Recently myself and my team are troubleshooting an issue with the CRM mobile app. The issue is that when the mobile app is trying to connect and getting the latest metadata it always stuck and fails at the step 4/5 of the configuration wizard.

We’ve found an article on an open source documentation: https://github.com/thuld/CrmFetchKit that says:

“Do not use the minified version (CrmFetchKit.bundle.min.js) in combination with the App for CRM. The App for CRM seems to have problems with minified code. The minified version prevents the successful configuration of the app (step 4/5 of the configuration wizard failed).

This issue affects all versions (3.x.x). The reason for this issue is unknown, Microsoft support did not provide any details.”

Once we used the non minified version of the javascript the configuration wizard of the mobile apps completed successfully.

HTH!

Dynamics CRM 2015 Online Update 1 (7.1.0) comes with the new feature that allows to apply theme and provide your Dynamics CRM application with branding capabilities and adding a sense of CRM application ownership.

To get started working on theming your Dynamics CRM application, navigate to Settings > Customizations > Themes.

Best practice is to create a clone of the CRM Default Theme by selecting the existing “CRM Default Theme” and clicking the CLONEbutton, so that by default, your custom theme will have the base colour.

What happens if you directly create a new custom theme? Your custom theme will be defaulted to black, and it is quite annoying to change it one by one.

The downside of the theme editor is the absence of colour picker. So for us to get a quick result of the look and feel of the custom theme that we are configuring, there is a great web app publicly available to help you: Dynamics CRM Theme Generator.

Once you are happy with the look and feel, simply put the colour back to the custom theme.

Adding organisation logo will improve the sense of ownership of the application. The logo will be taken from Dynamics CRM Web Resources. So, you could create and upload a new logo as a web resource. The recommended image size would be around 400px width x 50px height (Ref: https://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/dn932133.aspx)

Once you are happy with the theme, don’t forget to publish the theme by clicking the “PUBLISH THEME” button at the top of the theme editor form.

Now, you should have your theme applied to your Dynamics CRM Organisation.

Happy CRM Theming!

This post was originally posted at my company’s blog: http://dynamicscrmcoe.com/theming-in-dynamics-crm-doing-it-right-2/

A couple months ago Jerry Weinstock pointed out in his Tip of The Day post regarding the new trial setup experience. It is just in matter of couple months away from that post being published, we can see how committed the Dynamics CRM product team in providing a better service for their customers.

Today I’m about to spin up a new trial instance to see CRM 2016 in action (more blog posts to come). And the concierge page has been updated again! Now, back to the main point of the tip. To get a straightforward trial setup, it is more obvious than before, select “Self-Start Trial”.

It will then open up the well known trial wizard:

HTH!

Dynamics CRM Online came up with Sandbox functionality (ref: https://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/library/dn659833.aspx) that provides separate instance for development/testing purpose. Sandbox instance comes up with “Admin mode” functionality that allows the admin to turn on/off.

Admin mode allows users with System Administrator or System Customizer security privilege to access the CRM system, while the rest will receive a notification, similar to:

It is a common requirement for production deployment, during this period that normal users should not access the production environment to prevent data loss and interruption when the changes/deployment is in place. Now, as the “Admin mode” functionality only available for Sandbox instance at this moment, the option that we can do to achieve this is to switching Production instance to Sandbox instance temporarily, enable the Admin mode, put some friendly maintenance warning and that’s it, your normal user won’t be able to access the instance until the Admin mode has been disabled. Don’t forget to turn the instance back to Production.

This functionality is also useful to prevent normal users to access development environment and get lost in it 🙂

HTH!

Disclaimer: this workaround is categorised as unsupported by Microsoft as described in the following Best Practice article: https://technet.microsoft.com/en-gb/library/dn887218.aspx

Recently I just configured a Dynamics CRM Online to Exchange Online that has custom domain. It was a straight forward process for environment that is using “onmicrosoft.com” domain as their username and email address. However, in most of real cases, it should not use onmicrosoft.com domain for production environment, as it does not reflect the branding and ownership of the company. Most of the customers will use their own domain, e.g: emailaddress@contoso.com.

For this implementation I have followed through the regular guide on approving the mailbox as described in: https://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/library/dn832109.aspx. However as the email address is using the customer’s domain name, I always encounter an error during the “Test and Enable” the mailbox: The mailbox location could not be determined while sending/receiving the email message <Message Subject>. The mailbox <Mailbox Name> has been disabled for sending/receiving email and the owner of the associated email server profile <Email Server Profile name> has been notified.

