Phil Edry’s Dynamics CRM Blog

Here’s a quick gotcha. If you’re going through the walkthroughs for using the CRM 4.0 Online Web Services, you might run into a runtime error when you reference the sample dll if you’re deving on an x64 workstation. The error will look like: “An attempt was made to load a program with an incorrect format. (Exception from HRESULT: 0×8007000B)”

That’s because the helper dll’s that Microsoft provides to help with Passport authentication are x86 dlls. To fix this issue, stop using these helper dll’s, or target x86 in your build settings. The steps to do this are:

1. In Visual Studio, right-click your project and click “Properties”.

2. In the “Build” tab, set your “Platform Target” to “x86″.

-Phil

My buddy Will Schindler and I came up with a neat integration between CRM and SharePoint that has big a huge win internally. Hopefully this blog post will inspire similar solutions for your environment.

Summary: Here at Altriva, like many other organizations, we use CRM for many of our core business processes and use SharePoint for our intranet, document management, and enterprise search. With these two platforms being vital to many of our overall processes we have integrated the two applications. Having also solved this problem for many of our clients, we know how common it is for organizations to use CRM and SharePoint in similar capacities. As a result we felt it would be valuable to share our insight and integration approach.

Read more: http://www.altriva.com/AltrivaBlog/PostID/17.aspx

I think this is one of our most helpful blog entries to date. This entry details how to set up a “Sync User” entity to solve the issue of users wanting to sync contacts they don’t own, without having to go nuts in their local data groups. I highly recommend this blog entry that Hoss and I collaborated on.

Here’s a summary:

Microsoft Dynamics CRM 4.0 offers powerful functionality to synchronize data between CRM and your local Outlook. Most companies have certain contacts that many users interact with and want in their Outlook but Microsoft CRM does not give you an easy way to pick the contacts you want to bring down to your Outlook. This can be especially useful to users who sync their smart phones, blackberries, etc. to Outlook or Exchange because they can now access their CRM contacts through their phones address book.  Here at Altriva, one of the many “quick business facilitation configurations” we have in our toolkit extends this functionality to allow users (and multiple users per contact) to easily add and remove contacts synchronized to their Outlook. This allows multiple users to sync the same contact to Outlook effortlessly and allows users to decide which contacts they bring to their Outlook.    

http://altriva.com/AltrivaBlog/PostID/16.aspx

Hey there CRM friends. I was recently inspired by Menno’s post on twitter to start tweeting CRM-related stuff. Feel free to follow me at http://twitter.com/philedry.

#philedry

Here’s yet another link to a post I wrote for Altriva Solutions’ blog. Intro: 

Microsoft Dynamics CRM assumes a vertical tab order within a section. In other words, if you’ve selected a field on a form and press tab, focus will shift to the field below the previous field as opposed to the right of the previous field. This can be frustrating when designing field layout since it is often useful to tab horizontally when filling out a form. This entry will discuss a simple work around using sections without visible headers to allow for horizontal tabbing when appropriate.

 Read more…

Here’s another link to a post I wrote for Altriva Solutions’ blog. Intro: 

Did you know that you can send a hyperlink shortcut to an entity in CRM 4.0 over email? This functionality is especially useful when team members are collaborating on a customer or case together and want an easy way to link to what they’re working on so that the collaborating team member won’t have to search for the record to find it. But what happens if one team member connects to CRM 4.0 over the company intranet, while the other team member connects using IFD (Internet Facing Deployment)? Depending on network infrastructure, chances are that the sent shortcut will not work for both users. This blog entry will describe a workaround for this scenario.

Read more…

The company I work for, Altriva Solutions, has asked me to contibute blog posts to their CRM blog. I’ll post links to my company blog whenver I author something over there that is relevant to CRM. Most recently, I published a post entitled, “The Microsoft Dynamics CRM 4.0 Resource Center – What it’s good for and how to remove it”. Intro:

The Microsoft Dynamics CRM 4.0 Resource Center can either be a valuable tool to encourage user adoption or if it’s not used, it can clutter users’ screens without any value add. This post will discuss what the Resource Center is good for, and if you don’t buy it (or if your users do not have access to the internet from their workstations) we’ll also discuss how to remove the Resource Center to open up valuable screen real estate.

