If you are a coder or a wanna be Dynamics CRM Coder today’s videos for Dynamics CRM 2013 Spring ’14 release are for you.
Its all code from here down.
It is day #2 in the topic specific new feature videos for Microsoft Dynamics CRM 2013 Spring ’14.
Today the videos are all about the Sandbox instances available online.
If you are still trying to figure out all the new features in the Spring ’14 release to Microsoft Dynamics CRM Online, join the crowd. It’s the old, drink from the fire hose challenge. So over the next 5 days I am going to post by topic links to new feature videos that the CRM product team put together. Most of them are real short – 5 minutes or so, but none of this 1 hour stuff.
Here is the challenge, each day this week open up the next tip in the series and while you are eating lunch at your desk or taking a breather between tasks, play a video.
Today’s videos are all on Mobile
As you may or may not know, Unified Service Desk (USD) has made its appearance alongside with CRM 2013 SP1 in May 2014. It makes use of User Interface Integration (UII) SDK capabilities that has been part of Dynamics CRM SDK download since December 2013. We thought it was important back then but now there are other reasons to be excited about it.
USD makes use of UII capabilities and is delivered within CRM overall framework but to make it work, the team had to add some features that’s been on our wishlist for a long time. One of these features is ability to hide navigation elements of the URL addressable forms, views, dialogs and reports.
The following are the query string parameters used with the main.aspx page to open entity forms or views:
…navbar
…Controls whether the navigation bar is displayed and whether application navigation is available using the areas and subareas defined in the sitemap.
- on — The navigation bar is displayed. This is the default behavior if the navbar parameter is not used.
- off — The navigation bar is not displayed. People can navigate using other user interface elements or the back and forward buttons.
- entity — On an entity form, only the navigation options for related entities are available. After navigating to a related entity, a back button is displayed in the navigation bar to allow returning to the original record.
cmdbar
…Controls whether the command bar is displayed.
- true — The command bar is displayed. This is the default.
- false — The command bar is hidden.
For example, try dropping the following into your browser and you should see Active Contacts view in a naked browser:
https://<your CRM URL>/main.aspx?etn=contact&pagetype=entitylist&viewid={00000000-0000-0000-00AA-000010001004}&viewtype=1039&navbar=off&cmdbar=false
What’s great about it is that now you can embed CRM views and forms into other web pages in iframes and drop them into portals or SharePoint. And if you have single sign-on sorted out, users won’t even know that it came from CRM.
True ninja knows Himitsu iri or the art of “Silent movement”. Ability to move quickly and without screeching mouse noise is crucial when it comes to quickly whipping a prototype or putting out fire in production. Minimizing mouse movements is important skill that keeps your boss, your customers and your wrist happy. These are just some of the shortcut techniques that true customizer needs to know when facing a very visual but often daunting form customization dialog.
| Alt-Space | Brings up Properties dialog of the selected tab, section or field in focus |
| Ctrl-[ | Switches focus to the ribbon’s tabs |
| Ctrl-] | Switches focus to the ribbon |
| Ctrl-Space | Scroll down |
| Shift-Space | Scroll up |
| Del | Removes element in focus (doh!) |
| Ctrl-Z | Undo (phew! keep pressing) |
| Ctrl-Y | Redo (doh!) |
| Ctrl-S | Save |
Though the following is actually a mouse shortcut, it deserves the mentioning because you perform it with your fingers not the wrist
| Double‑click | Changes editor focus to the area of double-click. For example, if you are editing form’s body, simply doube-click on the header to start adding/removing fields in the header. Works for body, header, footer and navigation area. |
Have your own favorite shortuct for form customization? Send it to jar@crmtipoftheday.com!
I recently had the opportunity to collaborate with some of my MVP friends on a new book called CRM 2013 Quickstart. This book is a follow up to the CRM Field Guide and is designed for someone who is familiar with earlier versions of Microsoft Dynamics CRM and wants to get familiar with the new features of CRM 2013. See the table of contents here.
