CRMn IT

Where's my settings button?

2007-04-10T10:31:00.000-04:00

I do not attach to my companies CRM Server through outlook, I just keep a shortcut to it on my desktop and access it that way. In outlook I access my test server, since as a developer this is where I do most of my work. I keep task specific information in there and run a lot of backups, since I'm frequently breaking the intallation through trial and error.

I also connect to it via the web client to do cusomizations, and this triggers one of my least favorite "Features" in Dynamics CRM. Because the outlook client does not have the settings tab in in the navigation pane, explorer use the cookies left over from the Outlook Client and therefore my web client will not have a settings tab either.

If you clear your cookies you can get around this, but I loathe clearing my cookies, because I like to use "remember me" features whenever possible. Time is money afterall, and the less time I spend trying to remember credentials for the various webs sites, news groups, discussion groups, and even this blog, the better.

So after I did some digging I found KB Article 910050. This beauty solves the problem quite easily. All you need to do is find the IP address of the web server hosting your CRM app, and switch that out in three urls in the registry editor.

Browse to HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Software\Microsoft\MSCRMClient
and switch the machine name to the ip address (make sure to keep the port :8080 or whatever you use) in the values for WebAppUrl, PlatformRoot, and ServerUrl.

Now you can use both clients interchangably and not worry about the cookies.

Experlogix MPCpe 4.6 is available

2007-04-10T09:04:00.000-04:00

Today I will be upgrading the Experlogix MPCpe to version 4.6. I'm looking forward to some of the improvements. They've streamlined the installation process and and moved their files from the administrators directory to the %ALLUSERSPROFILE% which should make it much easier for me to delegate the maintenance of the system to non-administrative users. Which is a beg deal for me, because I have the sales manager adding new parts as need by her sales folks.

The new release seems to be focused on reducing adminstrative overhead on my part. Of course I'm all for that. But some goodies have been tossed in to helps the users as well. Being able to copy a configuration is a nice feature some of my users will love. I can't wait to see the custom model selector, if it's what I think it is, it could reduce some entry time for our users.

After the install I'll report what I've found and give you my impressions.

Account not found during Integration - But its there?

2007-03-30T11:42:00.000-04:00

Occasionally I get errors in SCRIBE transfers where the account can't be found. Even though the account is in both Dynamic GP and Dynamics CRM. Why? Unbeknownst to me the mapping for accounts is actually kept on the KEYCROSSREFERENCETWOWAY table in the Scribe Internal DB. Generally when this error occurs, the account has been merged in CRM and the GUID for the inactive account is referenced in the APP_B_KEY field in the KEYCROSSREFERENCETWOWAY table. We need to change this.

Check to see if the accounts have been merged. If they have been merged look at the GUIDs for both the Active and Inactive account. Copy The GUID for the active account including the "{}". The GUID is located in the address bar as seen here.

When accounts can't be found but they are in CRM and GP. Verify the GUID Scribe is using in APP_B_KEY in the KEYCROSSREFERENCETWOWAY table in \\NTINTEGRATOR\SCRIBE SQL Server.

Select *
From KEYCROSSREFERENCETWOWAY
Where APP_A_KEY = '%ACCOUNTNUMBER%'

The results should look like:

If the APP_B_KEY field doesn't equal the GUID of the active Account make it so.

This will fix any of those errors.

Microsoft One Note

2007-03-19T13:26:00.000-04:00

This only slightly relates to MS CRM, but I have been using One Note 07 for a couple of months now. And I am very impressed with it. I can create activities in it that relate automatically to Outlook then select the regarding and therefore relate them to CRM.

I'm hoping to eventually be able to apply contacts from CRM to it, but I have not looked that far into it yet.

There a free downloads available for OneNote07 and I would recomend trying it out if you are looking for a way to get better organized.

DST on WS2000

2007-03-06T11:21:00.000-05:00

If your like me you have a coule legacy systems hangng around that you haven't bumped up to Windows Server 2003. Out comes the new Daylight Savings Plan, and your stuck with a painful manual update for WS2000 machines.

