Process - Driven UI Explored

CRM in Cross-Browser has been one of the best improvements. CRM works much faster in Chrome and Fire Fox. So the forms that would take a few seconds to load prior to this update now is like click and its open :)
 

Some of it may have to do with the new Process-Driven UI made available for the Sales and Service Process.
 

What’s with the Process-Driven UI?

The idea is to make the UI more intuitive and process-driven rather than requiring users to create records manually through the sales process as well as reduce the number of clicks and popup forms required.

The top panel includes the milestones defined for the entire lead qualification process. This panel will let you know the progress made and stage at which the current lead is in the sales process.

The process steps are configurable. You can configure the process steps using the Edit Sales Process option in the … menu

The social section of the form has the activities, feeds and notes section incorporated in a single section that can be easily switched between without popups. Ability to quickly add Phone call and Task has been included just like we had the notes section in earlier version where we could just type in to add a new note.

 

Qualifying a lead is now just a click without any popups again. There is a button added separately for Qualify and Disqualify. Upon qualify it will auto-create Account and Contact depending on the information included in the Lead along with the Opportunity.

Using the Navigation panel you can navigate to the other associated entity grids included in the form. But note you can no longer create a new record for these associated entities from this view. It is just a listing of the associated records that you can click to view but cannot add a new record for that entity like it was in the traditional UI.

Is the Process Driven UI customizable?

Yes. The process-driven form is available under the specific entity. While the earlier forms were called Information, the process-driven form is named by the entity name.

You are open to edit and customize this form to include additional fields/controls. 

New addition is you can now include web resources in the process-driven UI as well as the classic UI and still have the forms open in Read-Optimized mode.

One observation made is, though you are allowed to add script libraries, but if you include one of those you lose the process driven top panel and it is replaced with the ribbon associated with classic form.
 

How to Enable Process Driven UI?

In existing organizations that are being upgraded, Process-Driven UI needs to be manually enabled by the user.
 

This section provides you with the feature to migrate the existing forms to the new UI & enable the new forms

Note: Once the new forms are enabled, it cannot be rolled back or disabled. However the new forms do have an option in the menu to “Switch to Classic forms”.

How to update to polaris ?

Follow the below steps

Step1

Go to the Administration Tab and click on "Product Updates"

Step2

Click on Update button to Update your system to Process-Driven UI. Remember once you Updated to Polaris the changes cannot be rollback.

Step3

Step4

Click on  " Yes "

Step5

Step6    

when you will click on " Migrate customization to the new forms " then the below page appears in new window

Step7

After reading the above page click on Enable the new forms

 

Simply click on YES and you are ready to explore Polaris ….!

 

Thanks!

Maplytics in times of UR12

Native Bing Maps Integration coming in with UR12

UR12 is scheduled for a phased roll out starting next week. With one of the offerings being Bing Maps Integration. This integration is made available as a setting that when activated by the users would show a link to open Bing Maps and automatically plot the address entered on the specified record.

What is Maplytics and why should you want to use it?

Maplytics continues to work towards being a “more than simple” address plotting on the map.  It is a geographical analytics tool. Some of the features supported include

·     Support for all entities that have address fields. You would be able to see any address included on any entity on the Map

·     Map is essentially dependent on Geo-coding data. Maplytics comes bundled with Bing Maps subscription that allows for use of Bing Maps Spatial service that will let you batch Geo-code bulk data. This does away with the need to worry about getting the data Geo-coded.

·      Save geographical search as static Personal Views in CRM

·      Ability to print the route and routing directions using multiple way-points.

·      Maplytics builds upon the inherent Dashboard feature of Dynamics CRM to provide Maplytics Dashboards to provide analytics based on CRM data including Sales

·     Color-coding CRM data plotted on the Map for better analysis and geographic representation of the data

·     Usual mapping solution would include Road View or Aerial View. You can now get a Street View of the address using Maplytics

Who is Maplytics for

Maplytics is still a must-have for business driven by geography and geographic data.

For more information check out the product details here. 

Add mapping for custom attribute of Order product to Invoice product

To map custom attributes of Opportunity Product to Quote Product, Quote product to Order Product and Order product to Invoice product CRM does not provide direct access to the “Mapping” page. To get the mapping page, you need to follow below steps.

