June 2006 - Posts
Tonight, thanks to Mike Christl, Microsoft Partner Managed Newsgroups, I (we!) resolved my 2 week problem with the CRM Outlook Client!!! I had narrowed down the problem to involving the Outlook <> CRM synchronization process (not the going Offline synchronization process). Frankly, once I had narrowed it down, and had disabled automatic synchornization, I was able to function pretty well. But tonight, Mike gave me the path to the answer.
Mike had analyzed a trace I'd sent him and found a bad character, or characters, in a data record. Seems a record that I had recently entered had '
' between characters in a field. The Contact record (a Microsoft employee, naturally) was entered via CardScan. The Job Title contained two parts which appeared to be run together (ie TitleDepartment). But instead they were Title૞partment. Mike gave me info on the data in that Job Title field so I did an Advanced Find on the Contact\Job Title field for the Title and Department data Mike isolated. I found the one record and cleared out the Job Title field. Apparently the character string was causing some problems.
After clearing out the Job Title field, I tried synchronizing once again. (Go to CRM on the Outlook menu, and select 'Synchronize Outlook with CRM'.) It took awhile and generated a number of errors which I attribute to having run CRM and Outlook for 2 weeks, clearing/closing Activities that couldn't be synchronized. But it DID synchronize! Now my Outlook and CRM are happy with each other once again and I can use Outlook with it's link to CRM as it should be. YEA!!!
Today I had an appointment with a prospective client that had attended the Microsoft Connections event where I was the featured partner co-presenter.They had won the 1 hour of consulting I had as a door prize and were cashing in on it. I had them entered in my system as a Lead, naturally. I had used a CRM 'Campaign' for the event and tied it to the Lead. After our great session, where-in I solved all their networking woes and explained to them how to harness technology to cataputl their business, I ended up with an extra 1/2 hour of billable time that they kindy paid me for.
Tonight I converted those Leads (there were two of them) into an Account (1) and Contacts (2). I then created an Invoice in CRM. I was disappointed to see that the Campaign was not an available option in the Invoice. Nor was there any tie in to the Account or Contacts. I guess what I should have done was converted the Lead(s) to an Opportunity instead (along with the associated Account & Contacts). THAT should have carried the Campaign forward. I had hoped to have that 1/2 hour show up as a revenue/sale/whatever in my stats/report for that campaign.
Today I may have made a little progress in resolving my problem with the CRM Outlook Client. I had noted that it seemed to work fine on my Desktop Client in the Office while the problem existed on my Laptop Client. I had once tried installing the Desktop Client on my laptop but that didn't have any effect. Today I decided I really did need to get some real work done so I fired up my desktop and was busilly doing my CRM thing in Outlook. All was well. Then I decided to go into the Outlook CRM menu, select Options/Synchronization and selected to use the desktop PC to synchronize CRM with Outlook every 30 minutes. Only one PC can be configured to do this for a given user. Therefore, configuring my desktop to synchronize removed that task from my laptop. Everything continued to work fine but I was called away for a while. When I came back about an hour later, I found my once working desktop with Outlook apparently locked up! I noticed with Task Manager that Outlook was using about 137 MB of RAM and about 33% of the CPU. I finally had to kill it with Task Manager.
Then I fired up my laptop. It has worked fine ever since. I've created stuff in CRM via the Outlook Client. I have tracked Outlook stuff in CRM and linked Outlook stuff with CRM Cases and such. But, I haven't synchronized to Outlook. Looks like the problem is related somehow to CRM synchronization with Outlook. I'll continue to post any progress.
Still trying, I still stricking out! Tonight I decided to try a number of things. Steve Noe suggested trimming the number of messages in Outlook. Mine was pretty big so I gave that a try. Deleted several thousand messages, mainly in my Sent Items folder. Then I uninstalled Outlook, again, and cleaned up the Outlook folder, hidden deep within the Documents and Settings folders. Uninstalled Outlook from the Office 2003 as well as straight Outlook from SBS. Went into the Registry and whacked and hacked there as well, removing the MSCRM entries.
Then I reinstalled Outlook 2003 from the ClientApps share on my SBS server. When I tried to run the install, it recommended applying SP2 to Outlook 2003. So I went out to Microsoft Updates and ran that update process.
Needless to say, I still am not successful. I fired off Outlook after all the reinstalling and rebooting and right now, Outlook is using over 216 MB of RAM!!!
One of the recommendations the team made when they released the new CRM 3.0 Demo VPC was to run it on an external hard drive. I presume they were referring to running it on a notebook environment as oppossed to on a desktop machine. Running it on the local hard drive is more convenient though if one has the space. You don't have to carry around an extra box, find an additional plug, have all those wires all over, etc. So, I decided to run a little informal test. I timed starting up the Demo VPC from a dead stop to see how long it took to get to the logon page. Running on the internal hard drive it took approximately 9 minutes on my notebook with 2 GB of RAM. Using a standard IDE hard drive connected to the USB 2.0 port, it only took about 5 minutes. That's a pretty significant difference, especially if you are trying to impress a customer.
