Microsoft Dynamics CRM Team Blog

Auditing User Logon

crmblog — Fri, 25 May 2012 16:31:00 GMT

Auditing of business data is a feature supported in Microsoft Dynamics CRM 2011. Included in Update rollup 5 is the ability to audit a user's logon access to the Microsoft Dynamics CRM Server. The information that is recorded includes when the user started accessing Microsoft Dynamics CRM and if access originated from the Microsoft Dynamics CRM Web application, Microsoft Dynamics CRM for Outlook or SDK calls to the web services.

The following steps describe how to enable auditing of user logon access.

In the site map click Settings, and then select Auditing.
On the Audit page, select Global Audit Settings
In the System Settings form, select (check) Audit user access.

Below is the screen shot of these steps.

You can view all the details of who logged into the Microsoft Dynamics CRM system in the "Audit Summary View grid". You can
view this page by clicking the Audit Summary View button as show in the above screen shot.

You can also retrieve the audit record of user logon access by using the Microsoft Dynamics CRM SDK. Sample code on how
to retrieve user logon information can be found on MSDN at http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/hh547448.aspx

Thanks,

Rahul Kavalapara

Update Rollup 8 for Microsoft Dynamics CRM 2011

crmblog — Tue, 22 May 2012 20:30:30 GMT

Update Rollup 8 for Microsoft Dynamics CRM 2011

The Microsoft Dynamics CRM Sustained Engineering (SE) team released Microsoft Dynamics CRM 2011 Update Rollup 8 on Thursday, May
3, 2011 and it is now available on Microsoft Update.

The links below will take you to the necessary information about Update Rollup
8. If a link does not work, please refer to the Release Channel Schedule below to make sure it is past the release date
listed.

Microsoft Download Center: http://www.microsoft.com/downloads/details.aspx?FamilyID=f72b8001-2bd3-4a21-8845-d0f284dc21b6
Microsoft Knowledge Base Article: http://support.microsoft.com/kb/2600644
Microsoft Update: http://catalog.update.microsoft.com/v7/site/Search.aspx?q=2600644

Release Channel Schedule

CRM Online Datacenter: Schedule is being reviewed
Microsoft Download Center: May 3, 2012
Microsoft Update: May 22, 2012

General Details about Update Rollup 8

Update Rollup 8 installation requires Update Rollup 6 to be installed.
Client packages installed manually by downloading the packages and running install
will require administrative privileges.
If the client packages are installed via the Windows Update (Microsoft
Update) system, they will not require administrative privileges.
For help with installation, please see the Installation Information section in KB2600644.

How to Get Support for Update Rollup 8

For support, please contact Microsoft Product Support. For a complete list of Microsoft Product
Support Services telephone numbers and information about support costs, visit
the following Microsoft web site: http://support.microsoft.com/default.aspx?scid=fh;[LN];CNTACTMS.

Note: In special cases, charges ordinarily incurred for support calls may be canceled if a
Microsoft Support Professional determines that a specific update will resolve
your problem. The usual support costs
will apply to additional support questions and issues that do not qualify for
the specific update in question.

Cheers,

Matt Brown

Like-Unlike for Activity Feeds

crmblog — Tue, 22 May 2012 15:50:00 GMT

Activity Feeds solution has been on the marketplace since late last year. With an upcoming UR, we are
adding new cool features including filters, ability to set a default view and
of course like-unlike. In this post we’ll walk through the like-unlike feature
and SDK how-to.

If you’d like a quick refresher on the SDK, try this
post. There is also sample code up on MSDN.

Social networks have set somewhat of a standard to quantify
the popularity of posts. Facebook has the like button, Google+ uses +1. This
system encourages users to participate actively as well get a feel of the
response to content that they have created. Overall, it gives the feeling of
being part of a community. Expressing this is quick, usually with the click on
a single button and feedback is represented along with the content of the post
itself.

Like-Unlike inches the social experience in CRM closer to
what users are already familiar with through other networking services.
Hovering over a post typically shows at least one button, viz., Comment. Now,
you’ll see a new ‘Like’ button like so:

Clicking it likes a post and changes the button text to
‘Unlike’. The content below the post text now indicates that you’ve liked this
post:

When another user views this post on their wall, they see
something like this:

The like count obviously reflects the number of people that
like it. Clicking the number displays the names of people who like this post in
a popover:

The Windows
Phone app has this ability too:

The smiley
icon in the left bottom corner likes a post.

Like-Unlike
works the same way whether you are on your personal wall, on an entity’s wall
on an entity form, even on read-only forms. A user can like-unlike all posts
irrespective of how they’ve been created- by other users, by workflows or rule
triggered auto-posts. A user will require the same permissions that they need
for Activity Feed post or comment creation.

There is SDK
support as well. The following code snippets show how you can like a Post and
retrieve user’s full names who like a particular post.

Like a post with a particular Id var postLike = new PostLike { PostId = new EntityReference(Post.EntityLogicalName, post.Id) };

Guid likeId = _serviceProxy.Create(postLike);

Console.WriteLine("Post with Id :{0} liked.", post.Id);

Retrieve list of likes for a particular post

string retrieveLikesFetchXml = "<fetch version=\"1.0\" output-format=\"xml-platform\" mapping=\"logical\" distinct=\"true\" returntotalrecordcount='true'>" +

                                   "<entity name=\"systemuser\">" +

                                   "<attribute name=\"fullname\"/>" +

                                   "<attribute name=\"systemuserid\"/>" +

                                   "<order descending=\"false\" attribute=\"fullname\"/>" +

         "<link-entity name=\"postlike\" alias=\"aa\" to=\"systemuserid\" from=\"createdby\">" +

                                   "<filter type=\"and\">" +                   "<condition attribute=\"postid\" value=\"{" + post.Id +"}\" operator=\"eq\"/>" +

                                   "</filter>" +

                                   "</link-entity>" +

                                   "</entity>" +

                                   "</fetch>";

var fetchExpression = new FetchExpression(retrieveLikesFetchXml);

var likes = _serviceProxy.RetrieveMultiple(fetchExpression);

Console.WriteLine("{0} users like this post. They are:", likes.Entities.Count);

foreach (var entity in likes.Entities)

{

Console.WriteLine(entity.Attributes["fullname"]);

}

Since the aim of Activity Feeds is to encourage communication, there is no way to
‘dislike’ a post. For the same reason, you cannot like or unlike a post via
workflows.

Aniket Naravanekar <anikna@microsoft.com>

Webcast: An Introduction to The Connector for Microsoft Dynamics

crmblog — Mon, 21 May 2012 16:04:40 GMT

Use the Connector for Microsoft Dynamics^® to integrate Microsoft Dynamics CRM and Microsoft Dynamics ERP data.

When: Thurs. June,7^th2 pm EST/11 am PST

Select Meeting Title: Dynamics CRM 2011 - Integrating CRM & Dynamics ERP 06/07/2012

CLICK HERE TO REGISTER

The Connector for Microsoft Dynamics benefits an implementation where Microsoft Dynamics CRM is used to manage your sales, marketing, and customer care activities and where Microsoft Dynamics ERP is used for order fulfillment, maintain customer, item, & salesperson records, and perform your organization’s operational and accounting functions.

This 1 hour webcast will include:

An overview discussion of the Connector for Microsoft Dynamics
A demonstration of the Connector for Microsoft Dynamics
Additional resources to learn more about the Connector for Microsoft Dynamics

We encourage you to attend this webcast and learn more about how integrating Microsoft Dynamics CRM 2011 with your Microsoft Dynamics ERP solution can drive efficiency and productivity in your organization.

Contact:

hqdynts@microsoft.com for more information regarding the Dynamics CRM Q2 2012: Integrating MS Dynamics ERP Webcast,

Using Connections for Team Selling

crmblog — Mon, 30 Apr 2012 16:19:00 GMT

With so many great capabilities delivered in CRM 2011, as a customer, it can be challenging to know what capabilities can be best combined to address the user’s needs. I came across one such situation last week when discussing a feature suggestion that came through our Connect feedback site.

