by Gustaf Westerlund | Oct 3, 2007
November the 9:th will be my last day at Humandata here in Sweden. My new employment will be at WM-Data/Logica CMG where I will be working as a consultant with special focus on Microsoft Dynamics CRM development.
This means that I will focus even more on MS CRM and less on SharePoint. Don’t get me wrong, I really like SharePoint and will probably use it for integration purposes with Microsoft CRM many times. This new employment will give me the opportunity to work with some of the largest MS CRM implementations and I will also be assisting in building a team of (hopefully) excellent MS CRM developers and consultants. If you feel that is you, please let me know, and we’ll meet and discuss it. It will also be very interesting and instructive to work with the very experienced CRM professionals at WM-Data.
I will still be activly blogging to get you the latest and most useful tips, but I will focus more on Microsoft CRM, even though an occational SharePoint posting might occur.
I would also like to say that I feel very sad to leave the company Humandata which is a great place to work and it has been a privilage to work with some of the most competent people in the business. If you are a skilled SharePoint consultant (or want to be), please contact Göran Husman (SharePoint MVP and owner of Humandata), I promise you wont regret it!
Gustaf Westerlund
CRM and SharePoint Consultant
Humandata AB
www.humandata.se
by Gustaf Westerlund | Oct 2, 2007
If you, like me, havn’t been able to test or have a look at the new Microsoft Dynamics CRM 4 (code named Titan), you can now. I havn’t seen any VPC out yet public but will let you know as soon as I know.
In the meantime, have a look at Stunnwares/Michael Höhnes site where he writes about the many new features of CRM 4. It’s been a long wait, but it has been worth it! CRM 4 seems to be great!
http://www.stunnware.com/crm2/topic.aspx?id=TitanBeta3
Gustaf
by Gustaf Westerlund | Oct 1, 2007
As many of you probably have customers running Exchange 2007 or are considering running Exchange 2007, careful consideration has to be taken to the fact that the current CRM Email router does not support Exchange 2007 due to the fact that it is a 64 bit program, and the router is not. This is going to be fixed in CRM 4. For more information have a look at the CRM Team Blog: http://blogs.msdn.com/crm/archive/2007/09/27/crm-3-0-and-exchange-2007-compatibility.aspx
Gustaf
by Gustaf Westerlund | Oct 1, 2007
I am currently developing a customized search webpart for a customer and I wanted to move all environment specific variables to the webpart public properties so that they can easily be changed and the same dll can be used in all environments (dev and production). One of the properties was Scope, which defined search scope to use. It was defined in the following way:
private string scope;
[Browsable(true), Category(“Settings”),
DefaultValue(“Documents”),
WebPartStorage(Storage.Shared),
FriendlyName(“Scope”),
Description(“Define Scope of search”),
XmlElement(ElementName = “Scope”)]
public string Scope
{
get
{
return scope;
}
set
{
scope = value;
}
}
Well, just to be on the safe side, I set the web part property to “Documents”, which is also what I had used as default. I was very confused the next time I opened the “Modify Shared Webpart” menu and found that the field was blank! First I thought there was some error in how the property was defined, but after a while I found that it actually blank the field if it is set to the value defined as default (in this case “Documents”).
So, if you run into this little “feature”, don’t be afraid, everything is just as it should be!
Gustaf
by Gustaf Westerlund | Sep 26, 2007
Any modification made to the main or META-database is considered unsupported customization. Not very strange, since you never know what new fields or tables Microsoft might add to the database.
Sometimes, however, especially when working with reports, it can be useful to create your own views that aggregate data to your needs. Adding a view to the CRM database might be the easiest and you will probably be ok as long as you are a bit careful when naming the view. However, you don’t have to do it this way. You can also create a new database on the same server and create your view in this database. To be able to access the views (and if you still want to play unsupported, tables), just add the database name in front of the viewname. For instance:
SELECT * FROM MyCompany_MSCRM.dbo.SystemUser;
The “dbo” part doesn’t have to be there but is added by the view creator GUI, so I left it there to avoid any misunderstandings.
Unfortunately, the “Add Table” function in the GUI doesn’t support selecting views from other tables even though it is supported in the database.
As far as I know, it is also possible to connect to a view in a database on another server. I don’t know how this is done and don’t really see the relevance from a MS CRM 3 perspective, but if I find out how, I will let you know.
Gustaf
by Gustaf Westerlund | Sep 16, 2007
Michael Höhne is one of the most generous and knowledgable people in the Microsoft CRM 3 community. His webpage http://www.stunnware.com/crm2/ hosts lots of very interesting articles, both for advanced Microsoft CRM developers and more novice Microsoft CRM application professionals. For instance, he has a very interesting posting showing an example of how to use the new file format OpenXML that comes with Office 2007 in conjuction with Microsoft CRM 3 to make very powerful software with almost no effort (ok, a little effort 🙂
Have a look: http://www.stunnware.com/crm2/topic.aspx?id=OpenXml
Gustaf Westerlund
CRM and SharePoint Consultant
Humandata AB
www.humandata.se
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