How to activate contract in CRM

When a new contract is created in CRM, it is in the Draft state and cannot be utilized to assign a case against it.

For a contract to be available, it must be activated. A contract is automatically activated by CRM if the following conditions have been met.
1. There must be contract lines added to the contract.
2. The contract should be invoiced. You can invoice a contract from the actions menu as is shown below
3. Once the above two conditions have been taken care of, the contract status would automatically activate once, the system date matches the contract start date Hope this solves the mystery about activating a contract. Just like a contract is activated, the contract is de-activated automatically by CRM once the contract end date passes.

Working of Announcement

Dynamics CRM provides feature to create announcement that can be broadcast to the entire organization. it can be viewable by the entire organization if the users have been given the permission to read the Announcements.
How to create the announcements

1. In the Navigation Pane, click Settings, click Administration, and then click Announcements.
2. On the Actions toolbar, click New.
3. On the Announcement tab, enter information or observe any noted restrictions or requirements as needed:
• Title
Enter a title that clearly and unambiguously describes the nature and purpose of the announcement.
• Body
Enter the entire text of the announcement. You can cut and paste an announcement text from another application. However, any formatting will be lost.
• More Information URL
Enter a Web address path for a Web site with more details related to the announcement. A Web address that does not include "http://" is automatically expanded to a full Web address.
In the announcement, the Web address is an active external link.
• Expiration Date
Enter the expiration date for the announcement, or click the Select Date button to select the date.
When an announcement expires, its expiration date cannot be updated. Microsoft Dynamics CRM removes it from the Announcements area, and you must create a new announcement.
4. Click Save or Save and Close.
As shown in the below screenshot.

After creating the announcements user can see these announcements under the Workplace then Announcements as shown in the below screenshot.

Benefits:
It is the good functionality to exchange the information and User’s communication in the organization. Announcements work like message boards where users can post topics of interest that they wish to share with all the other users of CRM.

How to Resolve time-out issues in Dynamics CRM

There have been times when you received the service timed out error when performing operations that take a long time to complete.

Apart from the keys in the web.config found in the CRM web root folder

httpruntime executiontimeout="300" maxrequestlength="8192"

Where you can change the execution timeout to wait for a longer duration, another option that developers can use to take care of this issue in their code, is set the Timeout property of the CRM service when creating the CRM service object.

This can be done as follows

service.Timeout = 300 * 1000; // This property takes time in milliseconds

For more on timeout you can check the following KB article posted on this http://support.microsoft.com/kb/918609

How to allow a single resource to be scheduled for multiple activities at the same time

CRM has this great scheduling feature that lets you schedule resources for a job based on the availability as well as the skill set (service) being required to perform the job.

You can associate a user with a particular service through the Required Resources Tab. Once you have the user selected in the selection rule for a service, they become eligible for selection in the scheduling process.

The scheduling engine also checks the availability a resource may not be found by the scheduling engine if they are already assigned another job for the same time. This is to avoid scheduling conflicts and makes perfect sense.

Say you have a Project Manager that can overlook more than one task at a time and hence can be scheduled for more than one activity at a time, such resource scheduling would not be possible in Dynamics CRM, unless you specify the capacity of the resource. By specifying the capacity of a resource, you let the scheduling engine of CRM know that these resources can handle more than one job at a time and hence can be selected for as many activities at the same time as is their capacity.

To set the capacity of the a resource, you need to set the Working hours of a user. You need to setup a new Weekly Schedule. In the window that popups

Select the Set Work Hours Hyperlink to bring up the following window


Click on the Show Capacity button, to bring up the Capacity column


With this done, now the user will be made available for selection for 2 simultaneous activities.

After scheduling 2 simultaneous activities, calender will show both activities and will not conflict. See below,

How to send email through email template which contains image links in email body

Once we observed that creating a new email activity using an email template with some images in its body does not come through properly and only image links appear in the body.
During our research, we found another way to send an email with the above same email template in it. The steps to perform this are as follows:

· Instead of creating new email from Activity -> New -> Email, create the email from the grid of the entity’s record to whom the email is to be sent.

· Suppose, an email is to be sent to a particular contact, then go to contacts grid -> select that particular contact and then click on “Send Direct E-mail” button seen on the grid’s menu.

· This will ask the user to select an email template and here select the same template with images in it as was mentioned above.

· The email sent can be checked from that contact’s history and user can find that all the images come through perfectly.