Posted on

CRM DEV TOOLS: A must have tool for Dynamics 365 developers/ Consultants

CRM Dev Tool is a great tool which reduces a lot of time of dynamics 365 professionals in their day to day activities. It is an add on to google chrome and easy to use. Just to list a few usages:

  • Form information (entity name, Id, entity type code, dirty fields in the form etc.)
  • Show hidden attributes in a form, show schema names of all fields without opening the form customisation, enable all fields in the form.
  • View Current User details (user Id, security roles etc.)
  • Execute Fetch XML queries and view the results.

More details available on http://blog.sonomapartners.com/2014/01/introducting-dynamics-crm-devtools.html

Image result for crm dev tools

Posted on

Set up Personal Settings

Because I receive many queries on Linkedin how to set up personal settings at D365 using User Settings Utility please find my answer in following post. I usually set up Personal Settings that way for CRM systems based UK. I hope it helps you – as a good example.  I published one post about it on Linkedin as well. Here is url: https://www.linkedin.com/feed/update/urn:li:activity:6277245355968995328

I would like to introduce/recommend User Settings Utility for all readers . It is a part of XrmToolBox. That way you can easily set up the personal settings for ALL CRM users in ONE GO e.g. time zone (UK), default currency(Pound),… Recently this tool saved me a lot of time. It is a little thing, but it really makes a difference, doesn’t it ? – a CRM’ game changer.

Usually I set up these 7 Personal Settings for All users (UK based CRM systems) like on following screenshot:

1,2,3. General Settings at CRM

4,5,6. Email Settings at CRM


Particularly setting number 5 on my screenshots is very interesting. It is important in tracking emails. Shortly I will write a post about tracking emails related to Case at D365 – a good example to understand tracking emails at CRM.

5. Select the e-mail messages to track in Microsoft Dynamics CRM – the following summarizes the various options. I usually choose All e-mail messages rather than E-mail messages in response to CRM e-mail.

  1. All e-mail messages – This will track all e-mail messages regardless no matter if it is a Dynamics CRM record or not
  2. E-mail messages in response to CRM e-mail  – This will track e-mails in response to current e-mails based on either the Tracking Token or Smart Matching configuration in System Settings. It looks to see if this e-mail has already been tracked in Dynamics CRM as well as the tracking token if one is being used.
  3. E-mail messages from CRM Leads, Contacts and Accounts – This will only track e-mails only if the sender is a lead, contact, or account.
  4. E-mail messages from CRM records that are e-mail enabled – This will track e-mails from all record types (all entities), including custom record types (custom entities) that contain an e-mail address field.

6. Automatically create record in D365

I usually select NO, because we don’t know for 100% sure it should be created automatically Contact or Lead, but I image it can depend of very specific requirements and you want to create Contact/Lead every time.

7. Error notification

I usually disable the errors notification to not frustrate the users. By the way I opened a very interesting discussion about it on Linked. Please look at this post.

 

Posted on

How to Disable the Script Error Notifications in Dynamics 365 ?

If you have any CRM presentations I would really recommend to disable the “Send Report to Microsoft” error pop-up. I saw users who were scared when they saw it. It is very easy to disable it.

You can disable the Script Error Notifications in Dynamics 365 using following steps:

  1. Navigate to Microsoft Dynamics CRM > Settings > Administration > Privacy Preferences
  2. On the Privacy Preferences Tab, select the option “ Specify the Web Application Error Notification preferences on behalf of users”
  3. Select the one of following options
  • “Never send error report to Microsoft”
  • “Automatically send an error report to Microsoft without asking the user for permission”

We have started very interesting discussion about it on Linkedin. Please look at this post. Here is url: https://www.linkedin.com/feed/update/urn:li:activity:6269476936607633408/

Other useful links:

https://community.dynamics.com/crm/b/xrminadynamicsbox/archive/2014/10/20/how-to-disable-the-send-report-to-microsoft-error-pop-up

https://community.dynamics.com/crm/b/crmtipsfromadeveloper/archive/2017/03/28/disable-the-script-error-notifications-in-ms-dynamics-crm-365

How to Disable the Script Error Notifications in Dynamics CRM 2015

Posted on

Unit testing is important but… where do I start?