Or are you?

Nope the guys from Intelliadmin.com have put out a nice little utility for this. Worked like a charm. I scaned it for virii and maleware, and none were found. None were found on my system after install. Go check it out.

http://www.intelliadmin.com/home.htm

Revisiting Scribe

2007-03-05T16:20:00.000-05:00

Over a year ago, I gave a review of Scribe Software's Insight. A product I had very high hopes for, but was not panning out in my production environment. I gave them an "F" after using their product, or rather attempting to use their product, for several Months.

My problems with Insight stemmed from two issues. One we attempted to install a trial version of MOM (Microsoft Operations Manager) on that server, only to have the install fail the prerequisites. We rolled it back and thought we were done with it, however we were wrong. During the long arduous troubleshooting of Scribe Insight, we discovered that there was a MOM installation stuck in the registry and had to uninstall it. Luckily it was still in the Add and Remove Programs mmc.

The other issue was that when my VAR installed the SQL server instance that would be used for Scribe they failed to install SP 3a. Once MOM was uninstalled and the SQL server instance upgraded to SP 4. We were able to get Scribe Insight on line.

Scribe is a very powerful integration piece. And after many months of working with Scribe Support people - Bill, Brendan and Larry, I have been able to stabilize Insight and get pretty good results with it.

I can comfortably say that they did not deserve that "F". In fact I can give their Support team a Solid "B+". I hold back on giving them an "A" only because they seem to lose track of some Action Items. They could definitely use MS CRM at their location. If they are reading this ... Call me, I can give you a good price on an installation.

They have pretty good knowledge of their product, and have developers handy if they need more info. On a couple of occasions I had to follow up with them to see where things stood. But if they said they were going to call me at 3pm the next day they did.

I can give their product another "B". Man I would love to give it a higher grade, but it seems overly complicated, at times. Like so many programs the insight seems bent on pushing you to partners and paid support, when with just a little bit of effort the program can be supported by blokes like me right out of the box.

If you are looking for a powerful integration piece, and don't mind a long learning curve, don't shy away from Scribe. I don't think there is much it can't do. Be prepared to spend hours learning the system, and running a lot of tests to see how your results come out. Once you get the hang of it though, expect some dazzling results.

Editing the Quick Find View

2007-03-05T16:03:00.000-05:00

I have spent months toying with workarounds for the fact that Microsoft CRM searchs Products by descriptions not the Part Number.

You can easily modify the fields the search is run against out of the box. I wish my VAR had mentioned this months ago.

Here's how to do it. This is for products, but is applicatble for all Quick Find views.

Settings > Customizations > Customize Entities

Select Products

Select Forms and Views

Select Quick Find All Products

Now on the right select the Add Find Columns

Here you are presented with a list of fields that you can search

Select the fields you wish to search on (you can use more than one).

Click OK

You can modify the rest of the view (the results columns and sort orders) just as you normally would with any other view.

My review of Experologix MPCpe

2007-01-05T13:50:00.000-05:00

We have begun rolling out the long awaited, CRM Quoting and Order Entry CRM (Q&OE) phase of our integration. We have decided to use Experlogix MPCpe as the platform. I can not rave enough about this product, and Experlogix. This company's service is what everyone in the software development and support industry should strive for when putting together a support department.

Fast friendly knowledgeable support on a very flexible platform. They really take time with you and help you not only do what you want to do, but steer you to better ways to accomplish what you want with their product. Christian and Jesse, and others over there, have pulled my butt out of the fire over and over again during the test phase as we corrected my configuration errors.

What is MPCpe?

MPCpe stands for Master Product Configurator with Paraimetric Engineering which is a mouthful, around here we call it configurator. It allows users to rapidly enter opportunities, quotes, and orders in MS CRM. As anyone who has tried will tell you the out of the box MS CRM solution is not workable for quoting at all. Especially if you are integrated. MPCpe comes in two flavors, Quick Quote and Quick Quote Plus. The Plus version lets you create formula based rules

The #1 feature in Configurator is the "Parametric Engineering". Parametric Engineering allows you to build advanced knowledge of the products into the configurator making it seem as if an engineer was doing the order entry. It requires more time in the setup stage, but the savings from preventing incorrect orders and the time saved by eliminating some of the research that data entry, inside sales or customer service requires to the answer questions more than makes up for the initial time spent in setup.

