rosslotharius.com

The one stop shop for an Account. Quickly add new Activities with the Form Assistant

Recently we had a client ask for a 1 stop shop view of their Accounts with the ability to instantly add new Activities on the Account form.  The Form Assistant already provides this but not by default.  So to provide the functionality they needed, we just enabled the Form Assistant to always show and added the following javascript on the onload of the form.

//Only use on the edit form

if (crmForm.FormType == 2)

{

                //Set the dropdown to Follow Up

document.getElementById("followup_context").selected = true;

                //Call the onchange event of the dropdown

                RelatedInformationPane.LoadContextData();

}

That's it for part one!

Now the last thing we needed to do was also show all of the open Activities on the General page as well. That was as simple as adding an iframe and building a Url to point to the Activities;

//Only use on the edit form

if (crmForm.FormType == 2)

{

                //Set the dropdown to Follow Up

document.getElementById("followup_context").selected = true;

                //Call the onchange event of the dropdown

                RelatedInformationPane.LoadContextData();

                //Get the current Account's Id

                var objectId = crmForm.ObjectId;

                //Get the Security Token

                var securityId = crmFormSubmit.crmFormSubmitSecurity.value;

                //Load the iframe

                document.getElementById("IFRAME_Activities").src = "/ sfa/accts/areas.aspx?oId="+ objectId + "&oType=1&security="+ securityId +"&tabSet=areaActivities";

}

And here is the final output:

Special thanks to one of our developer's, Richard Alvarez, for coming up with the idea to display the Activities in the iframe view.

Update: Bug or By Design? CRM 4 Mail Merge Templates and Sharing

Back in January I made a post about an issue/bug I found with sharing and mail merge templates (here).  After a few months, I finally got a response from MS about the issue after responding to a great blog post the CRM team made about mail merging (here).  Here is Shashi's response.

Hi Ross Lotharius,

Thats good point. Sorry, looks like we missed it. But good point is, you can fix it easily by updating the mailmergetemplatepersonal.xml located in the server install directory server\ApplicationFiles. Go and remove the filter condition <condition attribute="owninguser" operator="eq-userid" />.

Friday, March 14, 2008 4:17 PM by Shashi Ranjan

I tested it out and it works great.  The shared templates now show in the Personal mail merge template lookup. 

Note: This is most likely unsupported.

White Paper: Suggested Hardware for Deployments of up to 500 Concurrent Users

Microsoft released a white paper on Friday to summarize performance results of 500 concurrent users of CRM 4 doing a variety of tasks.  Below is a summary of the hardware used and the results taken from the white paper.  You can download the white paper here. 

Hardware Description

Summary of Scalability Results

CRM 4.0.3 Sdk Now Available

Download it here

This version contains lots of great new information, including the 1^st phase of the Report Writers Guide and a vastly improved Plug-in registration tool.

Also included in this release:

• A full sample showing how to create a Custom Workflow Activity that sends an e-mail alert if the close date on an opportunity has changed by more than 10 days.
• New sample code showing how to export the site map and ISV configuration using the API.
• A description and pointer to the Utility code used in the samples.
• A new sample that demonstrates how to retrieve a list of messages and entities that support Plug-ins. The output of this sample is included, in both the CHM and in an Excel spreadsheet.
• Many additions to reference topics.

CRM 3 to CRM 4 Metadata Privileges

Michael Höhne posted a very interesting article about CRM 3 not checking permissions on metadata calls and now checking in CRM 4.

CRM 3.0 simply ignores the metadata privileges and all users can access the metadata, which I think is the correct approach, as there are no secrets in it. CRM 4.0, however, *does* evaluate the privileges and as access to the metadata by default is granted to the System Administrator and System Customizer roles only, all other users receive an error when trying to access the metadata.

http://www.stunnware.com/crm2/topic.aspx?id=MetadataPrivileges

How to Change the Port on an Installed CRM

Recently I had to change the port on a CRM 4 install from 5555 to 80 and it wasn’t as easy as I expected it to be.  Here’s the list of steps to follow to change over the port.

1. Update the port in IIS
2. Update the following Registry Keys
• ServerUrl
• LocalSdkPort
3. In the MSCRM_CONFIG database update the following entries in the DeploymentProperties table
• ColumnName (Update the Column NVarCharColumn)
• ADSdkRootDomain
• ADWebApplicationRootDomain
• IFDADSdkRootDomain (IFD Deployments only)
• IFDADWebApplicationRootDomain (IFD Deployments only)