Regarding MS CRM

CRM Hanging?

Fri, 13 Mar 2009 14:17:00 GMT

The other day, a collegue brought to my attention that simply having Quick Tabs set in IE7 might cause CRM to hang.

Although I have not experienced this, I thought it would be helpful to others to get this out on our blog. You may be chasing the wrong rabbit trail -- as through debugging, you might be zeroing in on some jscript that might be triggering the problem; a plug in or something else totally unrelated.

If you're not sure if you have Quick Tabs set, your IE tabs will look like this:

This is a simple fix. To disable Quick Tabs, in IE, go to Tools->Internet Options->Tabs and simply uncheck Enable Quick Tabs, then restart Internet Explorer. CRM should no longer hang for you.

How to change the Parent of a Contact with the Bulk Edit feature

Fri, 20 Feb 2009 17:00:00 GMT

A few weeks back I described an XML modification that needed to happen, in order the get the Parent Customer field enabled on a Contact, when in Bulk Edit mode. If you missed it, here is the link www.askcrm.com/Default.aspx

Here is a simple video to show you how to use bulk edit.

Microsoft Dynamics CRM has encountered an error screen

Tue, 17 Feb 2009 20:01:00 GMT

If you’ve ever seen this error popup, nine times out of ten, it is probably due to an OnLoad, OnSave or OnChange script that contains an error. This usually indicates a null pointer problem.

However, we recently ran into a situation where we had an installation that contained very little customizations. In fact, there was no jscript loaded at all.

The headier part of this installation was migrating data from ACT to CRM. And therein lay the problem. Some of the Contacts did not have the name fields filled in, so when Data Migration Manager did the import, it loaded the Contacts without names. The last name is required for a Contact. When the user tried to move from one record to another, they sporadically hit this error.

In this case, since there was very little information for these “contacts”, we could delete the records. The user could have also filled in the contact information to make the records complete.

Once we deleted these records, the error went away.

Wireless and LAN not playing nicely?

Thu, 08 Jan 2009 21:50:00 GMT

"CRM was working fine earlier today, but now I can't track anything"

"I had no trouble yesterday, but now I am having trouble using the CRM Outlook client"

"Why are things just hanging??"

If you've experienced the above, your system might be experiencing a conflict between being connected to your LAN AND your WIFI is enabled. It's just plain confused. There may be a solution to work out some settings so there is no confusion, but the quick solution is to disable or turn off your WIFI.

If anyone knows of a more elegant solution, feel free to pass it along!

But I didn't track that email!

Tue, 11 Nov 2008 16:58:00 GMT

You might come across some emails in Outlook that are being tracked, but you never tracked them going out, and they don’t have a tracking token (if your CRM instance is set up to use a tracking token).

Is CRM randomly tracking emails it thinks are important? Of course not, CRM is actually behaving, as you, or someone else, has told it to behave.

I emphasize “someone else”, as most likely you copied your outbound email to another CRM user in your company that has their Email settings set to Track “Email messages from Leads, Contacts and Accounts”. When you receive a response from your email, it will be tracked because the other CRM user has told CRM to track all emails from CRM contacts, etc.

Mystery solved…

Enabling Parent Customer Field in Bulk Edit

Thu, 06 Nov 2008 14:36:00 GMT

You may notice that when you use bulk edit on Contacts, the Parent Customer field is disabled, not allowing you to assign an Account to a group of Contacts.

You can enable this field, to allow editing by doing the following:

1) Export the Contact entity xml

2) Edit the XML

a. Search for “Parent Customer” or whatever you have named that field

b. Find the following line

c. Set the ‘BehaviorInBulkEditForm’ attribute

BehaviorInBulkEditForm="EnabledButNoRender">

3) Import the XML and publish

You should now be able to edit the Parent Customer field when bulk-editing Contacts.

The following options can be used:

Disabled – does not allow editing
Enabled – allows editing of the field
EnabledButNoRender – allows editing of the field, but does not fire OnChange events associated with the field.

Cloning a Custom Entity Record

Tue, 28 Oct 2008 18:36:00 GMT

There are several nice examples that show how to clone a record in MS CRM. Most of the examples I found cloned native entities: Cases, Contacts, Opportunities, etc.

I needed to clone a custom entity and ran into problems during testing. The process for modifying the ISV config file and HTML code was fairly simple. But, when I tested the button, it would “hang”. Through the debugging process, I realized that the call to open a new form wasn’t quite right.

Since I was cloning a record for a custom entity, I needed to provide something that identified which custom entity I was cloning: the entity type code. I could find this value by opening a “new” record for the custom entity and look for “etc=” in the URL. This attribute needed to be added to the edit command.

The code to open a new form would now look like:

oClonedContact = window.open('/UserDefined/edit.aspx?etc=10006','','menubar=0, status=1, width=1000, height=600');

Once I modified the HTML script and cleared out my browsers cache (deleted temporary internet files), the button worked perfectly!

Other helpful references for cloning records:

http://icu-mscrm.blogspot.com/2006/04/how-to-extend-crm-in-order-to-clone.html

http://ronaldlemmen.blogspot.com/2007/05/clone-record.html

blogs.msdn.com/midatlanticcrm/archive/2006/04/10/Fun-with-JScript--Cloning-a-Case-aka-How-do-I-have-a-Master-Case-with-Microsoft-CRM-3.aspx

Duplicate Filters in Reports

Tue, 14 Oct 2008 18:31:00 GMT

Wizards are a wonderful thing… until they do things that you don’t expect.

