When you’re trying to connect Power BI to Dynamics CRM by entering Dynamics CRM OData Service URL, you may receive an obscure message “Parameter validation failed. Please make sure all parameters are valid.”
What Power BI is trying to tell you is that the license assigned to you is the Power BI freebie and not the Power BI Pro goodness.
Be a pro, go back to O365 Admin Portal and assign the correct license. Don’t have it? Free trial is available and it’s only $9.99 per month for many hours of entertainment trying to build a Klein funnel bottle out of your sales data.
As always the annual spring update for CRM online is introducing many new features and improvements. One of those is Mobile Offline Synchronization. In this video we look at requirements for the feature, and walk through setup and configuration (including defining offline profiles, and controlling what data is available).
There might be a part III, after all, – stay tuned. In the meantime give us your feedback, all of it: good, bad, and ugly, I’m sure we can take it. Suggest new topics either in comments or by sending your ideas to jar@crmtipoftheday.com.
And don’t forget to subscribe to http://youtube.com/crmtipoftheday
Spießrutenlaufen is everywhere. Even fundamental actions like creating a new entity in CRM are subject to irreversible hasty choices that we all come to regret later.
Introducing CRM Tipsters Illustrated Guide to Entity Creation in Dynamics CRM.
Download a full size image or a hi-res PDF version.
If you want to take advantage of an obscure Lookup Address feature when dealing with quotes or orders, you will find that the address lookup on that dialog looks very strange: first line is blank followed by the zip/postal code and city. In addition, how do you add multiple addresses to a customer record in a first place?
Tip 23 has become a dangerous one.
This is because associated addresses view has been “enhanced” to support customer entity and contains non-editable elements (references to objecttypecode, if you must). Edit it at your peril.
Unless you inherited a CRM system or users insist on built-in multiple addresses functionality, I’d say it belongs to “It was a good idea…” bucket and recommend staying clear of it. Too unpredictable, hardly documented and loaded with side-effects.
Gayan “Performance Wizard” Perera hates waiting. Be smart, be like Gayan.
The downside with my one is that it’s a wrapper around the sync method – some people do frown upon this since it is not true async. (and we frown upon those people – t.j.)
Bonus – OptimizedConnection class based on the https://pfexrmcore.codeplex.com/ to get true parallelism with the CRM SDK.
When a user opens Dynamics CRM Online instance manager (https://port.crm[0-9].dynamics.com/G/Instances/InstancePicker.aspx), they see the instance selector if there is more than one instance available but nothing else. The only option is to select the instance and click Open button.
What if you want user to be able to manage CRM Online features but without being a Global Administrator? There is no CRM Online administrator role in O365 portal?!
The answer is Service administrator role.
But wait, there is more: in addition to that O365 administrator role, user needs to be assigned System Administrator role in CRM to have access to the management features per instance basis. That way, user can add solutions to test instance of CRM but without ability to touch the production instance, for example.
The Annual Spring Update for CRM Online is upon as, and trial Instances are already available with the new features. In this video we highlight a couple of key items, and dive into the new SLA enhancements for other entities.
As you have guessed, there will be at least part II – stay tuned. In the meantime give us your feedback, all of it: good, bad, and ugly, I’m sure we can take it. Suggest new topics either in comments or by sending your ideas to jar@crmtipoftheday.com.
And don’t forget to subscribe to http://youtube.com/crmtipoftheday.
With the exception of the Queen who, according to Oscar Wilde, “is not a subject”, subject entity has always been a subject for complaints. Simple search on Dynamics CRM Feedback site shows a long wishlist where people wanted to filter the subject tree, being able to type in subject lookup, have multi-lingual support, use it in dialogs, etc.
But inability to customize the subject entity is arguably the biggest drawback of them all. In short, with the exception of a very few narrow scenarios concoted in early naughties,
Subject entity is next to useless and delivers nothing but a substandard user experience and pain for administrators and customizers
Enter sparkling Category entity, available in CRM Online 2016 Update 1 and CRM 2016 Service Pack 1 (on-premises). Don’t get the location of the entity under Settings > Service Management > KB Management to fool you. The only thing KB articles get that you can’t is native N:N relationship. Here is the short list of features of the entity designed to, uhm, categorize CRM records.
I’m sure there is more to it and we’ll be seeing steady migration from the subjects. But is it too little too late and everybody has already implemented their own taxonomy?
Nothing fatal. You can relax.
When organization database is restored and then imported into CRM Server, one of the wizard steps is the mapping dialog. The only requirement is to map your user account into at least one enabled user with system administrator privileges.
That makes sense – we don’t want to end up with an organization nobody can logon into. But what happens if you don’t map the rest?
In short, as we mentioned, nothing. The user records stay as they were, other records in the system are still owned by the same users as before. You can even assign records to these unmapped user accounts. The only side effect is that these user accounts are not mapped to the Active Directory accounts so nobody can login as these users. You can open any of these records, enter a new domain name and CRM will map that user to the specified AD login.
Why is it convenient?
of the