Below are the steps to set the mapping of Order product and Invoice product:

1.  Replace the CRM server name in the below URL and browse the below URL in the Internet Explorer.

 Online CRM

https://testorg.crm5.dynamics.com/XRMServices/2011/OrganizationData.svc/EntityMapSet?$select=EntityMapId&$filter=SourceEntityName eq 'salesorderdetail' and TargetEntityName eq 'invoicedetail'

On-premise CRM

http://crmserver/testorg/XRMServices/2011/OrganizationData.svc/EntityMapSet?$select=EntityMapId&$filter=SourceEntityName eq 'salesorderdetail' and TargetEntityName eq 'invoicedetail

2.  Then you will get the below result. Copy the Entity map id highlighted in red.

 

When you try to browse above URL, you might get the below page instead of above result in XML format.
 

Then you need to do below setting in the Internet Explorer.
Go to Internet Explorer à Tool à Internet options àContent à Setting (Feed and Web slices). Now uncheck the “Automatic mark feed as read when reading a feed” and “Turn on feed reading view”. Click on Ok. Then restart the Internet explorer and browse the above URL again.

3. Replace the mapping id with the entity map id you get from above URL in the below URL and then browse it.

https://testorg.crm5.dynamics.com/Tools/SystemCustomization/Relationships/Mappings/mappingList.aspx?mappingId=742b9ad0-b029-e211-a840-1cc1de6daa3e

4. You will get the below window where you can add new mappings,

Hope this helps!

Display more than 2000 characters in SSRS report

We would like to share one of our experiences with SSRS reports. One of the reports we were building required displaying of notes that could hold more than 2000 characters.
 

 Including a text box worked fine for most of the records but we observed that the ones that had more than 2000 characters reported error. To show the entire content of the notes in SSRS reports you can try the following workaround:
 

Add a textbox with the following expression

 =IIF(Len(Fields!description.Value) >= 2000,Left(Fields!description.Value,2000) ,Left(Fields!description.Value,2000))

 
This will show the first 2000 characters.
 

For the next 2000 add a blank row and include a textbox with the following expression

 

=IIF(Len(Fields!description.Value) >= 2000, cstr(Fields!description.Value).Substring(2000), "")

 

If the content included is less than 2000 characters in the first place itself, then to hide the blank row add the following expression to the visible property

 

=IIF(Len(ReportItems!txtDescription.Value) >= 2000,false,true)

 

Note ReportItems!txtDescription refers to the same textbox that we are hiding

 

This way we were able to increase the display limit to 4000 characters to increase it further add another text by using the same logic as above.

 

Hope this helps!

 

Developer Toolkit: "No Organization has been specified" error.

 

 

You may come across the following error when you try to open a project that was created using Developer toolkit

 

To resolve this problem you need to delete *.SUO(VS Solution User Option) file from Visual Studio Project folder.

(These file records all of the options that you might associate with your solution so that each time you open it, it includes customizations that you have made)

This .SUO file is hidden in the project folder next to solution file which you can see in below screenshot.

 

 

Simply delete the above selected red rectangle file(.SUO) and run solution file.

 Now it will prompt for Connect CRM Explorer.



 

Note: SUO (solution user options) are user settings files. Completely disposable, you can delete it and the most common thing you will lose are breakpoints.

Import attachments using OOB Import Wizard in Dynamics CRM 2011

As we all know that the there is no separate entity for the attachments in Dynamics CRM 2011. We can add the attachments into the Note (annotation) entity.

But in order to import Notes and attachments in the CRM 2011, it is essential that you must have the separate files for them.

For importing Notes with the attachments by the import wizard you need to Arrange all of your files and attachments into a zip folder as shown into the below screenshot.

 

Where the “Notes.csv” contains the data of the Notes as shown into the below screenshot.

 

And “Attachments” folder above contains all the attachment documents. The files contained in the Attachments folder are as shown below.
 

After that please zip both the Attachments folder and Notes.csv into a single folder, and then import with the following mappings.

After completing the import it will display the data as follows under the corresponding regarding records.