That error message is listed up on the troubleshooting guide on: https://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/library/dn850386.aspx. The resolution for this error is: “You will see this alert if your email server profile (Settings > Email Configuration > Email Server Profiles) is configured to use the Auto Discover Server Location option but auto discover cannot detect the location of your mailbox. If this issue occurs, check with your Exchange administrator to verify your network is configured for auto discover. You can update the email server profile and choose No for Auto Discover Server Location. Then provide the Exchange web services URL for your Exchange deployment.”

Now, for Dynamics CRM Online, it seems Microsoft have applied a different script/css to hide the Auto Discover Server Location settings. As a workaround I need to do some HTML hack to bring back the elements to be editable.

Now it’s the step by step guide:

1. Open the Exchange Online email server profile from Settings > Email Configuration > Email Server Profiles.
2. Using browser’s developer tool (in my example, I’m using IE, but it’s up to you to use your favorite browser). Find the auto discover element: with id useautodiscover_c and useautodiscover_d, remove the style tag that hide the element:
   
3. Now the Auto Discover Option should be visible, but they are in disabled state. So, we need to remove the disabled tag on the following element: div with id: useautodiscover and and input radio button with name: rad_useautodiscover.
4. Now you should have the Auto Discover Server Location tag to be editable, set it to No.
   
5. Then the next part is to make Incoming and Outgoing Server location to be editable and set the exchange online web service address: https://outlook.office365.com/EWS/Exchange.asmx. To make the fields editable, find the following elements: input with id: incomingserverlocation and outgoingserverlocation. 
   
   
6. Now you should have the fields editable:
   
7. Once you’ve specified the above configuration, save and close the Email Server Profile for Exchange Online. Then go back to the mailbox and run again the “Test and Enable” process. You should have the server side sync worked.

HTH!

Recently I’m working in a CRM Online environment with CRM 2015 Update 1. One of the use case that I’m working on is Email to Case. I read through the article from Microsoft to get this functionality worked: https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/dynamics/crm-customer-center/automatically-create-a-case-from-an-email.aspx.

One of the gotcha that I encountered is that when I’m configuring the record creation rule and creating a case record, some of the fields are pre-populated with some weird mapping (null(Channel Properties)):

And when I tried to map some of these fields to something else, for example I map the stakeholder to the email sender and clear out the value from Contact field, I usually encounter a failure in the case creation process:

The error description is apparently showing up that the contact in “Contact” field does not belong to the customer in my “Stakeholder” field. And when I tried to open the Create: Case properties, I found out that the Contact field is not cleared out in the automatic case creation workflow:

So, as a workaround. I need to let the pre-defined field to work as it is. It will then resolve the Case creation mapping as the following logic:

IF the sender belongs to an account

• Set the Customer to the email sender’s parent account and set the sender in the Contact field.

ELSE

• Set the Customer to the email sender’s contact record.

Apparently there is an KB article that related to this: https://support.microsoft.com/en-us/kb/3094208. Thanks to Feng Wang from Microsoft support to point out to this article.

7. Click on Set Properties and re-add any custom mappings. The out-of-box Customer and Contact fields will automatically populate to {null(Channel Properties)}. This value must remain, in order for the Email resolution to correctly correlate to the Contact or Account. If this value is changed, it cannot be reset manually and the Create Case step must be deleted and recreated again.

HTH!

I’m currently working on a project that implementing Click Dimensions as part of the solution for email marketing and we are using Agile methodology in our project.

As part of the project ALM requirement we have 4 environments (Dev, Test, UAT, Prod) to maintain. And given Click Dimensions solution is unique across instances, we found it is a bit tricky to do development and deployment across environments. Below are the questions that we had during the project:

How to deploy a customized sitemap/ribbon? Some cases that we encountered:

• We developed custom rule to hide/show “Send” button based on security privilege (only user with some specific privilege could send the emails), we modified the “Send” button to have the display rule, however when we deploy our solution to a different environment (Dev to Test for example), the “Send” button is referring to the originating environment account key.
• We made some changes to the sitemap, as we want some of common ClickDimensions entities to be available in the other location in sitemap to provide better navigation for the users. Now when we deploy our solution to a different environment, ClickDimensions Settings page is broken, as it is expecting the previous environment account key.

