Merry Christmas !

Only few days, hours left and it is X-mas, the time for eating, celebrating and have a good time.

So, I would like to wish all the readers of my blog a

Of course, more posts are coming your way :)

Keep reading!

New CRM 2011 book

Of course several books have been published about CRM 2011 already, but this book is kinda special. I was one of the technical reviewers of the book (yes, shameless echo boost).

As reviewer you just get the chapters review them and send them back. The book Microsoft Dynamics CRM 2011 New Features book dropped on my doormat few days ago. It was kinda cool to see that the authors were Jim Wang & Darren Liu.

Of course I can tell you that you should buy and read it, but decide for yourself. Its good book and also for more experienced CRM users nice to have and it might give you some new insights. More info about the book here . 


Happy reviewing reading :)

The Magic Ribbon: greyed-out + active buttons

Releasing your solution to another environment brings a lot of challenges, especially when this is the production environment. It is an extra challenge to deploy to architecture where RDS (Remote Desktop Services), the next version of Terminal Server 2003.

During testing we runned into strange behaviour of the ribbon. It suddenly got greyed-out, but even stranger, the buttons still worked.

Magic Ribbon: grey-out but clickable buttons

Looking closely we saw an JavaScript error (yes, bottom left of your IE). The error point out to SEC7115, which should have something to do with CSS not loaded correctly (to show errors hit F12). You may have similar errors.

Error message in debug window

Security settings in IE 

After some basic debugging and searches we also got some messages stating that "This page is accessing information that is not under control...".

Other side effect was that reaching the CRM application on server name worked fine, using the ip-address did show the mystery ribbon.

After some research this should do the trick and get it working again:
1) Add your CRM url to Local internet  (Internet Options > Security)
2)  Edit the settings in this zone -> Custom Level 
3) Change in Miscellaneous section: Access data sources cross domain to Enable




Hope this post save you some frustrations and looking for solutions. The error might sent you to different path..

Happy debugging :)

iSad

Just started to wake up and read the breaking news that Steve Jobs has passed away. I must say in the beginning I disliked the iMac ( tv like "PC"), in the time that I was building website. I spent lot of hours to have the same site on all OS's and browser versions.

This changed since the introduction of the iPad, which is used even more then my pc by my family, almost more then the television :) The step to iPhone was heavenly after all crappy other Smartphone like Blackberry, how you can type with that tiny keyboard, Nokia and also Samsung.

R.I.P. - Steve Jobs, 1955 - 2011

Prototyping CRM with mSketch

Yes, August was quiet month or at least it seems so on my blog. Nevertheless, very busy month with a lot going on.

Currently working on an new implementation of CRM 2011. In every project you have to demonstrate/show the screen based on the requirements you have gathered.

 Its commonly down in mock-up, images (either vmware, hyper-v or virtualbox) or via demo system like crm online. In all cases you have the challenges that you cannot show full functionality (besides out-of-box stuff). 

A good alternative is the use of mSketch a solution (e.g. stencils) for Microsoft Expression Blend. I must admit I seen the name popup in my MSDN account, but didn't use it before.

The most interesting about this mSketch is that you can make a mock-up with actually functionality behind it e.g. pull downs are opening when clicking on it. The solution, yes everything is called solutions today same as in Visual Studio, exist of toolbox with all fields you can use for designing your form as you can see in the image to the left.

So you might think I could also use my own tools or my own development enviroment. There is more about this way of working then you might expect. I did some basic research I came across the book "Dynamic Prototyping with Sketchflow in Expression Blend".

There have been a lot of studies about how our brain is processing images. In short our visual cortex initially reacts and is attracted by straight lines and angles of light,which means that if we use black and white sketches we have a advantage over something with lots of colors, images etc. It would also mean that the audience quicker should understand what you mean and your feedback should also be more constructive.

Of course, you have to get used to the Microsoft Expression tool first, but that shouldn't be that hard. You don't have build your own solution for CRM, it is already there too, so you can start almost immediately.

The mSketch stencils are made by Magnetism, also more information about the out of the box functionality can be found there.

 So start make your prototyping easier and more convincing, who wouldn't like that :-)

Dynamics connector... nice but no worthy yet?

I first saw the Dynamics connector at Convergence of last year. I was at that time not very impressed and it seems still a lot of work had to be done for making it a solid solution.

I am currently working on new assignment and due to the requirement we have to implement Biztalk 2010 for integration purposes. So I am currently focusing on the heavy weight for integration.

Nevertheless, I also had to look to two integration based on the Dynamics connector and as you might expect they both failed. It was integration between CRM and ERP (Nav and AX). Most complaints I heard that its almost impossible to debug, I also experienced it myself. The error messages are so general that you keep searching untill.... The other complaint I heard that Microsoft support on the connector is bare minimum and seems not to get a lot of attention.

In both cases the solution tends to be to turn to non-free integration solution either of Scribe or even custom .NET solutions.

Of course, I am curious if this was just my bad luck or that more of you have bad experience with the free connector? I also read some post that people got it working, but it didn't say if it was just basic or more complex integration.

Keep it integrated! :)

You missed it?

Yes, you might have missed it. Last Friday it was CRM day at Decisions Spring 2011. This time the event was held for 4 days in a row and also AX, NAV and GP had their own day.

It was a very interested event with many presentation including an impressive list of presentations given by people like: Varun Krishna, Larry Lents, Anne Stanton and Matthew 'CRM Bible' Wittemann :-) Of course, I must admit I was one of the speakers too and of course a litte proud to be in the company of big names in the crm community.

Of course, I had a presentation about data migration. This time about the 5 sins of data migration and after the ppresentation some very interesting questions and positive feedback too.

Now waiting for the next event, unfortunately I cannot make it to WPC but waiting for other events... might be Convergence and Decisions Fall 2011?

Don't miss it next time....