Do you utilise the follow function? Do you have “what’s new” on a default landing dashboard? Is it something “helpful” or in your opinion a feature that doesn’t really add any value?

How about if all of your users followed the main administrator of dynamics and then the What’s New as part of a default landing dashboard. If there was a new update to push out all we simply needed to do was post from the administrator profile and it would appear on everyone’s feed.

We can evolve the ‘onboarding’ of our users more by creating a workflow against a new user record. The workflow could;

  • Wait for 5 minutes to ensure the initial data has been populated and saved
  • Set the user to follow the administrator
  • Send them a welcome email with a link to their user profile and ask them to update fields not populated
  • Have a condition to send an email to their manager (if the field is populated) to say they are set up, and have them follow the manager and the manager follow them, or if the manager field does not contain data a task for the user to populate it (you may want this as a child workflow that is also triggered on the change of Manager)
  • Populate a welcome post on their wall with links to where help documentation is stored

Although there are a few things on here what you do have is a way you will ‘automatically’ have all CRM users following a particular user and managers and direct reports following each other.

If you want to evolve this a little further instead of setting users to follow other users, how about when you create an opportunity if it is for a particular product then the ‘product owner’ is automatically set to follow it. Or, if the opportunity is linked to a campaign, the campaign owner is set to follow that.

Using a workflow to automatically follow something or someone can start to create a really targeted ‘What’s new feed’ which may change your opinion on the worth and value of the Follow function.

Have a think and a play and see how Following could help your organisation.

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