Quick Campaign Bug

A client of mine found a problem with Quick Campaign's in his CRM environment. He was playing with the QC functionality and created a new QC, and then deleted the associated merge Letter/Email without sending it/distributing it. He then could not delete the QC record and got an error message saying that "This record is currently being used by Microsoft CRM and cannot be deleted."

I had to remove the records from the database itself. The QC entity does not have it's own table in the database, instead it is recognised within the system a Bulk Operation Activity. I had to remove it from the following tables:
- ActivityPartyBase,
- BulkOperationBase,
- ActivityPointerBase.

Microsoft CRM 4.0 (Titan)

I attended a Microsoft CRM 4.0 session at Microsoft NZ's offices here in Auckland early last week. The session was presented by Ed Martinez who is one of the Development Managers of the application.

Some of the new features in 4.0 are:
- multi organisation,
- multi currency,
- multi language,
- multi entity grid,
- improved workflow engine (WWF),
- reporting wizard,
- report scheduling wizard,
- web client mail merge,
- duplicate detection.

Unfortunately I am pressed for time so I can't go into further detail on each of the above..

"Send Direct Email" does not work

A client called me a few days ago and said that he couldn't 'Send Direct Emails'. After he'd select the template to send, it would simply do nothing, the History wouldn't show the send email nor would the recipient recieve any emails.

Naturally, the first place I looked was the Microsoft CRM Bulk Email service. I found that it was set to logon as the Network Service account. I changed this to Local System account (this is after I had tested to ensure that emailing was working from all other avenues in Microsoft CRM) and voila it started working.

Changing User Name in AD?

If you are changing the username of a CRM user in Active Directory, you'll notice that the username field on the User record in CRM will still show the old username. That's because the change in AD doesn't propogate to the CRM database.

You'll find that even though the username field is incorrect in CRM, the user will still be able to log in as normal- that's because authentication is handled by AD and not CRM. However, exported dynamic worksheets and pivot-tables will no longer work. They will also recieve errors when trying to view most of the standard CRM reports.

To fix the problem, simply update the DomainName field in the systemuser table in your OrganisationName_MSCRM database of the affected user. After the change, their problems should be fixed.

UPDATE systemuser SET DomainName = 'MYDOMAIN\andrew' WHERE DomainName = 'MYDOMAIN\andr3w'

Quick Create Form Layout

Unfortunately, the Quick Create form's aren't customisable in Microsoft CRM. Which is pretty annoying considering that the Business Required and Business Recommended fields are simply picked up and rendered as they read off the screen (left to right for every row). It's even more bizarre considering the tab ordering starts at the first row in the left-most column in every section and moves down the column, until reaching the end of the column before going to the second column!

If one were to have an Account record where the following fields (including the Account Name field) were Business Required:

Then the Quick Create form for the Account renders as follows:

You can change the order of the Business Required and Business Recommend fields so that they render in a logical way on the Quick Create form.

Which would render the Account Quick Create form as follows

Finally, we need to modify the tab-order on the fields otherwise users will have hard time entering new address data in. Add the following JavaScript into the OnLoad of the Account record:

crmForm.all.address1_line1.tabIndex = 1110;
crmForm.all.address1_line2.tabIndex = 1120;
crmForm.all.address1_line3.tabIndex = 1130;
crmForm.all.address1_city.tabIndex = 1140;
crmForm.all.address1_country.tabIndex = 1150;

I've simply taken the current tabIndex values being assigned to the 5 fields above and reassigned them to ensure that I don't distrupt anything else on the Account form.

Bug on Quick Create form

Not sure how many people have experienced this as yet, nor have I tried it on any of our customer's sites yet. We're running an English version with only Update Rollup 1 installed with no JavaScript on the form either.

When you have the Quick Create form open, and if the form has atleast 1 Business Required field and if you hit 'Enter' prior to filling the Business Required field, you recieve a warning message informing you that all required fields haven't been filled in and then the 'OK' field becomes disabled and remains disabled even after you've filled in all fields on the form...