Tip #103: Email Router Needs Updating after Moving to Office 365

Has your CRM Organization moved from the old CTP Platform and now is running in Office 365? Did emails that depend on the email router to be sent out appear to be stuck inside of CRM?

The reason is that the end points changed and you need to update your email router deployment configuration. I have found that it is necessary to delete the current deployment configuration and create a new one to solve the issue.

The key difference is that you need to use the correct url – change the dev to disco

Old

  • https://dev.crm.dynamics.com/<OrganizationName> where OrganizationName is a placeholder for the actual ID of your organization.

New

  • https://disco.crm.dynamics.com/<OrganizationName> where OrganizationName is a placeholder for the actual ID of your organization.

Have a great day

PS. don’t forget that the organization name is Case Sensitive

Tip #102: Replace the first things first woman

For today’s tip we are going to revisit our most popular tip to date — #68: Do you know this woman?

What if you don’t want to get rid of First Things First woman, but rather you would like to replace her with alternative versions? One thing we like to do is replace her with seasonally appropriate variations. It really makes your CRM environment seem more festive.

First thing first, obligatory note that this is totally unsupported, contains small parts, not suitable for children and only works for On Premise deployments.

  1. Locate the image files for the First Things First wizard. They are typically located in C:\Program Files\Microsoft Dynamics CRM\CRMWeb\_imgs\NavTour\NavTourContent.
  2. There are multiple images for the wizard, the main images are NavTourPage1Back.jpg opening the tour with NavTourPage7Back.jpg wrapping up the parade.
  3. Edit the image to create seasonally appropriate variation.
  4. Save in the same location with the same file name, being sure to back up the original first.

To get you started, we have included some variations for our favorite holidays.

Christmas

Christmas

Halloween

Halloween

September 19--International Talk Like A Pirate Day

September 19–International Talk Like A Pirate Day

Election Day

Election Day

The other cheerful variation is manipulation of the last image in series to create a reward scheme for persistent users who actually do go through the tour. Include cut-out sales coupons or simply include posters from your favorite shows and movies. Few samples to get you started:

JCPenney Coupon

JCPenney Coupon

Breaking Bad

Breaking Bad

Sponge Bob

Sponge Bob

The Regular Show

The Regular Show

Pulp Fiction

Pulp Fiction

Noitcif Plup (RTL Version)

Noitcif Plup (RTL Version)

And while you are at it, why wouldn’t you swap over the contents of en-US and ar-SA folders under C:\Program Files\Microsoft Dynamics CRM\CRMWeb\_imgs\NavTour\NavTourContent. Then curious English-speaking users who decide to take up the tour will see what does RTL world look like (and, yes, the tour is delivered as a series of animated GIFs):

RTL Dynamics CRM Tour

Dynamics CRM Tipper
The Custodians of The Tipping Jar, bringing you tips by a truckload

Tip #101: Can you transate this please?

So just how many languages does Microsoft Dynamics CRM speak?  Is it 10, 15 or maybe 25?  Dynamics CRM speaks a whopping 41 languages.  It’s a translating machine.

Chinese (Hong Kong), Chinese (PRC), Chinese (Taiwan), Danish, Dutch, English, French, German, Italian, Japanese, Korean, Portuguese (Brazil), Spanish (International), Basque, Bulgarian, Catalan, Croatian, Estonian, Galician, Hindi, Kazakh, Latvian, Lithuanian, Romanian, Serbian (Latin), Slovak, Slovenian, Thai, Ukrainian, Arabic, Czech, Finnish, Greek, Hebrew, Hungarian, Norwegian (Bokmal), Polish, Portuguese (Portugal), Russian, Swedish, Turkish

Tipped to the jar by

Tipp Jarr’s double dip

Great tip, as usual, Donna! One thing I’m always surprised at is that, when 41 language is mentioned, astonishing number of people believe that it’s the number of languages users can enter their data in. CRM has full Unicode support and, as such, will keep your data safe in any language you can master on your keyboard including Bork-bork, Pig Latin and Klingon.

CRM supports 41 language for user interface, i.e. navigation, messages, labels, etc. and that is configurable per user! These languages are installed by downloading and installing appropriate language pack on top of your base system. Base CRM system can also be installed in multiple languages – and administrators have 26 to choose from.

Tip #100: How to be a tipster

Wow. 100 tips!

Tipping truckWe’ve covered a lot of tips in the past five months. Each of us learned many useful things from the other tipsters.

One question we get asked from time to time is how do we come up with a steady stream of fresh tips? If you want to start your own blog or produce fresh content to tweet, how can you come up with ideas?

