Warnings like the one you see above, I often see in my customers systems when rudely looking over their shoulders. And what do they do? Call support and tell them that there is some weird error about email coming up and that there must be some error in the CRM-Exchange inter-server email synchronization mechanism? No. They don’t. They ignore it. Totally. Every time. They typically get a bit annoyed every time and think the system is a bit crappy but they ignore it. And we as their CRM-partner might never know that there is anything wrong unless we have very deep monitoring of their system (has anyone built this? Would be a great tool! Tanguy to the rescue perhaps?)
Well, as you guessed I don’t agree that you should just click away these error messages or actually any error messages. They usually mean something. In the case above, there is something wrong with the synchronization of emails, why emails that have be written and sent in CRM have not been delivered. Once fixed, these WILL be sent, which might be a bit problematic. Once, maybe 6 or 7 years ago, we had a customer who had had problems with synchronization of emails and hadn’t told us. We got to know during our summer vacation (don’t you always), and when we fixed it, the CRM system sent out loads of old emails to their customers. Which was not really appreciated. Well, we all do misstakes, but not all learn from them. So, do check which emails have Status Reason”Pending Send” as you can see in the picture below.
Having emails with this status for more than 24 hours is also what causes the alert at the top of this post. So, before fixing Server Side Sync, the Email Router or installing Outlook clients, do check this list to make sure that there are not a lot of old emails that will be sent to your customers and contacts. Advanced Find is very useful if you want to find them all, and not use the built in view that I am showing above.
Been working with the upgrade of a customer from CRM 2013 to CRM 2016 on-prem and we ran into this weird error. The case form didn’t want to work after upgrade if we didn’t turn of the turbo forms. For those of you who are not aware of this, in 2015 Spring wave, there was a revision of how forms were loaded, called the turbo forms. After this version there is a setting in the first tab of System Setting where you can turn on “Legacy form rendering” if you want to go back to the old rendering method.
However, we noticed some other strange errors, for instance bool fields with Yes/No values with No as default, were shown as “False” when the form was in create state. Once the form had been saved this error went away.
Another error we saw was that if you tried to save emails, (not send them), you got an error message. The email got saved anyway, but you got a nasty message.
However, if we switched back to turbo forms, both this email error and the bool-error disapeared. Hence, it seems the legacy form controls are not nearly as well quality tested as the turbo form versions so I would strongly suggest that you do not use them unless you have no other option, and then try to move away from them as soon as possible.
So, trying to stick to my paradigm for troubleshooting; “Find where the error is first, then what the error is” – I wanted to go back to the case entity and find out why the turbo forms didn’t work.
Rickard and I, who were troubleshooting this together, enabled the dev-mode in IE (pressing F12, if you don’t know it) and opened a case. The odd thing was that the point where it broke was in one of Microsoft’s functions. I have been unable to recreate the error now so I cannot show it. And after some nitty gritty debugging in IE, we found that the script seemed to be missing “productid” and “primarycontactid” or in laymans terms, Product and Contact.
So, I added them to the case form, and magic! It worked.
But the story doesn’t end there. As I thought that this might be a good blog article and I wanted to recreate the error to have as a screendump, I removed the fields again… and mark my surprise when the form still worked… twilightzone.
During the CRM UG Summit I was approached in the Medic booth by two nice guys from Microsoft who asked me if they could show me and get my opinion on a new feature of Dynamics 365. It was the AppDesigner. There had been so much hype around a lot of the other stuff (editable grids, editable grids, editable grids) that I hadn’t noticed this and when they showed it and I had time to think about it I recognized that it is really a cool and useful feature that I think can do a lot of good in the system.
One of the things I try to evangelize about is to slim the system down, not “dumb it down” but make it slim, and efficient to what you are trying to do. Hence not include a lot of unnecessary stuff. The AppDesigner is excellent for this, it creates subsets of Dynamics 365 (not operations/financials) into what are called apps. With their own sitemaps, view sets, form sets, business process flow sets, chart sets.
I made another film about this, on how to enable and get going with it. Why not watch it?
So, time to try something new. I recorded a small screencast with SnagIt to show how easy it is to enable the awsome new feature Editable grids in Dynamics 365. So, please have a look and let me know what you think!
And yes, I know I keep saying CRM, and Dynamics CRM. I have been working with this product for more than 11 years now. It’s going to take some time for this old dog to sit.
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