NEW BLOG!

Hi Guys

Unfortunately ths will be my last post here, please find my new blog here

Thanks for using my blog and I hope you join me at my new blog!

Filtering Custom CRM reports

Hi Guys

I have had much fun over recent days producing custom reports for our clients and as I am learning and making the reports flashier, I have finally learnt what you need to do to add a filter to your reports.

Firstly, you must alias the tables that you are retrieving data from with CRMAF_, for example

select *
from filteredaccount as CRMAF_filteredaccount

Secondly, if you want to specify which columns you wish to select you include the CRMAF reference in your select query

select CRMAF_FilteredAccount.name
from filteredaccount as CRMAF_filteredaccount

It is very basic I know, but if like me you have spent time creating reports in CRM then editing them in Visual Studio, just to have the filter, this saves a lot of time!

Happy Reporting!

Vista Business, Pre-release .Net Framework and the Outlook Client - Part 3

So after a weekend of banging my head against a wall, I have finally put to bed the issue of CRM Client not installing on a Vista Business laptop that has had a pre-released version of .Net installed on it... and to be honest it was a simple fix in the end!

Once I had got the .net uninstalled, it was still telling me that it could not install the client, so I took a backup of the registry and started messing around with the .net and ASP keys, which did provide fruition in the end, however if you are going to do this please, please please take a backup other wise you could be in a whole world of trouble!

So once finished experimenting, i simply deleted the entire ASP key from HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Microsoft

Then rebooted the machine and carried out the install/config and guess what, it all worked!

So good luck if you have this issue and hope that this helps!

Vista Business, Pre-release .Net Framework and the Outlook Client - Part 2

Hi Guys

You may remember a previous post where I talked about the firewall settings on Vista preventing the install of the outlook Client.

Subsequently it has turned out that this was not the only issue on said users laptop. Having the user away for the past month it has been difficult to diagnose the issues correctly, but having uninstalled the client again, as well as all .Net versions, things became clearer.

I was now getting an error message that pointed towards a pre-release of .net 3.0 being on the machine, however no matter where i searched in add/remove programs I could not remove this software.

However after some searching, it turns out that MS have released an Uninstall tool that removes all versions of pre-release .net 3.0.

Thankfully this has now removed the issue that we were having, and now barring any more issues, our client should now be able to use CRM!

Event Management Accelerator Part 2

Hi Guys



For a while I had struggled to find a way of displaying who had actually registered for the event, without actually going into the particular campaign.
However after much experimentation with the advanced find, a solution is with us!


What you need to do is:

Create an advanced find on Contacts with the following criteria



Activity Parties (Party)
Activity (Campaign Response)
Response Code Equals Registered
Parent Campaign(Campaign)
Campaign Equals "your event name"




all you then need to do is setup one for each campaign!

Display the last Note on an Opportunity Report

Hi Guys

One of my clients recently requested that we design an opportunity report that also provided the last note added, so they could have an easy summary report to present to their board of directors.

After a few hours scratching my head and I must admit a few nearlys it got time to call on the knowledge of others, and with thanks to Joel from Customer Effective, I was able to produce the correct SQL statement and then design the report is Visual Studio...

anyways here is the SQL:

select *
from(select filteredannotation.objecttypecode, filteredannotation.notetext, filteredannotation.objectid, filteredopportunity.accountidname, filteredopportunity.customeridname,filteredannotation.isdocument, filteredannotation.createdon, filteredopportunity.stepname, filteredopportunity.estimatedvalue, filteredopportunity.estimatedclosedate, filteredopportunity.closeprobability, filteredopportunity.statecodename,ROW_NUMBER()OVER(Partition By filteredannotation.objectid Order By filteredannotation.createdon DESC) AS RowNmbrfrom filteredannotation, filteredopportunitywhere filteredannotation.objectid = filteredopportunity.opportunityid) as test
where rownmbr = 1

So once this query was added to a new dataset, the report was designed and showed only the last note added!

So special thanks to Joel and a Merry Christmas to everyone!!!

CRM Client 4.0, Vista Business & Hosted CRM

Hi Guys

I have had a very trying day involving the CRM client, Vista Business and a number of firewall applications!

I have seen that a lot of people out there have had some issues with this setup, and there a number of registry hacks etc out there that people have tried.

However upon installing a fresh copy of Vista and Office on a test machine and enabling full blocking and tracking in Mcaffe firewall I found that there are three components of the CRM Client install that require external access, they are:

C:\Program Files\Microsoft Dynamics CRM\Client\ConfigWizard\Microsoft.Crm.Client.Config.exe

C:\Program Files\Microsoft Dynamics CRM\Client\ConfigWizard\Microsoft.Crm.Client.AutoUpdate.exe

C:\Program Files\Microsoft Dynamics CRM\Client\res\web\bin\ Microsoft.Crm.Application.Hoster.exe

I found once I had gone back through my clients personal firewall settings (which there were several) and enabled these three programs full access to the net, the install completed and they were able to use CRM, which meant that I could go home, Happy Days!