Gateway Solutions announces its merger with Armanino Consulting

Gateway Solutions announces its merger with Armanino Consulting—please click here to read the media coverage. To learn more about our expanded offerings and the benefit of teaming with the largest Microsoft Dynamics CRM partner in the Western United States, visit our new website.

February 20 2012 | crm musings and Uncategorized | No Comments »

Optimizing the Performance of CRM 2011

Need to optimize CRM 2011? Here are some points to consider to help you along the way:

Form Layout Considerations

• Utilize role based form layouts to minimize the elements that are required to load when a page is accessed.
• Loading sub-grids on a form requires additional requests to the CRM server and can greatly increase the time it takes for the page to completely load. However, CRM 2011 is optimized to begin populating the sub-grid asynchronously after the entire page has already been loaded so the user should be able to interact with the page prior to the sub-grids loading. Adding sub-grids does minimally increase the client side footprint however.
• Limit the number of features available to the user via security roles. Turning off the ability for certain system functionality or features you do not use will remove those items from the navigation and ribbon. Less items that load in the ribbon and in the navigation reduce the client side footprint.
• Properly consider the effect any javascript added to your page will have on page load times. Consider a large JS library containing a number of independent functions. If on a given form page you only utilize one function from the JS library, the entire library will need to be downloaded and loaded.
• Utilize minification to decrease the overall size of javascript scripts that you might use (keep in mind minifiers reduce readability significantly).

Client Optimizations

• If you are using Internet Explorer 7, you might need to increase the number of concurrent downloads allowed beyond the default of 2. Internet explorer 8 limits it to 6. Depending upon the form layout, CRM might make a number of requests to the server before a page is loaded. If the number of connections required exceeds this limit, a request is required to wait until a previous request has finished. Here is a link that will allow you to resolve this issue with IE7 and IE8 increasing the number of connections to 10: http://support.microsoft.com/kb/282402
• Add the CRM URL to the trusted sites of internet explorer.
• Make sure you are running the latest CRM 2011 rollup.
• The minimum requirements for the Outlook integration for CRM 2011 are 2GB of ram. We highly recommend 4GB for the best user experience.

Server Optimization

• Server optimization is a fairly complex topic. For performance tuning of your CRM environment, I recommend following the Microsoft Whitepaper located here.

December 13 2011 | administratiom and crm and CRM 2011 and crm musings and CRM Tips and tricks and Uncategorized | 1 Comment »

CRM 2011 Email Router and CRM Online

Working with a client today we made a fairly startling discovery. The E-Mail router for CRM Online doesn’t allow you to use “User Specified” credentials like it did in 4.0. What this means is that for every user/queue that you want to pipe e-mails into and out of in CRM, you will need to create profile for and assign manually to their user. This is somewhat troublesome as that means that whenever they change their e-mail password, an administrator needs to log onto the server hosting the e-mail router and make the password change for them.

If you find yourself in this situation, I would recommend taking a look at CWR’s new exchange connector for CRM. It’s included in their mobile application suite and is a incredibly slick way to integrate exchange with CRM. It even works in conjunction with the Outlook Client.

June 16 2011 | crm and CRM 2011 and crm musings | No Comments »

Upgrading CRM 4.0 Databases to CRM 2011

One of the neat features of CRM 2011 that many system administrators and technology providers will enjoy is the ability to upgrade an existing CRM 4.0 system directly into CRM 2011 without having to first install CRM 4.0. We can do this because the CRM 4.0 system database (for the most part) is entirely self-contained within a single MSSQL Database. This includes most plugins, Javascript and any xml customizations you may have built into the system. This is especially useful for those who have to migrate to new hardware due to the new 64bit/sql2008 requirement of the CRM 2011 server. A system administrator can simply provision the new server, install an empty CRM 2011 and then bring in the CRM 4.0 database into the fresh install.

How to import your CRM 4.0 organization:
1) Place your CRM 4.0 Database in a SQL server accessible by the CRM 2011 Server
2) Backup your CRM 4.0 Database.
3) Open the CRM 2011 Deployment manager
4) Click “Import Organization”
5) Chose the SQL Server that your CRM 4.0 database is located on and select the specific CRM 4.0 organization database and follow the prompts.

It’s as easy as that!