The solution

“Back to basics” – ClickDimensions is an xRM solution that built natively on top of Dynamics CRM. So, behind the scene it is a native CRM solution (ref: https://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/gg309639.aspx). And after spending a fair bit of time comparing the DEV and TEST solutions, I can conclude that the only differences that these solutions file are:

1. Location of Click Dimensions server (depending to the data centre of your Click Dimensions instance: US, EU or AU).
2. Account key: unique across instances (DEV, TEST, UAT and Prod).

Note: It is adviseable to note down these keys for future reference.

So, to ensure my solution file, that is referring to ClickDimensions’ customisation, to be able to be imported at the target environment without any problem. Once I’ve exported the solution from my DEV environment, I just simply need to replace the difference to point to the target environment by unzip the solution file, edit the customization.xml, find and replace the references (e.g: Account Key, use any text editor such as notepad++ to replace all recurrence of DEV account key to the target environment’s account key).

Now, I’m able to import my solution to the other environment without any problem. It might require a bit of due diligence, but at least we could still following our project methodology.

HTH!

Recently I’ve been asked by some of my colleagues and the CRM admin of the client that I worked with to find a way of the security privileges that assigned to some users in their CRM Organisation.

The answer is: CRM out of the box comes with a handful of out of the box report (some of them might not relevant to the business and you would like to hide them and the guide is available here) and there is a hidden gem that we often missed/forget. The report is named “User Summary”.

It will produce a matrix report similar to below (It is a bit ugly, as I need to hide the personal information)

Alternatively my colleague, Stephanus Natawardaja, has put a Fetch XML based report that will help you in checking the users security privilege in a nicer way: https://snataw.wordpress.com/2015/09/24/display-and-report-user-business-units-teams-and-security-roles/

HTH!

The latest Microsoft Dynamics CRM release preview guide is available. Can’t wait to see the new features in action, especially Document Generation and OneDrive for business integration.

Grab your copy of the release preview guide: http://download.microsoft.com/download/D/5/D/D5D38A09-6A5C-4DC0-8649-3A4F39A8F8F3/Microsoft_Dynamics_CRM_2016_Release_Preview_Guide.pdf

Recently I’m working on a project that using the out of the box Case (incident) entity. In the entity customization, we are adding a new option for Case Origin field to capture an in-person case report. So I added a new option to Case Origin option set. However, by default the icon of the case will showing up Yammer icon:

So to help the end user with a better visual appearance there is a method that described in this TechNet article to achieve this: https://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/library/dn660975.aspx

One of the tricky part of the instruction is to change the solution publisher to the default one to prefix all customization with “new_”. In my case instead of changing the solution publisher to the default publisher, I do the change from the default solution (Settings > Customizations > Customize the System). This will give any customization to be prefix-ed with “new_”.

The next tricky part is the naming convention. Be careful with the option set numbering (remove any commas) and the file extension (.png). As mentioned by the guide: “‘new_Incident_origincode_icon#.png’ where # represents the value for the custom option.”

Now once you saved and published the web resource the icon of the case will be changed.

Hope this helps!

Dynamics CRM out of the box has plenty of built in reports, however these reports might or might not relevant to the business of the user. So to avoid complexity for the end user, we want to make sure that only relevant reports from the out of the box reports to be made available to the user.

The TL;DR; answer is: make the report as personal report.

Now with the details, first of all we need to make sure the end user only have User level privilege on Read Report privilege.

Then on the report record, navigate to Actions > and click on Revert to Personal Report

And if required, you could assign the record to your admin so he/she could manage the report by sharing this to the other users in case they need it.

Note: Personal reports are not solution aware, so you could not add these report in your solution. In case you need to revert the reports on the other environment, yes, it is a tedious work to apply them one by one.

Hope it helps!

One of a gotcha that I learned while working on SSIS development would be to checking the version of the SQL Server that will schedule the SSIS package and the Visual Studio version that compatible with the Server version. This MSDN article describe the list of compatibility https://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/bb522577(v=sql.120).aspx

The table from the MSDN Article describe the “compatibility matrix” for the Server and Development tool required. For example, when I’m working on SQL Server 2012 environment, I need either Visual Studio 2010 or 2012 with SSDT, Visual Studio 2013 won’t be compatible for this.

Coming from Dynamics CRM development background, there are lots of things to learn from SQL Server world. So, hopefully my mistake could save up your time when developing SSIS, as at this moment I need to “convert” my package due to compatibility issue.