For instance, to use the standard mountain bike examples, you have a mountain bike with three choices of frames, and 3 choices of forks. The frame dictates which fork you can use. Consider that Frame one can use fork a or b, Frame 2 can use fork a,b, or c, and frame 3 can only use b or c. This is intimate product knowledge. If this were the only case, then it wouldn't be a big deal but as everyone knows product knowledge can require years to master. In some places the turn over rate far out paces the ability to master product knowledge. However the Parametric Engineering allows you to easily tell the system, if you use Frame 1 you can select only Fork a and b. Then when the user attempts to enter c it will give them a unmistakable error with customizable messages, and yet allow them to easily recover from it, by just de-selecting the incorrect entry. No tech support calls no re doing the quote or order. Nice huh?

I'll write more about some of the other features later this week, but check out their site, and download the brochure. It's one of the nicest pieces of software I've used, and the people at Experlogix will make you glad you considered them.

Scribe Saga Continues

2006-01-27T16:49:00.000-05:00

Well scribe has been installed for sometime now, and I've decided to give a grade. I'd have to go with a F. Now many people have had much better results with it than I have, and I don't want to scare anyone away from it. But the scribe product for me has been an abject failure.

The program crashes constantly and to make things worse when it crashes it fails to send out the aprpriate warnings and notifications, so it can go crashed and unrunning for long periods of time. Call me crazy or lazy if you will but I think software like this shouldn't need constant monitoring. And it appears that it does. I have to look at it every day to make sure it is running. If it fails my customer and order information doesn't come over to my CRM system from the accoutning package.

To add insult to injury, the products maintainence has come due, and while I am waiting for word from them about how the repairs are coming I get a phone call from them to pay up my maintainence. It's ironic that this company build integration software for a CRM suite, and could desperately use the product themselves.

New Products Dont Update

2005-08-22T17:10:00.000-04:00

There is one thing that has come up with using scribe as my integrator between CRM and Great Plains. We tend to add a lot of new products because my company engineers a lot of our products to our customer’s requirements. These products are not brought in by default when an order is created in GP. The result is orders and invoices in CRM that have items with prices but no product name. Clicking on these orders causes an error. We are developing an in-house “Products Update” in Scribe. I’ll let you know what I come up with if anything.

Moving

2005-08-22T16:27:00.000-04:00

I was getting errors, and having CRM pages fail to load because the drive my CRM was filling up, especially when pulling up pages with loads of results, like contacts and accounts. I fopund that you can move the Inetpub folder or just the wwwroot folder to another drive reletively easily. You won't find any information on this in technet, or customer source. But you should be aware that there can be issues if you have crm mobile installed and running.

First stop the website in IIS.

Simply copy the folder from the space challenged drive, and place it on a a drive with more room. Make sure you copy it and not move it incase there is an issue.

Then make sure that you duplicate the security that was on the original folder.

Then remap the site to the new location in IIS restart the website, restart the IIS Admin Service (this will restart all the necessary dependent services) and then restart all of the CRM services.

If any hang (none of mine did on my production server, but its possible) don't panic just re-register the service. Then restart it.

That should do it.

I'm planning to upgrade the network to 2003 soon, and I'll let you know how that goes.

Synching the Sloth

2005-06-24T11:53:00.000-04:00

Just some random notes from my Synching “Learning Experience”:

• Synchronization is very tricky. Replication must be stable before any synchronization can take place.

• The Synchronization DB on the remote system is based on MSDE

• MSDE has certain limitations most importantly a 2GB cap. Companies like mine will have problems if the data replicated (synchronized) is greater than 2 GB.

