Wednesday, December 21, 2011

Problems with converting email to case

I was recently working with a customer when I noticed an interesting bug in CRM 2011, in the Outlook Client. When trying to convert an email to either a lead, case or opportunity directly from the Outlook ribbon, it does not set the "regarding" lookup field of the email that was tracked. However, if the email is first tracked, then "viewed in CRM" and then from the CRM email form converted to lead, case or opportunity, the regarding field is set correctly.

To make this a bit more clear I will describe this with a few screenshot below:


We'll start off with opening a received email and pressing the Track button in CRM


This will then allow us to press the convert to Opportunity, Case or Lead, directly from Outlook. A very neat, and new function. It came with CRM 2011. In this example, I am selecting Case.
 This will show a smaller dialog allowing you to select case (not shown here) and also prompting you if you want to open the case or not. I selected to open the case.
After opening the case, I checked the closed activities to see if the attached email that was I just converted to a case, but as you can see below there were none. I was a bit perplexed as I was showing this new functionality to the customer as was expecting to see the email here.
I went back to the email from Outlook and opened it in CRM and found that it had not been correctly connected to the case using the lookup "Regarding" field.

So, I tried it the old way. I sent myself another email, pressed the track in CRM button, and then instead of converting it directly from Outlook, i pressed the "View in CRM" button to open it in CRM.

I then converted it to a case from the ribbon menu from the CRM Email from by pressing the "To Case" button.
I was shown a similar small dialog letting me select subject for the case and similar and then the case form was shown. It was identical to when created from Outlook, but when checking the closed activities there was one important difference;

And by opening the CRM email form from the list shows it clearly:

The regarding field has been set properly.

This is a very unfortunate bug in CRM and I do hope Microsoft solve it quickly as the feature that CRM 2011 adds in Outlook by being able to convert emails to cases, opportunities and leads directly from the email form is very good but as all of you know who work close to sales or customer service people, their time is very precious and every click counts and new features that do not deliver as expected are always annoying to the user. So, until the bug has been fixed, make sure the users open the CRM form to convert the emails.

Update: Jukka Niiranen left a very informative comment to this posting below informing us that Microsoft probably will fix this bug in UR6 planned to be released in Jan 2012.
Gustaf Westerlund
CEO, Chief Architect and co-Founder at CRM-konsulterna AB
www.crmkonsulterna.se

Wednesday, October 26, 2011

Built in imports in CRM

I have been working with the built in import functionality for imports a bit lately and I must say that it has been improved a quite a lot. It as now reached a level where it is quite usable but there are still problematic areas you have to look out for.

I found this blog posting (http://blogs.msdn.com/b/crm/archive/2010/03/15/importing-multiple-files-using-zip-import.aspx) which was quite interesting and enlighted me to the fact that you can import zip:ed files which is really good since there are some size limitation on file uploads to CRM. Since you usually get really good compression rates on csv and xml files this is really good news.

For those of you who don't know these limitations, the maximum upload file size to CRM is 8 MB. But if you zip the files the total size of files that can be contained within the zipfile can be up to 35 MB. Just to give you an example of the compression rates that can be achieved, we tried compressing a 70 MB xml based excel document and the zip-file we got was only 0.5 MB. That is a ratio of 1/140, less that 1% of the original size.

Zipping the import files is also good for uploading multiple files with at once, for instance when the files have dependencies or when there are attachments as this reduces the manual work a lot.

A bit of advice though. I would strongly advice against using the csv-format since it is very volatile and often brakes and gives rise to a lot of strange errors. It is also dependent on the local regional settings, for instance, in Sweden, it is not comma separated, but semi-colon separated, as this is the standard numeral separator. Very confusing.

On top of this you often have problems with codepages, if you work in other languages than english, and you have to re-save the file in UTF-8 to make it import properly. Today we also had some issues with Excel insisting on formating the Swedish personal number (Social Security Numbers) as 7.41231E+12 instead of the correct 7412311234. We had to manually force it with different kinds of formatting to save the number correctly.