If you have attended the increasingly popular CRM Saturday conference, you probably gained some valuable insights around the key aspects of delivering successful CRM implementations, and how to overcome the main challenges one may face during the implementation.

If not, I encourage you to visit the web site, it has great speakers, great content, and lots of networking opportunities… not to mention is one of the few Dynamics events out there where attendance is 100% free.

Two of the sessions were around test automation and how to implement a true DevOps strategy for Dynamics CRM, two key areas and best practices to increase the overall quality and healthiness of your CRM implementation, which, in turn, would give you the following benefits:

  •     Turning your customers into even more happy customers  (external)
  •     Making your colleagues a bit less stressed because of regression / production bugs will be reduced (internal)

If you are still not convinced about why your team should unit test your code, here’s another blog post with the slides of the test automation presentation.

Once your team realises how important unit testing is, the next immediate question probably is:

  • “Ok, I have an implementation which has been running for years , and I have a bunch of existing code, not tested. At the same time, I have a limited set of resources and trying to unit test everything would be mad… where do I start?”

Ideally, one should achieve a code coverage above 90%, but if you have limited resources, my advice would be: the 80/20 rule.

Try to find the 20% of your code which represents at least the 80% of the total number of executions or executed time, just because if there is a bug in there, then it is likely to affect more users than a piece of code which is executed from time to time only (this might be actually more complex as maybe something than just runs from time to time may have a bigger impact based on a million different variables… but I hope you get the idea).

The next question might be…. how to measure it?

Well, it turns out, from a plugin / codeactivity perspective, you could extract that information from the System Jobs entity rather easily.

Every time a plugin / workflow is executed, a new entry in that table is created, with the Created On, Completed On, fields etc, so you could actually measure how much time a single workflow / plugin execution took. If you have an On-Premise installation, then that is just a SQL query with some groupings, if On-Line, then a data extract plus some Excel manipulation magic should be enough too or… make use of the great Organisation Insights feature in AppSource:

Are you unit testing your code? If so, how did you start unit testing legacy code? Did you use a different approach? We would love to know more about your own experiences.

Please leave a comment below.

Posted on

Differences between MS CRM 2011 & MS CRM 4.0

We usually work on the newest version of Dynamics CRM e.g. Dynamics 365 now. However we still have some clients who use CRM 4.0 . The thing is, some companies didn’t decide to upgrade their CRM system and they still need our support and CRM strategy. We are even surprised how many clients are asking about our help and strategy in upgrading their CRM 4.0 to CRM 2011 or higher.

Recently we were very often asked to highlight the biggest differences / concerns between MS CRM 2011 & 4.0. First of all, there are many differences about syntax/methods between CRM 2011 and CRM 4.0. Please check some of the comparisons on the above image.

However there are more syntax differences between CRM 4 and CRM 2011 at least in:

  • data types
  • plugins
  • workflows

As we promised we try to keep everything simple. However if you need more technical details about it we would recommend you two following articles:

  1. A Summary Syntax Difference between CRM2011 and CRM4.0 made by Ben Hosking. Ben Hosking did a great job and summarised everything in one post.
  2. Differences between Dynamics CRM 4.0 and CRM 2011 by Ash
Posted on

Metadata Document Generator for Microsoft Dynamics CRM 2011

As everybody knows writing documentation about entities and attributes used in CRM project is very time consuming and bored.

However there is Metadata Document Generator which makes it easier for Dynamics CRM 2011 integrators to generate documentation about entities and attributes metadata.

You can download it using following link: http://metadatadocgenerator.codeplex.com/

PLEASE JUST BE AWARE THIS PROJECT IS DEPRECATED AND WON’T RECEIVE ANY UPDATE ! FOR THAT REASON PLEASE DOWNLOAD XRMTOOLBOX INSTEAD. IT CONTAINS THE METADATA DOCUMENT GENERATOR PLUGIN