Easy Navigation in CRM 2013

Roshan Mehta, 07 September 2013

Microsoft has invested huge amounts of time and money to improve the user experience in Dynamics CRM 2013. One of the pain points of previous versions of CRM was the excessive pop-up windows when working with multiple records. This has changed significantly with the new “flat UI” which allows users to switch between dashboards, views, and forms without having to leave a single browser window!

The new navigation bar includes breadcrumbs to easily see the path you have taken to get to the current screen. For example, the screenshot below shows what the navigation bar looks like if we click on Sales followed by Accounts and then open up a single Account record.

Notice that we can easily go back into previously viewed areas of CRM from the navigation bar. We can click on Accounts to go back to the view of Accounts we were working with or click on SALES to drop-down a list of common entities for the sales module. We could also click on the “Home” icon to quickly go back to our home page.

Because the new flat UI presents the CRM application in a single window, we now have the ability to use the browser’s “back” button to navigate to previous screens. This was not possible in older versions of CRM.

One important thing to note about the new flat UI is the URL that is displayed in the address bar when moving between different areas of the application. For example, the URL for the “A. Datum Corporation (Sample)” Account is shown in the screenshot below.

If we copy-paste this URL into the browser, we will NOT be taken to the same Account record. Instead, we will be redirected to the home page for CRM. This is different to previous versions where each record would open up in their own browser window, so would be URL addressable. To retrieve the URL of this record, we would have to use the E-mail a Link option from the command bar.

Note that there doesn’t appear to be an option to Copy a Link like there was in CRM 2011.