It didn't end there, Excel also found it fitting to add a few empty columns to the end of our CSV-file making it impossible to import into CRM.

So, we have been working to iron these things out and we were getting there but somewhere along the line we decided to skip the CSV and to go all in for the excel as xml format instead. The files that are saved are a lot bigger but with the zip feature it is managable.

Despite the fact that the new xml-format support and the zip-support exist I think the next time I will be even more vigourous in my recommendation for an import tool such as QuickBix Integration Suite, Scribe, or Import Manager. The new import features are great but for smaller imports, not for migrations.

Gustaf Westerlund
CEO, Chief Architect and co-Founder at CRM-konsulterna AB
www.crmkonsulterna.se

Tuesday, August 02, 2011

Nice blog posting on new CRM 2011 certifications

Back from the summer vacation and discussed CRM 2011 certifications on www.crmforum.se where my friend Fredrik Neiderud hinted about a nice blog posting by Richard Knudson regarding the new CRM 2011 certifications and what new in them.

Please read about it here: http://www.dynamicscrmtrickbag.com/2011/07/11/dynamics-crm-2011-certifications/

Gustaf Westerlund
CEO, Chief Architect and co-Founder at CRM-konsulterna AB
www.crmkonsulterna.se

Wednesday, July 13, 2011

Some interesting questions on xRM functionality

I have received a few questions from one of the readers of this blog and I will answer them bellow:

I am currently working on a project which is planning to use CRM 2011 as a development platform for migrating an existing  vertical specific LOB application.  As the existing application has a large and complicated database, I am trying to better understand how CRM 2011 can use external data, hence the following questions:
-          Can CRM 2011 use external data assuming it is exposed as an OData feed?

Yes and no. CRM 2011 cannot using some simple mode of configuration connect to an OData feed but there are numerous customizations that can be done using techniques such as javascript, mash-ups, SilverLight, XSLT or ASP.NET that can be used to work with the Odata feed. When I work with my clients, I usually try to understand what they are trying to achieve to be able to recommend a technique that fits their requirements.

-          Will CRM allow creation of Metadata for external Odata?

Yes, as mentioned above the different customization points allow for different ways of communicating and working with external data and metadata such as OData. There are no built in methods that automatically will connect OData to CRM (as I know of anyway).

-          Can CRM security model be used for external Odata?

The CRM security model is rather complex as it incorporates several concepts at the same time;
o   Security roles
o   Organizational context with ownership of objects based on this and in conjunction with the roles.
o   Sharing privileges to individual users and/or teams

This results in the fact that it is rather complex to replicate the privileges for a certain object to a related object in another system. It can be done, but requires in-depth knowledge of the CRM security model and the API:s as all data related to this can be accessed from the API.

As an example of the complexity, let’s say that you have users A, B and C. User A belongs to division inner sales, user B to division outer sales and user C to division service. All have the same role that only allows access to the accounts within the same division. The account “Vodaphone” is owned by A and A creates a new team to which he shares the rights to view the account “Vodaphone”. He then adds B to this team while creating it. Some time later he adds C to this team as well and shares read-write access directly to B as well.

This is an example that despite the fact that they all have the same roles would involve a lot of setting access rights in the external system since the adding of team members to teams indirectly sets their rights. It is not impossible to implement but quite complex and does require a considerable amount of effort. For an experienced CRM developer, probably not less than 200 hours.

When discussing issues like this with my clients, I, as I usually do, try to understand their core needs and motives so that I can suggest a good-enough solution that will give them the best bang of the buck.

-          Does CRM allow the use of external Odata in native forms or custom Silverlight UI has to be developed?

No. Fields (previously called attributes) are directly connected to the database and there is no support for virtual attributes that will retrieve data from an external source.

Integrations to external systems, using any data source, for instance OData, can of course be created that will transfer data to CRM. Data could for instance be periodically sent or sent when there is an update if the external system allows that kind of triggering.