January 27 2011 | 4.0 and CRM 2011 and crm musings and CRM Tips and tricks and NewsLetter | 2 Comments »

CRM Data Migration Manager: Words of the wise

The built in CRM Data Migration Manager that Microsoft provides is an extremely powerful tool that will allow you to import all types of information directly into CRM. While at first the tool seems very simple and friendly, there are some pitfalls that can cause even the most hardened CRM veteran to tear out their hair.

Help! How do I import extra addresses to an account or contact!
I have run into problems before where certain types of entities refuse to import no matter how hard I try and the information given in the error is extremely vague. I have also found that the documentation provided by Microsoft is either incomplete or occasionally incorrect. The particular issue of importing information into the CRM Address entity has plagued me and many others using the tool many times. The trick to getting them to import without having a generic import failure is to ensure that you include the “objecttypecode” field. This is a numeric field that tells CRM what the address is tied to. For example, whether it should be tied to Accounts (1) or Contacts (2). Even if you have set the parent of the address to the Account, it won’t be able to attach to an account unless you also specify the “objecttypecode” of 1. A list of entity type codes can be found here: http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/bb887791.aspx

Why can’t I import this (Phone Call, Appointment, Task, etc.) activity as closed!
The problem with closed activities or even closed entities (such as Account and Contact) is that you need to import not only a column that describes it as closed (statecode), but also a column that describes the reason it was closed (statusreasoncode). To resolve this you will need to look at the statuscode and statusreasoncode appropriate to the entity you are importing using the table here: http://rc.crm.dynamics.com/rc/regcont/en_us/OP/articles/statestatus.aspx

How do I assign records to my CRM users!
I’m not going to go into too much detail here but instead point you to a blog post that describes it better than I can here: http://blogs.msdn.com/b/emeadcrmsupport/archive/2010/06/04/import-data-into-microsoft-dynamics-crm-4-0-part3.aspx

October 15 2010 | 4.0 and crm musings and CRM Tips and tricks and NewsLetter | No Comments »

Update Rollup 13 for Microsoft CRM 4.0

Microsoft has release Update Rollup 13 for Microsoft CRM and we are recommending that our clients move to this release. This release has made CRM 4.0 even more stable than previous releases. Please remember that if you are using the CRM 4.0 retail disk to install the Outlook Client, you will need to update to rollup 7 prior to installing rollup 13.

Here is the link to download directly: http://www.microsoft.com/downloads/details.aspx?FamilyID=406e6247-873b-4db0-8a25-3f041b066844

To view the release notes: http://support.microsoft.com/kb/2267499

Issues that were not previously documented in a Knowledge Base article

Update Rollup 13 for Microsoft Dynamics CRM 4.0 resolves the following issues that were not previously documented in a Knowledge Base article:

• You receive an error message when you set a value in the Duration field of a record in the Arabic version of Microsoft Dynamics CRM 4.0.
• The Microsoft Dynamics CRM 4.0 client for Microsoft Office Outlook downloads notification events for all organizations instead of dowload notifications only for the configured organization. Therefore, you experience high CPU usage and high memory usage.
• When you try to reopen an Opportunity entity, you do not have the rights to complete the process unexpectedly. Additionally, the value in the ActualRevenue field and the value in the ActualCloseDate field are reset to a null value even though the opportunity is not reopened.
• If you enable the Duplicate Detection feature for entities that you try to import to Microsoft Dynamics CRM, you cannot use the Import Data feature to import the entities. This problem occurs if the entities contain lookup attributes.
• The deletion service cannot delete records successfully because of the inefficient queries in the CleanupInactiveWorkflowAssemblies stored procedure.
• When you run a duplicate detection job, the Potential duplicate records grid displays incorrect data.
• Consider the following scenario:
  • You receive an e-mail message from a router that uses a POP3 e-mail account.
  • The e-mail message contains an attachment that uses the UTF-8 encoding.

  In this scenario, the attachment shows invalid characters.

• When you import an organization to Microsoft Dynamics CRM 4.0, Deployment Manager crashes. This problem occurs on computers that run the 64-bit version of Windows Server 2008 or that run the 64-bit version of Windows Server 2008 R2.
• When you change the privileges on a security role, the date in the Last Modified On field is not updated.
• You cannot run the Configuration Wizard in the Microsoft Dynamics CRM client for Microsoft Office Outlook with Offline Access if the user account contains an apostrophe (‘).
• When the Microsoft Dynamics CRM E-mail Router processes e-mail messages from the Microsoft Exchange Server 2010 mailboxes, the current end date is incorrect.
• The Microsoft Dynamics CRM E-mail Router does not track the Out of Office (OOF) e-mail messages.
• Emails receive a duplicate tracking token when you create the emails from a workflow.
• Assume that you run the Beta version of Internet Explorer 9. When you try to create an account, you receive a script error.
• Assume that you run the Beta version of Internet Explorer 9. When you run the Print Preview function, you cannot select the All records on all pages option in the Print Listdialog box.

