Customization

Price List Items

When faced with the task of creating large numbers of price list items, you may be tempted to use the Import Data Wizard to import and therefore create price list item entries. My advice is don't do this for two reasons:

Date fields and time zones

The Problem

Dynamics CRM does not provide date only fields. Although date fields may be configured to show the date only, internally the time is stored as well. The time that is stored is usually the time in UTC that corresponds to midnight in the user’s time zone. This may cause date fields to show different values depending on the time zone of the user.

Field level security in CRM

Microsoft Dynamics CRM 4.0

CRM 4.0 does not provide a method for securing records at the field level. If a user has modify access to a record then they may change any field in the record.

Where field-level security is needed then there are workarounds:

Are duplicate security roles allowed?

I recently discovered in CRM 2011 that it is possible to have security roles with the same name in a Business Unit.

For example, imagine a simple business unit scenario where the root business unit is called BU1 and there is one child business unit, BU2.

Create a security role in BU1 called Manager. The Manager role will also be available in BU2 as an inherited role. If you try to create a role called Manager in BU2, the application throws an error, Role Error - The role already exists.

Can Custom Activities synchronize with Outlook?

Microsoft Dynamics CRM 2011 introduces custom activities. However, custom activities cannot be configured to synchronize with Outlook records.

Multiple relationships between the same entities cause multiple lookups to be populated with the same value

Imagine that you create multiple relationships between Accounts and Contacts. This will create several lookup attributes on the Contact entity which may be added to the Contact form.

When a new contact is created within an Account all the lookup attributes will be populated with the name of the Account. Often this is not desirable but according to this article, http://support.microsoft.com/kb/946599, this is by design.

Change name of the root business unit

It is not possible to change the root business name for a CRM organization after installation using the application. But what if you have installed CRM with the wrong root business unit name or need to change it after installation?

There is a way round this if you follow these steps. But please make sure you read and understand completely what has to be done and also make sure you have sufficient backups in case things don't work out.

Columns shown in duplicates detected view

The columns shown in the Duplicates Detected windows are based on the Lookup view for the relevant entities.

For the new and potential duplicate records, the columns used in the duplicate detection rule that triggered the duplicate detection are also shown.

For the potential duplicate records, the record status and modified on columns are also shown.

The application does not provide a way to customize the additional columns that are shown.

Customizing Marketing List Views

The CRM application does not allow marketing list views to be customized. However, the views are stored in the savedquerybase table and may in fact be customized.

Firstly, we need to find the GUIDs for the relevant views. There are nine views in total, All, Active and Inactive members for Accounts, Contacts and Leads. Query the table (using SQL Server Management Studio) for these views using:

select * from savedquerybase where name like '%mem%'

Changing country fields to picklists

Changing country fields from free text to picklists is not a trivial undertaking. There are several considerations:
1. The existing country fields cannot be changed to be a picklist
2. The country field appears in several record types (account, contact, quote, order, invoice and addresses).
3. Addresses are mapped when creating records in the context of other records.
The options appear to be:

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