Magnetism Blog

On Thursday and Friday last week I participated in the CSM Course held at the Hotel Grand Chancellor at Auckland Airport.

I had been looking forward to the course since last year and was not disappointed. Our trainers were Jeff Sutherland, co-creator of the Scrum framework, and Jens Ostergaard, a certified Scrum Trainer with many years Scrum experience. Their extensive experience and success stories were really inspiring and helped to create and maintain an exciting learning environment.

The two day course was a mixture of lecture-type sessions, exercises that taught us to apply the Scrum process to projects and Q & A sessions where we each got to seek advice from the experts about how Scrum applies to our individual situations. There were 18 people in the course, all from varied IT backgrounds. We were split into three teams of 6 people, which were our Scrum teams for all exercises.

One of the best things I took away from the CSM course was the clarification of the Scrum Master’s responsibilities. The Scrum Master is not a manager, they do not have any authority to make business decisions or assign tasks. The Scrum Master is a servant leader who supports and guides their team to follow the Scrum process in order to deliver complete and tested software functionality in rapid increments.

I’ve also come away with practical steps to take to improve our use of Scrum within Magnetism. Over the coming weeks I’ll be sharing the progress we make, so watch this space!

The team that wrote the dynamics crm sdk help rocks! I wanted to display the same crm icons on our time tracking application for consistency, so I opened up the sdk help file, searched for 'icon', ignored all the sitemap/isv config entries since I know I want to get these icons programatically, about half way down the search results I see 'organizationui', sure enough that contains the 16x16 (gridicon), 32x32 (outlookshortcuticon) and 66x48 (largeentityicon) icons!

 To get all the entities, execute a retrieve multiple request.

RetrieveMultipleRequest request = new RetrieveMultipleRequest

{

Query = new QueryExpression

{

EntityName = "organizationui",

ColumnSet = new ColumnSet(new[] { "objecttypecode", "formxml", "gridicon" }),

 }

};

var response = sdk.Execute(request) as RetrieveMultipleResponse;

Now you have all the entities and icons, here's the tricky part, all the custom entities in crm store the icons inside gridicon, outlookshortcuticon and largeentityicon attributes, the built-in entity icons are stored inside the /_imgs/ folder with the format of /_imgs/ico_16_xxxx.gif (gridicon), with xxxx being the entity type code. The entity type code is not stored inside an attribute of organizationui, however you can get it by looking at the formxml attribute objecttypecode xml attribute.

response.BusinessEntityCollection.BusinessEntities.ToList()

.Cast<organizationui>().ToList()

.ForEach(a =>

{

try

{

 // easy way to check if it's a custom entity

 if (!string.IsNullOrEmpty(a.gridicon))

{

byte[] gif = Convert.FromBase64String(a.gridicon);

}

else

{

// built-in entity

 if (!string.IsNullOrEmpty(a.formxml))

{

int start = a.formxml.IndexOf("objecttypecode=\"") + 16;

int end = a.formxml.IndexOf("\"", start);

// found the entity type code

string code = a.formxml.Substring(start, end - start);

string url = string.Format("/_imgs/ico_16_{0}.gif", code);

Enjoy!

How many businesses have CRM implemented, but are not using it to its full potential? Take the first part of the sales component of Dynamics CRM for instance; is it setup to give you the information you need to make informed decisions to deliver your sales strategy?

By using workflows you can automate your lead distribution process. The system intelligently filters your leads and automatically assigns them to a sales person as tasks, leads can also be assigned to marketing lists for future campaigns. Even with repeatable processes, your sales people can’t be successful without a 360 degree view of their prospects and customers; CRM gives everyone in your sales team access to consistent data you can count on. You can see every interaction from the initial lead to the final order and invoice and can share the complete history of your customer so you can make more informed decisions about how to further every sale.

Microsoft Dynamics CRM gives you standard and customisable sales reports and a 360 degree view of your pipeline prospects and customers. These reports and graphs can easily be exported to Excel. Understand your business better by quickly going your dashboard for an insight into pipelines, forecasts and revenue, to help you make informed decisions about how to pump up the pipeline or close more deals. Make your CRM investment work for you. For more information contact us.

After I completed the Applications Exam MB2-632, I went on to study for the Customization and Configuration Exam. To study for this exam I used a few different training tools. First I went to the Microsoft website and downloaded the E-Learning courses that relate to customization for Dynamics CRM. I then went through the PDF training course 8912A for Customization which was approximately 6 hours of training to get you up to speed with customizing CRM. The training will show you how to customize CRM using the customization tools that are already built-in Microsoft Dynamics CRM. I successfully passed the Customization and Configuration exam and in passing the exam gained qualifications that include, Configuring Deployment in CRM, Customizing Forms, Views, Entities, and Attributes. Customizing Relationships, Mappings and Maintaining Organizations.

Let me start off by telling you that I passed the Applications Exam and if I can pass this exam you can too! If you’re interested in CRM and think it’s for you, then this exam will give you qualifications in the following areas, CRM Concepts, Sales, Marketing, Service Management and Service Scheduling. Of course before you sit the Applications exam you will need to have a fairly good understanding of these areas, and that is where the course training comes in handy, which you can find here..  