My initial purpose in determining if the difference was significant enough was because I was preparing for a presentation I was to make to the San Antonio Manufactures Association. Did I need to drag out my USB externa hard drive. In the end I took a third course. I created my PowerPoint presentation and included screen shots of every step I would have demoed. That way I didn't have to worry about which was faster, nor did I have to worry about my demo hanging up or being sluggish, as they often are. It worked great!
For the last week I have been severely crippled. My CRM Outlook client no longer works. Not only does it not work, but it locks up Outlook so I can't do the basics. I have tried uninstalling the Outlook client, to include uninstalling the SQL MSDE and all data. I've tried uninstalling and reinstalling Outlook and reinstalling it. I've tried deleting my Outlook profile and recreating it. All to no avail. I only have this problem on my notebook PC. My office PC seems to do fine. It runs the Desktop Client. I tried just installing the Desktop Client on my notebook. Same experience! Very frustrating. I will continue working on it and have asked the managed partner newsgroup for assistance. I'll post back when I have more encouraging news.
I am currently setting up a new Small Business Server for a new client. They currently have
At our TS2 presentation, Charles was showing us all the great stuff that the new Office 2007 is going to have, especially Outlook 2007. Then I asked the dumb question, "Is this compatible with CRM 3.0?" Charles responded, "I was going to ask you that question." Somehow I knew I was putting my self on the spot, like saying "why doesn't someone do....". They expect you to do it. So, I queried the CRM team and the basic answer I got is that CRM 3.0 is not currently compatible with the Outlook 2007 but that they intend to have a fix for that shortly after Office 2007 is released. Other Office 2007 apps likely will be OK as they don't have the same issues as Outlook which depends on the CRM Outlook client add-on being installed. In fact, I just watched a recording of the webcast on the new CRM demo VPC. They said that Excel 2007 was really slick with CRM!
Microsoft Dynamics has recently released a new demo VPC for CRM 3.0. It is a large download, 5 files or over 630 MB each and one of about 128 MB! You can download this from here. Once you download all these large files, you need to execute the first one which will expand all the others into the demo collection. It creates a number of folders, including a trial version of Microsoft Virtual PC. The trial version will work for 45 days.
When the initial expansion completes, it opens a window that asks for accepting the EULA. Once accepted, the Welcome screen appears. At the left side are menu options: Welcome, Demo, Other Resources, Support. At the bottom are two buttons: one installs the 45 day trial of MS VPC, the other performs the installation of the demo VPC virtual hard drive, etc. You can also perform this manually by executing the \Microsoft Dynamics CRM\CRM.exe. This 2.9 GB file is a lot easier to manipulate than all the downloads, etc. Once the VPC items are created, which takes a bit of time, you can add it to your MS VPC. To do so, open Microsoft Virtural PC, assuming you have it installed. If not, hit the other button in the demo openinig screen. You should be running MS VPC SP1. If not SP1, can be found here.
I will review the stuff on the VPC 'DVD' over the next several days, or so. Stay tuned.
One of the things you can do with CRM is send e-mail 'blasts'. Currently I am sending out invitations to my upcoming Microsoft Connections cameo presentation. I'm sending it to about 750 of my nearest and dearest leads. Then I'll blast my contacts.
There are two ways to send e-mail blasts. Using the web client, you my select the records you want to send to and select Send Direct E-mail from the Action Toolbar. When you do this, you will be asked to select the e-mail template you want to use. You must have previously created an e-mail template in CRM based on the database you're accessing, typically Leads, Contacts, or Accounts. Then you can tell it which of the records that were found you want to send to. One of the nice options is all records on all pages. Once you tell it to go, it goes and you can go on to other things.
The other way is from the Outlook client. Here instead of the Send Direct E-mail function, you can select Mail Merge from More Actions. Instead of having to have a previously created template, you can create your e-mail message on the fly in Word. You can also use Word .dot templates. Tonight I am using a template provided by Microsoft as an invitation to the Connections event. I've tried using them in a CRM template before and had some problem so thought I'd try it this way this time. I've found two 'issues' with this method of e-mail blasting. First, it only lets you send one page of recepients at a time. And you have to specifically select all the records. Using the CRM, Options menu I've raised the number of entries in a page to the max of 250! But I'm sending to about 750 so I will have to perform the mail merge at least 3 times. In addition, the mail merge is SLooooooow. And it's performed right on your desktop. I started writing this about half way through the first 250 merges. It just finished. Now I have at least 2 more pages to go.
E-mail 'blasting' from CRM is easy. The two ways each have their advantages. The Outlook client/Word e-mail merge gives you more flexibility but is slower. The web client is quick and easy but requires unique templates for each database type.
Have a blast!