Update Rollup 9 – To be released February 11th

Posted by Mike Snyder on February 2, 2010 in   |  Microsoft Dynamics CRM 4.0  |  Comments (0)

Just got this bit of news from our Microsoft Partner Advantage Newsletter:

Update Rollup 9 for Microsoft Dynamics CRM 4.0 will be available February 11^th at 12:00 CST.  For the list of current Update Rollups for Microsoft Dynamics CRM click here: http://support.microsoft.com/kb/949256

UR7 and the Known Issues in Outlook

Posted by Kara O'Brien on November 5, 2009 in   |  Microsoft Dynamics CRM 4.0  |  Comments (3)

As I mentioned in my last post on Update Rollup 7 for Microsoft Dynamics CRM 4.0, there are a few known issues appearing in Outlook after the rollup is installed. I've noticed a few of them on my own workstation, so I thought I’d share the details:

• The Microsoft Dynamics CRM icon does not appear in the taskbar in Windows 7. Note that this can be fixed by customizing the taskbar and selecting "Show icon and notifications" for the "Microsoft CRM Outlook" option (pictured below).
• The CRM toolbar remains active when you disable it under Manage COM Add-Ins in Outlook, but does not respond to any actions.
• The View in CRM button remains disabled after your click "Track in CRM" on an Outlook record until you close and reopen the record.
• When you track a contact, then edit the record in Outlook, the standard Outlook contact icon appears next to the record instead of the "tracked in CRM" contact icon. The correct icon displays only after the synchronization process runs.
• If the Outlook client is installed but not configured, or if you are connecting to an organization other than the one configured in the Outlook client, the following error appears in Internet Explorer: "Internet explorer has blocked this site from using an ActiveX control in an unsafe manner."
• During the configuration wizard, the debug assertion fails and the Microsoft Dynamics CRM role is removed from the user.
• If you set a record to "regarding" in Outlook when synchronizing data with Microsoft Dynamics CRM, you will receive an error, since you cannot track e-mail messages when the manual sync is running. The Outlook and regarding CRM record will not be linked correctly until you open the e-mail in Outlook, click "Track in CRM" to un-track the record, and then delete the record in CRM. When the manual synchronization is finished, you can track the message in CRM again.

That said, even with a few of the issues listed above, the Outlook client is much improved with UR7 and seems to be faster and more stable. If you've run into other issues, feel free to comment.

Creating an Appointment through Workflow with a busy status

Posted by Brendan Landers on November 2, 2009 in   |  Microsoft Dynamics CRM 4.0  |  Comments (1)

Recently one of our clients was implementing a sales process via workflow and asked the following question:

 

"When I am creating a  Appointment record through workflow, why can’t I select  busy in the “Show Time As” field?"

 

   
 
They assumed this was a CRM defect because when a user creates a new appointment they can select the Busy value in this field.

The “Show Time As” field is actually the Status Reason (statuscode) field from the Appointment entity.  The Status Reason displays values based on the Status (statecode) of the record.  When a record is created, the status is set to ‘Open’.  As a result, the only corresponding statuscodes available are ‘Free’ and ‘Tentative’.  Therefore, within workflow you need to add a step after the appointment is created to change the record status to 'Scheduled - Busy'. 

 

Many CRM entities have similar statuscode and statecode relationships which would require similar changes in workflow.

 

Update Rollup 7 Released

Posted by Kara O'Brien on October 26, 2009 in   |  Microsoft Dynamics CRM 4.0  |  Comments (1)

Lucky number 7s: Microsoft released the much-anticipated Update Rollup 7 for Microsoft Dynamics CRM 4.0 (UR7) on Friday, the same day Windows 7 was released to the public.

UR7 focuses on the Microsoft Dynamics CRM Outlook client and there are significant improvements to performance, stability and installation in both the online and offline Outlook clients.  Here are some highlights:

• Faster startup. The load process was streamlined so that the CRM client loads in the background – so you can access e-mail and other Outlook records while the CRM client loads.
• Improved performance. There are a few big changes here:
1. Unnecessary processes were removed for the online version of the Outlook client, resulting in faster performance.
2. E-mail tagging runs as a background process, so users who have a large number of tracked e-mail messages should see faster performance in Outlook.
3. Synchronization between Microsoft Dynamics CRM and Outlook runs as a background process to minimize the impact on performance.
• Improved stability. Some code updates help Microsoft Dynamics CRM handle state changes more efficiently, so authentication, hibernation and other changes in each client won't require you to restart Outlook.
• Delegate support. If an Outlook user is a delegate for another user, the delegate can now track e-mails and other Outlook records in the other user's inbox, so records are attached to the correct owner in Microsoft Dynamics CRM.
• Improved SMS support, including silent, unattended installations of the Outlook client. Users no longer need to be logged into the workstation during the laptop client installation process.
• Better error logging in the synchronization process.
• Streamlined setup and configuration processes.