Also if you want to see a review of the Applications training you can find that here..

When creating a new DateTime attribute in Microsoft Dynamics CRM 4.0, the format drop-down-list only allows the customizer to select one of two values: Date Only or Date and Time. But what if you want to create a new attribute to show the time only? I came across this scenario when wanting to add information about Account business hours, and found a very useful solution using Javascript on the entity form’s onLoad event handler.

Firstly, you need to select “Date and Time” for the new Time attribute’s format. Next, you need to use the following Javascript code within the onLoad event handler.

document.getElementById("mag_time").childNodes[0].childNodes[0].style.display = "none";

This hides the text input area of the DateTime field, but users can still select a date using the calendar control. We want to eliminate this, so you need to include the following:

document.getElementById("mag_time").childNodes[0].childNodes[1].style.display = "none";

Adding this line also hides the calendar control. We are now left with exactly what we want, the time area of the DateTime field on its own. However, the field is completely disabled. To get around this, all we need to do is make sure we set a default value for the time field within the entity’s onLoad event handler. This should appear before the code snippets listed above.

var date = new Date(); date.setHours(8, 30, 0, 0); crmForm.all.mag_time.DataValue = date; And there we have it, a custom time field for you to use on any entity.

Every week my team helps our customers configure and customise their Dynamics CRM instance to make sure that they can capture relevant and valuable information. However, once captured, this information is only valuable if you can easily access and view it.

This is where knowing your way around Advanced Find in Microsoft Dynamics CRM is particularly useful.

Last week I shared about how to run Advanced Find queries when looking to export specific client information from Dynamics CRM to Excel. Advanced Find can also be used to create custom views that will filter your records by the criteria you need to access most frequently, for example, records assigned to you or records assigned to staff you manage.

To create and saved an Advanced Find view, use the following steps:

1. Click on the Advanced Find button and select the record type you want to Look For 
2. Select the required search criteria (remember, Advanced Find allows you to specify multiple search criteria to make sure that your results are as accurate as possible) 
3. Use the Edit Columns function to specify the columns you want displayed in your view 
4. Click the Save As button
5. In the window that pops up specify a name for your view and a description if necessary
6. Close the Advanced Find window and navigate to the entity that you have created the view for to view your results

To view and edit your Advanced Find views go to the Saved Views tab in Advanced Find. From this tab you can also share your saved views with other CRM Users.

Advanced Find is a great way to quickly and simply create custom views for yourself, and others in your organisation.

This innovative tool by Microsoft is the first of its kind to align with business software needs and goals with Dynamics CRM customers   An assessment of our Customer’s current Microsoft Dynamics CRM functionality is done by answering a series of business capabilities questions. Based on these answers, the tool recommends specific modules that the customer should use to address their business needs.   This enables Magnetism and our customers to  

• Better understand their long-term business objectives.

• Align their business objectives with specific process improvements that will help them reach these objectives.

• Develop a customized solution that deploys Microsoft Dynamics CRM broader and deeper into their organization.

• Create a one-to-three-year implementation roadmap tailored to their solution and their unique business needs.

 To help assess your business needs, define your future goals, and create a personalized strategic road map to achieve those goals use the Microsoft Dynamics Business Solutions Roadmap Tool.

After completing the Applications, Workflows, and Customization and Configuration CRM 4.0 courses it was time to move on to Installation and Deployment. As the title implies, this course covers the information required to effectively install, uninstall, repair, upgrade, and deploy all parts of the Microsoft Dynamics CRM 4.0 system. This course initially covers the requirements for each segment of CRM 4.0, and then moves into the installation process. The main CRM 4.0 server, email router, and Microsoft dynamics CRM for Microsoft Office Outlook installation and uninstalling processes are explained. Upgrading from Dynamics CRM 3.0 to Dynamics CRM 4.0 is also covered, and would be of invaluable help to anyone upgrading from an earlier version. Although the information in this course would not be put into frequent use, it would be helpful for at least 1 person in a business to understand the concepts of this course so that if there were any problems, the company would not require external help in solving them.

On Thursday, after many hours of study and revision, I sat the Microsoft Dynamics CRM 4.0 Applications exam. Initially I was a little frightened of sitting the exam, but I’d booked it in and there was no backing out. For the 4 days prior to my exam my evenings were filled with revision of CRM concepts, sales, marketing, service management and service scheduling. All these thoughts in my head must have paid off however as achieved a rather respectable pass grade in the exam. Now confident that my revision is working I will shortly be moving on to complete the Customization exam, the Installation exam, and finally, the Extending CRM exam. Looks like my next few weeks will be filled with forms and views, SQL servers and active directories, and all the wonders Extending CRM has in store for me! In summation I would conclude that although the Applications exam may seem daunting, if you get stuck into your study, and think through exam questions logically, the 70% required to pass is a reasonably attainable goal.