It is also possible to jack into the retrieve or retrieve multiple events that occur when CRM tries to retrieve data so that CRM could pull data from the external data source when data is retrieved. I would not recommend this though since these events occur a lot and it would probably affect performance badly. It is also supported to fetch data directly from the database views using SQL and that would bypass this logic making this data incorrect. This would also cause some problems with working with CRM offline.

The solution you are hinting at using Silverlight is of course also an option but would be similar to some mash-up integration that could also be created using ASP.NET or javascript.

It would sometimes also be an option to create specific reports in CRM that connect to external data sources and integrate the CRM data with the external data in this manner. This method is preferable when using data warehousing or when there are heavy performance issues, as these reports can be cached and scheduled.

Without knowing more about the specific requirements, I would hence recommend some kind of periodic or live integration that transfers the required data to CRM in read-only fields as this would be most in line with how CRM works and would enable all built in features that CRM has to work with this data. It would also be best from a performance perspective and could be scaled if needed.

-          Can external Odata be used in Workflow activities?

Yes, custom workflows activities can be created in all versions of Microsoft Dynamics CRM 2011 except CRM Online where the same logic can be created with some work-around effort using plugins instead. These custom workflow activities are created using the .NET framework typically in C# and can hence easily use any available datasource, like Odata.

On a related front, does CRM allow complicated (i.e. highly normalized and multi-level) data hierarchies to be implemented  natively?  If so, is there a performance penalty?  Would we be better off using this data as an external OData feed or bringing it internal to CRM?

No, CRM does not support some of the more complex OO concepts like interfaces and inheritance. As this is something many of us in the CRM community are looking for and it would also be a great addition to the xRM concept so I am certain it is on Microsoft’s list of features they are trying to implement. How far up, I cannot say.

This is usually not a major issue for me when I work with my clients and I have created very complex verticalizations, for instance for the Telco industry which implement a highly normalized and multi-level information model called SID, in CRM. What you need to do is make it a bit more flat and more concrete which you more or less have to do anyway if you want to make the system usable. It is of course important to be well aware of the simplifications you are making but I do not imagine that any usable system possibly could implement the entire SID information model without simplification and still make the system usable and with any reasonable budget. The abstract class “Party” for instance is just too abstract to be of any real use, but it is of course useful to know that contact, account, competitor, lead, system user etc. do share some information. The implementation would however have benefited from one or two inheritances or interfaces.

If the data should be kept in or outside the system is not easy to answer without deeper knowledge of what you are trying to implement. If you keep it mostly outside, you would have to define a very strict line at which information is kept inside or outside of CRM. Do not, however, underestimate the power of the xRM platform, it is often advantageous to implement large or all parts of the LOB application inside CRM/xRM since you get so much functionality for free when doing this.

In general I would need deeper domain knowledge to be able to give you more direct recommendations and I do not think that this is the forum for that kind of discussion as that requires a dialog and would probably best be done in workshops.

I do like the fact that you sent me these questions as I think they are very relevant when looking at the system from an xRM perspective and put the finger on some of the issues that Microsoft have to improve in the system. If there are other readers out there, if you have questions, please send them to me and I will try to answer them on this blog.

Gustaf Westerlund
CEO, Chief Architect and co-Founder at CRM-konsulterna AB
www.crmkonsulterna.se

Thursday, June 16, 2011

Today I was deploying a solution to a production environment and ran into a quite difficult problem; the custom report we had made could not be uploaded to CRM and the error description was rather cryptic. This error description was independent on if we tried to import the entire solution or just added the report directly. The error we received was the following:

Unhandled Exception: System.ServiceModel.FaultException`1[[Microsoft.Xrm.Sdk.OrganizationServiceFault, Microsoft.Xrm.Sdk, Version=5.0.0.0, Culture=neutral, PublicKeyToken=31bf3856ad364e35]]:

An error occurred while trying to add the report to Microsoft Dynamics CRM. Try adding the report again. If this problem persists, contact your system administrator.Detail:

http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema-instance" xmlns="http://schemas.microsoft.com/xrm/2011/Contracts">
  -2147188072
  http://schemas.datacontract.org/2004/07/System.Collections.Generic" />
  An error occurred while trying to add the report to Microsoft Dynamics CRM. Try adding the report again. If this problem persists, contact your system administrator.
  2011-06-16T07:43:12.1856313Z
 
