June 2007 - Posts
The CRM team has just released the latest update rollup for CRM 3.0. Here is their announcement:
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Microsoft CRM Sustained Engineering has publicly released Microsoft Dynamics CRM 3.0 Update Rollup 2 via the Microsoft Download Center!
Update Rollup 2 is a well tested, cumulative set of updates for Microsoft Dynamics CRM Server 3.0 and Microsoft Dynamics CRM client for Outlook 3.0, including performance enhancements, which are packaged together for easy deployment. Sincere thanks to the CRM SE and global CRM CSS teams, as well as the many customers, partners, and ISVs who helped us test this Rollup during our pre-release testing program.
Comprehensive information about this release is available via the Microsoft Knowledge Base article 927751, which was simultaneously published with the Rollup packages. The Knowledge Base article lists the fixes contained in the Rollup. The Update Rollup 2 packages are available via http://www.microsoft.com/downloads/details.aspx?FamilyID=81674da5-ffef-492a-a7b1-7e1f1951b05f
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It is my understanding that this update rollup does NOT include the compatibility upgrade for Outlook 2007 and Vista. You will need to install V3C first on your Outlook clients and then install the update rollup.
Ever need to find a specific e-mail in your CRM database? Need to search for it by some string of text in the body of the message? Try this approach:
Go to Settings, Customization, Customize Entities. Select the Email entity and then select Forms and Views. Then select the Quick Find All Email view. By select I mean open it up!
Once in the Quick Find view, click on Add Find Columns under Common Tasks. Find Columns allows you to select the data fields that the Quick Find will search. There are already several fields included in the default view. I added 'Description' which contains the body of the e-mail message. If there are other data fields you'd like to search, select away. Then 'Save & Close' until you hit the list of entities and then Publish the Email entity. If you don't Publish, it don't count.
Now for the search. In CRM go to your Workplace and select Activities under My Work. This will display a list of all activities. Well those that meet the criteria you want. Since we're concerned with e-mails, go to the Type drop down box and select Email. Under View select whether you want sent emails, received emails, all emails, etc. This will narrow things down a bit. Now under Look for: enter the text you want to search for. Since it's likely that your text will appear somewhere in the middle of the message, start it off with an asterisk "*". That's the wild card character. Then hit Find.
There you have it. Not real pretty but pretty effective. You can use the same process to search for stuff in other kinds of activities.
Exchange Server Q&A with the MVP Experts
Exchange MVPs will be on hand to answer your questions about Exchange Server, Outlook and Exchange for Small Business Server. So if you are thinking of upgrading to Exchange Server 2007 or have questions about Exchange Server 2003 we hope you can join us for this informative online chat!
Chat 1
When: Tuesday June 19th
Time: 5pm PST or 8pm EST
Where: TechNet Chat Room www.microsoft.com/technet/community/chats/chatroom.aspx
No password required
Chat 2
When: Thursday June 21st
Time: 10am PST or 1pm EST
Where: TechNet Chat Room www.microsoft.com/technet/community/chats/chatroom.aspx
No password required
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Q&A with the Security MVP Experts
We invite you to attend an Q&A with the Microsoft Security MVPs. In this chat the MVP experts will answer your questions regarding online safety issues such as phishing, spyware, rootkits as well as server related topics. If you have questions on how to protect your PC, please bring them to this informative chat
When: Thursday June 21st
Time: 4pm PST and 7pm EST
Where: TechNet Chat Room www.microsoft.com/technet/community/chats/chatroom.aspx
No password required
I learn something new every day. Yesterday I was demoing CRM to a couple of prospects. While I was showing them the Relationship Roles one said to the other that that would be a good way for them to make groups of contacts. No, no thought I, that's not how I do it. But then I though, hmmm, maybe that will work.
Groups have been a standard feature of many Contact Manager programs like ACT! and GoldMine for years. Groups are a way of creating lists of contacts. And any given contact may be a member of many different groups. For instance I belong to several organizations like the Chamber, the Manufactures Association and several networking groups. Let's say I'd like to send an e-mail to all the folks in my Business Leaders Circle. If I can quickly and easily access the contact records of the members of my BLC, then I can do so. The way I have been doing this is to include a code, like 'BLC' in the Description field of the appropriate contact records. This actually works pretty well. I can do an Advanced Find to find records where the Description CONTAINS the appropriate code. And Description can contain any number of such codes. This is quick and easy. I can get a list of contacts and can send them e-mails, etc. However, if I want to go to the organization's Account record, I don't have a ready list of members. And I have to remember the codes I've used, and use the same ones each time.