• Larger dbs can cause a huge amount of data (mine had 3 million rows + after several synchs) in the synch tables these need to be cleared out often.
o The SyncEntry table in the MSCRM Database
o MSMerge_contents table in the MSCRM Database
o MSMerge_tombstone table in the MSCRM Database
o MSmerge_history table in the Distribution Database

• Updating the outlook folders (the last checkbox on the offline configuration dialog box) will update the appointments and task folders in Outlook with CRM information and may add considerable time to the synchronization. This requires updating not only the client machine, but exchange. However this is valuable information and you might want to consider this as a second synch immediately after the first synch.

There is a white paper that I found helpful during this process and I recommend being familiar with these practices even if they are not all applicable in your setting.

http://www.microsoft.com/downloads/details.aspx?FamilyID=E1A00070-2E5A-410A-881F-D859F8474933&displaylang=en

Integration Install Part 1

2005-04-19T16:34:00.000-04:00

Well, I didn’t have time to write an original post yesterday, but I did post an interesting article on about Siebel Systems. At least I thought it was interesting, especially the part about them grooming themselves for a possible sale… especially since the name Microsoft was mentioned.

I was working on the Integration piece for my MSCRM and MS Great Plains for the last three days. I can’t wait to see the consulting bill on this one. It took a lot longer then they anticipated, and longer than it should have.

I provided them with the entire set of production dbs, well over 25 GB of data to test the integration with. I copied them over to an external HD and they came and picked it up back on Feb 22.

The installation architecture consisted of a SQL Server with a CRM db and a GP db on one box, and a SQL Server on another box that houses the Integrator, the idea is to have those on separate machines to help load balance. And even though this was the plan from the beginning the consultant only tested the integration on a single machine and a single SQL Instance. Needless to say there was some inconsistencies, and it had to be redone a couple of times.

Testing and evaluating are important factors on any install. One of the key points to evaluating a system is to ensure that as much of the system as possible is reproduced on the test server or in the test environment if more than one server is being tested. The ultimate would be to test it on the exact same hardware, but for the most part that’s not feasible. If you plan on running a piece of software on a server that runs enterprise Antivirus, you better be sure to put it on there when you test. If a consultant or VAR is testing something for you be sure to push them to get the environment as close as you can. Its your money and testing can reveal a lot of problems and lets you try things several times before paying three people to sit and troubleshoot an install issue that should have been identified in testing.

Anyway, our last integration piece was the default BizTalk model that was released 6 months after CRM came out of beta. And like I’ve said here before, it worked – but just barely. It was slow, and required more resources than necessary. And when large updates were pushed through like the company wide price increase we had last year it broke in the middle and had to be left behind. Literally. It took us weeks to fix it, upgrade to 3 GB of RAM, then another 2 weeks to force feed the info through the sausage grinder. We had to break it down into bites and feed it only at night. Feeding it during the day slowed the production servers that ran GP down so much that we couldn’t post invoices or run our BOM inventory auto builds.

The initial integration took about 15 hours with that monstrosity. Once the tedious installation took place, Scribe Insight shattered that time, even though the database had grown considerably since the initial go around 2 years ago. I’m not exactly sure how long it took, because It was done the first time I checked on its progress 5 hours later. In fact it was done so quickly I initially thought it had failed until I saw that it had update or integrated 25,000 records in the monitor.

I’ve noticed some periodical slow downs, and some minor problems on a few records, but for the most part I feel pretty good about the integration. The true testing starts tomorrow when the consultants come back to look through the results, and train me a little further on the GUI. I’ll keep you posted on the results.

Death of a Salesman - Computerworld

2005-04-18T10:53:00.000-04:00

Death of a Salesman - Computerworld

Slugs not as slimey as you think

2005-04-14T13:43:00.000-04:00

I finally got to finish up on a project I've been working on for a while and I thought I'd share it.

My company has a unique situation where the MFG Sales Reps are not employees of the company. And as of right now they do not have access to our proprietary databases or CRM. Therefore they are not registered users of the system.

This complicates things because in some regards we would like them to act as users. We have not reached the point where we can justify buying an additional 45 or so license. Turning them into accounts that we link as sub-accounts to the accounts that they would own is a cumbersome work around, but the best solution we have right now.