Scenario

Here’s the high level scenario: There are often situations where two or more sales reps need to collaborate on an opportunity, sometimes referred to as the pursuit team. To accomplish this, there are a few challenges to work through:

1) How do I denote who are the salespeople working on the opportunity?
2) How can I make it easy for them to view the opportunities that they are working on?

There are several possible approaches that you might take here depending on what makes the most sense for your organization.
One simple way would be to add fields to the opportunity form to identify team members that are working on the opportunity. For example, in addition to Owner, you might have fields for “Sales Lead” and “Industry Lead” and so forth. If your requirements are static, this works. However, it’s not very flexible if the number of people that you might have working a deal varies from opportunity to opportunity.

Using Connections
Here’s where the strength of the Connections capability that was introduced in CRM 2011 comes into play. Connections allow you relate records together of all types – in a way it’s like an “any to any” relationship, with an added ability to annotate the relationship with the meaning of the relationship, or other notes. For example, you can use it to identify a contact as your “Colleague” or express the roles of the various contacts that are associated to an opportunity such as “Influencer” or “Decision Maker”.

Let’s take a look at how to address each of our questions using Connections:

Identifying the Sales Team
For our scenario, the simplest thing to do is to add Connections for each sales rep that will be working on the deal.

From the opportunity, click the Connect button

Fill in the desired user for the “Name” field:

That’s all that’s required. Save and Close.

These will appear in the Connections area for the opportunity:

Note: You may want to customize the Opportunity form to add Connections as a sub-grid, to make viewing this data inline easier.

You may even want to go a step further and define Connection Roles to express what role each sales person is playing with respect to the Pursuit Team: “Sales Lead”, “Industry Lead”, and so forth.

From Settings -> Administration -> Connection Roles, you can add new Connection Roles:

Back on the Opportunity, here are the roles used for the Connections to further clarify the meaning of the relationship to the users identified in the Connections:

Creating a Public View for My Opportunities

Now that you’ve denoted the sales reps that will be working on this opportunity and ensured that they have appropriate access, the next step is to ensure that there is a Public view that includes these opportunities.

Here’s where I ran into a bit of a snag. I had intended to just modify the “My Open Opportunities” Public View to add an OR clause such that it would show effectively “Owner Equals Current User OR Connected to Current User”. Of course, the problem is that the filter criteria doesn’t allow creating OR expressions across entities, so I couldn’t add the clauses to include Connections.

That’s ok though. What it means is that in this model, we’ll drive the view fully off Connections only, not Owner. Taking this approach does require that each sales person will need to be identified with a Connection, including the Owner of the opportunity, so you will want to automate this with a simple workflow or plug-in that creates a Connection for the Owner automatically.

Let’s start with the View creation first.

Creating the Public View

So, here’s what I did to create the view to enable the user to see opportunities that they are working on.
1. As the system customizer, go to Settings -> Customizations -> Customize the System, select the Opportunity entity.
2. I opened the “My Open Opportunities” Public view and chose Save As to create a copy of the view
3. I then modified the filter criteria as follows:

a. Removed the “Owner Equals Current User” clause, but kept the Opportunity Status Equals Open.
b. Added the following clauses to locate the Active Connections to the Current User:

Note: In this case the “From” side of the Connection represents the Opportunity, and the “To” side represents the User, hence the usage of “Connected To” Equals Current User. You may have noticed that this is very similar to the “My Connections” view that we provide out of box.

4. Be sure to mark this new Public view as the Default view by choosing “Set Default” from the More Actions menu for the list of views. This way, users will see the desired records by default.

Creating the Workflow to Automate the Owner Connection

As I mentioned above, to help your users adopt this model, a little workflow automation is called for. What we’re going to do is create a Connection automatically for the Opportunity Owner. Here’s the basic idea.

1. From Settings –> Processes, Create a Process of type Workflow for the Opportunity entity.
2. Set the scope as Organization and Start when the record is created or the record is assigned.

3. Add a Create Record step to create the Connection and set the fields as follows:

a. “Name” as the Opportunity Owner
b. “Connected From” as the Opportunity
c. “Owner” as the Opportunity Owner

4. Save and activate the workflow.

With this complete, individual owners won’t have to do any additional to work with their opportunities. If others are involved in the opportunity, they can list the additional users using Connections, optionally adding a Connection Role to clarify their role with respect to the opportunity.

Summary

The Connections capability, used in this context, gives you a flexible way of forming the pursuit team and to expand the membership when it is required (e.g. perhaps adding other SMEs at a particular stage in the process). Of course, once you head down this path, there are a number of other enhancements that you may want to make to facilitate ease of use. For example, you may want to have a workflow that creates placeholder connections for the various pursuit team roles to be filled in once it is appropriate to do so. You may also discover this pattern works well for other situations whereby you have multiple individuals collaborating on records in CRM.

Derik Stenerson

p.s. If there are other creative ways that you use the Connections capability, we’d love to hear about it!
As an aside: The security modeling implications for how you grant access to the salespeople working on the opportunity (e.g. usage of CRM Teams, sharing, etc.) are something you should consider carefully to determine what will work best for your organizational needs. This topic is beyond the scope of this blog post.

This posting is provided "AS IS" with no warranties, and confers no rights.

Help yourself to fixing CRM Outlook Client configuration issues

crmblog — Fri, 27 Apr 2012 19:38:00 GMT

We’ve released a troubleshooting wizard to help you help yourself resolve errors configuring the Dynamics CRM Outlook Client. Give it a whirl:

http://rc.crm.dynamics.com/rc/2011/en-us/online/5.0/outlook-troubleshooting.aspx

Why did we create this wizard?

There are several reasons that you might receive an error attempting to configure the CRM Outlook Client. The most likely solutions can be different depending on the error and other factors such as whether you’re using Dynamics CRM Online or On Premise. Instead of having to search KB’s and possibly find articles that do not apply to your scenario, the wizard can help guide your to the most likely solution based on your symptoms.

The wizard was created by CRM Outlook Client subject matter experts. We can continually improve this wizard as we identify additional solutions so please provide feedback.

Tell us what you think! Invite for CRM user research participants

crmblog — Thu, 19 Apr 2012 22:59:00 GMT

The Microsoft Dynamics CRM User Research group is looking for people who would be interested in providing us with information about your experiences with Dynamics CRM, including the Resource Center. We are looking for people who are (1) CRM Developers and/or Microsoft Partners OR (2) users of CRM Dynamics. We would like to interview you in person (if located in Seattle area) or by phone. The interview will take about 2 hours of your time. We know how important your time is and appreciate it. We will reimburse you with a Microsoft software gratuity (you can choose a Microsoft Application from a list of MS Applications).

If you are interested or have any other questions, please contact mlalomia@microsoft.com or carolak@microsoft.com.

Regards,
Microsoft Dynamics CRM, Project Manager
Carola Klass

The Microsoft Dynamics CRM Swiss Army Knife

crmblog — Tue, 17 Apr 2012 21:17:00 GMT

For this month’s column, I would like to stay away from a technical subject and discuss the most important fact regarding Microsoft Dynamics CRM Users who I had the opportunity to meet at Microsoft Convergence 2012.

This year was the first time I had the opportunity to participate at Microsoft Convergence and I felt that it was the perfect time for me to meet the Microsoft Dynamics CRM Users that participate on this community and maybe answer some questions in person.

The most shocking and important fact regarding most of the Microsoft Dynamics CRM users I met at Microsoft Converge was the fact that they had no idea regarding all the FREE help that is out there to ensure that their experience regarding Microsoft Dynamics CRM is outstanding.

Since I learned that most users did not know where to go when they needed help (not just technical support), I decided to dedicate my next column to all the Microsoft Dynamics CRM Users out there and detail all the different options in one single post. All the tools in one column, the Microsoft Dynamics CRM Swiss Army Knife!

If you look at the bottom left corner of your Microsoft Dynamics CRM Web Client, you will notice a section called “Resource Center”. This section is phenomenal and gives you access to all the information you need.

Access is granted to the Microsoft Dynamics CRM Community, the Dynamics Marketplace, instructional videos, CustomerSource, Microsoft Connect, the Microsoft Knowledge Base, Technical Support and many other features.

