Regarding MS CRM

Test as a user

Fri, 11 Jul 2008 17:13:00 GMT

There are times where it is helpful to test your CRM changes logged in as a different user. This will allow you to see everything that this user would experience.

Of course you can physically log on to the users machine, but a better way is to run a simple batch script that will start the CRM web client and prompt you for the users password.

The contents of the .bat script would look like:

runas /user:LITWAREINC\PaulW "C:\Program Files\Internet Explorer\iexplore http://moss:5555/loader.aspx"

You would supply your own CRM instance and user information. You do need to know the users password to test this way.

If you need to test specifically how something looks iwith the Outlook client, this won't help you... you'll still have to log on to the users machine and start Outlook.

Duplicate Detection

Tue, 13 May 2008 16:10:00 GMT

I was testing the new Duplicate Detection feature in MS CRM 4.0

I wanted to be warned about duplicates that might be entered as a Contact with the same name and phone number of an existing Contact. I created a new rule that looked for an exact match on Full Name and Business Phone. Through testing, the duplicates were not detected as I entered new Contacts with seemingly the same name and phone number. Initially I thought that, maybe there was a 'latency period' for the newly published rules to take effect, and tried again a little later.

The problem was that I was testing the Contacts Full Name. Since the record is not saved until after the duplicate detection work is done, the Full Name attribute was empty. I had to back up and modify the rule to test for the discrete Last name and First name fields. Once I made this change, the duplicates were detected.

Tip: Since the match codes are updated every 5 minutes, there is still a chance that duplicate records will sneak in, if entering several records in succession.

I also ran into a problem, where the duplicate detection rule "fired", but it seemed to get stuck in some loop, and never returned the form that challenges me choose whether I want to go ahead and add the record anyway, or cancel out. The security roles for users, need to have the "Duplicate Detection Rule" set properly (ie NOT 'None Selected') for the duplicate detection function to process fully. Once I fixed this in the roles, duplicate detection worked all of the way through.

I accidentally regarded an email to the wrong account

Thu, 17 Apr 2008 15:00:00 GMT

This doesn't happen often, but when it does, it can be a pain to resolve if you don't follow the right steps. A client of ours ran into this problem early on, as they were learning how to use MS CRM 3.0

In order to "undo" or "untrack" and email do the following:

Make sure the original email still exists in your 'Sent Items'
Open your Activities using the 'My Closed Activities' view
Delete the email that was incorrectly 'Regarded' (if you don't the following steps will copy the whole record, including the incorrect 'Regarding' field)
Go to 'Sent Items' in Outlook
Find the email that you need to track (don't open it, just locate and highlight it in the list)
Click the 'Track in CRM' icon located in the CRM Toolbar. (You will get a warning that this record is already tracked and asks if you want to make a copy.)
Click 'Yes'
(one way to do this) Now open the email and Regard it to the correct Account. Close the email.

You should now have successfully regarded this email to the correct account.