You can buy the book at http://www.crm2013quickstart.com. Enter code JoelLindstromQuickStartBook for a discount at purchase.
The following is an excerpt from chapter 8 — upgrading to CRM 2013.
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If you use Microsoft Dynamics CRM 2011 On Premise, you choose when you upgrade, and the upgrade methodology that you will use. There are three different options that you can choose:
In-place Upgrade
In this option you will install CRM 2013 on an existing CRM 2011 server. During the installation, your CRM environment and database will be upgraded to Microsoft Dynamics CRM 2013.
Benefits of in-place upgrade
Risks of in place upgrade
Point to existing database upgrade.
In this option you will install CRM 2013 on a new CRM Application server, but you point it to the existing CRM SQL Server. A clean copy of the application is installed, and during the installation the MSCRM SQL database will be upgraded to CRM 2013.
Benefits of “point to existing database” upgrade
Risks of “point to existing database” upgrade
Import upgrade
With this option, CRM 2013 is installed on a fresh set of CRM and SQL servers. A clean (empty) CRM installation is performed, then a backup of the CRM 2011 database is restored to the new CRM 2013 SQL Server, and the organization is imported via the deployment manager MMC console snapin.
Benefits of Import upgrade:
Risks of import upgrade
The import/upgrade option is Microsoft’s recommended approach for upgrading to Microsoft Dynamics CRM 2013.
You implement Microsoft Dynamics CRM and create a custom entity called “Account Review” as a child of the account entity. This entity is part of a sales management account review process. You make the entity relationship parental so that deletions and re-assignments of account records will cascade to related Account Review records.
Five years later, when you upgrade to a new version of CRM, you notice that the Account Review records are not really being used–some use it, but it was a good idea that never really was adopted by sales managers. You don’t want to delete all of the data in the entity, but to simplify, you remove security role access to the entity and remove it from the sitemap so users won’t see it.
After the upgrade you notice that your ERP integration that updates accounts is failing. The reason is that the user that the integration process is assigning the account to doesn’t have permission to read the related Account Review entity. But the integration process doesn’t reference that entity. What’s happening?
The reason for the error is because the Account entity has a parental relationship with Account Review. When updating records that have associated Account Review records, when a record is reassigned, the assignment cascades to the related Account Review records. If the user to whom the Account is being reassigned does not have permission to read the custom entity (since we removed it from their security role), the update step will fail.
Lesson learned: When updating an existing customization and removing entity permissions from a security role, always verify if there are any parental or configuring cascading relationships with that entity, and if the users with that role will ever have a parent record assigned to them. if that is the case, change the relationship to configurable cascading and turn off cascading for assign.
I received an excellent question this morning:
“Dear Tip, why can’t I do a funnel or pie chart? These buttons are grayed out!”
The reason the buttons for funnel and pie are grayed out is because the chart definition includes multiple categories. Pie and funnel charts only support single groupings (series and category). When doing multi-series or multi-category charts, you should use a bar or line chart.
The goal functionality in Microsoft Dynamics CRM is very powerful, but in my opinion, is not used as often as it should be. One of the reasons for this is because goals do not recreate themselves–you must recreate them for each time period. This can be very cumbersome, especially if the time periods are short. If someone has to manually type in goals every week, chances are they aren’t going to do it.
The good news is there are ways to make goal re-creation more automated. The following are three approaches.
Bonus tip: Make sure that you periodically “close” completed goals. This freezes the goal value, and prevents performance impact from CRM having to keep recalculate completed goals.
Nuget is a great tool and a real timesaver but beware of automatic updates that can unexpectedly bring incompatible or broken builds of third-party libraries and that will, in turn, break your plugins or workflows.
All users logoff and CRM is up for a good scrub over the weekend. It’s about to get an upgrade to the latest version of code that has been in development and testing for a few weeks now.
Continue to the full scoop
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