Johnz Blog - The MscrmGuy

Vista gadget for Dynamics CRM

2007-03-14T02:27:00Z

Here is an article on a gadget I wrote for Vista which access MSCRM accounts and contacts:

http://mscrmguy.blogspot.com/2006_10_01_mscrmguy_archive.html

New blog site

2006-10-16T12:33:00Z

Hi all:

Since I have left Microsoft I will be losing this blog eventually. Please update your links to this new site:

http://mscrmguy.blogspot.com/

John.

New email address

2006-08-15T01:03:00Z

Hi all:

I have left Microsoft to join a partner, Unis Lumin. My new email address is jstraumann@unislumin.com.

John.

Passing GUIDs to .NET assemblies from Workflow

2006-06-01T20:23:00Z

.NET Assemblies part Duex - Level 200

Hi all:

A partner recently asked me how to pass a GUID to a .NET assembly called from worklow, so here's a simple example of how to do it.

Workflow Assemblies

Back from vacation

2006-05-17T11:16:00Z

Hi all:

Sorry about the delay in new posts, I just got back from a 2 week vacation and since we traveled by car to Florida with our 2-year old and 5-year old, it was no vacation at all. So now I am trying to catch up on my rest and think of a good topic for a post!

John.

Montreal decks

2006-04-25T21:12:00Z

Hi all:

The presentations from our recent event in Montreal can be downloaded here:

John's CRM presentation

Janine's Presentation

Tamer's Presentation

iFrames part Duex - Level 200

2006-04-12T19:52:00Z

In this article, reading MSCRM attributes from an iFrame.

Cick here for the article

An ASP.NET Service Portal - Level 300

2006-04-11T12:57:00Z

Hi all:

Here is an example of a possible configuration for a web-based portal into the MSCRM Service module.

Service Portal

MSCRM and iFrames - Level 100

2006-04-07T11:28:00Z

How to add simple iFrames to MSCRM forms.

Click here for the article

Easily Create picklists with many values - Level 200

2006-04-06T19:12:00Z

Have you ever created a pick-list with a significant number of entries, and gotten pretty sick of adding items one at a time in the MSCRM GUI? I faced this recently when I had a customer ask me how to easily create a pick-list with all the countries in the world in it.

So facing the prospect of clicking the "Add" button on a pick-list 194 times (at least I *think* that's how many countries exist in the world today! :)) I decided to write a little utility to generate the pick-list code for me.

Check it out:

http://www.mscrmguy.com/hols/tips_and_tricks/picklists.htm

Installs and SQL Server

2006-03-14T16:08:00Z

Today I did my first non-SBS install of MSCRM in a customer’s lab environment. They had SQL Server installed in a named instance which is unsupported by MSCRM, so since I am not a SQL guru (or even a SQL guru in trainingJ) so I involved a SQL expert.

On his advice, we installed a new instance of SQL Server on the same machine as the named instance, apparently you can have up to 16 instances on one SQL install, applied SP4, and away we went. This is a cool feature of SQL I was not aware of, so it was worth getting up today, I learned something new!

I also learned that SQL 2005 can have up to 50 instances!

Accounts Product Listing - Level 100

2006-03-10T15:22:00Z

Hi all:

The other day I was at a customer site and they asked if there was a way to see a "rollup" of all the products a particular account has purchased, other than going though their invoices one-by-one. So as an exercise I decided to have a crack at a solution for this.

Click here for the lands-on-lab...

Note it was suggested to me to just use the "Products By Account" report from the Account record screen, however while this is certainly a cool report, the customer in this case specifically asked for a grid to be integrated into the Account form.

Server Install HOL

2006-03-07T21:29:00Z

Hi all:

Here is a HOL covering the install of the MSCRM Server...
v3 Server Install

Enjoy!

Clustering

2006-02-23T01:49:00Z

As we move into the Enterprise space with MSCRM, we see more and more requests for "failover" and "clustering support". We have just published some new guides on MSCRM clustering:

Here is the link for this great info from the Dynamics team

http://www.microsoft.com/dynamics/crm/using/default.mspx

A first look at the Dynamics Snap-in Tool for Office

2006-02-22T22:45:00Z

A first look at the new Office Snap-in tool for MSCRM....

http://www.mscrmguy.com/hols/snap/snap.htm