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Ever wish you could use a workflow to update related/child records? For example, when I update the address on an account, update the address on all of the related contacts. You can, with the help of the very helpful CRM 2011 Distribute Workflow Activity assembly written by Alberto Gemin on Codeplex. While this says “CRM 2011” […]
Tip #168: Renumber the pipeline stage
When you use Business Process Flow, the stages are categorized using the stage category option set. The categorization allows you to have standard process stage categories across multiple processes. While your various process flows may have stages with different names, the stage category provides consistency between process flows and allows you to chart opportunities with […]
Tip #167: Where did my navigation menu go?
On one of your forms you notice that you no longer have the navigation bar/navigation menu. Typically this is the right-most drop down menu on the top of the form, but for a specific entity, you notice it is missing. Click the “Form Properties” button and go to the “Display” tab. On this tab there is […]
Tip #165: 1:1 with security twist
Usability of 1:1 relationships stretches far beyond UI candy. They can become a very useful tool that secures parts of the same logical record. For example, financial services company might use account entity to hold information about their customers but due to Chinese walls within the company, investment manager should not be able to access […]
Tip #164: Not all roles are created equal
It’s a reasonably well-known fact that recreating roles from scratch and adding all privileges to replicate one of the system roles is not the same as copying that system role. There are some hidden privileges that are not exposed via security dialog. This topic has been discussed and documented for CRM 4.0 and for CRM […]
Tip #163: Create a 1:1 relationship
Creating a 1:N or N:1 relationship between two entities is very straightforward, but what if you want to do a 1:1 relationship? For example, say you have a subprocess that needs to be owned by a different user than the account owner, or you have a child relationship where only one record should be associated […]
Tip #161: ADFS vs Citrix for external access
When deploying Microsoft Dynamics CRM on premises, ADFS is the recommended approach for providing external access to the application. However, alternative methods, like Citrix and application virtualization can also be used. These alternative methods can do a good job of providing access to the core CRM web application, but do not provide full support for […]
Tip #159: PowerShell fails in IFD deployment
Microsoft Dynamics CRM Windows PowerShell snap-in is an excellent automation tool but on some Internet Facing Deployments even an innocuous call to Get-CrmServer can fail with a fairly generic message “The caller was not authenticated by the service“. One of the possible reasons is that the tool always runs on CRM server but for IFD […]
Tip #158: If upgrading more than one version, recreate security roles
Let’s say you work for a company that uses CRM 4.0, you did not upgrade to 2011, and you now are moving to CRM 2013. If you use custom security roles (and most people do), I recommend recreating your custom security roles. Many new privileges were added in CRM 2011, and even more were added […]
Tip #156: Why doesn’t my real time workflow do anything?
So you create a real-time (synchronous) workflow, and when you test it out, it doesn’t do anything. Say you have a workflow that should fire when an opportunity status is changed to “Won,” but you close an opportunity as “won,” and nothing happens, and there are no errors. Most likely, you have the workflow definition […]