Microsoft Dynamics Community – http://community.dynamics.com/product/crm/default.aspx

In case you are not connected to your Microsoft Dynamics CRM Organization but still need access to Microsoft Dynamics Resources, the Microsoft Dynamics Community is the main location for all your Microsoft Dynamics CRM needs. From here, you can access “CustomerSource”, the Marketplace, Blogs, Videos and the most important feature of all, “Ask the Community”. Let me give you some details regarding each of these features:

1. CustomerSource - https://mbs.microsoft.com/customersource: CustomerSource is a secure site that allows you to access job-tailored productivity tools including unlimited training courses and self-support resources like the knowledge base. Just as important, it provides access to downloads and updates such as timely tax and regulatory releases that may be necessary to help your organization remain compliant.

This site is Easy to navigate using the Left Navigation Pane where all these great resources are available in one place:

2. Microsoft Connect - http://connect.microsoft.com/ : Microsoft Connect is a place for you to submit bugs and suggestions for Microsoft products which will be considered for addressing in a future release.

Some of the things you can do in this web site are:

• Participate in feedback programs managed by Microsoft Dynamics CRM Product Team

• Download and test beta products

• Submit bugs and suggestions for future releases of Microsoft Dynamics CRM

• Vote, comment, and validate other people’s feedback

Many great features of Microsoft Dynamics CRM 2011 are the direct result of feedback provided by users just like you. Even some features of the Microsoft Dynamics CRM Community are the result of feedback from Microsoft Dynamics Community users.

3. The Microsoft Dynamics Marketplace - http://dynamics.pinpoint.microsoft.com : The Microsoft Dynamics Marketplace helps you discover innovative applications and professional services from Microsoft partners worldwide. Find expert help, download applications and tailor Microsoft Dynamics to improve productivity and build your business.

There are hundreds of Applications and Services offered at the Marketplace for FREE.

The Marketplace can be access via Microsoft Dynamics CRM (Settings -> Dynamics Marketplace) or by going to the Microsoft Dynamics Marketplace website.

4. Blogs - https://community.dynamics.com/product/crm/b/default.aspx : The Blogs section within the Microsoft Dynamics CRM Community contains blog entries coming from 85 different Microsoft Dynamics CRM Blogs around the web. These blogs have been recommended by other community users and include entries posted by the best Microsoft Dynamics CRM Professionals in the world.

Instead of searching or reading dozens of blogs out on the web, go to the Microsoft Dynamics CRM Community and browse all of them at once!

5. Videos - http://community.dynamics.com/product/crm/crmnontechnical/b/crmvideos/default.aspx : The videos available in this section are posted by the Microsoft Dynamics CRM team as well as Microsoft Dynamics CRM Partners worldwide.

From an “Introduction to Microsoft Dynamics CRM” to “Optimizing Internal Business Processes”; from “Adding a field on a form to complex customizations and development”, find free step by step instructional videos in one place.

6. Ask the Community - https://community.dynamics.com/product/crm/f/117/p/addpost.aspx : This is by far my favorite feature on the Microsoft Dynamics CRM Community.

This section allows you to post any question regarding Microsoft Dynamics CRM. The difference between Microsoft Dynamics Technical Support and Asking for Community Support is that the community has no limitations and it is always free. Microsoft Technical Support engineers are the best in the world at solving issues relating to Microsoft Dynamics CRM. However, the Microsoft Dynamics CRM Community is available to answer questions regarding issues inside and most importantly outside the scope of Microsoft Technical Support, “how-to” requests, best practices, related technologies that work with Microsoft Dynamics CRM, Solution Architecture, User Adoption, etc.

We have received posts from simple “How do I…?” questions to “What is the best way to implement a CRM Cluster around the world?” questions.

In other words, here is the place where you can get ANY question you have regarding Microsoft Dynamics CRM answered by the best Microsoft Dynamics CRM Professionals in the World. All of this FOR FREE!

If you currently work with a Microsoft Dynamics CRM Partner that knows and understands your CRM organization and you have an agreement for support or access to their expertise, you will be able to exploit that benefit.

The organizations without access to these benefits can leverage the power of the Microsoft Dynamics CRM Community to achieve success and drive User Adoption.

One great feature of Asking the Community is the access to all previous questions asked by many users in the past. There is a chance that the issue you are having has been already addressed before.

In Summary, the Microsoft Dynamics CRM Resource Center and Microsoft Dynamics Community provide you with access to:

1. Free access to the latest news, software and fixes.

2. Free Training.

3. Free Instructional Videos.

4. Free Technical and Non-Technical Blogs.

5. Free Access to voting, commenting, and validating other people’s feedback regarding bugs and suggestions for future releases of Microsoft Dynamics CRM

6. Free Technical and Non-Technical assistance by thousands of Microsoft Dynamics CRM Users and Experts.

The questions posted on the Microsoft Dynamics CRM Community Forums represent what I call a “Perfect Circle”. For the users, any concern or question can be addressed by some of the best Microsoft Dynamics CRM Professionals of the world. For professionals, it represents learning. Learning we normally wouldn’t find by working with a limited amount of customers and situations. We like to be challenged by these issues and solving them burns the knowledge in our minds.

If you are a Microsoft Dynamics CRM Professional, please distribute this column to all users you can currently reach and to every customer and user you work with in the future. It is important to provide awareness and I hope this column contributes to it.

So, if you have any questions or needs regarding Microsoft Dynamics CRM or even this column, let us know what we can do to help you.

Gus Gonzalez

Deep queries for subgrids

crmblog — Mon, 16 Apr 2012 23:16:00 GMT

In This Post:
• Problem statement
• Sample definition
• Adding the customizations
• Modifications of the Customizations.xml
• Conclusion
• Further reading

Problem statement

Currently, Microsoft Dynamics CRM 2011 allows filtered views in sub-grids for the entities directly related to the opened entity.
In Microsoft Dynamics for Wealth Management Solution we enhanced this functionality and I will explain in this blog the enhanced feature that is now available in Update Rollup 7.

Note: These steps require that you are familiar with Fetch XML query language and you are comfortable modifying the solution’s Customizations.xml file.

Sample definition

To explain the new feature lets start by defining the custom entities hierarchy. We have a Legal Account which has a 1:N relationship to Portfolio that has a 1:N relationship to Holding. This feature works for deeper hierarchies as well, but for simplicity we will work with this three entities hierarchy.

Prior to UR7 we could not have a sub-grid on the Legal Account form showing related Holdings. Sub-grids only supported showing related entities that were 1 level deep, such as the Portfolio entity.

Adding the customizations

In UR7 we added additional functionality to support sub-grids that could display related records more than 1 level deep.

To use this new feature, I will describe below the steps necessary to enable it. I will use the same object model above. Our goal is to add a sub-grid on the Legal Account form to display related Holdings.

We start by opening our solution and navigating to the Holding Entity. Here we will create a new View. We will modify this view later using Fetch XML to enable seeing related Holdings in the Legal Account form. For the purpose of this exercise I named the view “HoldingsRelatedToLegalAccount”. We click OK after entering the name and click Save & Close on the new window.

We navigate now to the Legal Account entity and we open the Legal Account form. We click Insert on the Ribbon and choose Sub-Grid.

We give a Name and a Label,and, most importantly we choose HoldingsRelatedToLegalAccount as the default View. Also, select “All Record Types” for the Records dropdown and “Holdings” for the Entity dropdown. In other words we will see all the Holdings in the system regardless of whether they are related to the currently opened Legal Account or not. We will modfy this via Fetch XML later so that only related Holdings will be shown.

We click OK, Save&Close on the form and close the Solution window.

We are ready right now to Publish All Customizations and Export the solution as an unmanaged one.

Modifications of the Customizations.xml

Extract the Cusomizations.xml from the zip and open the file in your favorite XML Editor.
Search for the new sub-grid name (in our example the name is Related_Holdings).
Note that the <RelationshipName> entry is empty. This means that we show all the entities in the system, not only the related entities. We will change this by adding the relationship name between the current entity (in our case Legal Account) and the immediately related entity down the hierarchy (in our case Portfolio). The name can be obtained by looking at the Relationships (1:N, N:1) of the Legal Account or Portfolio entity in the solution window.