 


I Binged/Googled the webb some and found that this article probably describes this error as it fits our environmen setup:

http://support.microsoft.com/kb/2491352

The error was due to the fact that reports written for SQL 2008 R2 are not compatible with SQL 2008. This has some very important effects as many customers might be running SQL 2008 for the production environments and many developers work with SQL 2008 R2 when developing. This difference might not be noticeable in general but this fact will cause these reports  to not be importable into the production environment.
So, a general suggestion is to have all environments, development, development test, acceptance test, training and production on exactly the same version of both Windows server and SQL-server to avoid any errors showing up in one of the environments but not the other, something that can be very problematic to solve due to the difficulty of finding the error since it by definition cannot be replicated on some of the environments.
Gustaf Westerlund
CEO, Chief Architect and co-Founder at CRM-konsulterna AB
www.crmkonsulterna.se

Wednesday, June 01, 2011

Problem with Custom Workflow Activities in CRM 2011

The workflow activities framework for CRM 2011 has been upgraded from CRM 4.0. The dependance properties have been removed and it now support the simplified datatypes used in CRM 2011 like DateTime.

I was developing a custom activity today and I had an output argument that was of the type EntityReference. However, when I tried to run it I got a weird error:

"The argument of type 'Microsoft.Xrm.Sdk.EntityReference' cannot be used. Make sure that it is declared on an activity."

The argument declaration looked like this:

[Output("The Output of special entity")]
[ReferenceTarget("new_specialentity")]
public OutArgument specOut { get; set; }

And I am trying to set it with the following code:

specOut = new OutArgument();
Entity outent = entities.Entities[0];
specOut.Set(executionContext, outent.ToEntityReference());

I had also tried creating the entity reference with a default contstructor and filling id and logicalname, with the constructor setting id and logicalname. I had even tried setting it using the entity directly but they all give the same error. I had not found anything useful on the internet or in the SDK.

After some rethinking I looked closer at the error message and thought that there might be something wrong with the declaration or definition of the OutArgument. And after some tries I found that the error was that I had created a new OutArgument which is wrong, it is precreated and this was the reason for the error. Hence I just removed the line:

specOut = new OutArgument();

and it work like it should have from the beginning.

It is always interesting to work with new technology!

Gustaf Westerlund
CEO, Chief Architect and co-Founder at CRM-konsulterna AB

www.crmkonsulterna.se

Thursday, May 12, 2011

Ignoring system checks during installation of CRM

Sometimes when installing, it can be necessary to allow the installation to take place despite the fact that some of the system checks that are conducted during the installation fail. There are some different places mentioning how to do this, it is actually rather simple, you just have to add the DWORD key IgnoreChecks with a value of "1" to the MSCRM key in the registry [HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Microsoft\MSCRM].


Gustaf Westerlund
CEO, Chief Architect and co-Founder at CRM-konsulterna AB

www.crmkonsulterna.se

Problems when connecting PluginRegistration Tool to CRM

I was going to deploy some plugins to a server today and when I tried to connect to the CRM with the PlugingRegistration.exe I found got the following error:

Unhandled Exception: System.ServiceModel.FaultException: The server was unable to process the request due to an internal error.

So I switched on the tracing in CRM and read the following from the trace log (edited):

System.IO.FileNotFoundException, mscorlib, Version=4.0.0.0, Culture=neutral, PublicKeyToken=b77a5c561934e089

Could not load file or assembly 'Microsoft.Xrm.Client, Version=5.0.2.0, Culture=neutral, PublicKeyToken=31bf3856ad364e35' or one of its dependencies. The system cannot find the file specified.

The error seems to originate from CRM not being able to find the Microsoft.Xrm.Client.dll file. After some fiddeling, I fixed it by copying the file from the SDK\bin directory to CRMWeb\bin directory. It is a bit strange that it is required that you do this, and it will probably be fixed in future rollups of CRM 2011.