Important points to note:

 

• Only map that column of the source file to the Document (documentbody) field of the Note record type which includes information about attachments. The mapped value in the source column to the document is the file name that is used to search a file in the Attachments folder in the .zip file.

• Each note record can have one attached file. You cannot import attachments to e-mail messages, sales literature items, or to any record type that does not support notes. The types of files that can be attached are determined in the Set blocked file extensions for attachments section of the System Settings dialog box.

• If you import file attachments, each attachment has two names: a physical name (Document in our case)and a logical name (File Name in our case). The logical names might not be unique. The physical names must be unique.

• During import, you must map the column with physical names to the "Document" field of the Note record type. You must map the column with logical names to the "FileName" field of the Note record type.

• The value in source column that is mapped to the Document is the file name that is used to search a file in the Attachments folder in the .zip file.

•  Each attachment must have a unique name to import. It is mandatory to include a column for the physical names in the source file. Also include a logical names column assigned to the file that is imported. You must map the column containing the logical file name to the File Name attribute in the Note (annotation) record type.

• We recommend that you map the column that contains information about the parent record to the Regarding field of the Note record type. This column creates the relationship between the note and the parent record to which the note is attached.

• In the .zip file, the folder containing attachments must be named Attachments.

 

 

Hope you find this information helpful.

 

Maplytics Release Announcement !!

The much loved Geo-analytical tool for Dynamics CRM 2011 which uses Bing Maps API now has an update available that will make Maplytics a must have tool for Dynamics CRM

We have added the following new features in Maplytics 5.4 version,

1.      Support for all entities defined in Dynamics CRM. Configurable entity maps
2.      Ability to map the address fields to be used for Geo-coding
3.      Color coding of pushpins based on configurable categorizations
4.      Heat Maps added
5.      Configurable tool-tips
6.      Dashboards. You can now include Maplytics component as a Dashboard web resource
7.      Dashboard   queries is configurable
8.      Overlay of nearby locations like airports, restaurants etc. along with the Dynamics CRM search results
9.      Ability to save the geographic search results as static views in Dynamics CRM for later use
10.      Ability to export search results to external file
11.      Ability to save the geographic search results as static views in Dynamics CRM for later use

For more details have a look at the White Paper

Maplytics supports all CRM Deployment models namely On-Premise, On-Line, Office 365 and Partner-Hosted.

It is supplied as a managed solution that is easy to install and un-install without affecting your existing customization.

We already have a 15 day fully functional trial available of our product. We are now also making available for a limited period only, a Community Light version of the product. This product is free to use for the next 6 months for up to 5 users after which you can order the product from us and upgrade to the unlimited full license of the product.

You can download the light version from http://www.inogic.com/Trial/DynaMapsCommunityVersion.zip. This is valid until 26^th December 2012.

The light version has the following limitations.

1.            Available for use with only account, contact and opportunity entities
2.            Mapping capabilities restricted to plotting of 50 addresses at a time on the map
3.            Only 5 dashboards can be configured
4.            Only 5 way-points can be defined for routing

After downloading contact us with your CRM install details to avail the 6 month free license.

Contact us for the 15 day full trial of the product.

Note: Bing Maps API is chargeable and you need to purchase Bing Maps subscription from Microsoft. We have entered a contract with Microsoft Bing Maps partner to make this license available to you for use with Maplytics at a reasonable price.

Here is a complete list of features included in Maplytics:

1.       Plot any entity record on the map
2.       Street View for any address
3.       Color coding of pushpins based on configurable categorizations
4.       Routing using multiple way-points
5.       Geo-spatial analysis of Opportunity and Sales data for summary analysis
6.       Uses Dynamics CRM views that can be easily created using the Advanced Find feature of Dynamics CRM. No learning curve required
7.       Print the Map and Driving directions
8.       Configurable Entity maps and Dashboards to support any Dynamics CRM entity
9.       Dashboards. You can now include Maplytics component as a Dashboard web resource
10.       Dashboard queries is configurable
11.       Overlay of nearby locations like airports, restaurants etc. along with the Dynamics CRM search results
12.       Ability to save the geographic search results as static views in Dynamics CRM for later use
13.       Ability to export search results to external file
14.       Ability to save the geographic search results as static views in Dynamics CRM for later use

Go ahead and request the trials and pour in your valuable feedback!