My prospect's suggestion is to set up Relationship Roles between the organization and the members. So I'm giving that a try. I've set up an Account Relationship role to relate to Contacts that is 'Group Organization'. I've also set up a Contact Relationship Role to Account of 'Group Member'. Having gone through a few of my lists and established the Relationship with their group organization, I then set up an Advanced Find for each organization. The Advanced Find looks a bit like this:
Look for: Contacts
Customer Relationships (Party 2)
Role 2 Equals Group Member
Select
Party 1 (Account)
Account Equals <desired organization Account>
Select
Sorry, this is the best I can do as this blog site doesn't appear to support graphics. I can save each Advanced Find for each organization as noted in the <desired organization Account> or I can use one of my saved Advanced Finds and changed the Account. I'll be interested in how this works in the real world. I'd also be interested in others' approach to Groups.
The San Antonio Spurs (from right here in TACO TOWN) have just won their FOURTH NBA National Championship after sweeping the Cleveland Cavaliers!!! (By the way, Taco Larry was actually born in Cleveland, but I got to San Antonio as quickly as I could. Took a couple (2) of years.)
GO SPURS GO!!!
Recently I added a short workflow rule to my Cases so that when I create a new case for a customer, they get an e-mail letting them know the case has been created. That seemed to work fine. Then the workflow waits until the status changes to something other than Active and sends the client a closed case e-mail. Well, the first part worked great but somehow the closed case e-mail would fail. I tried Googling the error code I got but that wasn't particularly helpful (so I won't bother listing the error code here). Then I examined the e-mail templates, the one that worked and the one that didn't. I couldn't see any difference between the two that would cause the error. Then I examined my workflow rule. On the first send e-mail action, I had listed the Owner of the case in the CC. That worked great. When the case was created, the customer received the e-mail and so did the assigned CRM user (who 'owned' the case). But on the close case e-mail, I had included the owner's Manager as well. When I opened a case, it would send the appropriate e-mails. When I would close one of my cases, it would not send the close case e-mail. The reason I found was that I don't have a Manager. Apparently the Send E-mail was choking on the fact that the Manager was undefined. I would have expected it to send it to the other recipients.
I had two choices now: I could remove the Manager from the CC, or I could be sure everyone (CRM User) has a Manager. I liked having the Manager receive the CC. I have other folks in my organization who might open and close a case and I'd kinda like to know about it. I added myself as Manager to everyone else but when I tried to make me my own manager, CRM wasn't happy. If I leave myself managerless, my workflow will continue to fail. So... I made the Administrator my Manager. No, Administrator won't get a pay raise. And I used my own e-mail address as the Administrator's e-mail so the messages won't build up in the Administrator's mailbox (actually that may cause another problem in CRM I'll have to check out). Now when a case is closed, I get a message as well as the customer. Kewl.
One of the major sponsors of the IT Pro Conference in New Orleans last week was StorageCraft from Phoenix, AZ. They have a backup/imaging solution that looks pretty good. You can request a 30 day eval or get an NFR if you are a reseller. Their web is at www.StorageCraft.com.
I have configured the Server version on my server. It has let me make a complete backup of both of my hard drives and compressed it nicely, and QUICKLY. I am able to mount these images and can drill down and get specific files from the backup if I need.
At the conference, one of the presenters (NOT from StorageCraft) demonstrated restoring a Windows 2003 Server to a Virtual PC on his notebook from a StorageCraft backup. StorageCraft allows for restoring to different hardware! I haven't tried that yet but I am planning to. I need to redo my SBS server. I will put another, lesser, server in place while I rebuild my primary server. Then I will do a Swing Migration from the temporary server to the 'new' one. Using StorageCraft will, hopefully, save me a swing. I'll let you know how that goes.
StorageCraft is a backup solution, not just a replacement for Ghost or Acronis. You can schedule regular backups, and have them occur even hourly. I have just configured my server to do a full backup every week and incremental backups throughout the week. I'll be interested to see how it goes.
I had never heard of StorageCraft before going to NOLA. At our user group meeting last Friday, I asked and nobody there had heard of them either. But at NOLA EVERYONE was singing their praises. Guess I missed a lot not going to SMB Nation last year. But then how could it compete with Europe?