By the way, I heard some rumors from the CRM Statement of Direction that CRM 6 will be released Q2 2012 and that it will have multibrowser support. The feature we have all been waiting for, and it is probably going to be more or less the same thing as the 2011 version but with multibrowser support. So Software Assurance will probably be a good idea this year for Microsoft Dynamics CRM.

Gustaf Westerlund
CEO, Chief Architect and co-Founder at CRM-konsulterna AB
www.crmkonsulterna.se

Tuesday, May 10, 2011

New design and name

Since I live by the principle that you should focus on what you are good at and leave the rest to others, I must admit that my SharePoint experience is degrading due to the fact that I havn't worked with it for several years. This can also be seen in the postings that I have done on the blog, where almost 100% of the posting during the last years have regarded Dynamics CRM.

The natural conclusion of this is that this blog should also focus, hence I have renamed it to Gustaf's Microsoft Dynamics CRM Blog omitting the previous SharePoint part.

I also revised the layout of the blog, to freshen things up a bit.

Gustaf Westerlund
CEO, Chief Architect and co-Founder at CRM-konsulterna AB

www.crmkonsulterna.se

Friday, May 06, 2011

Debugging sandboxed plugins

Microsoft Dynamics CRM 2011 includes a feature to allow sandboxing of plugins. This means that the program execution is fenced off from the rest of the server to avoid any buggs or exploit attempts in the plugins to affect the rest of the server. This is most useful in the CRM Online and partner hosted deployments but can also be used in normal on-premise solutions to fence off some risky code.

When developing plugins, I strongly recommend a local CRM installation, even if the deployment of the plugin is going to be on CRM Online. It is not possible to step-debug programs on CRM online for natural reasons, and the shotgun-debugging approach that is available from the CRM Plugin SDK is quite rough and does increase development time.

Normally when step-debugging plugins, you would attach to the w3wp process for the CRM app-pool.


However, you do have to remember that plugins that are registered to be run in the sandbox, actually are executed under a different process hence you cannot attach to the w3wp process when debugging but instead have to attach to the Sandbox process.


If you would like, it is also possible to register the plugin outside the sandbox first while developing and the re-register it in the sandbox later. Some errors might, however, only show when working with sandboxed plugins so it is also good to be able to debug these.

Do note that it I have installed the sandbox to use Network Servce as the executing account, this is not recommended for production deployments, since that will nullify some of the security features of the sandbox. Instead a dedicated minimum security account should be used to block the process from accessing anything outside the sandbox.

Gustaf Westerlund
CEO, Chief Architect and co-Founder at CRM-konsulterna AB

www.crmkonsulterna.se

Tuesday, April 05, 2011

Email router on Windows Server 2008 R2

A customer of mine is running CRM 4 in IFD mode on a Windows Server 2008 R2 and I thought it might be a good idea to activate the Email router and talk to them about sending mail using that instead of the internal email handler to reduce the need for them to be online with their Outlooks for things to work.

Well, as usually I set up the email router on the CRM-server but was baffled when I couldn't connect to it. I just got this weird error of 401 Unauthorized error. I tried everthing, changing the users, adding the user to the privusergroup, changing the ADWebApplicationRootDomain. After some googling I found the solution on this excellent blog.
http://crmwizard.blogspot.com/2010/02/server-2008-and-email-router-with-ifd.html

It turned out that the server was using IPv6 to access itself and the onpremise exceptions set up in the IFD settings were only based on IPv4 hence it tried to access it in the IFD mode. I just switched IPv6 off in the network adpater and everything worked as it should.

If you speak swedish, there are some interesting discussions on http://www.crmforum.se/, the only Swedish CRM-forum dedicated to Dynamics CRM. So head over there and digg in!