By adding this relationship we ensure that we will filter the results by showing only the Holdings related to the currently opened Legal Account. However this is necessary but not sufficient.
<control id="Related_Holdings" classid="{E7A81278-8635-4d9e-8D4D-59480B391C5B}">
        <parameters>
          <ViewId>{B7FAD5B3-2906-415D-9279-E94CB879A4C7}</ViewId>
          <IsUserView>false</IsUserView>
          <RelationshipName>msdyn_account_msdyn_portfolio_Legalaccount</RelationshipName>
          <TargetEntityType>msdyn_holding</TargetEntityType>
          <AutoExpand>Fixed</AutoExpand>
          <EnableQuickFind>false</EnableQuickFind>
          <EnableViewPicker>false</EnableViewPicker>
          <ViewIds>{B7FAD5B3-2906-415D-9279-E94CB879A4C7}</ViewIds>
…………

The next step is to search for the View definition by searching the id (in this example ‘B7FAD5B3-2906-415D-9279-E94CB879A4C7’).

Here we need to enhance the FetchXML. Remember that the current FetchXML for our View is retrieving all the Holdings in the system.

We need to add a link-entity statement between the current Holding and the parent Portfolio by using the primary key/foreign key link.

If we had a deeper hierarchy we would need to add all link entities up the hierarchy except the last one. For example, if a Holding was related to Assets, and we wanted to show all the related Assets for a Holding, then in the FetchXML we would need to add the link entity from Asset to Holding, and an inner link-entity from Holding to Portfolio.
<fetchxml>
    <fetch version="1.0" output-format="xml-platform" mapping="logical">
      <entity name="msdyn_asset">
…
       <link-entity name="msdyn_portfolio" from="msdyn_portfolioid"
                to="msdyn_portfolioid">
<link-entity name="msdyn_holding" from="msdyn_holdingid"
                 to="msdyn_holdingid">
</link-entity>
</link-entity>
…
</fetch>

Link-entity entries in Fetch XML will be transformed into SQL Join statements. To be able to filter all the Holdings related to the currently opened Legal Account we need to build these Join/Link-Entity statements by walking up the relationship hierarchy.

The last Join/Link-Entity (in our case from Portfolio to Legal Account) we will be added by the Sub-Grid engine. The engine does this by inspecting the <RelationshipName> (i.e. msdyn_account_msdyn_portfolio_Legalaccount). It uses the relationship name to populate the last Link-Entity statement on the fly (e.g. from Portfolio to the currently opened Legal Account). This is the reason we need all the other Link-Entity statements up the hierarchy, except the last one.

Once this is done, we need to repack the Customizations.xml into the zip file and reimport the solution into the system and republish the customizations.

By opening a Legal Account, we notice that we see now only the Holdings related to the currently opened Legal Account.

Conclusion

In this blog post we have shown that having Sub-Grids that show related entities that are multiple levels down the relationship hierarchy is possible with the Dynamics CRM 2011 UR7 release.

Further reading

Form Sub-grid in Dynamics CRM 2011

Download and inspect the asset allocation charts in Microsoft CRM for Wealth Management solution

Build Queries with FetchXML

Microsoft Dynamics CRM content on Microsoft Update Expiring

crmblog — Tue, 10 Apr 2012 23:15:00 GMT

Microsoft Dynamics CRM publishes Update Rollups to the Microsoft Update site when each update is released. Currently all the Update Rollups are available on the Microsoft Update site. Going forward we will maintain the three most recent Updates Rollups. On 4/19/2012, we will expire and remove our older Update Rollups from Microsoft Update. The removal of the Update Rollups does not affect the Microsoft download center http://www.microsoft.com/download. You will still be able to download all the previous Update Rollups from the Microsoft download site.

Below is the current schedule for the content to expire. On the expiration date, the binaries will disappear from Microsoft Update at 10 am (Pacific). Update Rollup 6 will be an exception and not expired because Update Rollup 6 is required for future Update Rollups to be installed.

Release	Expiration Date
RTM (Patch from RTW)	4/19/2012
UR1	4/19/2012
UR2	4/19/2012
UR3	4/19/2012
UR4	N/A (Not on Microsoft Update)
UR5	When UR8 is published
UR6	N/A (Required for Future URs)
UR7	When UR10 is published
UR8	When UR11 is published
UR9	When UR12 is published

Questions or problems with Dynamics CRM Online billing?

crmblog — Mon, 09 Apr 2012 17:14:00 GMT

Do you want to convert your trial to paid subscription? Change the credit card you’re using to pay for your subscription? Questions about your bill?

Help yourself to answers about your Dynamics CRM Online billing—we’re here to make it easy. Visit Frequently asked questions about Microsoft Dynamics CRM Online billing. There’s a great chance we have the answer you’re looking for. You can avoid banging your head on your desk while waiting on the phone.

This FAQ is for those of you who manage your billing via https://billing.microsoft.com/home.aspx. If you manage your billing via Microsoft Office 365, visit that web site to get help with billing.

Reminder: Clear the browser cache after an update rollup (UR) is installed!

crmblog — Wed, 04 Apr 2012 21:13:00 GMT

Recently in the forums I have noticed a few users reporting that certain clients are getting script errors on their Crm deployments while other clients are working fine. This issue arises after update rollups have been installed. To prevent these errors, Microsoft suggests always clearing the IE cache after installing an update rollup.

Sample steps to clear the cache in IE:

- Open Internet Explorer
- Click “Internet Options”
- On the “General” tab, under “Browsing history,” click “Delete…”
- Check “Temporary Internet Files,” “Cookies” and “History”
- Click “Delete”
- Restart your browser and you are good to go!

Also, remember that after installing a UR you will need to close existing sessions and then re-open to get the changes.
Cheers,

Brandon Simons

Announcing SDK Update V5.0.10

crmblog — Thu, 29 Mar 2012 02:04:00 GMT

Microsoft Dynamics CRM SDK Version 5.0.10 is now live on MSDN downloads and on the MSDN library. Here are some of the many additions and updates you’ll find in this release

Updated assemblies for Microsoft Dynamics CRM 2011 Update Rollup 7.
New performance information about retaining a service proxy instance throughout an application’s session and about allowing the system to generate GUIDs for better performance.
- Active Directory and Claims-Based Authentication
- Performance Best Practices
A new topic with guidance about two types of read-only forms: the new read-optimized forms included in Microsoft Dynamics CRM 2011 Update Rollup 7 and the Microsoft Dynamics CRM for Microsoft Office Outlook reading pane.
- Design Considerations for Read-Only Forms
Updated sample code to include a demonstration of the following messages: RetrieveAttributeChangeHistoryRequest and RetrieveAuditDetailsRequest.
- Sample: Audit Entity Data Changes
Updated sample code to demonstrate how to retrieve the members of a list without specifying the entity type for the list member, such as a lead, contact, or account.
- Sample: Distribute Campaign Activities to Dynamic and Static Lists
Added a new sample to show how to retrieve PrincipalObjectAttributeAccess (secured field access) records.
- Sample: Retrieve Secured Field Access Records
Added a new sample showing how to retrieve records that are related to a specified record. In this sample, the opportunities are rolled up by their parent account.
- Sample: Rollup Records Related to a Specified Record
Updated the walkthrough and added a new sample that demonstrates how to create a workflow in code.
- Walkthrough: Create a New Workflow in Visual Studio
- Sample: Create a Workflow in Code
Updated the Deployment Web Service sample code to correct an authentication problem and added a Visual Basic version of the sample code in the download package.
- Sample: Use Deployment Service Messages
See the complete list of new and updated samples and links to all the new topics in the Release History on the first page.

The next SDK update is scheduled for May. Send Feedback

Thanks for all the hard work by the SDK team!

Amy Langlois

Microsoft Dynamics CRM SDK

Update Rollup 7 for Microsoft Dynamics CRM 2011

crmblog — Thu, 29 Mar 2012 01:58:00 GMT

The Microsoft Dynamics CRM Sustained Engineering (SE) team released Microsoft Dynamics CRM 2011 Update Rollup 7 on Thursday, March 22, 2011.

The links below will take you to the necessary information about Update Rollup 7. If a link does not work, please refer to the Release Channel Schedule below to make sure it is past the release date
listed.

