by Gustaf Westerlund | Apr 25, 2013
Privileges regarding the price list entity has some interesting quirks to it as I found out working with it recently.
Yesterday I was working together with Christian Högman at Midpoint trying to help out a common customer of ours who it turned out had an interesting issue. Their typical users had a role that did not allow them to set a price list on an opportunity. So, just add “Read” privilege to the Price list entity, you might think, well, not so easy, as this entity does not exist in the security role matrix.
Well, after some trial and error we found that what was actually required was “Read” and “Append To” privilege Product.
So if you facing the same or similar issues, with price lists, try working with privileges on the product entity as this seems to be the entity that also controls price list.
If you havn’t read my colleague Rickards latest blog posting on some really interesting bugs we (mostly he) have found in how queues work and in some cases don’t work, at least as expected. http://rickardnorstrom.blogspot.se/2013/04/the-crm-email-router-routing-emails.html
Gustaf Westerlund
MVP, CEO and owner at CRM-konsulterna AB
www.crmkonsulterna.se
by Gustaf Westerlund | Apr 9, 2013
When using the mobile solutions, it is quite common to use a server-based CRM-Exchange synchronization software. There are several different products out there and the one I have the best experiences from is Riva Exchange integrator (http://www.rivacrmintegration.com) although a bit more expensive than other on the market, a very stable and high quality product.
If the Outlook addon for CRM is used at the same time, there is a substantial risk that appointments created in CRM are integrated twice to the Exchange server, once through the server based integration and once using the Outlook integration. As the server based integration is to be the main method of integration the Outlook integration needs to be modified to stop appointments from being integrated from CRM to Outlook.
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| Setting which entities are to be synchronized from CRM to Outlook |
This is a bit problematic however, as there is no way of doing this for a group of users, but is done in the personal settings once the outlook addon has been installed. This means doing it manually is practically impossible.
The data is actually stored in CRM in the UserQuery entity. This is a rather special entity however, for instance, you need to impersonate each user to be able to edit each users UserQuery’s. This will take some extra consideration in coding. Thanks to David Jennaway for pointing out some of the details regarding this.
If you are running a CRM On-Premise, writing to the SQL database in not supported, but in certain cases, and I would generally advise against it as it can damage you CRM system, it might be ok. In this case, what is needed is to change the statecode and status code of some UserQuery:s. As this is unsupported I give no guarantees but I have used it myself, so I thought I’d share it with you if you’d like to use it.
The following SQL Update script, will deactivate all appointment synchronization in the CRM Outlook addon for all users. Run it in the context of the CRM database.
Again, USE AT OWN RISK, it is unsupported!
UPDATE [UserQueryBase] SET [StatusCode] = 2 ,[StateCode] = 1 WHERE QueryType = 256 AND (ReturnedTypeCode = 4201 OR ReturnedTypeCode = 4214 OR ReturnedTypeCode = 4251)
The following script will reactivate them.
UPDATE [UserQueryBase] SET [StatusCode] = null ,[StateCode] = 0 WHERE QueryType = 256 AND (ReturnedTypeCode = 4201 OR ReturnedTypeCode = 4214 OR ReturnedTypeCode = 4251)
Another interesting fact that you might not be aware of is that if you switch off the synchronization of appointments between CRM and Outlook, the next time you run the synchronization, the CRM Outlook Addon will remove all the corresponding appointments from Outlook, and hence from Exchange (if Outlook is connected to Exchange).
Gustaf Westerlund
MVP, CEO and owner at CRM-konsulterna AB
www.crmkonsulterna.se
by Gustaf Westerlund | Apr 8, 2013
As many of you have been aware, working with the Swedish translation of Dynamics CRM, there are some annoying bugs. One of these has been around for quite some time, I think at least since CRM 3.0 and maybe as long as 1.2, a cannot remember, even though I worked with that version.
The bug I am referring to is the translation of both Subject and Regarding to “Ämne” in Activities. This looks really strange in CRM as this is one of the most common entities. An annoyance for many partners has also been that both these fields are system fields which makes their labels quite hard to change. You cannot just go into the normal field settings and change the display name. There are some workarounds out there, of which I think the best one is to use the translation file to change the display name (which I think has worked for me a couple of times any how).
The other one faced in CRM 2011 and is the translation of the two buttons “Delete” and “Remove” in a solution. These have both been named “Ta bort”. Again this is not very thoughtful and has obviously not been done by anyone who works with CRM.
In this case the effects can be rather drastic, as the difference is huge. If you plan to remove a custom entity from you solution containing 3 million rows of data, and press the wrong “Ta bort”-button, you will accidentally remove all 3 million rows of data. With CRM Online currently lacking any manual backup functionality, this means that you have lost these 3 million rows. Thankfully there is a confirm dialog, and the users working inside solutions are usually rather savvy so they know what they are doing.