Gustaf Westerlund
CEO, Chief Architect and co-Founder at CRM-konsulterna AB

www.crmkonsulterna.se

Friday, March 11, 2011

CRM 2011 Online and datawarehousing

I attended a half day presentation by Microsoft yesterday on the subject of Dynamics CRM 2011 and integrations. It seems that many parterners are a bit hesistant to integrating Dynamics CRM 2011 Online and are promoting the on-premise versions when the issues of integration are important.

Microsoft did a good job in showing that they do have sufficient technology to handle integrations to Dynamics CRM 2011 Online including the Azure based technology ACS - Access Control System that together with Active Directory Federation Services 2.0 can be used to allow Dynamics CRM 2011 Online to use a local AD as authenticator. It is probably not as easy as setting up a normal on-premise solution but at least it can be done and there hopefully are some whitepapers or Youtube-clips on how it is done.

One of the issues that were discussed was the issue of integrations in reagards to Business Intelligence and data warehousing. This is usually done using SQL Integration Service (SSIS) with direct SQL communication. Their suggestion on how to address this issue was to use the new OData interface that exists in Dynamics CRM 2011. I am no SQL expert but I do believe that this being a standardized protocol, integrations will be possible. However, there will still be issues with performance as the amounts of data that need to be transfered are quite large and the OData protocol is still a strict pull-protocol which does not allow for trigger-based updates.

Another issue that I asked about was the licensing issue in regards to Dynamics CRM 2011 Online. Take the following example: A large company of about 40 000 employees has about 500 people activly working in with Dynamics CRM 2011 Online for SalesForceAutomation. A data warehouse is created and data is integrated from many different systems, ERP, production systems, quality control systems and CRM. CRM being the customer data master. SharePoint is used as the global Intranet platform and some of the data from the data warehouse is published on the SharePoint portal to all employees. For instance our currently 10 most important customers. So, the 39 500 employees are only viewing a minute part of the customer data, and it indirecty, via the data warehouse, originates from the CRM system. What licenses in CRM are required for these users?

In the case of an on-premise installation, the best licensing option for Dynamics CRM is the Application Platform Agreement (APA) that is sort of a "free-for-all pass" which is negotiated with Microsoft. However, in the Online environment there is no correlating licensing agreement to the APA. I explicitly asked Micrsoft how this was to be licensed and their answer is that 40 000 separate users licenses are required for Dynamics CRM 2011 Online, making it a rather impossible option, in other words forcing the company to either an on-premise solution, removing some of the data from the data warehouse/Intranet or moving to another CRM supplier. Neither of which is in line with showing off the power of Microsofts cloud services.

I hope this is just a temporary flaw since it does limit Microsofts business opportunities with larger companies and I would think it is probable that some similar agreement form that matches the on-premise APA will be introduced.

On the other hand, the External Connector license is not required at all for CRM Online (or SPLA) making it even more interesting for smaller CRM customers as customer/event/portal integrations are more and more common.

Gustaf Westerlund
CEO, Chief Architect and co-Founder at CRM-konsulterna AB

www.crmkonsulterna.se

Tuesday, March 08, 2011

Installing CRM 4.0 on Windows Server 2008 (R2)

Windows Server 2008 (R2) brings a lot of new and nice features. IIS 7 being one of them and fact that you need to install the features you want to use also makes it more slim and generally better.

However, it does add some extra complexity to installing Dynamics CRM since it requires some components. The installation check that Dynamics CRM runs during installation is not complete in this aspect either and it misses out on some critical components.

I am preparing a virtual machine for a customer of mine and it came with everything installed, but not verified. The Dyn CRM installation did not work. After some checking I found that the following role services were missng:

Static Content Handler
Windows Authentication

and I also added

Digest Authentication and
Static Content Compression

Also the SQL Reporting Services (SSRS) was configured to run with an Execution Account, which I found on some bloggs was erroneous. This is not strange since SSRS with Dynamics CRM is designed for sending the user credentials all the way to the SQL-server, which means that SSRS must impersonate the user. So I disabled this.

After fixing these issues, the best way forward is to reinstall Dyn CRM since trying to fix a faulty installation is a lot harder and takes a lot more time. If you have data that you need, try reinstalling and then redeploying the database.