Microsoft Download Center: http://www.microsoft.com/download/en/details.aspx?id=29221

Microsoft Knowledge Base Article: http://support.microsoft.com/kb/2600643
Microsoft Update: http://catalog.update.microsoft.com/v7/site/Search.aspx?q=2600643

Release Channel Schedule

CRM Online Datacenter: Mid to Late April, 2012
Microsoft Download Center: March 22, 2012
Microsoft Update: April 10, 2012

General Details about Update Rollup 7

Update Rollup 7 installation requires Update Rollup 6 to be installed.
Client packages installed manually by downloading the packages and running install will require administrative privileges. If the client packages are installed via the Windows Update (Microsoft Update) system, they will not require administrative privileges.
For help with installation, please see the Installation Information section in KB2600643.

How to Get Support for Update Rollup 7

For support, please contact Microsoft Product Support. For a complete list of Microsoft Product Support Services telephone numbers and information about support costs, visit the following Microsoft web site: http://support.microsoft.com/default.aspx?scid=fh;[LN];CNTACTMS.

Note: In special cases, charges ordinarily incurred for support calls may be canceled if a Microsoft Support Professional determines that a specific update will resolve your problem. The usual support costs will apply to additional support questions and issues that do not qualify for the specific update in question.

Cheers,

Matt Brown

Dynamics CRM instructional and conceptual videos now on YouTube

crmblog — Sat, 24 Mar 2012 01:20:00 GMT

The CRM content publishing team has been publishing various videos to help you get started with using the Microsoft Dynamics CRM application.

For the benefit of our customers, we have now made these videos available on YouTube on the MicrosoftDynamicsCRM’s channel page: http://www.youtube.com/user/MicrosoftDynamicsCRM.

These videos can be viewed on any browser or device that is supported by YouTube for watching videos.

Dynamics CRM Instructional (How-To) Videos

Dynamics CRM Conceptual Videos

Cheers!
Shubhada Joshi

Read-optimized forms

crmblog — Thu, 22 Mar 2012 23:27:00 GMT

As Microsoft Dynamics CRM moves into the future by enabling information workers to access information across many devices and networks—environments in which time-to-load and consumption are the key success factors—we’re focusing more than ever on providing a fast-loading, consumption-oriented user experience. This focus is particularly helpful for people who use Microsoft Dynamics CRM primarily to consume data, rather than to edit or update records.

To further these goals, in Update Rollup 7 we’re introducing a new feature called read-optimized forms.

A read-optimized form displays a record very quickly. We achieved this by trimming the record to its bare essentials: just the data, with no ribbon, Web Resources, or form scripts.

Need to edit a read-optimized form? Editing the record is just a click away.

In Update Rollup 7, read-optimized forms are disabled by default. Because we’re introducing a brand-new experience in viewing records, we didn’t want to surprise you by turning it on as the default experience. We also know that some of you have form customizations using scripts and Web Resources. We’ve made sure that those experiences continue to work as expected. We plan to continue refining the read-optimized form experience in future releases, so that read-optimized forms will eventually become the default record-viewing experience.

In this post, I want to introduce you to read-optimized forms. Here are the things that I’m going to cover:

• Read-optimized form details
• Switching to the full edit mode
• How to enable read-optimized forms
• When will you see a read-optimized form vs. an editable form?

Read-optimized form details
Read-optimized forms shorten the time needed to open a record by stripping the form down to its bare essentials. A read-optimized form:

• Displays all fields, notes, IFrames, and sub-grids that are visible by default.
• Honors all form- and field-level security configurations.
• Does not display the ribbon or allow editing a record.
• Does not display form navigation.
• Does not display embedded Web Resources.
• Does not execute form scripts.

The following screenshots show read-optimized forms for a sample Account.

Notes
If you’ve added notes to your record, you can view them in the read-optimized form. However, you’ll have to switch to the edit mode to add a new note or to edit your existing notes.

Sub-grids
Most of us have related records that show up as sub-grids in the main form. You’ll be able to view these sub-grids in the read-optimized form, and all common sub-grid actions like refresh, sorting, paging, and search will work. Also, if you have a sub-grid represented as a chart, it will render properly in the read-optimized form. However, since there isn’t a ribbon on read-optimized forms, ribbon actions on the sub-grid won’t be available.

IFrames
Some of us get data from external systems into Microsoft Dynamics CRM by using an IFrame, and seeing that IFrame in the context of your CRM record is very important to us. Because we realize the importance of your IFrames, we’ve enabled them on read-optimized forms. This is one of the places where a read-optimized form differs from the Outlook reading pane. However, if your IFrame calls in to the client API to get some form data, you might get errors on the form because read-optimized forms don’t have client API support.

Activity Feeds and Image Web Resources
A read-optimized form will render properly if it has Activity Feeds and/or image Web Resources, but if the form has other Web Resources or scripts, editable form will render automatically. In Update Rollup 7, Activity Feeds and image Web Resources don’t render; to view them, you must switch to the edit mode. By the way, we plan to change this behavior in our next major release, and at that time we expect Activity Feeds and image Web Resources to work in read-optimized forms. Today, however, this is what the user will see when viewing Activity feeds or image Web Resources in a read-optimized form:

Switching to the full edit mode
Editing a record that’s in read-optimized form is just one click away. A user can quickly switch to the edit mode in two ways:
1) On an open read-optimized form, click the Edit button in the toolbar.

2) Before opening a record, on the record grid, select a record and then click the Edit button.

How to enable read-optimized forms
The default behavior when Update Rollup 7 ships will be to turn off read-optimized forms for all new and existing organizations. The admin or user will have to explicitly turn on the feature to enjoy the capabilities of read-optimized forms.
Admin settings
The admin can set the form mode at an Org level, and also select individual users to use read-optimized forms.
At the Org level, the admin can set the default form mode for all users by clicking Settings, Administration, System Settings, and then going into the Form mode area. Here, the admin also can control whether to give users the option to configure the form mode, or not.
• If the admin selects Edit as the default form mode and disallows user configuration, users will always get editable forms.
• If the admin enables users to change their default form viewing mode, all of their forms will load in the mode that they select (Read-Optimized or Edit). This individual setting overrides the organization default setting for that user.

The admin can also select just a few users and change their form viewing default (for example, mobile salespeople who prefer to use read-optimized forms). This sets the default form mode for those users, and is also reflected in their User setting (Set Personal Options dialog). These users can change the form viewing mode if they want to.

User setting
By default, users will get the organization default as their form viewing mode. However, if the user chooses a specific form mode, all of their forms will load up in the mode they select (Read-Optimized or Edit). The user setting will always override the Org setting for that user.

When will you see a read-optimized form vs. an editable form?
Many of you have form customizations that involve Web Resources and custom scripts, and we made sure that we didn’t break them. Because read-optimized forms don’t support Web Resources or custom scripts, we detect if your form has these components and then load the editable form automatically for you—ignoring the org/user settings.

Information for developers is available in the Microsoft Dynamics CRM 2011 SDK topic: Design Considerations for Read Only Forms.

Information for business users and administrators is available in the Microsoft Dynamics CRM Resource Center: Usingread-optimized forms to view data more rapidly in Microsoft Dynamics CRM.

I look forward to hearing your feedback on read-optimized forms. Just remember that you need to enable the read-optimized mode in order to use them!

Anusha Shankar

Update to the Convergence 2012 Discussion Group Schedule

crmblog — Tue, 13 Mar 2012 23:26:00 GMT

The Microsoft Dynamics CRM Engineering Team is looking forward to working with you at Convergence 2012, sharing with you some of our ideas and aspirations for future versions of Microsoft Dynamics CRM, and, as always, learning from you, your experiences, your needs, and your insights. These focus groups will be offered Sunday March 18 through Wednesday March 21.

These discussion groups will be forward looking research sessions. During these sessions we will present prototypes, and ideas designed to improve Microsoft Dynamics CRM; we invite you to review and critique these designs, provide us with your important scenarios, business processes and needs so that you can influence our direction in a wide variety of areas.

Gratuity & Non-Disclosure Agreement

Participants in each Discussion Group will receive a Microsoft gratuity which must be mailed to a U.S. address. We will have a list of gratuity choices available for you at the sessions. We will also ask you to sign a standard Microsoft Non-Disclosure Agreement (NDA) so that we can confidentially share our ideas and present our thinking.