Report not running on more than 25 records

We created  a SSRS on-premise report using CRMFiltered parameter and the report was working fine except for the case when we ran this report on more than 25 records. In that case the report was crashing. When we used Diagnostic Tool then we found the below error.

The error was that it was concatenating the GUID’s instead of separating each other.

 

We found that the CRM FilteredAccount parameter only returns 25 records, not more than that. Hence, to fix this we used CRMAF_filteredAccount parameter and then the report was working fine.

 

Hope this trick helps!!!

 

Filter issue with Excelsheet exported from Report

As we all know, we can export the CRM report in various formats and one of them is “Excel sheet”. After exporting the report in the excel sheet, there are chances that you may not be able to see the filter on certain columns. You will also notice that two columns get merged in single column and have empty columns. Hence there are two issues, one with column filter and other with the merged columns, as you can see in the below :

 

The actual problem is with the report column and not with the excel sheet. The problem in report is the column width. If a column has width more than 1in then it adds a column extra in it.

Now you just need to set the column width to 1in which is default width of a column, which will solve these problems and there will be no extra column or filter issue.

Hope this help while designing the report which can be exported to the excel sheet.

Update Rollup 11 now available!

Update Rollup 11 for Dynamics CRM 2011 is now available for download from http://www.microsoft.com/en-us/download/details.aspx?id=34969

This update includes compatibility with Windows 8 and IE10 besides other fixes. A complete list of this can be found at http://support.microsoft.com/kb/2739504

In addition to this, a few days back new bits for UR10 were made available. These included fix for issues reported from the original version of UR10. This can be found at http://www.microsoft.com/en-in/download/details.aspx?id=30711

How to Dynamics CRM

New to Dynamics CRM or already using Dynamics CRM? But do you do CRM the way it should be? Learn to CRM from the experts. 

Roughly around 20 CRM MVP's (I was not one of them) have got together and come out with a collaborative offering called CRMFieldGuide.

To say the least.. Its simple and powerful. CRM is simple and the book will let your CRM be effective by letting you keep it simple.

The book touches upon all offerings/tools related to Dynamics CRM. It is not restricted to explaining the functional concepts of Sales/Marketing and Service. It goes way beyond and includes the entire process right from Installing and Configuring CRM to the Best Practices for customizations and Server Maintenance. It has a total of 25 chapters to touch upon the various topics some of which we generally need to search on the web to find information on like

• Sharepoint Integration

• Dynamics Connector

• Best practices for upgrade from CRM 4 to 2011

• Understand Solutions to make it work better for you

• Data Import

Who better than the experts to share with you their collective knowledge in one CRMFieldGuide.

Its a must have for anyone who needs to CRM the right way!

This book was released on October 1st 2012. Grab a copy right now from www.crmfieldguide.com

How to convert silverlight 4 application to silverlight 5

When we open Silverlight 4 application in Silverlight 5 we get following errors

1) error  : Unable to read the project file 'Silverlight4App.csproj'.

2) Silverlight4App.csproj(137,3): The imported project "C:\Program Files\MSBuild\Microsoft\Silverlight\v4.0\Microsoft.Silverlight.CSharp.targets" was not found. Confirm that the path in the declaration is correct, and that the file exists on disk.

This error occurs as the application was earlier built using Silverlight-4 Reference. So while opening this in Silverlight-5, the Visual studio looks for the Silverlight 5 reference files but it cannot find it.

To resolve this error you will have to follow following steps:

1) Open the project in Visual studio.

2) Go to solution explorer

3) Right click on the project that is not loaded and click on edit the CSPROJ file

4) And then change the Target Frame Work version to 5.0

5) Save and close this file and again right click on the project which is not loaded and click on Reload project.

6) Now the project will be reloaded successfully.

By following above steps your Silverlight 4 application will be converted to Silverlight 5 application.

If in case you again want to go back to Silverlight 4 then just repeat the above steps and set the Target Framework version to “v4.0”.

Hope this helps!!

