Like us on facebook, we at Goldcrest are very much aware of how much social networking is favoured by Businesses and clients. Why not join our facebook page and see how we are developing our excellent CRM solutions with news on the latest advancements and quick fixes which may help provide solutions for your CRM problems & much much more. Just follow the link! 

http://www.facebook.com/event.php?eid=140977625991777#!/pages/Goldcrest-Solutions/48682639895

We recently came across an interesting problem with smart matching, we switched it off on the server and thought that all was well as we could process inbound emails successfully using our rules rather than the smart matching rules.  However, over time quite a few outbound emails started to be attached to erroneous records which suggested that smart matching was alive and kicking - after carrying out some investigation we managed to resolve the issue by installing a patch on client machines. 

http://support.microsoft.com/kb/958084

As with most Dynamics CRM providers we use blogs extensively to find javascript to do useful things with CRM.  However, when it came to renaming a tab dynamically using javascript we drew a blank.  Thankfully we have rather clever people in the developement team who provided the following javascript:

document.getElementById(’tab2Tab’).innerHTML = ‘<a onclick=”return false;” href=”javascript:onclick();” target=”_self”>Hello</a>’;

As you all probably know, tabs are zero based so tab0Tab would be the first tab and tab1Tab would be the second and so on. 

xRM is a term that neatly defines what we, at Goldcrest Solutions, have been doing for a long time with CRM, which is developing specific line of business applications that are tailored for a business requirement but use all the ‘relationship’ features that are the backbone of Microsoft Dynamics CRM.  When we demonstrate how quickly we can build a solution that matches a customer’s bespoke requirements the reaction is normally one of astonishment.  We have now developed many solutions for our customers, such as call centre, complaint management, asset management and bereavement management solutions, which are a long way away from the typical sales force automation tool that most CRM systems are used for.   So to coin (and change a little!) the phrase from the  1980s show the A-Team ‘If you have a problem, if no one else can help …. maybe you can use…Microsoft CRM’

I recently answered a question regarding designing dashboards for CRM for the CRM Forum and I thought I would share how you do this.

‘What you need to do is download (if you haven’t already done so) Visual Studio 2005/2008 load it and start a new report project, create a new data source which will point to your CRM database, add a new report and build your query.  Once you’ve run through all the steps you are now in a position to add a dashboard,  if you are running SQL 2005 install the dashboard tool, Dundas for Reporting Services (http://www.dundas.com/Components/Technologies/RS/index.aspx), which is a non-expiring eval of the dashboarding software that comes with SQL 2008.  From within Visual Studio Select ‘Chart’ from ‘toolbox’ and start adding your graphs and charts - I normally have about 4 charts per page.   Once completed save and deploy, then load up the report from IE (typically you will go to somewhere like http://reportservername/ReportServer and the report name) and copy the URL. Next step is to add it into CRM - you will need to edit your sitemap.xml file to do this.  Use something like the following code:
</Area>
<Area ID=”DB” Icon=”/_imgs/yourimage.gif />
<Titles>
<Title LCID=”1033″ Title=”Dashboards” />
</Titles>
<Descriptions>
Description LCID=”1033″ Description=”Dashboards” />
</Descriptions>
<Group Id=”DB”>
<SubArea Id=”YourReport” Icon=”/_imgs/youricon.gif” URL=”TheURLyoucopiedabove” Client=”Web,OutlookWorkstationClient” AvailableOffline”false” Tile”Dashboard” />
</Group>
</Area>
Save and upload back into CRM,  you will now have an area in CRM called Dashboards and within that area a dashboard,  this then allows you to break up dashboards by customer service, sales etc.  Also you can point to custom views in CRM when creating your dashboards that can be used to drilldown into the CRM data from the charts you’ve just created.’

We’ve had quite a few problems with plug-ins not working, they work fine in our dev environment, which is typically a VPC Server but on the customer site it would not work at all.  After a good deal of investigation we ascertained that the problem lies with the client being denied access to certain areas of the server and this can only be resolved by editing the web.config file.  What you need to do is enable the HTTP Post and HTTP Get in the web.config files located in the root of the IIS folder.  For instructions on how to do this check out the following post http://support.microsoft.com/kb/819267.

We have extended the solutions we now offer to encompass Microsoft Dynamics NAV.  Microsoft Dynamics NAV is one of the leading ERP (Enterprise Resource Planning) applications that help organisations to automate their back end business processes, such as order management.  We believe that the latest version of Dynamics NAV with its redesigned screens, focus on roles and integration into other Microsoft applications is quite simply the best solution for any organisation wanting to streamline processes, check out our Dynamics NAV page for more information.

We are developing really great solutions all the time and Twitter seems the right tool to let anyone who’s interested know about all that is good and great at Goldcrest Solutions - so if you’re interested you can follow us at http://www.twitter.com/GoldcrestGirl.

Occasionally it is necessary to put a lot of JScript code into a button or menu defined in isv.config where a function call is not possible, such as an application level button.  It is also possible that this code will contain characters that upset XML such as “<” or “>”, especially if web service calls are being made.  To get the code correctly encoded, use XML Notepad to create a dummy element with an attribute named “Javascript” and paste the JScript into the attribute.  When the saved XML is viewed in notepad or such like it has been correctly encoded and may be pasted into isv.config.

If you have customised a User Role, you may find that users who are in that permission role cannot access areas of the system.  CRM will be giving you an error that looks something like this:

Error Number: 0×80040220

Error Message: SecLib::CrmCheckPrivilege failed. Returned hr = -2147220960 on UserId: ########-####-###-####-############ and PrivilegeId: ########-####-###-####-############

If you have removed many permissions, tracing which one you removed to cause this issue can take a long time. Fortunately, a short piece of SQL will show you wish permission the system is attempting to find.  Run the following against Organisation_MSCRM

select Name, * from PrivilegeBase where PrivilegeId = ‘########-####-###-####-############’

Replace ########-####-###-####-############ with the PrivilegeId from the error message, making sure to keep it enclosed in single-quotes.  The system will now return the name of the Privilege that CRM requires to display your Entity.

For more information, see Microsoft Knowledge Base article 953962