Phil Edry’s Dynamics CRM Blog

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

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…

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…

1. Read this quick guide on how to redeploy CRM 4.0 without uninstalling and reinstalling CRM. (Note that you won’t have to copy over the CONFIG database). http://blogs.inetium.com/blogs/tedh/archive/2008/05/20/15540.aspx

2. An oldie but a goodie, if you need dummy users to map to, use this script! FOR /L %i in (1,1,100) DO NET USER CRMUSER%i Pass@word /ADD

Everyone’s favorite nightstand reading is now better than ever.

Thanks to the CRM Team Blog for pointing us to the new version. They advertise “Over 30 corrections and revisions”, but these are largely related to grammar and other minor changes. One welcome addition is help on using NLB to install CRM 4.0 on multiple computers.

The MSDN link doesn’t seem to work (at least not on Firefox) but this link works.

I came upon this blog entry when attempting to configure CRM 4.0 Client for Outlook. I kept getting: “The configuration wizard cannot connect to the Microsoft CRM server. This might indicate that the server is down.”

Luckily, rmaclean has found a few ways to fix this. I’ve never seen so many positive replies to a blog post!

http://www.sadev.co.za/node/155

Thanks rmaclean!

p

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