InoDashboard – Dynamics CRM Business Intelligence Dashboard released

Dynamics CRM requires a comprehensive tool for monitoring the KPI in a visual/dashboard format. Inogic labs has come up with InoDashboard, a Business Intelligence Dashboard designed for Microsoft Dynamics CRM to fill in this gap. This tool will allow the CRM users at each level to design a dashboard specific to them and include the reports and monitor areas specific to their interest.

It comes along with a pre-packaged bundle of about 40+ reports that provide you with the most commonly requested reports for monitoring the KPI. Whats more is that with the wizard kind of UI it is very easy to develop your own custom reports/charts with basic knowledge of writing SQL queries. The Dashboard can be seen as below screen shot.

Its feature set includes

• Easy to create reports to analyze your CRM data.
• No learning curve required. Use your SQL query writing skills to design reports.
  
• Ability to add CRM reports, views, custom website URL
• User personalization available.
• Secured reports. Pre-defined reports use Filtered Views to force inbuilt CRM security.
• Ability to drill down to CRM entity forms.

Technical details

• It is developed using .NET Chart control for designing the various charts
• It makes extensive use of Web parts to support personalization
• It supports the following types of charts shown in the screen shot.

It supports Dynamics CRM 4.0 On-premise with IFD

We have come up with this after a lot of research in this area some of our r n d was put up in our earlier blogs http://inogic.blogspot.com/search/label/Dashboards where we studied the various ways in which a dashboard could be presented in Dynamics CRM.

Increasing the length of address1_line1 attribute does not work - FIX

We once happened to increase the length of the adress1_line1 attribute of account to 200. We had done this before with other attributes and it had worked just fine.

So we were surprised when even after publishing the account entity after make the above change, we still received an error.

To Fix this Error we had to instead increase the length of line1 attribute of the “customeraddress” entity and publish this entity.

Once the above change was published we did not receive any more errors related to street1 attribute on the account entity.

Change left navigation lable ,display order on custom entity

This blog will help you to customize your left navigation pane settings found on entity record. Like shown in below screen shot. You can change the order as well as label shown over here but note that this functionality will only apply on custom entity and not on system entity.

This is CRM functionality where you can change the display label and order of the list on the left navigation. Following below steps for this:

- Go to Settings --> Customization --> Customize entities and open the entity of which the related entities label you need to change. (see below the screen) here we have displayed changes in the account-opportunity bid.


- Go to 1:n relationships and open the related entity and find “Navigation pane item for primary entity” section on page (see below the screen).


- In this section you have see four fields as follows:
o Display Option: In this fields contain three option select “Use Custom label”.
o Custom label: Enter your text
o Display area : Select the display area such as details, Service, sales , marketing .
o Display Order: Enter order number which is set the order of the displayed list.
- After that publish it and open the record and check the changes.

Debugging Script with CRM events

Writing JavaScript in CRM is a tedious job and finding the error in your script is even more difficult. The best way to find the error cause is to debug it. The blog will give you the steps to debug the scripts added on form events in CRM.

Steps to enable debugging script:

- Go to Internet Explorer settings.
- Click on Tools and select Internet Options. You will we see following screen.


- On the Advanced Tab, under Browsing find the Disable script debugging (Internet Explorer) option and uncheck it.
- In the script use “Debugger”, just before the statement where you want to start your debugging session.
- For example: you can write script under the CRM events such as onLoad, Onsave etc.
debugger;
//after start to write script
- After add script ,save it and publish. Refresh the page, you will see following screen.

- Select new instance of visual studio 2008/2005 and click on yes. After this open script code on visual studio for debugging mode where you can debug own script. (See below the screen)

How to change the properties of the Primary Attribute of an Entity

The blog will help you change the properties of primary attribute of an entity. Modifying properties of primary attribute is disabled when you try to do it from “Primary Attribute” tab. However you can change the properties if you opened the attribute from Attributes left navigation instead.

Follow the steps below to change the requirement level for account entities primary attribute “name”. (Note the Ownership of entity does not matter here i.e. as “User” or “Organization”)

1. Go to Attributes and select “name” i.e. primary attribute of entity. As shown in below screen shot.

2. Open primary attribute i.e. name and change its Requirement Level to “No Constraint” then Save and Close.

3. The changes will also get reflected in Primary Attribute tab. Publish account and test the changes.