Cross domain access from Silverlight

Silverlight control hosted at http://myserver/mypage.aspx can access only services on that same domain by default – for example http://myserver/service.svc, but not a service at http://otherserver/service.svc. This prevents a malicious Silverlight control hosted on the http://myserver domain from calling unauthorized operations on a service hosted on the http://otherserver domain.

To enable a Silverlight control to access a service in another domain, the service must explicitly opt-in to allow cross-domain access. By opting-in, a service states that the operations it exposes can safely be invoked by a Silverlight control, without potentially damaging consequences to the data that the service stores.

To allow cross domain access place clientaccesspolicy.xml and crossdomain.xml file at the root of the domain where the service is hosted. In the above example the file will be placed at the http://otherserver.

 

Create a clientaccesspolicy.xml file to allow the access from any other domain to service of the current domain.

 

<?xml version="1.0" encoding="utf-8"?>

<access-policy>

  <cross-domain-access>

    <policy>

      <allow-from http-request-headers="SOAPAction">

        <domain uri="*"/>

      </allow-from>

      <grant-to>

        <resource path="/" include-subpaths="true"/>

      </grant-to>

    </policy>

  </cross-domain-access>

</access-policy>

 

There are three types of wildcards allowed:

 

1.      <domain uri=”*”/>:This option is used to allow access to all domains of the same scheme. An HTTP service will allow all HTTP callers. An HTTPS service will allow all HTTPS callers.

 

2.      <domain uri=”http://*”/> or <domain uri=”https://*”/>:The first option is used to allow access to HTTP service from HTTP callers and HTTPS service from HTTP callers. The second option is used to allow access to HTTP service from HTTPS callers and HTTPS service from HTTPS callers.

 

3.       <domain uri=”http://*.myserver.com”/>(subdomain):This option uses a wildcard at the first segment of the path ("http://*.contoso.com", for example) that allows all subdomains of the domain specified. So for the example.http://web.myserver.com would be allowed. Note that a uri path where the wildcard does not occur as a prefix (http://web.*.com, for example) is disallowed.

 

To prevent malicious attacks, you should never provide one client access policy file for both HTTP and HTTPS services on your domain that enable calls from both HTTP and HTTPS clients.

 

To allow access to specific domain, you need specify the particular uri e.g. <domain uri=”http://otherserver.com”/>. So http://myserver/service.svc service will be accessible from only http://otherserver.com (other domain).

You can implicitly deny access for all domains not listed in a <domain> element tag in a Silverlight policy file.

Create a crossdomain.xml file that contains the following configuration. The file must be configured to allow access to the service from any other domain, or it is not recognized by Silverlight 4.

<?xml version="1.0"?>

<!DOCTYPE cross-domain-policy SYSTEM "http://www.macromedia.com/xml/dtds/cross-domain-policy.dtd">

<cross-domain-policy>

  <allow-http-request-headers-from domain="*" headers="SOAPAction,Content-Type"/>

</cross-domain-policy>

 

Phone Formating in SSRS report

Many a times there had been requirements to format the CRM phone number in the SSRS report in following format.

We tried to achieve this by creating 12 text boxes and in each textbox we applied the below logic in the expression.

= IIF(Fields!telephone1.Value.toString().Length>=1, GetChar(Fields!telephone1.Value.toString(),1), “”)

It works successfully when the length of phone number is equal to 10. But it fails when the length of phone number is less than 10 and you will get an error while running this report.

To resolve this issue we found a work around for this.

First you need to format the data using the SQL query and PAD the spaces into the field. As given below.

LEFT(ISNULL(telephone1, '') + '          ', 10)

The above statement will format the telephone1 attribute. If the user enters errorneuos or junk data into the telephone1 field like “99”, then the above statement will return the value “99        ”, i.e. 99 + additional 8 spaces . And in the textboxes expressions you just need to write the following expressions without checking the IIF condition.

= GetChar(Fields!telephone1.Value.toString(),1)

= GetChar(Fields!telephone1.Value.toString(),2)

= GetChar(Fields!telephone1.Value.toString(),3)

= GetChar(Fields!telephone1.Value.toString(),4)

Hope this helps!