I am also using VirtuaBox as virtualization and I strongly advise against using the snapshot functionality, it seems very unstable.

Gustaf Westerlund
CEO, Chief Architect and co-Founder at CRM-konsulterna AB

www.crmkonsulterna.se

Friday, March 04, 2011

Javascript in CRM 2011 - lots of new stuff

CRM 2011 brings lots of new technology, one of the areas being web resources, a very longed for area where general resources like webpages, javascript libraries and silverlight applications can be uploaded in a general area and then selected in certain areas.

Microsoft have also revised the javascript framework for CRM 2011 and it brings a lot of enhancments and and some old stuff has been depracated, but still works.

I found a very interesting grid at this blog: http://inogic.blogspot.com/2011/02/difference-between-crm-40-and-crm2011.html

I have referenced it directly for your pleasure bellow, click it to view it in full size:



Great thanks to the guys behind it at Inogic. A great help!

Gustaf Westerlund
CEO, Chief Architect and co-Founder at CRM-konsulterna AB

www.crmkonsulterna.se

Wednesday, March 02, 2011

www.crmforum.se

We have longed for a local Swedish forum dedicated to only Microsoft Dynamics CRM where both consultants, experts, trainers and users can create a community and discuss issues concerning Microsoft Dynamics CRM. Not as big as the official forum hosted by Microsoft, but smaller, in Swedish and maybe a bit more friendly! That is why we have created http://www.crmforum.se/, the Swedish forum for the Dynamics CRM community in Sweden and Scandinavia. So if you are working with Microsoft Dynamics CRM and like to communicate in Swedish, join us. There are no adds and no fees.

http://www.crmforum.se/

Gustaf Westerlund
CEO, Chief Architect and co-Founder at CRM-konsulterna AB

www.crmkonsulterna.se

Thursday, February 17, 2011

CRM 2011 is now fully released

Now it is finally here in full! The new, brilliant version of our favorite product, Microsoft Dynamics CRM 2011. If you havn't already tried it, there is no time to loose! Click the link bellow and start downloading:

http://www.microsoft.com/downloads/en/details.aspx?FamilyID=c3f82c6f-c123-4e80-b9b2-ee422a16b91d

Gustaf Westerlund
CEO, Chief Architect and co-Founder at CRM-konsulterna AB

www.crmkonsulterna.se

Thursday, February 10, 2011

My first apperance as guest blogger

I have been asked by the very well renowned blog at Software Advice, to write a guest post and you can now read it at their site: Software Advice. It is a post concerning the legal problems of cloud based systems and where its data is stored. It is most uncertain which laws apply to the data, and the most probable outcome is that it will be viewed as subject to the country where it is stored. Something that might not always be beneficial to companies and organizations with sensitive data.

Please read it and leave your comment on the subject, it would be very interesting to read your view on the subject. I personally think it is very interesting and that it is one of the aspects of cloud computing that I feel often is neglected by companies.

Gustaf Westerlund
CEO, Chief Architect and co-Founder at CRM-konsulterna AB

www.crmkonsulterna.se

Monday, January 17, 2011

CRM 2011 IFD

Internet Facing Deployment is one of the most important features of Dynamics CRM 4 and will be so for CRM 2011 aswell. It is the enabler for real multitennancy environments and for accessing Dynamics CRM from the Internet.

As I mentioned previously, in CRM 2011 there have been some major changes to this feature as it is now based on Claims based authentication. I tried setting this up for the Beta release but the AD Federation Services 2.0 requirements were a bit over my head.

Well, Microsoft acknowledged this and have now released a video on how to set this up and they mentioned it on the CRM Team blog aswell.

I havn't tried it yet, but videos are an excellent way of learning how to do these things since you can pause, rewind and do it one step at a time.

If you have any experience of setting up IFD for CRM 2011, please drop a comment.

Gustaf Westerlund
CEO, Chief Architect and co-Founder at CRM-konsulterna AB

www.crmkonsulterna.se