Help Your IT Help You
“CRM is not working.” Says, Co-worker. This, or something like this, is usually what the IT department receives whenever a User is having some sort
November 11, 2016
Author: Scott Florance
Helpful Tools for a Consultant or Any Project-Based Work
When I started as a Consultant many years ago, it opened my eyes to an entirely new way of working I was not familiar with.
October 26, 2016
Help! I Can’t Access My Opportunity in Dynamics CRM!
That is the frantic call you receive when, during another day at the office, a User goes to check on one of their open Opportunities. When they click on the Opportunity in their view, the record won’t load and they receive an error message:
June 1, 2016
Best Practice for Building CRM Queries in an SSRS Custom Report
When writing a custom SSRS report for CRM, one of the greatest features is the ability to include pre-filtering in your reports. By adding the CRMAF_ prefix to the alias assigned to the table you are querying, it will pass your selected CRM records as the context for your report. E.g.:
SELECT * FROM FilteredAccount AS CRMAF_Account
When writing a custom SSRS report for CRM, one of the greatest features is the ability to include pre-filtering in your reports. By adding the CRMAF_ prefix to the alias assigned to the table you are querying, it will pass your selected CRM records as the context for your report. E.g.:
SELECT * FROM FilteredAccount AS CRMAF_Account
When writing a custom SSRS report for CRM, one of the greatest features is the ability to include pre-filtering in your reports. By adding the CRMAF_ prefix to the alias assigned to the table you are querying, it will pass your selected CRM records as the context for your report. E.g.:
SELECT * FROM FilteredAccount AS CRMAF_Account
When writing a custom SSRS report for CRM, one of the greatest features is the ability to include pre-filtering in your reports. By adding the CRMAF_ prefix to the alias assigned to the table you are querying, it will pass your selected CRM records as the context for your report. E.g.:
SELECT * FROM FilteredAccount AS CRMAF_Account
When writing a custom SSRS report for CRM, one of the greatest features is the ability to include pre-filtering in your reports. By adding the CRMAF_ prefix to the alias assigned to the table you are querying, it will pass your selected CRM records as the context for your report. E.g.:
SELECT * FROM FilteredAccount AS CRMAF_Account
April 4, 2016
Correcting a Duplicate User in Microsoft Dynamics CRM
It was the perfect storm that unfurled to cause this commotion that had us spinning our wheels for a while. A User left the company and had been deactivated in CRM (we’ll call this record User1). Due to policy (I’m guessing policy, as I have heard the practice is not recommended) the user Account was deleted in Active Directory (AD). Well, lo and behold, this User decided to return to the company within a few months of leaving. When the Administrator attempted to reactivate the User within CRM, they were unable to because the User was no longer in AD; the User was added again in CRM (the new User record will be User2). After
January 20, 2016
How to Set Default Parameters in SSRS Reports Based on CRM Roles
I enjoy working with SSRS reports and learning new things to help me build out reports that meet our clients’ needs. When a client comes to me with an interesting way they want something displayed or a request for a feature that is unknown to me, I jump at the chance to do it. I love a new challenge and it acts as a learning experience as well. A recent request came to me that required a little creativity on my part. It was to modify the default value of certain report parameters based on the security role the User had in CRM.
December 14, 2015
Modification to Bulk Update the Parent Account: MSFT Dynamics CRM
No one enjoys opening up each record, one at a time, to update a field with the same value in your company’s CRM. This is why the bulk edit feature in Microsoft Dynamics CRM is such a great tool, especially if the field you need to update is a Lookup field. This ends up saving a bunch of clicks and ultimately, time. One thing I never really noticed though, is that while most fields can be edited there is one on the Account that stood alone. The Parent Account. Since I hadn’t had a need to ever update this field en masse myself it wasn’t until a client wanted to change the Parent Account on multiple records that I realized CRM has the lookup link grayed out. Meaning, Read More »
November 20, 2015
How to Renew an SSL Certificate for CRM on ADFS 3.0
If you are using an Internet Facing Deployment for your CRM there is always that time every 1, 3, or X years where you receive the message to renew your SSL Certificate. With ADFS 3.0 no longer dependent on IIS like its previous version were it changes the process a little bit. It is not very difficult to do but it took me a little research to piece together all the steps in the right order. I wanted to share this information so that the process goes as smooth as possible and you aren’t stuck with your environment being down as you scramble to figure out how to get the CRM and ADFS applications working together again.
You will first want to remove the old certificate from the ADFS and CRM servers. If the certificate is not removed then this will cause problems later down the line.
July 28, 2015
CRM Service Module: Part 1
Often when discussing a Dynamics CRM it is not uncommon to think of the application solely in the terms of how it can be used for the Sales and Marketing departments. As marketing to prospects and building potential sales are the first interactions companies usually have with a customer it is easy to see why these tend to be focal points for a CRM system. However, critical interactions with those companies do not stop after the sale, they continue on well beyond closing the opportunity and invoicing the order. If you have heard the adage, “It is easier to retain current customers than to acquire new ones,” you know I am speaking of customer service. The customer service module in Dynamics CRM is often forgotten in conversations when speaking of the capabilities of the application yet it is quite a robust piece. To bring light to this often overlooked module of Dynamics CRM over the next few articles we will highlight some of the features.
April 1, 2015
Where do Value Based Enable Rules get their data for the CRM 2013 ribbon?
A recent request tasked me with adding functionality to the form ribbon of an Order in CRM 2013. The goal was to capture information from two fields on the Order’s associated Account and based on that information enable or disable a button on the ribbon of the Order which for the purposes of this article we can call Has_Value. I was not able to pass the values to the Order when it was created as these values could change some time after it had been created. Additionally, if the associated Account were found to be a duplicate, it would have to be merged and updated on the Order that could also change the results of the information I was capturing. This left me with having to query for my information using Javascript when the Order form loaded. With this Javascript query, I then updated a hidden Boolean field on the Order if the criteria was met or left it blank if it was not. This might not seem important now but having to take these actions in order to meet the requirements affected how this customization had to be modified at later steps in the functionality.
February 18, 2015
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