Participation

Please review the session titles and RSVP directly to me (Michael.McCormack AT microsoft.com) your preferred sessions, and I will reply with confirmation. All Sessions will be repeated so that we can accommodate your schedules at Convergence 2011. Preregistration will guarantee you a seat, otherwise its first come first serve and seating is limited.

All events are in Room 335C at the Hilton EXCEPT SUNDAY which is in 342D in the Convention Center.

Early SFA storyboards and scenarios for Office integration and Sales Insights

Description:
Our Sales Force Automation tools, will best grow when we, the R&D Team, listens to you. Help us understand your experiences, focus on your scenarios, and discuss with you our current thinking. Please join us in a review of early storyboards, and help us hone our work.

Audience: Sales Professionals, Sales Management or Executives, Business Decision Makers

OFFERED Monday 2:15p-3:30

OFFERED Tuesday 2:00p-3:15

Using external data sources to increase sales productivity within CRM

Description: Come help influence the future of SFA in Dynamics CRM. This session will cover the sales scenario of working with new leads and contacts, discovering information about them and bringing that information into CRM from outside data services and websites. The CRM R&D team will present storyboards and scenarios for upcoming investments and would like to get your feedback.

Audience: Sales Professionals, Sales Management or Executives, Business Decision Makers

OFFERED Sunday 4:45p-6:00pm 342D in the Convention Center.

OFFERED Monday 12:45p-2:00

Session Cancelled - Microsoft Dynamics CRM Online Licensing model

Description: In this session we will present a sneak preview of our future online experience and offering plans for both enterprise IT and professional users. Come provide feedback on the licensing model
and help us by sharing your experiences.

Audience: Business Decisions Makers, Administrators, IT Executives and Portfolio Managers

OFFERED Monday 3:45-5:00pm

OFFERED Tuesday 10:45a-12:00p

Hosted Email connector overview and feedback

Description: Ever wondered about how Dynamics CRM connects business processes with Email system of your choice? Come and learn about the CRM Email connector’s journey towards hosted solution and integration with Office365. The R&D team will be presenting new concepts and their strategy for integrating Email systems in your business with CRM.

Audience: Business Decisions Makers, Administrators, IT Executives and Portfolio Managers

OFFERED Tuesday 9:00a-10:15

OFFERED Wednesday 9:45a-11:00

Social Customer care concept overview and feedback

Description: Come help us explore the relationships between social networks and CRM. How will your customer service representatives or sales people use CRM in the near future? The R&D team will be presenting new screens and strategy for using social networking in your business with CRM

Audience: Service Professionals, Service Managers, Sales Professionals, Sales Management or Executives, Business Decision Makers

OFFERED Monday 10:45a-12:00p

OFFERED Tuesday 330p-445

Using “Weighted BANT” Lead Qualification process with Microsoft Dynamics CRM

crmblog — Thu, 08 Mar 2012 23:34:00 GMT

I found this blog article on Weighted BANT. I wanted to try implementing it with Dynamics CRM. Here’s how it worked out. With zero code, I created this in a few hours using the scoring assumptions below. How are you using BANT or other lead qualification methods with Dynamics CRM?

I started with the scoring assumptions.

Authority (which of the following best describes your influence on the purchase decision)?

0 = I have no authority and no access to the decision maker(s).
1 = I have no authority, but have direct access to the decision maker(s).
2 = I influence the decisions and have access to the decision maker(s).
3 = I am one of several decision makers.
4 = I have complete authority as the sole decision maker.

Need (do you have current business need for xxx solution)?

0 = No.
1 = likely.
2 = I definitely have the need. This product/project has potential to help.
3 = I definitely have the need. This product is one of them that can help.
4 = I definitely have the need. This is one of the very few products I’m looking at and will help.

Budget (Do you have budget allocated for this business need)?

0 = no
1 = likely to have some budget soon
2 = have some budget, but not sufficient
3 = have budget that may be just right
4 = have sufficient budget

Time (what timeframe are you working with to solve this problem)?

0 = No Time Commitment.
1 = 12 months+.
2 = 7-12 Months.
3 = 3-6 months.
4 = 0-3 months.

Then, I created a process flow of what the qualification would look like.

Once that was done, creating the process using Dynamics CRM Dialogs was pretty simple. Here’re the end results of that process. Salesperson wants to qualify a lead. She runs through the 4 steps prompt & response dialog.

Here’re the screenshots of the 4 steps.

1. 2

3 4

In the background, each of these follows weighted scoring to finally calculate total BANT score and take actions called out in the flowchart above.

After trying it out on 5 leads, Activity Feeds shows:

Other salespeople as well as sales manager who follow all team members will now see this activity as well, and collaborate with this sales person if they have any comments, and/or follow these newly created/qualified objects.

Here’s what the actual process looks like. In order to fit it into two screenshots, I have collapsed the other ‘page’ sections, but they are very similar to the Determine Authority one that’s shown here.

This is the prompt and response form for Determine Authority:

Form to set ScoreA after determining authority:

Updating ScoreOverall everytime a step/response is complete:

And finally, a post that shows the creation of opportunity:

I have the solution with me (still working to figure where to post it. If you want it, find me on twitter @manishapowar.

Manisha Powar

Microsoft Dynamics CRM and SQL Server 2012 - Better Together

crmblog — Wed, 07 Mar 2012 19:10:00 GMT

At Microsoft Dynamics our vision is to help companies transform into dynamic businesses by impassioning and equipping the individuals in their organizations. SQL Server 2012 which is being released at the Virtual Launch Event today is helping us deliver on that promise. Microsoft Dynamics CRM along with SQL Server 2012 provides a mission-critical customer data platform that can provide valuable insights for end-users, fulfilling the vision of “CRM Anywhere” by enabling individuals to access the right information at the right time on the right device.

Streamlined Insights

Microsoft SQL Server 2012 introduces a new Reporting Services Add-in for Microsoft SharePoint Server 2010 called Power View, previously code-named Project Crescent. Power View is a next-generation BI tool for interactive data exploration, visualization, and presentation. Simply put, it helps business users put together interactive presentations and breathtaking insights similar to Hans Rosling’s vivid demonstrations. Salespeople and customer care representatives can get such insights on an immersive canvas with the Power View templates for Dynamics CRM that will be available in the Microsoft Dynamics Marketplace as part of the Q2 2012 service update.

Besides Power View, there are numerous enhancements to the core reporting engine within SQL Server 2012. SQL Server Reporting Services (SSRS) introduces alerting for end-users, enabling users to set up their own alerts directly against the elements of a report. For example, end users can setup alerts when certain numbers on reports go out of band. The Alert checks for data changes in the background and sends an Alert Message. Reporting Services now also provide the ability to export reports into Open XML formats which are the familiar document formats used by Microsoft Word and Excel since 2007. The new rendering capabilities also take advantage of the new document formats such as increased column and row limits within Excel and generally smaller file sizes.

Increased Availability

With the Microsoft Dynamics CRM Q2 2012 service update we provide customers with the opportunity to harness the core database engine capabilities of Microsoft SQL server 2012 to leverage its performance and scalability advancements. Currently SQL Server 2012 is being deployed in all Microsoft Dynamics CRM Online data centers to further increase performance and reliability for your mission critical customer data. It is worth pointing out that Microsoft Dynamics CRM Online powered by SQL Server 2012 is the largest implementation of SQL Server “AlwaysOn” technology providing a highly available enterprise-class solution in the cloud with financially backed 99.9% uptime.

Better Scalability and Predictable Performance

Last year, we released performance benchmarking results that demonstrate that a single instance of Microsoft Dynamics CRM 2011 that can scale to support an enterprise implementation of 150,000 concurrent users executing a heavy workload against a large, complex database. SQL Server 2012 which is NUMA (Non Uniform Memory Access) aware takes the Dynamics CRM performance to a new level with a much improved memory manager. With a fast and robust Extended Capturing mechanism, performance profiling and fine tuning with SQL Server 2012 is better than ever. With AlwaysOn Active Secondaries, you can actively utilize the secondary instance for reading business data instead of having an idle backup hardware wasting key resources. Overall, SQL Server helps Dynamics CRM customers deploy a global application regardless of whether they deploy on-premises or in the cloud with CRM Online.