  1. Use the software yourself. If you are in a role where you implement Microsoft Dynamics CRM, if you don’t personally use the application every day, it is difficult to put yourself in the shoes of actual users.
  2. Be curious. It may kill some domesticated animals but won’t do you any harm. Experiment and click on those cogwheels and obscure buttons. You never know, that ticket number could be just behind the next one!
  3. Talk to other users or look at questions being posted in forums like Dynamics Community, Dynamics CRM Facebook group, Microsoft Dynamics CRM LinkedIn group. This will show you topics that real world users are interested in, and problems that they are having. Post solutions to these questions.
  4. Look for areas of the application that could be improved. Share configuration changes you make that improve the application.
  5. Raise suggestions on Microsoft Connect, read and vote for suggestions of others. The team does listen.

Here are some of our favorite tips from the first 100, and the story behind where these tips came from:

Our most popular tip of all times is neither technical nor business. With double-digit retweets, bookmarks on facebook and google+, it’s all about usability for end-users: Tip #68: Do you know this woman. Effectively it came from a very determined customer who said they are going to cancel their hosted Dynamics CRM subscription if we don’t stop this dialog from appearing. And more on this to come, stay tuned!

Tip #95: Track emails using forward inbox— I love these kind of tips where you find that something used primarily for one purpose can meet another need. This one came from a project where we had users using Mac where Outlook was not an option, but it was still a requirement to be able to track emails.

Tip #88: Duplicate activities — The best tips come from actual users. So when a user came to me and asked “why are my appointments duplicating since we upgraded to CRM 2013?” I watched how she was creating activities, and noticed that she was assigning them before saving the appointment. Once the question came up during the Convergence “Ask the MVP” session, I knew that this was an issue that other users were probably experiencing, and that it would make a good tip. If you work with support and identify an issue or a workaround, blog or tweet it (or submit it to the tip jar). That way you don’t forget about it, and you will help others who are having the issue. Note–if you are going to blog about bugs, be sure that you do it responsibly. Don’t just explain the issue, give users a workaround to deal with the issue.

Tip #41: Compare CRM Online and Salesforce pricing – that was a result of a foul mood and one hour to spare after a bitter loss to a competitor who literally took CEO to lunch and stole the deal right from under our noses.

Tip # 75: Make IOS remember your CRM password — Even though I am a loyal Windows Phone user, I get plenty of experience with IOS and Android by helping troubleshoot and support my friends and family’s smartphones. When my Father-in-law got upgraded to IOS 7 and his phone stopped remembering his password, I found this helpful video that explained the issue. A couple of months later, when a colleague started using CRM for Phones on his iPhone, this tip came back to me when her iPhone would not remember her CRM password.

Sometimes we get it right, sometimes we get it wrong, but are certainly having a blast.

Tipping hatAnd we always on a lookout for external contributions from you, our readers. You don’t have to be a regular tipster, just send your favorite to jar@crmtipoftheday.com and we’ll take care of the rest.

The crew

Tip #99: Remember when your certificates expire

I will occasionally get the frantic “CRM is down” call from clients, and for on premises users, one of the most common reasons is expiring SSL certificates. If you just deploy CRM without claims authentication, when your CRM SSL certificate expires, CRM will still work, but users with receive a certificate error. However, if you deploy claims/IFD, if the certificate expires, the application will not be accessible by users. It will just stop working with no warning.

Administrators, if you don’t have a system for tracking expiration of SSL certificate expiration dates, you should have one. CRM can do that–set yourself a task for a month prior to the certificate expiration.

Tip #98: CRM SDK is now online

In case you don’t spend your afternoons lazily browsing MSDN pages online and missed this news, CRM SDK is now available online. Is it such a big deal? Not really, because you can always download latest SDK but

  • Online version is always up-to-date
  • When in need of a reference whilst discussing development topics, we can now simply point
  • It’s got boogle juice and is searchable using a browser and engine of your choice
  • Tips like this one becomes unnecessary
  • You can switch between versions for a topic

Tip #97: CRM Administrators Don’t Take this Shortcut

Okay, I understand, we are all busy and have more to do than time to do it. As CRM Administrators we can often spend most of our day reacting to requests with little time to actually plan our response.

Here is the typical scenario – The marketing manager calls you and lets you know that a new advertisement just appeared in the national trade publication. New inquiries are coming in right now and the ‘How did you hear about us?’ option set list doesn’t include this new marketing source. You are already backed up on other issues and don’t have a minute to spare to go into CRM and update the field. So what is the most expedient thing to do so the marketing managers’ VP doesn’t call your VP who calls you? You guessed it – assign the System Customizer role to the Marketing Manager or worse yet assign the System Administrator role so the manager can do it. Now you can get back to what you were working on.

