Phil Edry’s Dynamics CRM Blog

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

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.

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