by Gustaf Westerlund | Apr 19, 2012
Today I am working with a customer who has used other CRM consultants previously. It is always interesting. In this case the QA/testing environment was not up to date and wasn’t acutally working at all. All changes had been made directly in production, not really my cup of coffe, as I like things to be a bit more controlled. Just for the record, it is a CRM 4 system, but the I do believe the same issue applies to CRM 2011 aswell.
So, I wanted to get the QA-environement up to date with the production environment and started by exporting all customizations from production and attempted to import them into the QA-environment. (Backing up that enviroments customizatons first of course). Well, that didn’t actually work, and I didn’t get a very good error message, just some non-descript error. When looking in the event viewer I got a ASP.NET error saying that “Post size exceeded allowed limits.” which of course go me thinking about the size of the customization file. Checking it, I found that it was almost 9 MB, which is above the set 8 MB ceiling. After some pondering about which parts of the customizations might be the issue, I found that the Templates part was about 7.9 MB. So, my suggestion is to keep this in mind especially when exporting customizations/solutions from production systems that Templates can be very large and might brake the maximum transfer size of 8 MB. This maximum size can be changed, but that is another issue.
Gustaf Westerlund
CEO, Chief Architect and co-Founder at CRM-konsulterna AB
www.crmkonsulterna.se
by Gustaf Westerlund | Apr 4, 2012
There is currently rather a lot of media in Sweden about a computer system hosted by a larger Software Integrator outsourced by the Swedish IRS. This system was hacked and about 9000 client accounts were compromised. The discussion in the media is if this a government agency really can delegate this kind of responsibility to a third party or if there will always be some fundamental responsiblity for maintaining the security at the government agency? The security experts and even the Swedish Secretary of IT, Anna-Karin Hatt, indicated that this kind of responsibility could not be delegated.
This question is very relevant in the case of CRM systems in general and Microsoft Dynamics CRM in particular. It would then seem more or less impossible from an government agency CIO perspective to use any kind of cloud based service for line of business systems like CRM/xRM as this would imply that it is impossible to fully maintain the control required over the information in the system. This is no problem for us working with Dynamics CRM as it can be deployed on-premise, but bad news for anyone looking to work with SalesForce.com or any other pure cloud based service as they cannot be used in such conditions.
Gustaf Westerlund
CEO, Chief Architect and co-Founder at CRM-konsulterna AB
www.crmkonsulterna.se
by Gustaf Westerlund | Apr 4, 2012
Custom workflow activities are one of my favorite extension points of CRM. The power workflows gives the customers are great as they can easily change the content of outgoing emails, todos etc. With the ability of custom workflows I can connect the workflow engine to anything in the world, from credit rating checks, integrations to other systems or just adding a bit more complex logic than what the standard activites include.
One of the major drawbacks of the current version of CRM-Online (as of march 2012) in comparisson to On-premise is from my perspective that custom workflow activies cannot be deployed in CRM-Online. I asked developer evangelist at Microsoft Sweden, André Henriksson about this and his comment was that it was probably due to the fact that the workflow foundation team didn’t support sandboxing of custom workflow activities. At SharePoint Exchange Forum I had the oppotunity to discuss this with SharePoint MVP Eric Shupps and he mentioned that in SharePoint there was full support for custom workflows. This made me a bit puzzled since this implied that the SharePoint team had managed to create a workaround for the lack of isolation for custom workflow activities that the CRM team hadn’t.
However, in the upcoming R8, release for Dynamics CRM 2011, Microsoft have annonced (http://crmpublish.blob.core.windows.net/docs/ReleasePreviewGuide.pdf) that there will be support for custom workflow activities in CRM Online. This is great news, but as the functionality will be based on sandboxing there might still be limitations to what can be done within the sandbox, for instance on which external connections are allowed. This remains to be seen, but the news of support custom workflow activities in CRM Online is still something I have waited for a long time!
Gustaf Westerlund
CEO, Chief Architect and co-Founder at CRM-konsulterna AB
www.crmkonsulterna.se
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