DON’T DO IT!

Training is required for the System Admin or Customizer Role – they have extensive rights which can create significant Human Induced Catastrophe!

Any user that gets these roles must go through proper training first.

CRM System Admin

Tip #96: Reset temporary internet files after update rollup

Last week, most CRM Online organizations were updated to version 6.0.2.43 (update rollup 2). A number of users have reported after their environments were updated that users received error messages like the following

error

Error log text

<ErrorDetails xmlns:d2p1="http://schemas.datacontract.org/2004/07/System.Collections.Generic" />
<Message>System.ServiceModel.Security.SecurityNegotiationException: Microsoft Dynamics CRM has experienced an error. Reference number for administrators or support: #D359011E</Message>
<Timestamp>2014-03-21T12:24:39.6093808Z</Timestamp>
<InnerFault i:nil="true" />
<TraceText> [PipelineRollup: PipelineRollup.CreateFirstPipelineQuote] [1f88333e-1441-e111-8ef3-1cc1dee89ac3: PipelineRollup.CreateFirstPipelineQuote: Create of opportunity]
</TraceText>
</OrganizationServiceFault>

In most cases, these script errors will go away after resetting the browser cache/temporary internet files. This is a best practice–whenever you make a configuration change or you apply an update and users see unexpected results, the first thing to do is reset the user’s temporary internet files. Even if the user uses CRM for Outlook, CRM forms and charts and dashboards and reports and other system components are rendered using Internet Explorer.

Tip #95: Track emails using Forward Mailbox

CRM MVP Jukka Niiranen recently posted a great post covering the difference between activity tracking and synchronization in Microsoft Dynamics CRM. This is a frequently misunderstood topic, and Jukka does a fantastic job of explaining how tracking from Outlook gets the email into CRM, and synchronization updates activities automatically once the activities are in CRM.

So if you have users who are using CRM without Outlook and you want to track sent emails, one option is to use the forward mailbox option of the email router or server synchronization.

Things you need to know about the CRM forward mailbox feature:

  • CRM monitors the forward mailbox and tracks emails to CRM users or queues.
  • The user or queue’s email address must appear in the To or CC line.
  • The user associated with the email forwarded to the forward mailbox must have “forward mailbox” selected for their incoming email tracking method on their CRM mailbox settings.
  • The email must be forwarded as an attachment to the forward mailbox to be tracked.
  • The email address cannot be in the BCC line.

The forward mailbox is frequently used to provide a way for emails sent to a queue to be automatically converted to a CRM email in the queue, but it also can be used for tracking emails sent from outside of the Outlook client.

  1. Set up the forward inbox. This mailbox can use whatever email address you want. For example sake we will call this crmforward@company.com. .
  2. Create another email account and associate with a CRM user. For example sake, we will call this crmtrack@company.com using Microsoft Exchange 2010 or 2013. In CRM, set the user’s incoming email
  3. Log in to the crmtrack@company.com email box. One of the best ways to do this is using Outlook web access. Create an exchange rule to forward emails where crmtrack@company.com is in the to: or cc: line to forward the email to crmforward@company.com. Make sure you choose the option to forward as attachment.

Now when users create an email on their iPad that they want to track in CRM, they can CC the email to crmtrack@company.com. The Exchange rule will forward the email to the crmforward mailbox, from where it will be automatically tracked in CRM. CRM will automatically resolve any email addresses in the header to any accounts, contacts, leads, users, or custom email enabled entities.

Downsides to this approach:

  • Users cannot set the regarding object when they CC the email to the crm tracking email address; however, the standard activity rollup will make the email appear in the activity history of the parent accounts or contacts of any people who are activity parties on the email.
  • Recipients of the email will see the crm tracking address in the header, so you will want to be sure to use an innocuous sounding address for your tracking email address.

Tip #94: Cancel workflow in style

If you decided to follow our previous tip and cancel workflows only when necessary, you may wonder what does the Set Properties button for this step do. As it turns out, stopping workflow has a single property called Status message:

Cancel workflow properties

The best use of this property comes with the new real-time workflows in CRM 2013. If the workflow is part of transaction initiated by a user e.g. when creating a record, and Status message property is not set then the user will see a generic error message:

Business Process Error
ISV code aborted the operation.

If Status message property is set then it will be displayed instead of “ISV code aborted the operation.”. The best part is that status message can be built at run-time to contain references to the attributes of the workflow records:

Sample message for canceled workflow