I was doing some research around different areas of Dynamics CRM 2011 and i came across the Articles entity. Looking around some I noticed the search tab in the ribbon where you can configure loads of different searches for the articles, including Full-Text Searching. This confused me a little as i was always told that we couldn't use this in CRM 2011 but seeing this makes me wonder.
So is it possible to actually use this in CRM 2011, or is it just a special feature for this one entity?
Thanks
Full-Text Searching only applies to Knowledge Base entities.
http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/gg309378.aspx
Related
I have an Office Word add-in that I wish to make it work with Office Word 2016 for Mac. I tried looking into official Microsoft documentation and could not find anything. I want to reuse as much code as possible while still having the extension to work with older versions of Word as well as Office Word 2016.
Is there any way to do this? Any help, even if it is something remotely related to this is appreciated.
TL;DR;
There is no way to do that.
Microsoft has bet on a new technology suite also called Office add-ins but web based. They are compatible with Mac. The old COM based approach (on which VSTO .NET add-in are built on) are legacy.
There is no way to reuse .NET code with this new technology, except of course to port business logic to the web server (which serves the web based add-in).
More reading on the comparison with the two add-ins generation: see this article I wrote
I second Benoit's answer. In addition, Not sure how complex is your add-in in terms of interactions with the document content, or if its a service that then inserts or imports data from a backend. Depending on that you will have more reusable code.
I would recommend you to do a full analysis on what APIs you need for your add-in to work properly. The new model offers big value with both supporting multiplatform and an easier deployment model. It also provides many rich APIs you can use, however the API depth its still not as rich as VSTO. Our goal is to get there.
I would be curious to understand if there are any gaps on you migration analysis.
thx!
I know it's hard to, but how do you improve user experience in Dynamics CRM 2011?
How do you design your forms? Are your forms "full of iframes"? Do you hide all the fields then insert an iframe that hosts and exposes all the features?
Do you try to mimic the default style of Dynamics CRM in the iframes (so that it integrates better with the user interface)?
The Xrm.Page.data.entity.attributes allow installation of onChange() handlers. That's all as far as I know. How do you deliver good user experience by having almost no feedback from the user?
I hope these are common sense questions :)
Thank you in advance!
PS: I'm kind of new in Dynamics CRM development
and...
how do you make an autocomplete text-field?
You're going to constantly fight a battle between maintainability and customization. Sure, you can do lots of custom iframes, a javascript and everything else, but Dynamics CRM is a rapid application development platform. Making the most beautiful websites ever was not its intent. Allowing the people with the business knowledge to make changes and customization that are supported through multiple release cycles was. I would try to keep it as simple as possible.
As far as an autocomplete text field, use jquery to wire up some on change events and go from there.
With regards to mimicing the default style, I think you'll find the style guide in the SDK useful for matching particular colors and fonts, etc. You can find it in sdk\resources\styleguide:
As for improving the experience, I try not to fight what the CRM framework provides. I use the existing controls as much as possible and use supported javascript to smooth over the on-form details. If you have a specific requirement we can suggest solutions. The form events for onload, onsave, and onchange provide an acceptable level of feedback for almost all situations on a data form. What specific requirement do you have that requires more than those?
Hope that helps.
I have requirement of preparing an in-house Project Management and accounting app using Microsoft Dynamics. My requirements are similar to what explained in the below page:
http://community.dynamics.com/product/crm/f/117/p/54453/98182.aspx
Can someone suggest that should we use ERP or CRM? And which one to use i.e. SL, GP, NAV, AX? And why?
CRM is probably the first choice to eliminate. Project management is usually an internally facing application, while CRM is by definition, externally facing. Secondly, if you need to maintain budgets, Dynamics CRM doesn't have anything built in for this (a general ledger for example).
As for the others, each will have its own costs and the extent of support you can get for any of them will vary depending on where your business is located. In some areas you may be able to get good SL support but no NAV or AX for example.
As for one you may not have considered, have you considered Project Server / SharePoint? If you need really heavy weight PM capability, Project may be your best bet. SharePoint can do some PM stuff. There's at least one book around by Dux Raymond Sy, published by O'Reilly. He's also done at least one webcast. Both are based on SharePoint 2007.
HTH
Of the Dynamics ERP products, SL is the one most focused on the project management (i.e. Project Accounting) space. CRM doesn't have a lot of project management capabilities built in, but is probably the most customisable and extendable of the dynamics range.
If you're after something that needs to cover the financial aspect of PM (e.g. billing, tracking costs etc) then you should look at the ERP options. If you're not worried about the financial side, then building a custom solution within CRM might be an option.
