Phil Edry’s Dynamics CRM Blog

To follow up on my last post, New CRM 4.0 Certification Exams Available Tomorrow …

I just took the 30-633: Installation and Deployment for Microsoft Dynamics CRM 4.0 (AKA MB2-633) exam. I studied the implementation guide for about five mintues and just walked right up and took it. I got a 54%, 16 points off of passing. Thanks to Second Shot, this served as a good practice exam. So, be advised, this exam takes more than five mintues of studying!

I noticed very few questions in common with the 3.0 installation exam. I’d say the exam focussed on features and gotchas new to 4.0.

So since I got 27 out of 50 questions correct, and I need 8 more to pass, I’d say picking up the Microsoft E-Learning materials and going through all of the practice questions should get me over 70% next time.

I’ll write again when I take my Second Shot.

-p

According to PartnerSource, the following CRM 4.0 exams release tomorrow: 

Don’t forget to get a Second Shot voucher before you register for the exam. My plan is to take the exams without much studying, and then retake them if necessary. I’m already 3.0 certified, and I took the beta training at Microsoft on 30-631 and 30-633, so who knows, I might pass the first time. I’ll write back with how I do.

The tests are listed as MB2-631, MB2-632, and MB2-633 on the Prometric website.

Thanks to Menno te Koppele for pointing it out: http://www.tekoppele.com/Blog/post/2008/04/Get-certified!.aspx

UPDATE: Hey Everyone — I no longer have access to this code and actually I no longer recommend this approach. Over the last two years as I’ve gotten better at this, I’ve found straight C# is a better practice. Thanks for all of your interest and good luck…

According to the Data Migration Manager help documentation, “You cannot migrate attachments to e-mail messages, sales literature items, or to any record type that does not support notes.”

So what do you do when you’re doing a data conversion and you need to migrate email attachments?

Well, there’s got to be an more elegant way than this out there, but the first thing that came to mind for me was to migrate the attachments as notes by following the instructions here: http://blogs.msdn.com/crm/archive/2008/03/11/migrating-notes-and-attachments-using-data-migration-manager.aspx

For the csv file, I had three columns. The GUID of the email’s ActivityID, the filepath+filename of the attachment relative to the “Attachments” folder, and the name of the file. I then mapped the ActivityID guid to “Title”  the filepath+filename to “Document” and the file name to “File Name”.

Then, all you need to do is go into the database and INSERT INTO ActivityMimeAttachment FROM AnnotationBase where applicable and you’re good to go! Reply to this message if you want more details or code snippets on the specifics of this hack. Fair warning, this is very unsupported.

Ever tried adding a column to a view that is a lookup to a user in Dynamics CRM 4.0? You’ll notice a mysterious checkbox titled “Enable presence for this column”. Now, if you google “Enable presence for this column”, you get nothing (well until I wrote this entry.) So what the heck does this feature do?

Turns out, it’s a neat new feature of Dynamics CRM 4.0. Now, if you’re signed into Communicator or Windows Live Messenger, the online status circle icon will appear next to users’ names in the view.

 See the below msdn blog for more details.

-p

References: http://blogs.msdn.com/lezamax/archive/2008/01/11/crm-4-0-presence.aspx