When building a new report for a client, we usually start with the Report Wizard. We then take the files that the wizard creates and use Visual Studio to do the heavy work.

Recently, we built a report this way, but for some reason the resulting report, in CRM, had “double-filters” for each entity we filtered on. The first filter would be correct, containing the parameters to filter on; the second (duplicate) filter was blank, therefore “everything” would be returned.

Why are there duplicate filters and how to we fix it?

Well, it seems that the report wizard, our post-wizard modifications or some combination thereof, set the Report Parameters incorrectly.

To remedy this:

1) Make a backup of your report files!

2) Open Visual Studio and locate the report that needs to be fixed

3) Go to the Report Parameters of the report

4) Take out the parameter(s) that is(are) causing the duplicate filters

5) Save and re-run the report

Modifying a Completed Task

Mon, 22 Sep 2008 13:59:00 GMT

It is true, a completed task cannot be modified with workflow. For some custom billing functionality, we needed to modify an attribute on a task, after it had been completed. Although I knew workflow could not modify it, I thought I had read where a plug in can handle this with no problem. Well, no, a plug in cannot modify a completed task either. What were we to do?

A coworker, who can’t stand to be told “it cannot be done”, found a solution for us… using workflow! Although it is true a completed task cannot be modified, we can temporarily change the status of the completed task, make the change, then change the status back to completed. Voila! We have now modified our completed task and our processes can continue as spec’d out.

Here’s what the workflow might look like:

Thank you Michael!

Could not promote email with attachments

Thu, 31 Jul 2008 15:49:00 GMT

A client of ours recently ran into a problem with promoting an email to CRM. Using the MS CRM 4.0 Outlook Client, he received the error message below:

"An error occurred promoting this item to Microsoft Dynamics CRM. The Microsoft Dynamics CRM server could not be contacted or user has insufficient permissions to perform this action."

I asked him to forward me the email, and I also was not able to Track in CRM.

There were two attachments, and I isolated the error to one attachment in particular. The attachments were named like:

Large-company, Inc. 7-31-08.doc

You&Me Company 7-31-08.doc

I isolated the error to the first document. A co-worker came by and suggested it might be the hyphens or other punctuation, but both files contained the hyphens. Then the only other difference was the other punctuation. I saved the file to Large-company Inc. 7-31-08.doc, by taking the embedded comma out, created a new email with the new attachment and Voila! the email could now be tracked in CRM.

Although I had no trouble tracking the email with the second document, I have seen references in other blogs that the ampersand (&) could also have problems. See KB949719 http://support.microsoft.com/kb/949719/en-us

Test crm as a different user

Mon, 14 Jul 2008 15:53:00 GMT

There are times where it is helpful to test your CRM changes logged in as a different user. This will allow you to see everything that this user would experience.

Of course you can physically log on to the users machine, but a better way is to run a simple batch script that will start the CRM web client and prompt you for the users password.

The contents of the .bat script would look like:

runas /user:LITWAREINC\PaulW "C:\Program Files\Internet Explorer\iexplore http://moss:5555/loader.aspx"

You would supply your own CRM instance and user information. You do need to know the users password to test this way.

If you need to test specifically how something looks iwith the Outlook client, this won't help you... you'll still have to log on to the users machine and start Outlook.

Duplicate Detection

Tue, 13 May 2008 16:10:00 GMT

I was testing the new Duplicate Detection feature in MS CRM 4.0

I wanted to be warned about duplicates that might be entered as a Contact with the same name and phone number of an existing Contact. I created a new rule that looked for an exact match on Full Name and Business Phone. Through testing, the duplicates were not detected as I entered new Contacts with seemingly the same name and phone number. Initially I thought that, maybe there was a 'latency period' for the newly published rules to take effect, and tried again a little later.

The problem was that I was testing the Contacts Full Name. Since the record is not saved until after the duplicate detection work is done, the Full Name attribute was empty. I had to back up and modify the rule to test for the discrete Last name and First name fields. Once I made this change, the duplicates were detected.

Tip: Since the match codes are updated every 5 minutes, there is still a chance that duplicate records will sneak in, if entering several records in succession.

I also ran into a problem, where the duplicate detection rule "fired", but it seemed to get stuck in some loop, and never returned the form that challenges me choose whether I want to go ahead and add the record anyway, or cancel out. The security roles for users, need to have the "Duplicate Detection Rule" set properly (ie NOT 'None Selected') for the duplicate detection function to process fully. Once I fixed this in the roles, duplicate detection worked all of the way through.

I accidentally regarded an email to the wrong contact

Thu, 17 Apr 2008 15:00:00 GMT

This doesn't happen often, but when it does, it can be a pain to resolve if you don't follow the right steps. A client of ours ran into this problem early on, as they were learning how to use MS CRM 3.0

In order to "undo" or "untrack" and email do the following:

Make sure the original email still exists in your 'Sent Items'
Open your Activities using the 'My Closed Activities' view
Delete the email that was incorrectly 'Regarded' (if you don't the following steps will copy the whole record, including the incorrect 'Regarding' field)
Go to 'Sent Items' in Outlook
Find the email that you need to track (don't open it, just locate and highlight it in the list)
Click the 'Track in CRM' icon located in the CRM Toolbar. (You will get a warning that this record is already tracked and asks if you want to make a copy.)
Click 'Yes'
(one way to do this) Now open the email and Regard it to the correct Contact. Close the email.

You should now have successfully regarded this email to the correct contact.