Recently one of the client that I’m working on had their CRM Online instance to be updated with Update 1. There are a couple gotchas that we encountered. One of them is the new feature to set the default entitlement to Case (incident) entity. This new feature is really good productivity enhancement for the service users, as they don’t need to manually assign the entitlement for some common requests.

However, it is depends on the implementation and business process. On my current implementation, I don’t use the entitlement when tracking a case (as it is for a public enquiry), therefore I exclude entitlement from my solution and removed the security privilege of Entitlement entity for generic users roles. Then, because of this new feature I received some questions from the users that they are no longer able to create case. By default, the automatic assignment is turned on.

So as a workaround, I need to turn off this default entitlement assignment by navigating to Settings > Administration > System Settings > Service and turn off the Automatically apply entitlement settings.

For more details of the default entitlement: https://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/dn689025.aspx

Recently I got a weird issue when I’m trying to migrate the configuration data from the Dev environment to the other environment. I’m using the Dynamics CRM SDK’s ConfigurationMigration Tool to move these configuration records.

Apparently this is the error message that I received:

Below is the import log:

** IMPORT TO CRM PROCESS LOG
** Log Start: 06/05/2015 09:28:35

Log started at : 9:28:35 AM
9:28 AM New Progress Event – Result: True – Entity: unknown – Parsing import data file
9:28 AM Progress Event – Result: True – Entity: unknown – Parse Complete
9:28 AM New Progress Event – Result: True – Entity: unknown – Beginning Import To CRM.. Importing 3 entities – 42 records
9:28 AM New Progress Event – Result: True – Entity: unknown – Running Schema Validation
9:28 AM Schema Validation – Result: True – Entity: ALL – Validating 4 Entities
9:28 AM Schema Validation – Result: False – Entity: (myconfigentity) – Missing Fields: transactioncurrencyid , transactioncurrencyid , exchangerate 
9:28 AM Progress Event – Result: True – Entity: unknown – Schema Validation failed for Missing fields on Entities, See log for missing fields
9:28 AM Progress Event – Result: True – Entity: unknown – Import Process completed
Log ended at : 9:28:35 AM

I’m spending some time in comparing the schema of my DEV and TEST environment, both of the environments has the same version of the customization solution, however what I’ve found is that in my DEV environment, I do have 2 rogue fields (transactioncurrencyid and exchangerate) for the failing entity, whereas in my TEST environment these 2 fields do not exist.

The reason of this entity has these fields is because during the development of the entity I added a currency field that no longer needed when I have the clarity of the requirements and removed it before the solution made into our TEST environment. These fields cannot be removed on my DEV environment due to the nature of the automation of creation by the system.

So for my workaround in my scenario would be excluding these fields on the ConfigurationMigration Schema. I hope these rogue fields won’t add further implications because it can’t be removed, and I hope the system could automatically clean up the transactioncurrencyid and exchangerate fields when there is no Currency field at all in the entity.

The Problem

Dynamics CRM 2013 comes up with a new feature called “Access Team”. In this post I won’t discuss about “How access team works?” or “Why should I use access team?”, last year CRM MVP Adam Vero posted a really good article about it: http://blog.crmguru.co.uk/2014/05/16/why-use-access-teams-in-dynamics-crm-2013/ I would recommend to Adam’s article as the base source when implementing access team.

Now, despite of the usefulness of access team to track the record sharing, it does have some problem in the deployment: It is not solution aware and as we need to setup the access team subgrid in the form and the customization XML only recognise the access team template by it’s GUID. So, even you create a new Access Team Template with the exactly the same name you won’t get the access team subgrid right.

One workaround is to modify the form where the subgrid resides, remove the subgrid, then add and configure the subgrid back. This workaround is quite time consuming and quite impractical for ALM, where we need to deploy the solution(s) quite often.

Kingswaysoft to the Rescue

Initially I was thinking that the DataMigrationUtility which is included in the CRM SDK could do the job, but it does not support (does not retrieve teamtemplate entity) the Access Team Template entity. So, Kingswaysoft CRM SSIS Toolkit is the tool that I found could help me in this situation at this moment. Why? It does retrieve the teamtemplate entity and it does assign the GUID of the record to be the same as the original template (in my scenario it would be coming from the DEV environment).