Came across this thread in a search I was doing. Hope Sukhminder Singh is still listening...
Sounds like you shouldn't abandon Dynamics CRM, a tool which your organization has tried and tested for nurturing customer satisfaction and turning it into ongoing revenue. On the other hand, you need to maintain a smooth accounting and billing relationship with the same customers - and for that, you'll need an ERP solution. As ccellar suggested NAV can do that, or even SharePoint, as suggested by Mike. I'll hazard a guess your organization already has SharePoint, too.
Now, what about the integration? You know, devising an effective, scalable, and future-proof way for getting MS folk to "talk" is quite a challenge! Also, you need a solution that places stress on human, as well as system workflows. The human factor can be decisive in time-critical projects.
Sukhminder, are you going to be coding solutions on either end? That's one way to go, though often, that option comes with high overheads: dragged-out coding projects, functionality that can be difficult to maintain, and even harder to modify, and serious concerns when one of the systems is upgraded or replaced.
From another angle--are you considering BPM? I'd urge you to.
BPM (Business Process Management) software suites are becoming an increasingly practical and mainstream option as an organization's central integration hub. BPM lets you rapidly map out and control mission critical processes involving multiple systems (as in your scenario). BPM lets you visualize the players, processes and apps over time, and when it comes to adjusting, remapping, and remodeling your workflows, you may have to do some coding, but a large part of the work can be done by experienced, non-programmer BPM users.
There are a bunch of vendors out there, each with its own pros and cons. For the job of connecting MS CRM and MS ERP/Sharepoint, here are 3 candidates I have come across.
Kofax's TotalAgility BMP integrates between Dynamics CRM and SharePoint, by leveraging SharePoint capabilities. The solution obviates elaborate coding by supporting workflows, rules, and user screens. It "orchestrates" processes between itself and other MS and products, most notably SharePoint, CRM, Lync, Visio, Outlook. They enable "in-flight" process change and dynamic BPM, so that down-time on your production is minimal. See the data sheet.
Sequence Business Process Management from PNMsoft. Provides integration with systems from many vendors. The forte is on human-centric processes, with a strong bent for Microsoft products. Sequence lets you integrate with existing systems using wizard-based connectors. When your organization changes, Sequence lets you "hot-swap" your business processes fast, without down time in your production.
MuleSoft's CRM-ERP integration. Their strong point is application integration, for connecting (legacy) systems from a range of vendors, including SAP, Oracle, Salesforce.com, and MS. The Mule ESB is a lightweight integration platform. It comes with a library of connectors to quickly create connectivity with all systems and services, whether on-premise or in the cloud. When adding or modifying an endpoint, you can easily update your integrations to reflect the change.
HTH some....
I'd start off at the Microsoft Dynamics site and explore what each product has on offer. They even have an ERP selector tool for you to try out with just a few questions. Why not contact Microsoft yourself and they could provide a list of potential partners that work in your area - it will be an important decision and they would better guide you through the selection process.
After a few projects which also had an accounting part, I would not recommend to use Dynamics CRM (at least for the accounting part). That's not what it's meant for and you have to spend much effort to get to a level of Dynamics NAV for example.
On the other side: why not combine both systems and use their strenghts.
I'm in the middle of a contract that is porting a company's hand-rolled Microsoft Access-based CRM to Microsoft CRM 4.0. It's all gone pretty well, but now I have to migrate the data across.
The data is all over the place in the source .mdb. Lots of tables, lots of duplication, and generally shows all the signs of an ad-hoc database which has grown organically (like weeds) over time.
So, my dilemma is this. Do I bite the bullet and write lots of queries inside Access to export the data into some intermediate format that CRM can somehow import? Or is there some other way? Are there any middleware tools that map data from one to the other that anyone here knows about?
Note this is my first time using CRM, so if the question is obvious, I appologise.
Cheers,
Shane
Dynamics CRM 4.0 provides built in tool called Dynamics CRM 4.0 Data Migration Manager to help developers migrate data from previous database into Dynamics CRM 4.0 database. I haven't used it extensively, but as far as i know, the previous data needs to be exported into a "standard" excel format provided by CRM 4.0 Data Migration Manager (DMM).
You can refer to below references :
http://blogs.msdn.com/crm/archive/2008/01/04/microsoft-dynamics-crm-4-0-data-migration-manager-with-john-o-donnell.aspx
http://www.microsoft.com/downloads/details.aspx?FamilyID=6766880a-da8f-4336-a278-9a5367eb79ca&displaylang=en
There is also 3rd party solutions called Scribe http://www.scribesoft.com/ that will help you migrate to Dynamics CRM 4.0 database
I've had success just using the mscrm api in these kinds of cases. You can write a .net app which use odbc to connect to your mdb then use the mscrm api to create the entities you need on that end.