Download UR7 now – As always, try it in a test environment before going live in production if you can. Also, before installing UR7 in your environment, check the known issues published by Microsoft. Note that UR7 is inclusive of the previous Dynamics CRM 4.0 rollups released by Microsoft, so if you have not updated your system recently, all released fixes will be applied with UR7.

Problems Registering Plug-Ins after a Domain Controller Change

Posted by Kara O'Brien on October 9, 2009 in   |  Microsoft Dynamics CRM 4.0  |  Comments (1)

While deploying a code update to a customer last week, we ran into timeout and SQL errors when trying to register a couple plug-ins. We've worked with this client before and never had problems registering our plug-ins, but since our last project the client had changed their domain controller.

After running a trace of the registration process, our team tracked the issue to the domain controller change, based on the following errors:

Exception in FindResultInDC: The server is not operational.

CrmSoapExtension detected CrmException:
System.Web.Services.Protocols.SoapException: Server was unable to process request. ---> System.Reflection.TargetInvocationException: Exception has been thrown by the target of an invocation. ---> System.Data.SqlClient.SqlException: Timeout expired.  The timeout period elapsed prior to completion of the operation or the server is not responding.

MessageProcessor fail to process message 'UnregisterSolution' for 'none'.

Exception: System.Data.SqlClient.SqlException: Timeout expired.  The timeout period elapsed prior to completion of the operation or the server is not responding.
   at System.Data.SqlClient.SqlConnection.OnError(SqlException exception, Boolean breakConnection)

The cause of these errors is related to properly demoting the old domain controller. The domain controller was taken offline, but there were still records in Active Directory and DNS that routed requests to the old controller.

Following are the steps that resolved the issue for our customer:

1. Added a String value in the registry under HKLM\Software\Microsoft\MSCRM called PreferredDc.
2. Entered the NetBios Name of the target domain controller.
3. Restarted the CRM server.

The customer was able to register the plug-ins successfully after making this fix. Note the registry key was included as a manual update in an earlier rollup and should alleviate some potential Active Directory issues. For more information, see this knowledge base article.

 

A few tips to keep you from going customization-crazy

Posted by Kara O'Brien on October 2, 2009 in   |  Microsoft Dynamics CRM 4.0  |  Comments (0)

I’ve been working with a customer recently on ideas for managing customizations. Like many organizations, this customer has several environments running Microsoft Dynamics CRM 4.0 and many people on staff making form and field changes with the customizations tools, which resulted in some errors when importing the customizations into another environment. There also were a few incidents in which one person’s changes were overwritten by another’s.

Using the handy documentation generator add-in for Microsoft Office Excel 2007, we created a change log that will be managed and updated by one administrator. The documentation generator allows you to load the customizations file from a Dynamics CRM environment, then parses it to compile form, picklist, and script configurations by entity in an Excel spreadsheet – a great tool for anyone who has had to document customizations!  It’s a free download from CodePlex if you’re interested.

I hope a future version of Dynamics CRM has auditing and a rollback feature in the customizations tools, but for now, we’ll make do with a well-defined process to manage the customizations. Here are a few other best practices to help manage customizations:

1. Limit the number of people who make customization changes and if possible, divide ownership of entities so that more than one person isn’t likely to make changes on an entity at the same time.
2. Select one environment (typically a development or test environment) as the master organization for all customizations, and make sure all changes are made and tested there before being exported and imported into another environment.
3. When possible, limit the export to only the entities that were changed.
4. The customizations are stored in the database, so all of the form layouts, client-side script and views are recoverable as long as you’re backing up your MSCRM database regularly.
5. If an entity, attribute, or relationship is deleted, you must remove the object from each environment manually.

Chicago Bulls and Hawks use Microsoft Dynamics CRM

Posted by Mike Snyder on September 28, 2009 in   |  Microsoft Dynamics CRM 4.0  |  Comments (0)

 

We just announced a press release about two of our high profile CRM customers, the Chicago Bulls and the Chicago Blackhawks! You can read the full press release on our website.

I am really proud of this deployment for a few reasons:

• The United Center information technology team (the organizations that supports both the Bulls and the Hawks) conducted a very thorough CRM platform selection process considering 10+ different applications…including our good buddies at Salesforce.com. Of course, Microsoft Dynamics CRM came out of top!
• This deployment is a great XRM example. The Bulls and Hawks have been slowly consolidating multiple disparate systems onto CRM, and now they have a single platform that supports sponsorship and marketing, community relations, ticket operations, and more! This system definitely contains more than your typical sales, marketing and service scenarios.
• The Bulls and Hawks use CRM to support a pretty aggressive call center effort. Sonoma Partners took the out-of-the-box Microsoft CRM functionality and customized it very specifically for employees making non-stop outbound dials so they can be as efficient as possible. We also included some great tools for call center managers to route calls, assign work, and shift work as necessary.