Still, the fixes are simple, just fix the labels in the default translations. I hereby volunteer to Review the translation for the Swedish MUI if asked at no cost, just to make sure we can remove these kinds of errors.
I have submitted these as feedback to Microsoft Connect, if you agree with me that Microsoft should fix this, do sign up and vote for them.
This is the link for the Ämne-issue:
https://connect.microsoft.com/dynamicssuggestions/feedback/details/783135/error-in-swedish-translation-same-word-used-twice-mne
And this is the link for “Ta Bort”:
https://connect.microsoft.com/dynamicssuggestions/feedback/details/783226/delete-and-remove-in-solutions-translated-to-same-word-in-swedish
Gustaf Westerlund
MVP, CEO and owner at CRM-konsulterna AB
www.crmkonsulterna.se
by Gustaf Westerlund | Mar 20, 2013
A couple of days ago I was setting up the email router for a customer running CRM Online. I must say that I really look forward to the day when Microsoft retire this very strange product that in no way fits the cloud story of CRM Online and Office 365. On what server is it to be deployed?
However, this customer is running CRM Online (at the time of this article, Polaris) and Exchange 2007 On-premise. They had been trying to get the email router to work for several days and had been advised by Microsoft Support to use the WebDAV protocol to connect to the Exchange server. This has worked fine at the beginning but after a while, one of the two queues stopped receiving emails for no apparent reason.
After a lot of trying and look at logs, I removed all settings and recreated everything based on the Exchange protocol from WebDAV to Exchange Webservices, which after some finetuning of the URL:s actually started to work. During this time I discussed this issue with some of my MVP friends, especially Joel Lindstrom, David Jennaway and Donna Edwards who were very helpful and they pointed me in the right direction of what was probably the root cause of the error, not that I have actually have had it confirmed but it seems very plausible.
What seems to be the error, that they mentioned, is that some of the emails contain some “special” characters which caused the WebDAV to crash for one of the two queues, while the other one did not contain any emails with any “special” characters. When I changed to the Exchange webservices protocol, which does not have this bug, the mail got imported to CRM as it should.
This is a very tricky error as it is very hard to find and also rather hard to confirm. I still do not not if this is a fact, it is just a hunch, but it fits the symptoms.
My general recommendation based on this is hence the following:
1. Do not use WebDAV when connecting the CRM Email router to Exchange. It is buggy and does not support special characters, some searching the net show these to be characters like !#$%^&. It might work at first but after a while, you might receive an email that contains a special character and it will break down without saying why.
2. Microsoft Support are very good to have when things to not work but do not put your life completely in their hands, sometimes you need to trust your own judgment and try stuff yourself.
3. Isolate errors as far as you can. It helps when trying to find the root cause.
4. Listen to your friends, they are the best!
And let’s all together ask Microsoft to can the email router and build it into the CRM application, especially CRM Online.
Gustaf Westerlund
MVP, CEO and owner at CRM-konsulterna AB
www.crmkonsulterna.se
by Gustaf Westerlund | Mar 18, 2013
Yet again we are holding Techie After Work here in Stockholm!
I am afraid I am blogging about it a bit late this time as it is already this wednesday, the 20:th of march at Hotel Anglais in Stockholm (close to Stureplan).
This time we will be trying out a different setup with round table discussions in the subjects of:
– Information modelling
– Security
– Performance
All from a CRM perspective of course. The goal is to get more of a dialog than the previous presentation type of event that we have been.
As usual, Allan Varcoe, Peter Björkmarker and myself will be hosting the event together with Microsoft.
If you are or want to be a real CRM geek, this is the place to be, so try to buy a Kinect for your Kids and wife or buy a gift card to H&M for you girlfrind so that you can get a endulge yourself in the wonderful discussions we are going to have about our favorite product!
Please note your attendance on this facebook site: http://www.facebook.com/home.php#!/events/351100611667866/?fref=ts
Gustaf Westerlund
MVP, CEO and owner at CRM-konsulterna AB
www.crmkonsulterna.se
by Gustaf Westerlund | Mar 5, 2013
Licensing issues are often complex when designing CRM solutions and I have strange attempted workarounds with proxy users and simlar and often the issue has been that the sales people have not had the technical insights enough to know the inplications of the licensing setup.
I recently saw I nice blog entry with a summary of CRM licensing. Do check it out. http://markmargolis.wordpress.com/2013/03/04/microsoft-dynamics-crm-licencing-simplified/
Gustaf Westerlund
MVP, CEO and owner at CRM-konsulterna AB
www.crmkonsulterna.se
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