If you need some “getting started” walkthrough to use this tool, I’ve posted an article about it here.

So, I quickly create an Integration Service Project in Visual Studio and configure the data flow as follow:

The package consists of:

1 Dynamics CRM Source (in my case, it’s pointing to my DEV environment)

And depends on how many environment to be kept synced, you might need a multicast to distribute it to any required environments. Then based on the number of environments you require, create the CRM Destination with Upsert action to target team template entity:

with the following mapping:

Run the package and wait until..

Now, I have a repeatable Access Team Template “Deployment Tool” that only takes about 5 minutes to setup, no code and quick 🙂

Recently I’m doing a cleanup on a brand new production environment which was provisioned through CRM Online trial. One of the entity that I tried to clean up is Product entity. With the enhancement on product functionality introduced in Dynamics CRM 2015 update, apparently I got below error message when I tried to delete the record:

After spending some time doing trial and error, apparently the solution is by disabling Auditing functionality on Product entity:

Now I’m able to clean up the records:

There might be some fix that will be released by Microsoft, so I hope this is should be in one of the immediate fix. As this will cause more problems in the long run.

Hope this helps!

Keep yourself slim is an interesting topic from health perspective, but what does this title mean for Dynamics CRM customization? To start with, I’d highlight on what we could have in a Dynamics CRM solution. Based on MSDN article: https://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/gg334576.aspx below are the list of items that can be added to a CRM solution:

Most of the above items are relatively small in size (XML markup in customization.xml), however one part that makes the solution file becomes really big is the Web Resources, typical large files that attached to the solution are the image files. One of the consequences of having large solution file is solution import timeout (this problem happened quite often to me). So, I’d share my tips to overcome this issue.

First tips is separating the solution for deployment e.g: one solution for anything apart the images web resources and another solution to include the images. Note: be mindful on the sequence of the import (the images solution need to be imported first in this case).

Second tips is to check whether there is any unused web resource. To check this, I’m using XrmToolbox with “Web Resources Manager” plugin:

Load the web resources, once loaded, there is a nifty feature on Tools menu called: Find web resources without dependency.

This feature will list up the web resources without dependency (orphan record that uploaded but no longer used)

Now after this, it is your decision whether you would like to delete the record straight away or use this as your own reference. My suggestion would only use this for your reference, remove the item manually from the solution without deleting it.

Hope this helps!

Following up the preparation in the new Dynamics CRM Online updates, there are some confusions in terms of the naming convention of the releases/updates. Looking back to last year’s update Dynamics CRM 2013 has an update called SP1. Now the new updates for CRM Online (code named ‘Carina’) has different naming convention: Dynamics CRM Online 2015 Update 1. It is confusing, isn’t it?

So, to answer this confusion, the Dynamics CRM product team just recently posted an update for this naming convention, that based on the version number of the release/update.

So for a summary on what happened, below is the quick summary on what Microsoft Dynamics CRM product team has formulised:

The following table shows CRM Online product names with their associated version numbers and code names.

The following table shows CRM (on-premises) product names with their associated version numbers and code names.

HTH!

Yesterday I just presented in Melbourne CRM User Group for the new features of Dynamics CRM Online 2015 Update 1.

There are a massive list of new features that I’m really excited to see it to be rolled out in the live CRM Online. Just to mention some of the top favorite features:

• New main menu navigation
• Custom theme and branding
• Recent View/Records with pinning ability
• Deeper Office365 integration (Excel and OneNote)
• Folder-level email tracking
• And lots of platform enhancements (https://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/gg309589.aspx)

For some more information, the Release Preview guide can be downloaded here.

Below is the slides that I put up for my presentation with some of my personal notes/thought:

Enjoy!

First of all, thanks to Shilpa for this heads up information. As you may be aware, Chrome has removed support for Modal dialogue with 37 & above. Currently, a registry workaround is in place that will allow applications that use Modal dialogue to continue to function. This workaround will expire by end of April 2015. See below for more details.

http://blog.chromium.org/2014/07/disabling-showmodaldialog.html

CRM currently utilizes this Modal dialogue functionality. In order for customers, who are using Chrome browser, to continue to function, they need to upgrade to the below upcoming CRM versions:

CRM 2011 – A COD will be delivered on CRM 2011 UR18(On prem Only)
CRM 2013 – A COD will be delivered in CRM 2013 UR3(On prem Only)
CRM 2013 SP1 – Fix will be included in CRM 2013 SP1 UR3(Online & On Prem)
CRM 2015 – Fix will be included in CRM 2015 UR1(Online & On Prem)

These COD’s and releases are planned to be released next month (April).

