Tip #1067: When two groups say “We want to hide our stuff but see everyone else’s”

Generally my policy is unless there is a REALLY good reason, all data in CRM should be shared. However, on rare occasion, there is a REALLY good reason. When you have one special group who want to hide their, say, Activities from everyone else, a well-placed Business Unit will do the job (either have one […]

Tip #928: When CRM monthly charts won’t render

Just another pie chart

In Dynamics 365/CRM on premises, if you create a chart and group by month and find that it doesn’t render, you may need some additional SQL permissions. Database owner must have external access assembly/unsafe assembly permission SQL database Trustworthy property must be set to “on.” With these settings in place, your monthly grouped charts should render […]

Tip #917: Too many business units

Microsoft org chart

Someone recently asked me what I thought of someone adding 1,000 + business units to Dynamics 365. I told them it was a bad idea. Here’s why: Business units are like large granite rocks–they are designed to be permanent and infrequently moved. While users can be moved between business units, it is not a trivial […]

Tip #897: Alternate key, duplicate data, and solutions: part 2

Alternate key

The alternate key saga did attract some attention and we received the definite say from Brandon Simons, who’s probably as close to the proverbial Dynamics 365 metal as it gets. tl;dr Alternate keys can be in an inactive state when the definition is created but the unique index is not. These pending keys can be […]

Tip #894: Alternate key, duplicate data, and solutions

Duplicate key

tl;dr If you have duplicate values present in a field, creating alternate key on that field will fail. However, when a solution that includes alternate key is imported into the deployment where duplicates are present, the import does not fail and completes with the warning indicating that alternate key was not created. Long story Not […]

Tip #823: Custom Action editor wipes out parameter list

Cleaning

Love the tips sent to a jar@crmtipoftheday.com – always something new! Today, Elliott Hulburd unmasks a truly unpleasant bug in custom action a.k.a workflow editor that could literally cost you hours of trying to figure out why suddenly all your calls to a custom action fail. When working with Custom Actions in CRM 2016 recently, […]