Been working lately with a customer in CRM 2015 Spring wave and I must say I really like it! My number one feature is the lovely menu which I enjoy every time i use it!
If you havn’t noticed the excel export/import functionality now supports .xlsx (finally!) which is great. I did have an issue with importing data into CRM from xlsx-file once, which might have been due to the fact that I had added a column by hand (with the correct field name!). The sad thing was that I got an error when uploading this and no option to download a log file. So, I don’t really know what was wrong, but I think my new column was it. It was easily solved, anyway, I just saved the document as “XML Excelsheet 2003 format *.xml”, which is the format used when exporting excel-templates in CRM 2011 and 2013. Importing that worked great. Some of you might think that csv-files are better, as the overhead is smaller in these, but I would warn against using these as I have had some issues with these. The most obvious being that the csv-format is regions sensitvie. With a en/us locale it will use the comma (,) as the separator but in Sweden (se/sv) it will use semi-colon (;). This will mess up a lot of.
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| Spring has come – when is summer comming? |
Another messy thing of CRM 2015 Spring wave, that I think most users of it have noticed, if they are not blind, is that form customizations cannot be done in IE11. I cannot understand how this bug could have escaped Microsoft quality control, and it will most certainly be fixed. Hence I use Chrome when customizing CRM. This made me notice another bug, that being that when using Chrome, I cannot save new mappings, which works perfectly well in IE11. Isn’t the multi-browser world wonderful! Just imagine the amount of money Microsoft must pour into this.
And on the subject of pouring money, we all want Microsoft to get us a lot of nice shiny features for CRM, and fix all the bugs, so how are we doing on the upgrades ourselves? Maintaining a lot of different code trees costs a lot of resources, which could have been used to other stuff. Think about that when you are requesting fixes for CRM 4.0.
Gustaf Westerlund
MVP, Founder and CTO at CRM-konsulterna AB
www.crmkonsulterna.se
Gustaf, thanks as always for the helpful post. Can you clarify what you mean by no form customization with IE11? I'm asking because I have an instance with Spring Wave and I've had no problem with simple form configuration. Worried I'm going to bump into something significant and have no desire to switch browsers for different functions. Thanks in advance!
Well, we are expecting an update any day now, so you might have gotten it and would expect it to contain a fix for this bug as it is a bit embarrassing for MSFT. When I tried to do form customizations in IE11 I could not move fields around or drag new fields onto the form as the litte red line didn't show as expected no matter how much I flipped around. If you got it to work, I don't Think you have to worry, the problem is just that it doesn't work (at least for me on all the Spring wave instances I have tried).