So, stay tuned for the update from Microsoft!

Today I took and passed the Dynamics CRM Online Deployment exam MB2-706. The title only mention Dynamics CRM Online, however when I look more carefully on the skills measured section, there are some topics that quite overlapped with the Dynamics CRM Installation exam MB2-708.

First of all, I won’t break the NDA of the exam but I would like to give my thought on the exam. And if you ask me anything about sample questions and answers, I would say upfront, but sorry I won’t give anything.

As I mentioned earlier on the post that there are some overlapped topics with the installation exam, however I was quite unprepared when I was given some questions that supposedly only applicable for on-premise installation. Then I spent the time of the feedback to point out the questions that not accurate for the Online Deployment. Apart from that, the rest of the exams questions completely reflects the items that listed on the skills measured.

For the preparation of the exam, I just used the Dynamics CRM Online Deployment MOC training material from PartnerSource, however the training itself is not sufficient to pass the exam. Referring back to the skills measured, there are some topics that were not covered in the Online Deployment training, maybe combined with the installation course would be beneficial. Reading the Implementation and Administration guide also a good supplement to prepare the exam.

And one more tip for the exam: Second Shot. Microsoft is offering the second chance if you don’t pass the exam for the first time. The Second Shot offer valid for MCP exams that is taken between January 5, 2015, and May 31, 2015. My tip on this Second Shot is not use this opportunity to memorise the questions, but to identify on which section(s) that we are weak at, then do better preparation for the second chance.

I hope this helps!

I’m a big fan of XrmToolBox developed by Tanguy Touzard, it is a must have tool for Dynamics CRM Professionals.

One thing that quite annoys me is every time I download the tool, the assemblies are blocked (due to Windows security to prevent rogue assemblies to run on the machine). So, I found a way on how to unblock the assemblies in bulk using PowerShell.

The syntax goes like this:

gci <your XrmToolBox folder> | Unblock-File

eg:

gci c:\XrmToolBox | Unblock-File

Edit: a better trick to unblock all assemblies is by unblock the downloaded zip file first before extracting it. Ref: http://support.microsoft.com/kb/942532. Credit to Marco to mention it in Twitter post!

I hope this helps!

Recently I had a conversation with George Doubinski regarding an update required in Visual Studio to be able to work with the new Dynamics CRM 2015 SDK assemblies (it requires .Net 4.5.2 as the minimum .Net framework version). And he asked, you do use chocolatey to install the update, don’t you? And it was a shocking answer for him that I don’t know Chocolatey.

So, I quickly search and look at it: https://chocolatey.org/

Chocolatey NuGet is a Machine Package Manager, somewhat like apt-get, but built with Windows in mind.

I quickly install it and apply the .Net 4.5.2 Developer pack by executing the command: choco install netfx-4.5.2-devpack

Conclusion: Chocolatey is definitely a go-to tools to get an update for development tools.

There has been a couple questions in the forum regarding the solution compatibility after Dynamics CRM 2015 upgrade, so below is the matrix that MattB from Microsoft shared, I hope this gives us a clear picture on which version of CRM that the solution was originated will be compatible with.

An exciting news, Dynamics CRM 2015 is released earlier than it’s expected. The download links for On-Premise is available now: https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/newsearch/DownloadsDrillInResults.aspx?q=crm+2015&cateorder=2_5_1&site

As well as the new CRM Online trial instances are provisioned as Dynamics CRM 2015. http://www.microsoft.com/en-au/dynamics/crm-free-trial-overview.aspx

To get started with the adoption and training for Dynamics CRM 2015, Microsoft Dynamics content team has put a good resource: http://www.microsoft.com/en-us/dynamics/crm-customer-center/training-adoption-kit-for-microsoft-dynamics-crm.aspx

Plus this Curah! links from Donna Edwards that really summarised the available content on the net: https://curah.microsoft.com/211516/crm-2015-helpful-resources

The Dynamics CRM Product Team now have extended their presence in the social media with their new Facebook apps that can be reached: https://apps.facebook.com/microsoftdynamics/

The Facebook apps featured the youtube page that also available: https://www.youtube.com/user/msdyncomm/DynamicsCRM, Twitter feeds about Dynamics CRM and quick links to some useful websites related to Dynamics CRM.