October 15 2010 | 4.0 and crm musings and CRM News and NewsLetter and Rollup and rollup crm dynamics outlook registry and Uncategorized | 2 Comments »

CRM: Update Rollup 12 for Microsoft Dynamics CRM 4.0 is Available

http://www.microsoft.com/downloads/details.aspx?FamilyID=a80147f8-130e-492d-93d3-e16e6b2e2fa1&displaylang=en

Issues that were not previously documented in a Knowledge Base article

Update Rollup 12 for Microsoft Dynamics CRM 4.0 resolves the following issues that were not previously documented in a Knowledge Base article:

• The Rule Deployment Wizard now supports Microsoft Exchange 2010.
• When you try to use Set Regarding feature in an email message to set a campaign to link to the email message, you receive the following error message: “An error has occurred”.
• Assume that you create an appointment in Microsoft Dynamics CRM. When you update the appointment in the Microsoft Dynamics CRM client for Outlook, a duplicate appointment is created unexpectedly in the Outlook calendar of the recipients of your appointment.
• When you edit entity attributes in Microsoft Dynamics CRM on a computer that is running Windows 7 or Windows Server 2008 together with Windows Internet Explorer 8, the CPU usage is high.
• When you change column properties in the report Wizard in Microsoft Dynamics CRM, you receive a “script exception” error message in the Report Wizard. This problem occurs after you install Update Rollup 8 that contains the fix 10413 for Microsoft Dynamics CRM 4.0.
• Email messages are not removed from the queue after the status of the email messages are programmatically set to Completed.
• When you import customizations, you receive an error message that indicates that a SQL exception has occurred. The error message resembles the following: “Exception: System.Data.SqlClient.SqlException: ‘FilteredCampaignResponse’ has fewer columns than were specified in the column list.”
• After you add the SDKSerializeSendEmailAPI registry entry from the Microsoft knowledge base (KB) article 981053, email messages that are distributed through campaigns cannot be sent. For more information about hotfix 981053, click the following article number to view the article in the Microsoft Knowledge Base:
• 981053 A workflow rule that contains a step to send an e-mail message causes a deadlock when many instances of the workflow are executed at the same time in Microsoft Dynamics CRM 4.0
• When you switch between subareas that were added by customizing a sitemap, Internet Explorer 8 or Internet Explorer 7 crashes.
• When you set the primary key of an entity by using a PreCreate plugin, the Duplicate Detection window returns a “Duplicate Found” error message if a duplicate record exists. The error message resembles the following:

Error: Exception of type 'System.Web.HttpUnhandledException' was thrown.
Error Message: An unhandled exception occurred during the execution of the current web request. Please review the stack trace for more information about the error and where it originated in the code.
Error Details: Exception of type 'System.Web.HttpUnhandledException' was thrown.


• After appointments are tracked in Microsoft Dynamics CRM, the appointments dissapear from the Outlook calendar of the user in the Microsoft Dynamics CRM client for Outlook.
• By default, the Record a closed campaign response check box is selected in Microsoft Dynamics CRM 4.0. After you apply update rollup 12,this check box will not be selected by default.
• The Quick Find feature is slow to perform searches because the query runs two times.
• When you view related data in Microsoft CRM Mobile, the data is not displayed if the data contains more than 30 characters.
• The Neglected Accounts report shows accounts that have recent activity.
• Duplicate records are not displayed when you edit records if the duplicate rule contains a lookup condition.
• Microsoft Dynamics CRM is now updated to be compatible with the update that is described in the following Microsoft Knowledge Base (KB) article: 981793 May 2010 cumulative time zone update for Windows operating systems
• Assume that you customize the length of the address fields on a lead entity to a value that is greater than the default length. When you save the record, you receive an error message that resembles the following:

Error: Exception has been thrown by the target of an invocation.
Error Message: Exception has been thrown by the target of an invocation.
Source File: Not available
Line Number: Not available
Request URL: URL
Stack Trace Info: [SqlException: String or binary data would be truncated.The statement has been terminated.