We would like to generate a Lead Notification & Follow-Up form that is emailed to the appropriate rep when a lead is pseudo-assigned to them. I say pseudo-assigned because, when a lead is generated, we cannot really assign it to a Rep in MSCRM, since only a user can be an owner. So the assignment is theoretical. Instead we assign it to the Rep’s Regional Sales Manager (RSM). After interviewing an RSM, I determined that not all leads will be pseudo-assigned to a REP.

I decided the best way to handle this is through workflow. I originally attempted to create an email template in MSCRM. The MSCRM email template has certain limitations, and the biggest is that the email template cannot be sent to anyone other than the email address associated with the MSCRM lead.

Swing and a miss…

My next idea was to use the create an email as a workflow action. However there was no obvious way to skim information off the Lead objects and put it in the body of the email.

After discussions with Microsoft, I discovered that we could create an email in workflow and use xml slugs in the body, we could also use HTML format the email. This worked perfectly for the Lead Notification. I haven’t tested it anywhere else yet, but I am fairly certain that this can apply across the board.

The slugs are pretty simple to understand, and the information to create them is readily available in the Schema Manager. You can get to the Schema Manager in the deployment manager on the CRM server.

The basic format for a leads first name is: &lead.firstname;

There is one hiccup in this system and that is when deploying a custom picklist from the schema only the integer is returned as the value in the picklist, not the string that the integer represents.

By using this basis of our Lead notification system we have created the following procedure. When a batch of Leads are entered, the data entry person can the select the leads and apply the LEAD NOTIFICATION AND FOLLOW UP rule. The system will automatically generate an email that includes contact information and follow up questions. The Email is sent to the owner of the record, in most cases the RSM. The RSM can then evaluate the Lead and make any further notation he deems necessary and forward it to the appropriate Rep. The rep can then fulfill the Follow-Up requirements, and email it back, since it is a Registered CRM EMAIL when the rep replies to the email it is already associated with the lead, making it that much easier for the RSM to qualify or disqualify the lead.

Not perfect, but a half decent workaround.

CRM Integration

2005-04-13T14:22:00.000-04:00

On of the biggest advantages of MS CRM for UECORP was that it fit so well with our current Great Plains Solution. The integrator that came with it was based on the BizTalk Model, and while powerful, it was lumbering recourse hog. It might have been fine in a smaller environment, but with a 12 GB Sales database, we were constantly running into buffer overflows crashing the Queues in the integrator. We knew we would be looking for a better solution to the problem in the next year or so, but when Hurricane Ivan dumped 12 feet of water into my server room, we decided the future was now.

After months of searching for the right solution and looking for the right balance of speed and power, we settled on Scribes Insight solution. And the installation will Begin tomorrow. This selection process itself was not with out painful lessons.

Does anyone remember back at the turn of the century (1999-2000) when white papers were technical tools written by Software Engineers and Technical Writers? That’s not the case anymore as these things have become just more marketing fodder corrupted by the almighty sales push. You can no longer read a white paper with out seeing marketing sound bites like “much easier to install than other solutions” and “More powerful database Engine” these phrases wouldn’t be a sore spot for me, except that they often fail to backup these claims with any technical proof.

The main problem I found with Scribes white papers was that in the white paper for the MSCRM to Great Plains Connector was that it stated that certain add-ins or modules were part of the package, and only after the purchase did I find out that they were not, the financial impact of purchasing these modules separately and adding them to the package was significant, but not enough to push me in another direction. It did leave a bad taste in my mouth though. I really like the Scribe Dashboard and the product seems to be fast easily customizable, and much simpler to work with than the default Integrator that came with MSCRM.

They offer some training with the product to get you familiar with it. The don’t document in the training information that you need to have the product installed to get anything out of the training. So even if it’s just in a test environment, make sure you get it installed first or you’ll be behind the eight ball when the lessons start.

I’ll provide some more information after the install on my overall feel of the product, and document some of the pitfalls and sore spots we find while going live.