Phil Edry’s Dynamics CRM Blog

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.”

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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.

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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…

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

Here are a few CRM blog posts that I’ve found helpful or interesting lately:

A quick intro comparing Workflows and Plugins: http://mscrmuk.blogspot.com/2008/06/differences-between-workflow-and.html

A description of how workflows are different in 4.0: http://crowechizek.com/cs/blogs/crm/archive/2008/03/26/differences-between-the-workflow-functionality-from-crm-3-0-to-crm-4-0.aspx

Internet Facing Deployment Lessons Learned: http://blog.customereffective.com/blog/2008/04/lessons-learned.html 

 Suggested steps for upgrading to CRM 4.0: http://blogs.msdn.com/crm/archive/2008/05/01/upgrading-to-crm-4-0.aspx

-p

The StringMap table is a handy source for selecting picklist values — but it’s essentially readonly. Picklist values are stored in the FieldXml field of the OrganiationUIBase table, as well as in the StringMap table. So if you insert into the StringMap alone, your values will be overwritten when you republish.

WARNING: The following is unsupported.

If you need to add a large number of picklist values, you’ll have to keep the two sources synchronized by doing the following:

1. Export the entity containing the picklist attribute to which you want to add the values.
2. Take a copy of the exported customizations to keep as a backup in case this breaks everything (always a risk with unsupported customizations… better yet, back up the CRM databases just in case.)
3. Open the exported XML file in your favorite XML editor.
4. Search for the attribute you want to update.
5. Carefully add the attribute values following the formatting of the existing picklist values. (Should look something like the below XML.)
6. Re-import the customizations.
7. Publish the imported entity. (If this doesn’t work, publish all entities.)

              <options>
                <option value=”1″>
                  <labels>
                    <label description=”Sample Value 1″ languagecode=”1033″ />
                  </labels>
                </option>
                <option value=”2″>
                  <labels>
                    <label description=”Sample Value 2″ languagecode=”1033″ />
                  </labels>
                </option>
              </options>

-p