Easy manageability

SQL Server provides a policy based management framework that vastly simplifies administration and improves manageability of SQL Server databases. With AlwaysOn, IT gets much better database availability but at the same better hardware utilization with active secondaries. SQL Server 2012 also expands on the PowerShell support delivered in SQL Server 2008 by leveraging Windows PowerShell 2.0 allowing DBAs to take advantage of the latest PowerShell features and offers the flexibility to use SQLPS.exe for all SQL and related automation scenarios.

Enterprise Security

SQL Server 2012 includes a number of security enhancements to provide a robust enterprise-grade database platform for customer data. The addition of user-defined server roles increases flexibility, manageability and facilitate compliance towards better separation of duties in enterprises. This is very helpful to organizations that have several users administering a variety of databases. Also a number of industry certifications have been granted to Dynamics CRM Online and SQL Server recently to further validate our commitment to trustworthy computing.

Simplified Development

With a new Visual Studio based IDE named “SQL Server Data Tools”, developers can now rejoice with a unified and integrated toolset for developing database and BI applications. For SQL Server Integration Services (SSIS) developers, SQL 2012 brings the much anticipated undo/redo functionality along with an improved data flow design experience and human readable packages that also works well with source control systems.

This post was just a tip of iceberg on what SQL Server 2012 can offer to business applications and to learn more about SQL Server 2012 release and to download a copy of the SQL Server 2012 RTM bits, check out the SQL Server team blog at http://blogs.technet.com/b/dataplatforminsider. Also learn more about the new capabilities that Dynamics CRM brings with Q2 2012 Service Update by reading Dynamics CRM Q2 2012 Release Preview Guide.

If you have an interesting case study or usage of SQL Server 2012 with Dynamics CRM, I’d love to hear from you and please feel free to reach out to me directly at http://blogs.msdn.com/b/girishr/contact.aspx.

Thanks,

Girish Raja

Product Manager, Dynamics CRM

Improved Upgrade Performance in UR6

crmblog — Fri, 02 Mar 2012 19:48:00 GMT

Upgrades of CRM databases from V4 are much faster in CRM 5.0 UR6 release. We've made improvements to the most time consuming parts of CRM upgrades that should significantly reduce the upgrade time for large CRM databases.

I wanted to share some options to make upgrades even faster. These options are more relevant for higher end hardware common to large production deployments of CRM. Since these options are hardware and deployment specific, they are implemented as registry key options(DWORDs) under HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Microsoft\MSCRM.

1. MaxDopForIndexCreation - CRM recommends that the max degree of parallelism (maxdop) SQL option be set to 1, to avoid the potential pitfalls of allowing SQL to generate parallel query plans. But those concerns are not valid for upgrades, which usually happen in single user mode. Index creation is a lot faster when SQL is allowed to parallelize index creation. The MaxDopForIndexCreation registry key hook allows you to specify the maxdop value used for index creation. We got pretty good results using a value of 4 for this setting in internal testing.

2. SortInTempDB -- For indexing large tables (tens of millions of rows), SQL has to store intermediate sorted rows on disk. The SORT_IN_TEMPDB option makes the index creation go along much faster, assuming you have dedicated hardware for tempdb. For the upgrade, you may specify SortInTempDB registry key (set it to 1) to allow SQL to use tempdb for sorting index data on large tables.

3. NumThreadsForIndexCreation -- Production SQL machines for large CRM deployments tend to be very powerful, typically with 16 cores or higher. In addition to specifying the MaxDopForIndexCreation option, you can specify that the index creation happen in multiple threads. We got pretty good results, again, using 4 for the number of threads in internal testing.

The above registry key options greatly speed up the "Upgrade indexes" step of a CRM deployment (you can look at the upgrade logs to see where time was being spent if you weren't paying attention during the upgrade process). Index upgrade can take several hours for a large CRM database, and we've seen reductions of over 75% through the combined application of these options.

4. BatchAddAttributeUpdates -- This is an internal optimization that allows us to reduce the number of SQL queries we issue while adding non-nullable columns to existing tables. It will help if the metadata changes (DiffBuilder) stage of the upgrade is taking a long time. You may set this to a value of 1 for it to take effect.

These are all upgrade specific improvements, and aren't useful when the system is in normal use. We released these changes in UR6 because they were significant pain points for our larger customers, and they have not undergone comprehensive testing that happens with a full CRM release. We recommend that you leave them on only for the duration of the upgrade, and only if your upgrades are taking a long time. You may remove them once the upgrade is complete, to avoid any unintended consequences. Other settings you may experiment with as part of your upgrade planning include turning off high availability modes for your CRM database, and switching to simple recovery mode, again, only for the duration of the upgrade.

Using the upgrade performance improvements that are part of UR6, and some of the registry hooks described in this post, we were able to speed up upgrade of CRM from V4 by over 60% for a large internal deployment of CRM (over a terabyte in size). We hope UR6 with these options help with your upgrade planning to CRM 5.0, and significantly reduce your downtime windows for the upgrade.

CRM Upgrade Team

Atul Shenoy

The Visual Album of your Accounts. Montage.

crmblog — Fri, 02 Mar 2012 19:38:00 GMT

Here’s a fun way to integrate some Social into your salesperson’s life. Say I have a new account assigned to me. What do I do? I research it. To research the business data, I will probably go to some of the business data sites that are out there. To see what’s happening on the Social sphere, it would be nice to see all the combinations of news about this account in one place, in a fun and interactive way. Microsoft Fuse Labs has Project Montage that allows you to just that.

Here’s a quick set of screenshots showing the final results of this blogpost.

1. Open your account form. Say it’s called U2. Click on ‘Research this company’

2. See the social information about U2 with a choice of layouts. Pick a layout (I like newspaper#2).

3. Save your favorite layout.

4. Spend time you want reading the news, twitter feeds about this account and looking at other’s curated news about the topic by searching for it on Montage.

To do this, here’re the components and changes:

- Create two web resources with the montage images – 16 px and 32 px.

All these are, is scaled PNG files of this:
http://montage.cloudapp.net/Content/Images/logtagleft.png.

- jScript web resource that will be used by the ribbon button

Script code

function openMontageCompanyUrl() {

var attributeValue =

Xrm.Page.data.entity.attributes.get('name').getValue();

var url = 'http://montage.cloudapp.net/edit/?topic=' +

attributeValue;

window.open(url, '_blank');

}

- Updates to the account form Ribbon (see this article for the step-by-step on adding a ribbon button). For the purpose of a demo, the button is added to the ‘process’ group on the form. But one can add it to any other group or create a new group.

Ribbon XML for this button:

<CustomAction Id="MontageButton.CustomAction"

Location="Mscrm.Form.account.MainTab.Workflow.Controls._children" Sequence="30">

</CommandUIDefinition>

</CustomAction>

</CustomActions>

</Templates>

</EnableRules>

</Actions>

</CommandDefinition>

</CommandDefinitions>

</EnableRule>

</EnableRules>

</RuleDefinitions>

</RibbonDiffXml>

In Summary – I added a button that reads some data from the form, and launches the Montage to explore.

Manisha Powar

Automatically purging records from Microsoft Dynamics CRM

crmblog — Mon, 27 Feb 2012 20:02:00 GMT

I was recently asked about purging records from Microsoft Dynamics CRM. The company that asked the question wanted to use CRM to store sensitive information, but they wanted the records to be purged out once they reached a certain age, mainly to mitigate risk of e-discovery. Once a record was 18 months old or greater, they wanted the records to be automatically deleted from the system.

Their expectation was that this was going to be something that required custom development or costly configuration. However, they were pleasantly surprised to see that it can be done using the standard bulk delete
functionality.

In CRM, go settings—>Data Management and select “Bulk Record Deletion.”

Click “Next”

The Bulk Record Deletion wizard is based on an advanced find query. Define the query that will retrieve the records that you want to delete. In this case, we want to delete any cases that are more than 18 months old, so we will select Cases for the entity and Created on, Older Than X Months, 18, then click “Next.”

