May
29
2009
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…
May
29
2009
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…
May
11
2009
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