Anyway you cut it - it's not too pretty but you can get the job done.
Good luck.
Ms CRM Service Reference
I am sorry to say, I think you have to bite the bullet and write queries to pull the data from various sources and use some intermediate database like access ( You may also use SQL server or any db)
In my experience of handling several data migration projects for various small and large enterprises, I have always uses MS access as my data massaging/pulling tool. It works great. It might sound a lot of work but it’s is definitely lot cheaper than buying any expensive tools and spending thousands of dollars configuring them.
I would recommend you save all your queries and write a macro to automate the import.
Hower trivial the query is, SAVE it. This will be very useful as you will have to do this again and again before you actually go live.
Once you automate it, it is just a matter of clicking a button.
Typically and data migrating project will undergo at least 2 iterations and it could go up to 10.
Once you have data in the intermediate database, you can use de duping tools to standardize and remove dups from your data. There are a lots of cheap tools available both online and offline.
My organisation is in the final stages of acquiring CRM 4.0 for use as a general purpose software development platform. The company who is selling it to us has convinced upper management that CRM will solve all our productivity problems and make software development as easy as point and click. (They don't read Brooks.)
Having resigned to the fact that I can't stop CRM from being foisted upon us developers, I have been doing research on how to manage the complexities of large scale CRM development.
I have so far identified the following complexities that need to be addressed:
CRM seems wholly incompatible with basic configuration management practices.
Keeping the black box CRM database in bidirectional synchronisation with external LOB systems is both very hard and critical to project success.
What other complexities must I take into account when building a large scale CRM application?
What limitations does CRM have as a development platform?
Edit: This topic provided additional insight.
I've worked with MS CRM 3.0 and now 4.0 here's my take:
Whenever possible focus on standard best practices. Don't get overly confused by what CRM is doing or wants you to do.
Don't be afraid to break what's "supported" by MS. With some caveats on 2 major factors - will your company let you think outside the box to solve problems and do customizations/integrations that are not officially supported? - and are you comfortable enough with .Net, SQL, javascript etc to weave through their code and implement what you need?
I have sometimes banged me head 100 times trying to do something in a "supported" fashion when one small tweak to a js file here or a small db modification there gave me what I needed.
If constant data integration with other LOB apps is critical you should consider a 3rd party tool like Scribe (http://www.scribesoft.com/). It's not cheap but can basically get you 90% of the way when it comes to integrating with your other LOB apps.
As a general rule, MS CRM is great at contact management - doing things like tracking appointments, doing mail merges, etc. Could you use it as your core HR system - probably. Finance system - maybe a bit more difficult. The further you go from it's core competency of performing contact management the more custom work you'll have to do. The more custom work you have to do the more you should consider if MS CRM is the right solution to that problem.
I know you're likely well underway into your deployment of Dynamics CRM, but just a few quick tips:
I'd avoid making unsupported changes purely because it becomes too hard to track the changes eventually. Since Dynamics CRM allows developers to make C# Plugins and access to web services, it's usually unnecessary to make unsupported changes for anything non-trivial. Plus you run the roulette of having to hide changes from MS if you have to call their support. I know many people will include external javascript files (jquery, etc) and other somewhat benign changes, but try to mentally stop yourself when an unsupported edit involves anything non-visual.
Look into the phrase Microsoft Dynamics Xrm, there are several books on the subject that are excellent, http://www.thecrmbook.com/ is particularly good because it comes with some nice custom code to use with your CRM.
Source Control your customizations xml's and don't let people touch the database, also, Google Halan CRM tool, and use it for scripting out CRM customizations and javascript files. Easier than writing custom powershell scripts to do the same job.
Transaction Support
If your application require transaction support from the underlying platform, Dynamics CRM is not the correct choice. The reason is because currently Dynamics CRM SDK web service doesn't support transaction.
The reference thread is here : Does MSCRM web-service support database transactions?
Since you would like to utilize Dynamics CRM as a platform, that means all the business logic should utilize Dynamics CRM SDK Web Services as data access layer. But imagine without the transaction support and you're invoking a series of web service calls as a unit of work, and one of the web service calls fails. That means you potentially will encounter data integrity issue.
Configuration
Usually i create a custom entity called Configuration, which will store all the necessary related configuration for the current CRM application. After it has been created, you can use Dynamics CRM SDK Web Service to read all the necessary configurations from the Configuration custom entity