October 2006 - Posts
I have a client that wants to design his CRM forms so that when a user views them, they appear in full screen. That way he can design the form so that all the fields are visible and the user doesn't have to use the scroll bars, etc. to view/edit data. Easy thinks I! There's a registry hack (Full Screen in the Internet Explorer registry). Set it to 'yes' and you get full screen mode (same as hitting F11). Strange thing I found is if you do this and start Internet Explorer, it opens in full screen mode as advertised. But, when you then open MS CRM, it resets this registry key and reverts to whatever it wants. I also saw a recommendation on sizing the IE window in non-maximized view so that it still takes up the whole screen, or whatever size you want. That seems to work OK but would require the individual users to have to adjust their IE screens. Not something one can depend on.
I posted the problem to the 'back channel' and stirred up a bit of a discussion among the development folks. Philip Richardson, Senior Program Manager | Customization and Settings | Microsoft CRM | Office Business Platform Group came up with the solution. Actually Philip pointed me to a Knowledge Base article that offered a solution, http://support.microsoft.com/kb/287171. This provided a script for opening a web window to take up the whole screen. Philip suggested using the script in the OnLoad event for the desired form. You have to do it for each form you want to have displayed full screen, but that gives you alot of flexibility. You only need to use it on those screens that require it.
When I tried to use the exact script from the KB, it didn't work. There are a couple of items that need to be removed. I was smart enough to remove the <script...javawhatever> and the corresponding </script>, but that didn't work. Philip was nice enough to have a look and he removed the function definition. He sent me the following code which seems to work great. Be sure to Enable it in the OnLoad event.
window.moveTo(0,0);
if (document.all)
{
top.window.resizeTo(screen.availWidth,screen.availHeight);
}
else if (document.layers||document.getElementById)
{
if(top.window.outerHeight<screen.availHeight||top.window.outerWidth<screen.availWidth)
{
top.window.outerHeight = screen.availHeight;
top.window.outerWidth = screen.availWidth;
}
}
Short and sweet, but it works!
Microsoft is looking for folks to help them test their new Centro and they're looking for beta testers. Beware, this requires some horse power. It wants 64 bit servers, preferrably three of them. But, if you have want it takes, go for it. For more information check out
The SBS and Centro Community Lead Blog
As you likely know, "Working with Microsoft Dynamics CRM 3.0" by Mike Snyder and Jim Steger is a great book for getting the most out of MS CRM. It was handed out by the pallet load at Convergence last Spring.
Recently our Saturday morning CRM study group adopted this book as our study guide for the Customizations exam. The book is not really an exam preparation book, but it will give us a great foundation and understanding of how customization works in CRM. Then we'll likely get the office course materials for the final exam preparation.
This morning we were reminded that programming is an extremely precise, and sometimes painful, exercise. A simple code sample we (I) were typing in failed because I typed a semi-colon (;) instead of a colon (:), Luckily, Mike and Jim were kind enough to make the code samples from their book available for download. So this afternoon I downloaded and installed it. Then I decided to try it out.
One of the features lacking in MS CRM has been automatic formatting of phone numbers. This has been a bit of a disappointment for me since other, lesser, crm systems I've worked with have had phone number formatting for years. Well, actually the Contact form phone numbers format very nicely once a contact synchs with Outlook. But the Account and Lead forms do not. Mike and Jim were kind enough to include sample phone number formatting code in their book, and in the download. It's actually a fairly involved routine that covers a lot of possibilities. There's also a simpler code sample in the CRM SDK. But I liked Mike and Jim's better.
Implementing this code was very simple. I simply copied the code from the sample and pasted it into the OnChange event in the properties of each phone field on the Account and Lead entity forms. It worked great, well at least on the fields where I remembered to enable the event!
If you don't already have "Working with Microsoft Dynamics CRM 3.0", then you should get it if you were interested in enough to read this blog entry this far. It's available through Microsoft Press and on-line book stores like Amazon and Barnes & Noble. You can find more information about the book at http://www.microsoft.com/mspress/companion/0-7356-2259-0/. Thanks, Mike & Jim!
Internet Explorer version 7 has just been released. You can download it from
Microsoft Downloads. Tonight I decided to download and try it on my notebook computer as an initial test. My main concern was whether it would kill my CRM, at least the web client. I had heard of others, including other CRM MVPs, having problems with beta versions of IE7 and CRM. So it was with some level of concern that I went ahead and downloaded and installed IE7. Then I fired it up and, after going through a bit of a config process, I eventually got my HOME page whichi is my Companyweb. That seemed to work fine. Then I clicked on my Microsoft CRM link and CRM came up just fine! I had to enter my user name and password a time or two, and I'll check the config settings for this later, but otherwise it worked fine! (Hmmm... I do notice that I am having some problems entering this blog article with IE7. It won't let me create a hyperlink. But I'll deal with that later. At least I can still do CRM!
If you use MSN Messenger, you should try out a new game that's just been released for play over MSN, LUXOR: Amun Rising. It is at multiplayer game that I haven't figured out quite yet. But it looks fun the time I tried it against my daughter in Dallas. The game is a release from Mumbo Jumbo which produces computer games.
To play it, open a conversation with someone via MSN Messenger. Then click on Actions and then Play a Game. You will see a list of available games to play over MSN (I never knew they were there!). On my list, LUXOR, being new, is at the bottom of the list.