Read more…

As of May 8th, 2009, I’ve been running 64-bit Windows 7 RC1 at work. Here are some observations that might be relevant to the CRM community:

- CRM 4.0 Outlook Client with Rollup 3 is working great working “kinda ok” with my Outlook 2007 SP2!… Sometimes Outlook freezes up and I can’t send emails. If you instead choose to install the offline client, your outlook will freeze up even worse and you will hate life. I’ve heard of similar symptoms for installing the offline client on Vista 64-bit, so it’s no surprise. I will have to try again with rollup 4 and installing the offline client in compatibility mode. UPDATE: My outlook freezing issues have gone away and things have been working pretty great. To re-iterate, no matter what system you’re on, I highly suggest installing the Outlook client WITHOUT offline access in the name of performance and stability, unless you absolutely need it.

- The new Virtual PC is really cool (but not all THAT much different user-experience-wise from Virtual PC 2007)! I was able to open Virtual PC 2007 virtual hard drive files with Windows 7 Virtual PC. The USB and clipboard integration stopped working after a while, so I had to manually disable it and install the new version of the VPC integration tools. After that, life is good!

- Multiple monitor support is still not perfect. I’m convinced Microsoft will never get multiple monitors to work perfectly without driver confusion and flickering.

All in all, I am shocked with how well everything is working. Feel free to comment if you’re thinking about moving to Windows 7 RC and have any questions.

UPDATE: I’ve now rebuilt my laptop with Windows 7 RTM and have had no problems with the CRM for Outlook Client (no offline access). HOWEVER, if you install Rollup 6 on your client, you may get an unexpected error when you click “Advanced Find” within Outlook. To resolve this issue, turn off UAC. I was unable to recreate this issue on my workstation, but a colleage of mine spent a long time working through it. To turn off UAC in Windows 7, do a start menu search for “User Account Control” and select Change User Account Control settings. Then drag the bar down to “never notify”. This work around is non-ideal, since UAC in Windows 7 can be a helpful security tool, but there you have it. Your other option is to uninstall rollup 6 and install rollup 5.

-Phil

To follow up on my last post, MB2-634 Extending Microsoft Dynamics CRM 4.0 Has Released, I’ve finally gotten around to taking the exam — and I passed! I’d be happy to answer any questions about the exam within the limits of the exam non-disclosure agreement.

To prepare for the exam, I read through the Microsoft eLearning Course 8969 materials a couple of times the day before the exam and then just took it. I believe that you can access the course materials for free if you have a support contract with Microsoft, or you can pay $35 (until June 30, 2009) and buy the materials. The course material on the whole was pretty good. I think the topics covered were mostly applicable to real life. I’m not sure if I was working with an early release of the documentation or what, but my biggest complaint was that the grammar and typos were pretty horrendous in some sections. But whatever, that stuff isn’t important if the material is good.

My day-to-day work involves the material covered in this exam, so that’s probably why I got by on so little preparation. Microsoft’s MB2-634 Exam summary lists the topics covered in the exam. Of the topics covered, I found “Deployment Considerations” to be a pretty big part of the exam when considering how your extensions will work in the offline client. “Licensing Requirements” was a topic I forgot to study for, so be sure to read up on those.

All in all, I’d say this was my favorite exam since it was the most “real world” of the four MS CRM certs. I didn’t take the 3.0 version of this exam, so I can’t compare the two.

Don’t forget your Second Shot! I wouldn’t have taken such a chance with my limited studying if I didn’t have that safety net.

Phil

To follow up on a previous post regarding the release date for the Extending Microsoft Dynamics CRM 4.0 exam, Mb2-634 has finally released! Microsoft Learning has a study guide out: http://www.microsoft.com/learning/en/us/Exams/MB2-634.aspx and you can register for the test at the Prometric site.

Be sure to register for the Second Shot voucher before you register for the exam. They now offer 25% off of your next exam in addition to a free retake.

Apologies for the long break in posts, but wedding planning can be rather time consuming! I’m now back from my honeymoon and ready to get back to work. I hope to take the new exam soon and ramp up on the new Accelerators for CRM. Meno has a good post with links to how to get started.

Lastly, I’d like to point out a quality CRM blog from my friend Tim Dutcher: Takin’ care of business… with Dynamics CRM 4.0. His CRM 4.0 Quick Reference is nice to have near your phone when discussing CRM with clients.

-Phil