Topic: ‘Dynamics CRM’

Tips and tricks around the advance find features. Learn more about the report wizard and its expanded feature sets with CRM 2011.

Title: CRM Reporting: Advanced Find & Report Wizard

Speaker: Kristen O’Connor, I.B.I.S. Consultant

Great news - a new Update Rollup release for Dynamics CRM 2011! Rollup 3 is now available for download.

Want to go to the Download Center to access the downloadable files? Click here. These EXE files should be downloaded based upon the bit version of your CRM server (they are available for 64-bit server and 32-bit server versions). A Client download EXE file is also available based upon which version of MS Office you have, either 32-bit or 64-bit. Read the rest of this entry »

A new study by Forrester Research, a top information technology research company based out of Cambridge, Massachusetts, concludes that Microsoft Dynamics CRM 2011 not only reduces marketing, sales, and service costs throughout organizations using CRM 2011, but also increases revenue productivity and collaboration throughout the company.

Using a risk-adjusted ROI cost analysis method, Forrester determined that organizations can see a total return of investment in as little as 4.1 months. After gathering information and feedback from executives currently working for 9 Dynamics CRM 2011 customers in their initial implementation phases, Forrester conducted a composite case study with 50 CRM users working for an organization with 2,000 employees. Read the rest of this entry »

When implementing CRM, it is not unusual for a request to surface that requires datat creation based upon a certain action.  Usually it is something like “create an Activity record” or “update another entity based upon a change in a record.”  Plugins, and sometimes workflows, can both handle this situation. 

Workflows are a basic and simple way to go. However there is a limitation – workflows cannot update multiple related records (e.g. child records of a parent record).  Plugins on the other hand are fully capable of getting the job done. When you are in a situation where either functionality can handle the job, a question surfaces: “Which one do you use?”  Read the rest of this entry »

Good news - a new Update Rollup release! Rollup 18 is now available for download for the 4.0 version of Dynamics CRM. Click here to review the blog post from the Microsoft Dynamics CRM Team Blog.

Want to go to the Download Center to access the downloadable files? Click here. These EXE files should be downloaded based upon the bit version of your server (they are available for 64-bit server and 32-bit server versions). A Client download EXE file is also available for the 32-bit version of MS Office ONLY.

Want to go to the KB Article to read a bit more about the fixes included in the Rollup? Click here. The KB article goes in depth about included hotfixes available in the Rollup, as well as installation requirements and reminders.

NOTE: A prompt to restart the server may or may not occur after installing Rollup 18. As a reminder, a restart of a Client machine is ALWAYS required after installing the Rollup file for MS Outlook.

There is a big change in CRM 2011 that isn’t really talked about much, but it has an impact in some key areas. In CRM 4.0 there was a column in the database tables for each entity to tell you when a record was deleted or not – DeletionStateCode.* It had the following possible values: 0 meaning the record was active in the database, 2 meaning the record was marked for removal when the deletion service next runs, and 1 which was not used. On a schedule the deletion service would skim through the tables and remove all the records with a value of 2.  Fortunately or unfortunately (depending on how you look at it), the deletion service had problems and often didn’t run or would leave records in the system. When developing against the CRM environment (i.e. any custom SSRS reports, SQL queries, custom web pages, or plugins), you would need to take into account records with ‘deletionstatecode = 2’ (either excluding/including them based on what you were trying to do). There was an upside however; the inclusion/exclusion made it easy to be able to go back and look for missing records that may have been deleted accidentally and recover them or determine who had deleted them.

In CRM 2011, ‘DeletionStateCode’ no longer exists. When you delete a record, it goes bye-bye for good. There is no trace of it left behind. This means that you do not have to include it in your customizations against CRM anymore. If you want to be able to go back and retrieve old records you will need to do a restore to a backed up version of the database.  If you want to see who deleted what, you will need to use some type of audit logging.**

How does this affect your system? If you are new to Dynamics CRM 2011, it has no impact, but if you are upgrading…this means you may have some work to do. If you have customized your system beyond simple configuration and reference DeletionStateCode in your custom code, reports, or queries, you will need to go and remove those references to prevent errors from rendering your customized system useless. Additionally this is very important when planning for your upgrade from CRM 4.0 to CRM 2011. Make sure that you run the deletion service manually prior to upgrading and also check that all records with a DeletionStateCode = 2 that the service might have missed get removed from the system as well. If there are any records remaining in the database when the system gets upgraded, they will magically reappear as active records when you log into CRM 2011! While it might be a little tedious, it is not a difficult change process if you know ahead of time what to expect.

*Microsoft will tell you that it was unsupported to reference the DeletionStateCode if you ask them to assist in fixing any problems you may encounter in regards to this field. Catch 22 – you had to reference it while customizing 4.0 because the deletion service never worked and your data would be incorrect. Good news is, you don’t need to worry about it anymore because they removed the process - but your upgraded customizations will have to be modified.

**CRM 2011 has auditing functionality built in natively.

Want to know more about Dynamics CRM 2011 on a technical level? Want to download and peruse the 2011 SDK? Want to view some tecnical articles specifically geared towards Dynamics CRM 2011?

Microsoft TechNet has a library with technical information that is very helpful for any technical consultant working with Dynamics CRM 2011. Click here to navigate to the Microsoft Dynamics CRM 2011 section of the TechNet library.

If you’ve used CRM before and been part of the administrative group that sets up and modifies users, you are fully aware that a security role is required for a user to log into the CRM system. However, I have seen an issue where a user, with a security role, cannot log in. Read the rest of this entry »