Oh, and did I mention that my daughter is the Marketing Manager for Mumbo Jumbo? Check out their new web site at www.mumbojumbo.com. Have fun!
For some time I have been unable to add new users to my CRM installation. So this week I decided to burn a support incident and get help. My friendly support technician, Joshua, quickly determined that my user groups in CRM/Active Directory/SQL were all screwed up. That happened back in April when I had to uninstall/reinstall CRM in an attempt to resolve other issues. Wish I'd spoken to Josh back then.
CRM 3.0 maintains four security groups in Active Directory, PrivUserGroup, ReportingGroup, SQLAccessGroup, and UserGroup. Each of these groups has a SID (system identifier) associated with it. Each group, that works, has the same SID associated with it. When moving CRM data from one organization to another or when screwing it all up by uninstalling/reinstalling, etc., the group membership can get corrupted and not related to the SQL databases.
Microsoft has provided a nice tool, on the CRM Server installation CD, that takes care of all this. It's called the Redeployment Tool and it's located in the RedeploymentTool folder on the CD. It's an MSI that installs the program on the server. There are a few pages of documentation that do a good job of explaining how it works and how to use it.
Basically the tool is designed not so much for solving problems like mine, but for moving CRM databases between organizations and Active Directory domains. I tried it out on a VPC version of CRM before doing it on my production system and was pleased at how easy it was to use. However, you must NOT have CRM installed on your server before you use it. But you must have your CRM databases running is SQL server. In my case I had to uninstall CRM before I could use it. Unfortunately that was not as simple a task as it should have been. But I'll save my readers the agony that was involved in ripping CRM out by the roots. Thanks to my new best Microsoft friend, Josh, for helping me through that process as well.
Here's a post I wrote off line while in Europe but couldn't get into my blog to post while over there. Thought I'd go ahead and post it now.
Dateline: September 22, 2006, Vagliagli, Tuscany, Italy
We left Roma on Tuesday and have spent the last three days in the Tuscany region. The Tuscan landscape is absolutely gorgeous! Rolling hills with magnificant views and grape vines as far as the eye can see. Where there aren't grapes or olives, there are beautiful trees to include Cyprus and 'Christmas trees'.
The other day we went to Florence (Firenza in Italian). It was quite interesting as we toured some of the sites of famous art, etc., in particular the Museo Uffizi.
Today we hit the Chianti wine country and stopped, and sipped, at several wineries. I almost got wined out :-)
The GPS has been invaluable. Getting out of Florence the other night would have been darned near impossible. However I did pay a high price for that that day. I had to lug the notebook PC around on my back all day. And we did a LOT of walking. Tonight there would have been no way we could have found our way out of Siena, at night. Nor back to the tiny town of Vagliagli where we are staying.
Tomorrow it's off to Vinice. Hopefully we'll have Internet.
In our Saturday morning CRM study group this morning we started our study for the CRM Customization exam. This will be a very interesting topic and I'm really looking forward to it.
One of the problems we've identified is that CRM pretty much requires the use of Visual Studio .NET 2003 to develop custom code (Callouts). Of couse the current version of VS is now 2005. The members of our group all have VS 2005 because Microsoft was generous enough to provide it to attendees at last year's SQL 2005/VS 2005 Launch. Gee, an application that is launched in late 2005 (CRM 3.0) that requires code written with a system released 2 years earlier... So, I queried the CRM MVP channel and the answer was that CRM requires .NET 1.1 while VS 2005 produces code using .NET 2.0. Makes sense, I guess.
Luckily one of the CRM dev guys, Arash Ghanaie-Sichanie, also saw the problem and has developed a workaround. He posted the details on his blog at http://blogs.msdn.com/arash/archive/2006/08/25/719626.aspx. So, if you have VS 2005 and want to develop callouts for CRM, have a look at Arash's blog.
Well, I'm back from my European Odyssey. It was a great trip even if it did start off a bit on the soggy side. After we left Rome, we left the rain. We also pretty much left Internet access. We had very spotty, if any, access from there on. At some locations it just wasn't available. Take our villa (bed and breakfast) in Tuscany. The owner had a dial up for his Internet, but he didn't use it until very late at night because it required using his one phone line and lost guests wouldn't be able to call. Elsewhere, it was just flat expensive or very inconvenient. But you know what, I really didn't miss it (Internet) all that much. Afterall I was on vacation. We get so dependent on, wrapped up in, our constant Internet access here. It was kind of nice not to worry about it so much. But I'm back to the real world now.
Technology was a key part of our trip. Without it we would have been really lost. Literally! Just before we left, Microsoft was kind enough to make MapPoint Europe 2006 available on MSDN. I was able to download it and we used it extensively on our trip. Neither my wife nor I have any idea how we could have made it without our GPS and MapPoint. (We rented a car in Zurich and drove all over.) European roads are a bit different from US roads. What would be alleys or back roads here turn out to be major passways over there. Our favorite feature was what I call the 'take me where I want to go from where I am now' button. Many times we would miss a turn and the GPS would shortly let us know we screwed up. I'd hit that button and it would recalculate our route to where we were headed from where we had accidentally ended up. Oh, and we even used it to find a gas station between Florence and Siena in Italy, and a McDonald's in Venice. Yes, our last meal in Italy was McDonalds 'take away'. It was great!
Our trip took us to Switzerland, Italy, and Austria. I enjoyed it all although my wife often made an endurance test out of our sightseeing! Now back to CRM, SBS, and the real world once again.