Lastly (most importantly?!), I am a die-hard Blackhawks fan so it’s pretty cool to go the United Center for our business meetings. I remember that in one of our very early meetings, the Blackhawks coach (and hockey Hall of Famer) Denis Savard came in, sat down and started chatting it up with us. Unfortunately he quickly realized he was in the wrong conference room, so he said good-bye and bolted. Even though it was short-lived it was fun, he was a super nice guy.

Gathering no moss

Posted by Kara O'Brien on September 26, 2009 in   |  Microsoft Dynamics CRM 4.0  |  Comments (0) We've been busy at Sonoma Partners this summer, and it doesn't look like things are slowing down anytime soon. In addition to some challenging new customer projects, we're excited about the activity around Microsoft Dynamics CRM 4.0, including:

• Increasingly robust mobile solutions for Windows Mobile, Blackberry and iPhone
• New accelerators – Coming soon, keep an eye on CodePlex for updates
• Updates to the Outlook client
• More information about accessing CRM data in SharePoint
• More ISV solutions

All of the above are detailed in the Microsoft Dynamics CRM Statement of Direction, an updated version of which was released last week. If you haven't seen the document already, check it out –- It's a great overview of the roadmap for Microsoft Dynamics CRM. You can download the document from CustomerSource and PartnerSource. Happy reading!

Slow forms? Try Update Rollup 5!

Posted by Kara O'Brien on August 3, 2009 in   |  Microsoft Dynamics CRM 4.0  |  Comments (0)

Last month, Microsoft released Update Rollup 5 (UR5) for Microsoft Dynamics CRM 4.0. Many of our customers have upgraded already, and if you’re experiencing slow performance on any Dynamics CRM 4.0 forms – particularly those with a lot of attributes – UR5 includes a design change that might help. In the update, the form load process was optimized by removing unnecessary code used to compile the dynamic data fields used in workflows and templates, leading to a greatly improved load time for forms! For more details, check out Alex’s post on the Microsoft Dynamics CRM Team Blog.

For a complete list of fixes included in UR5, as well as links to the previous four rollups, see the Microsoft Support website.  Note there are a few manual updates and configuration changes included in UR5, also detailed in the Support article.

Unsupported changes (if you’ve dared to make them!) to core Dynamics CRM 4.0 code are skipped when UR5 is applied. This means your custom changes aren’t lost (good) but currently there’s no log to identify which files were skipped (bad). If you’ve made unsupported changes to the HTC, JS, XML or other core Dynamics CRM 4.0 code, grab the latest code in UR5 and manually merge your changes to them to ensure you have all of the updates included in UR5. Hopefully logging will be included in UR6 to make this process easier!

Like all update rollup releases, UR5 is inclusive of the previous Dynamics CRM 4.0 rollups released by Microsoft, so if you have not updated your system recently, all released fixes will be applied with UR5. Also note that the rollups are not included in the latest installation files for Dynamics CRM 4.0, so if you’re bringing up a new environment, make sure to download the latest update rollup after installing the software. As always, test the update in a development or staging environment before installing the rollup in your production environment if possible.

The update also is on schedule with the 8-week release cycle Microsoft announced in January, which means we expect Update Rollup 6 to be released in September. Stay tuned for details!

Live from WPC – Day One

Posted by Mike Snyder on July 13, 2009 in   |  Microsoft Dynamics CRM 4.0  |  Comments (1)

I am at the Microsoft Worldwide Partner Conference in New Orleans this week, and today was an interesting first day. The personal highlight for me was the announcement that Microsoft Dynamics CRM went over the 1,000,000 user mark!

I sat in on a session by Kirill Tatarinov, and I picked up a few new tidbits:

• Microsoft CRM had double digit growth in FY09
• Microsoft’s ERP products has single digit decline in FY09, but they actually took market share because the competitors did even worse
• Kirill said that ALL of Microsoft will be running Microsoft Dynamics CRM exclusively within the next 12 months!
• He presented a new nomenclature set for our competitors, which I had not seen before:
• "The Bandits"
  • Primarily two competitors
  • MSFT will beat with:
    • Role tailored UI
    • Lower TCO
    • Flexibility and ease of customization
• "The Zombies"
  • Approximately a dozen companies that use old technologies (one competitor has 192 products doing same things!)
  • MSFT will beat with:
    • Focused innovation
    • The "MSFT factor"
    • Strong partner ecosystem
• "The Force"
  • Locks customer into SaaS
  • MSFT will beat with:
    • Power of choice
    • Better customer economics
    • From "instant on" to "instant value"