Last week I worked with a client that went live with their IFD implementation for CRM On-premise. The whole setup of the IFD ran smoothly for the internal and external access, firewall and TMG rules have been updated in place. However, we hit a problem when one of the main integration point, that usually has quite heavy traffic, does not work properly. So after some amount of time spent to troubleshoot, we finally just barely finished the deployment 3 minutes before the planned rollback as the previous system testing was failed.

So, the main reason of the problem is the incompatibility of SHA256 certificate that we used for the IFD with the older infrastructure (Windows Server 2003) where the integration to CRM was hosted. Luckily we found a KB Article and the hotfix for SHA256 compatibility with Windows Server 2003 and Windows XP: http://support2.microsoft.com/kb/938397. Once the hotfix from applied to the server the integration works properly.

The selection of SHA256 certificate itself was driven by the plan of deprecation of SHA128: http://blogs.technet.com/b/pki/archive/2013/11/12/sha1-deprecation-policy.aspx.

In conclusion, I learned something new to be reminded when deploying the latest technology (updates or upgrades or even simple certificate change), consider the existing systems, especially the one that going to be not supported anymore, whether they are going to work or not.

It is a great effort from the Dynamics CRM product team that producing the informative videos regarding the upcoming Dynamics CRM 2015 releases. These videos are really informative for everyone who is working with Dynamics CRM product to be ready to embrace the change and plan ahead with the implementation of the upgrade.

This blog post will be a life post that I will keep updating to combine the video list.

Upgrading from Microsoft Dynamics CRM 2013 to 2015

Field Level Security in Microsoft Dynamics CRM 2015

Business Process in Microsoft Dynamics CRM 2015

Update Process Enhancements with Microsoft Dynamics CRM Online 2015 Update

CRM for Outlook Configuration in Microsoft Dynamics CRM 2015

SLA Enhancements in Microsoft Dynamics CRM 2015

Rollup and Calculated Fields in Microsoft Dynamics CRM 2015

Configurability in Synchronizing Data with Outlook or Exchange in Microsoft Dynamics CRM 2015

Tablet Productivity Enhancements in Microsoft Dynamics CRM 2015

Hierarchy Visualization in Microsoft Dynamics CRM 2015

Hierarchical Security Modelling in Microsoft Dynamics CRM 2015

Microsoft Dynamics CRM 2015 Cortana Demonstration

Enjoy 🙂

As requested by Ben on my previous blog post. I posted the slides of my Just 1 Tip presentation from the last Melbourne CRM User Group. The presentation focus is a quick tip on how we as developers are often forget the small details in event-driven solution design that could ended-up in a headache for the other fellow developers/business user to trace/test.

There are 3 issues that I commonly encountered during the design and development:

#1: Infinite Loop – a request inside the plugin code to the same message and field filter as the registered step and in the same entity.

#2: Auto-save – this will trigger the update request and if the plugin step registered is not filtered, it will trigger the plugin very often.

#3: Multiple Synchronous Events (Plugin + Real Time Workflow) – Tips of using XrmToolbox plugin to change the order of executions. (This section drove me to post the previous blog here).

I hope this helps!

Update Rollup 18 for Microsoft Dynamics CRM 2011 is available, the KB article related to this release:

http://support.microsoft.com/kb/2958724

Download Link:

http://www.microsoft.com/en-us/download/details.aspx?id=44265

Some  important issues that this UR fixed:

• If a user’s logon domain is different from the Fully Qualified Domain Name, Deployment Manager crashes while opening.
• When a Managed Solution is imported that updates an existing solution that contains customizations from another Managed Solution, not all labels included in the update are applied to the system.

Update Rollup 1 for Microsoft Dynamics CRM 2013 Service Pack 1 (SP1) is available, the KB article related to this release:

http://support.microsoft.com/kb/2953252

Download link:

http://www.microsoft.com/en-us/download/details.aspx?id=44262

Some issues that I encountered that fixed in this rollup:

• Duplicate records created if Save or Save and Close is pressed multiple times
• When programmatically making visible tabs that contain several subgrids, the size of these subgrids is not recalculated causing the layout to be scrambled.

