pages, but by dynamically changing the page constructs based on view, device, and form factor that ensures a responsive user interface.

Dynamics CRM 2016 has also evolved from cached records and timestamps to offer full mobile CRM offline capabilities, offering a consistent user experience across a wide range of devices. Dynamics CRM 2016 enables your sales staff to stay productive even when there is no internet service. Here are a few ways your remote sales staff can continue to work efficiently in spite of low or no connectivity while on the road:

• Microsoft uses the Outlook client as an offline edition and stores offline CRM data and IIS (Internet Information Services) to render the web pages.
• Automated sync ensures that updates are applied to the live CRM system once you regain connectivity.
• The sync process is flexible and allows you to setup local data groups, apply filters, and choose which CRM records are available offline.
• You can make use of mobile apps that keep records that you've used recently, and access them even when you’re disconnected from the network.
• Offline support allows you to capture new information by creating drafts of new records like accounts, and activities. Once you're reconnected, you can review and save your unsaved drafts that can then be made available to your teams.
• While your offline experience might look a little different from your online experience, you can still complete important tasks offline and upload or share them with your colleagues once you’re connected.
• Records you've recently used are saved as cached data in your device. Since this data is specific to your device, depending on the records you've viewed, the cached data on each device will be different.
• The offline capability is also offered within the CRM App for Outlook along with rich sales data that salespeople already use on a daily basis.

Limitations

While Dynamics CRM 2016’s offline mobile support allows you to carry out a number of tasks while offline, there are certain limitations:

• When offline, you can only create new records. To edit existing records, you need to be connected to the network.
• Offline support allows you to create standalone records or link records to those that are available for offline access on your device. If an account was created when offline, you cannot create an opportunity for the same while offline.
• When offline, you cannot set the value for lookup fields. If you create a record that is linked with another record, you can fill in fields after you’ve connected.

Work Uninterruptedly

Dynamics CRM 2016 offers a full offline experience with mobile apps, allowing you to work uninterruptedly around-the-clock. Create, change, and delete records while offline and have your local changes get synchronized through CRM Online. Enjoy a seamless user experience while switching between online and offline modes and ensure optimum productivity and efficiency.