CRM Lab @ Cobalt Iterates its CRM Intelligent IQ for new Advanced Find Queries

Last month the CRM Lab @ Cobalt, creators of Dynamics CRM Snapshot 3D, released another free add-on for Dynamics CRM called CRM Intelligent Query (IQ).

CRM IQ allows users to create ad-hoc "Not In" or "Does Not Have" queries in Advanced Find and apply those queries to Marketing Lists, Saved Views and System Views. Cobalt reports over 100 unique downloads in the first two weeks and plenty of feedback from the CRM community with ideas improvements and additional functionality.

IQ leverages a little-used feature of the Dynamics CRM Advanced Find interface to make "Does Not Have" queries possible. The image below details an example how the Advanced Find tool allows users to create a condition on related records that specifies that the primary key of the related record "Does Not Contain Data."

The result of this Advanced Find, under normal circumstances, would be 0 records returned from the query since the user is asking CRM to find all Accounts with related Cases where there is no Case. Instead, CRM IQ infers that what the user intended was to retrieve all Accounts with No Cases, a far more meaningful and useful query.

Since last month, Cobalt has released two updates to CRM IQ addressing user feedback on the company's blog and in social networks. One such piece of feedback was that the mechanism for modifying queries on the fly applied to every entity in CRM, and there was no way to turn off the functionality for certain entities if there were ...