Phil Edry’s Dynamics CRM Blog

Hey friends — as you may have noticed, there hasn’t been a lot going on here at DynamicsCRMBlog.com. I’ve been busy implementing Dynamics CRM for customers, and when I’ve had time to blog, I’ve been posting at http://www.altriva.com/AltrivaBlog.aspx. Hope you stay current with my CRM musings there!
- Phil

Not sure what happened, but Google has flagged this site as suspicious, so I’m guessing there is a subtle hack that I can’t detect due to some vulnerability to my ancient WordPress version.

There will be some downtime while I fix the problem. I sure wish Google would be more helpful in identify what about your site really is suspicious.
Phil

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

Here’s a quick gotcha I saw on the CRM Forums. When configuring the CRM Client for Outlook, you enter http://servername:port/ORGNAME in the Internet address field and you get a cryptic error stating “Mandatory updates for Microsoft Dynamics CRM could not be applied successfully. Try running the application again.”

Read more…

I’ve somewhat recently discovered Microsoft Connect as a great place to suggest new features to MS and report bugs. They get read pretty frequently and everything gets a response eventually, especially if other connect folks vote it up as important. I joined the CRM and CRM Online communities and have reported all kinds of stuff.

If you’re like me, you’ll at least feel a little better once “Microsoft knows” about a bug you’ve discovered.

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…