Recently I need to re-run the VMs of the CRM server setup on my test and practice machine. One of the stuff that I would like to test is to establish trust relationship between ADFS from one to another CRM deployments, therefore, I need to start my ADFS VMs. On one of the instance of the ADFS server, the ADFS won’t start for unknown reason and I got this error message when I looked at the event viewer: The Active Directory Federation Services service terminated with the following error: An exception occurred in the service when handling the control request.

The error message is seems to be generic exception message without any further details provided. After a quick research and looking around at the event viewer, I found more descriptive error message on: Applications and Services Log > AD FS > Admin

The error message described the connection to SQL could not be established, as my practice ADFS setup is using internal database, it turned out to be the Windows Internal Database service is stopped.

Yesterday Microsoft made an exciting announcement for Microsoft Dynamics CRM. The press release is announced here and the blog post from Bob Stutz is available here.

For us to get up to date with this release, this page from Microsoft Dynamics CRM Customer Center provide the overview of the new features introduced in Dynamics CRM 2015.

The Release Preview Guide also available here. The new features that highlighted in the release preview guide:

Dynamics Marketing

• Multi-channel marketing
• Enhanced Email editor
• Campaign Management Console with the ability of A/B testing, cross channel operations and others
• Integrated Social Listening with the embedded social insights for CRM
• Sales Collaboration with marketing calendar
• B2B Marketing with improved lead scoring and webinar integration
• Marketing Resource Management with the marketing calendar
• Internal Process Automation with approval workflows
• Geographical Expansion to Japan and Russia

Sales

• Improvements to the sales processes enabling branching of the process based on business rules
• Product Families with the ability to bundle products and recommend related products for cross-sell/up-sell and simplify and minimize product management with product attributes (It seems the reason of Product Kit depreciation)
• Sales Hierarchies with the support on mobile device.
• Offline draft mode on table app

Customer Service

• Further Case Management enhancements with the ability topause and resume SLAs, and tracking time of case on hold or waiting on customer

Microsoft Social Listening

• Location filters
• More geographic and languages to be supported

Platform enhancements

• Enhanced Search Capabilities
  • Global search that works similar to the existing tablet app search
  • Search Bar added to navigation bar
  • Advanced find button added to the navigation bar
• Synchronise additional types of information with Outlook with the new configuration wizard
• Enhanced Business rules, which will be executed server side that will works everywhere (not only on web browser)
• Enhanced business logic with If and Else If statements with AND and OR grouping
• Pre-filling information when a record is created
• Business process flows can now be accessed via the client API
• Calculated fields and Roll-up fields are now added
• Field Level Security is now supported for out of the box fields

From my perspective, the overall platform enhancement is a really significant enhancement for functionality and development capabilities of Dynamics CRM. Now we could use more point-and-click customisations to achieve some rules. Especially with the availability of server-side business rules, validation and logic will become easier to manage (compared to using plugin, where developer effort is required). Yet, still there might be some complex scenario that the usage of plugin is still required. In conclusion this release is closing our gap with what Salesforce.com always boasting of their platform. Global Search, Validation Rule, Approval Process, etc. and even we are one step ahead with the Advanced Find and graphical interface to construct business rules.

A quick post. I found this useful page when I was searching the new licensing model for CRM Online: http://www.microsoft.com/en-us/dynamics/resource-library.aspx?SortField1=Microsoft%20Dynamics%20CRM&SortField2=Licensing

I hope this helps anyone that looking for licensing model and preparing tender documents 🙂

Microsoft recently upgrade the experience in provisioning the CRM Online Trial. The process that took quite long time now has been reduced into a couple minutes. This is a good sign in terms of speed in quality service. Unfortunately with this speediness, I found out it is not perfect yet. So here’s what I found…

I run a new CRM Online instance today for demo and test purpose, so I entered the trial, configured the instance as usual, however once the process finished and I opened the CRM Online instance, I got a whole heap of errors: “You do not have sufficient privileges to view this chart. Contact your system administrator.“ on dashboard charts and the only available navigations are Service and Settings. My first impression: what’s going on? I’m the full system admin: my security role is admin & I’m the admin of the Office365…

So, after a short head scratch and wondering why it’s happening… I found out the underlying issue: Even though I’m the “Admin”, but I’m not assigned with the license (doh).

To fix this, I need to go to Office365 admin page, navigate to Users & Groups > Active User > Click on the User

Navigate on licenses, then assign the correct licenses and click on Save.

Wait a couple seconds… Refresh CRM page and…

I hope this helps others to troubleshoot CRM Online Trial Provisioning