Finally, on the options screen, check the box to run the job every X days, and enter the desired recurrence interval. This will make the job run on a repeating basis.

Now your deletion job will run as a scheduled job, and any records returned by the advanced find query will be deleted.

But let’s say that you forgot to set the job to re-occur, and you want to have a job you already ran once become a recurring job. You can do that by selecting a record from the Bulk Record Deletion menu, and selecting “More Actions” and “Modify Recurrence.”

A word of caution

Remember, deletions are permanent in CRM 2011. Be sure that in your record purging strategy that you are not diluting the effectiveness of your CRM system by deleting records that users need to do their job. The best approach is to take a balanced approach that meets your legal requirements as well as the requirements of end users.

For more information, here is another post on this topic: http://blogs.msdn.com/b/crm/archive/2010/05/12/deleting-imported-data-with-the-bulk-record-deletion-wizard.aspx

Joel Lindstrom, CRM Technical Specialist

Announcing Convergence 2012 Research Sessions Schedule

crmblog — Wed, 22 Feb 2012 17:22:00 GMT

Gratuity & Non-Disclosure Agreement

Participation

Please review the session titles and RSVP directly to me (Michael.McCormack AT microsoft.com) your preferred sessions, and I will reply with confirmation. All Sessions will be repeated so that we can accommodate your schedules at Convergence 2012. Preregistration will guarantee you a seat, otherwise it’s first come first serve and seating is limited.

All events are in Room 335C at the Hilton EXCEPT SUNDAY which is in 342D in the Convention Center.

Early SFA storyboards and scenarios for Office integration and Sales Insights

Description: Our Sales Force Automation tools will best grow when we, the R&D Team, listens to you. Help us understand your experiences, focus on your scenarios, and discuss with you our current thinking. Please join us in a review of early storyboards, and help us hone our work.

Audience: Sales Professionals, Sales Management or Executives, Business Decision Makers

OFFERED Monday 2:15p-3:30

OFFERED Tuesday 2:00p-3:15

Using external data sources to increase sales productivity within CRM

Audience: Sales Professionals, Sales Management or Executives, Business Decision Makers

OFFERED Sunday 4:45p-6:00pm 342D in the Convention Center.

OFFERED Monday 12:45p-2:00

Microsoft Dynamics CRM Online Licensing model

Audience: Business Decisions Makers, Administrators, IT Executives and Portfolio Managers

OFFERED Monday 3:45-5:00pm

OFFERED Tuesday 10:45a-12:00p

Hosted Email connector overview and feedback

Audience: Business Decisions Makers, Administrators, IT Executives and Portfolio Managers

OFFERED Tuesday 9:00a-10:15

OFFERED Wednesday 9:45a-11:00

Social Customer care concept overview and feedback

Audience: Service Professionals, Service Managers, Sales Professionals, Sales Management or Executives, BusinessDecision Makers

OFFERED Monday 10:45a-12:00p

OFFERED Tuesday 330p-445

Update Rollup 21 for Microsoft Dynamics CRM 4.0

crmblog — Tue, 14 Feb 2012 00:51:00 GMT

The Microsoft Dynamics CRM Sustained Engineering (SE) team released Microsoft Dynamics CRM 4.0 Update Rollup 21 on Thursday, February 9, 2012.

The links below will take you to the necessary information about Update Rollup 21.

Microsoft Download Center: http://www.microsoft.com/download/en/details.aspx?id=28799

Microsoft Knowledge Base Article: http://support.microsoft.com/kb/2621054

General details about Update Rollup 21

Update Rollup 21 is cumulative. However, the Update Rollup 21 CRM Client and Data Migration Client packages require Update Rollup 7 to be installed. For all other CRM components, you do not need to install any previous Update Rollups prior to Update Rollup 21.
The Update Rollup 21 download contains updates for the 40 supported Language Packs. Prior to installing the Update Rollup 21 Language Pack, you must install the original Language Pack.

If you have Language Packs installed, you should

Download the Update Rollup 21 Language Pack
Install the Update Rollup 21 Language Pack
De-provision the Language Pack
Re-provision the Language Pack

Information about how to avoid reboots when installing the CRM Outlook Client can be found in the Update Rollup 4 blog posting.
The Update Rollup 21 Client can be deployed before the server is upgraded to Update Rollup 21.
Steps to make the Update Rollup 21 Client available via AutoUpdate can be found in the Update Rollup 4 blog posting. The Link and Patch IDs can be found in KB article 2550098.
Each update rollup could have fixes that require manual configuration. Please see the “Hotfixes and updates that you have to enable or configure manually” section in KB article 2621054.

Future Updates for CRM 4.0

Due to the low volume of fix requests for CRM 4.0, the CRM SE team will stop shipping CRM 4.0 rollups on a regular schedule. CRM SE will service CRM 4.0 requests on an individual basis using our Critical On-Demand process.

CRM SE will continue to evaluate the need for Update Rollups for the remainder of CRM 4.0’s supported lifecycle. A rollup will be shipped if there is a significant increase in fix request volume or in the event that a rollup will benefit a majority of the 4.0 installation base.

How to get support for Update Rollup 21

For support, please contact Microsoft Product Support. For a complete list of Microsoft Product Support Services telephone numbers and information about support costs, visit the following Microsoft Web site: http://support.microsoft.com/default.aspx?scid=fh;[LN];CNTACTMS.

Note: In special cases, charges ordinarily incurred for support calls may be canceled if a Microsoft Support Professional determines that a specific update will resolve your problem. The usual support costs
will apply to additional support questions and issues that do not qualify for the specific update in question.

Cheers,

Matt Brown

CRM Anywhere

crmblog — Mon, 06 Feb 2012 20:11:00 GMT

Over the last few months I have spent a lot of time meeting with customers, partners and industry leaders around the world on the current trends effecting businesses. The discussions have been fascinating! An interesting theme emerged around technology. The most common questions put to me were what are the innovations other customers are asking for? How are they embracing the rapid change of technology? And how can we leverage technology and Microsoft Dynamics CRM as a vehicle to drive a truly dynamic business to thrive in a hyper competitive environment? Heavy questions! I'll get to my answers in a moment.

In my last blog post I discussed the innovations going on in the CRM space and the fact that CRM is a big bet for Microsoft. Our "CRM economy", if you will, is a deep and vast network. It is big business. Couple that with our strategic "more innovation available more frequently" agenda which we announced last November along with all the work we are doing to synergize Microsoft technologies and bring them home to the CRM customer. Put that all together and you still only begin to scratch the surface of how much we are bringing to the table to change the industry. We will deliver more. Why? Because like you, we are relentless in our drive to outpace the competition.

So on to those answers I promised. We want to be revolutionary, not evolutionary. ...and the market is moving fast. Our customers are tackling CRM initiatives like never before. They can't afford to be casual. They are serious. They don't flinch. They are absolutely convinced that together with the Microsoft Dynamics CRM innovation agenda and pace of delivery, they can be a dynamic business. The most successful customers are innovating with mobility, using every kind of device they can deploy CRM functionality on, and they are going deeper with Microsoft Dynamics CRM flexibility for their specific needs than ever before.

Six months ago we announced our Social Productivity and Enterprise Cloud capabilities release. It was a great success and it was a good part of the answer to those questions I mention above. But we're not standing still. We have no rear-view mirror. I am thrilled to announce the next wave in our continuing cycles of rapid innovation in helping provide those answers: the Microsoft Dynamics CRM Anywhere release is coming in Q2 2012. With this release we are enabling you to be pervasively connected to your most valuable asset-your customer. We are providing more flexibility in mobility than any other CRM provider. Period. CRM where you want to consume it on the device you use.

Who doesn't love to get ahead of their competition in a big way? You do. And we just did in many ways!! And that's really only the beginning of what this release will offer. There's much more to discover including cross-browser support for broad access, data visualization capabilities for unique insight, big additions to our Marketplace and enhanced social capabilities to keep you in touch with your network and customers.

I encourage you to learn more about our Q2 2012 Service Update in our Release Preview Guide.

I look forward to hearing from you as we roll this into the market in the next few months.

Dennis Michalis
GM, Dynamics CRM

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