• After you send email messages to a queue in Microsoft Dynamics CRM by using the POP3 protocol together with a text format, the “Unicode (UTF-8)” encoding option, and the MIME format that uses the “None” encoding text, the email activity content is not readable in the queue in Microsoft Dynamics CRM.
• When you run a report that is created by using the Report Wizard, you receive the following error message: “Query execution failed for data set DSMain.”
• When you install the Microsoft Dynamics CRM client for Outlook together with Microsoft Office 2010 on a computer, and then you apply Update Rollup 11, you notice that the ISV buttons and menus do not appear on the Office Ribbon.
• Outlook crashes after the CRM synchronization fails when you use the Czech version of the Microsoft Dynamics CRM client for Outlook.

August 18 2010 | 4.0 and crm and crm musings and CRM News and NewsLetter and Rollup and rollup crm dynamics outlook registry | 1 Comment »

CRM: Getting past export to Excel pivot table errors

I’ve helped several clients in the past get beyond some pesky word merge issues that crop up on occasion. The most common problem we come across relating to word merge is the user forgetting to include the transactioncurrencyid field. If you aren’t familiar with what I am referring to, just remember that if you are merging money fields into a Word merge document, always include the transactioncurrencyid field (Currency).

Well today I have to expand that info to include dynamic pivot tables as well. If you include money fields in your dynamic pivot table from just the primary entity you are referencing, there won’t be any issues. However, if you include money fields from related entities within your dynamic pivot table, the pivot table will not load once it is exported into Excel. To get around this, you will need to include the transactioncurrencyid fields from the related entities as well as the transactioncurrencyid from the primary entity.

August 05 2010 | 4.0 and crm and crm musings | No Comments »

Microsoft CRM Receives Accolades from the Press

Microsoft CRM received some great press in the last couple of months about their raking against other CRM software (the sales folks are pretty excited)…  

Forrester research has proclaimed Microsoft Dynamics CRM “tops” for both Customer Service as well as Sales Force Automation (SFA).  Here is a link to the Microsoft CRM Team Blog with the specifics.

August 05 2010 | 4.0 and crm and crm musings | No Comments »

The Next Version Microsoft CRM is Almost @ Beta – CRM 2011

Microsoft Dynamics CRM 2011 – Pronounced “twenty-eleven”…

 Fresh from the recent Microsoft Worldwide Partner Conference, here’s Bryan Nielson’s presentation on what’s new in the next release of Dynamics CRM, interspersed with demos by Andrew Bybee.

 The first demo is about some of the new features for users and starts at the 8 minute mark. The second demo focuses on new features for customizers and developers, and starts at 29 minutes.

 Applications:
Lots of new goodness in the Outlook client:
 -          More “context”, For example, the Outlook preview pane will be “CRM-aware”, presenting things like related records for a tracked e-mail or appointment, without having to open the tracked record’s form.

-          Convert a tracked e-mail to an Opportunity, Case or Lead…from the Outlook ribbon, without having to open the form. This will be a nice time-saver.

-          When replying to an e-mail in Outlook, you can access a Dynamics CRM e-mail template directly from the Outlook ribbon, and you can do an in-place search of the CRM knowledge base and insert an article.

 And…you can even attach CRM sales literature to an e-mail directly from Outlook! Seeing as how you can’t even attach sales literature to an e-mail at all in 4.0, this is going to be a nice feature and for lots of organizations may justify using sales literature.

 Dashboards and Views:
Lots of improvements to KPIs and Dashboards. Perhaps most importantly, it looks like we’ll be able to centrally deploy dashboards to users. (Currently, the CRM Online implementation requires every user to create their own).  In the demo at the 15:18 mark, you can see several dashboards available as “system dashboards”, which indicates we will be able to create them the same we can now a system view, as a schema customization.  

It looks like improvements to views will fix a lot of their current shortcomings. Check out the video at about the 21-minute mark to see improved sorting and grouping of data within views. Andrew doesn’t actually show creating group subtotals, but if that doesn’t make it into the product I’ll scratch my eyes out.

 Field-level security. Yay! ( at 44 minutes)

 The video requires Silverlight here’s the link:  

http://digitalwpc.com/Videos/AllVideos/Permalink/f9625bd7-7009-4bed-ab7a-c3fbb548d6ac

August 04 2010 | 4.0 and crm and CRM 2011 and CRM Beta and crm musings | No Comments »