This company had been spun off from a much larger company and had to implement all of the software systems to manage their business. At that point I was hooked — I became obsessed with how Dynamics CRM could help businesses develop inexpensive integrated systems to manage all of the data that the organization captures.
However, my employer and I did not share that enthusiasm and shortly after completing the Trade Spend project; I moved on to another Microsoft partner who was looking to build out a CRM practice.
By the time Dynamics 4. Dynamics CRM 4. We were still limited to using Internet Explorer and Outlook for browsing, and if I remember correctly, we had the ability to do very light access via mobile browsers. CRM Online developed its popularity very slowly, and On Premise was still the default implementation choice. The timeframe between the release of CRM 4. During that period social media like Facebook and LinkedIn began introducing people to the idea of interacting online with friends, neighbors and business associates.
The application also had an Office-like Ribbon for common commands My favorite feature was subgrids on forms. The ability to display a grid of related records on a form was awesome! CRM still suffered from the lack of compatibility with browsers other than Internet Explorer on Windows. IE had a very poor reputation and many users only wanted to use Firefox or Chrome. This incompatibility became a point of contention at many sales demos as people just hated IE! Of course, Salesforce.
Another drawback that still existed in CRM was the number of popups. After several hours of using CRM, users could have dozens of windows open! I remember being very careful while demoing to close these pop-ups as soon as possible lest the prospect notice. Before Dynamics CRM was released, I had left my previous employer as they had decided that in the wake of the economic slowdown in , they needed to focus on their core business.
For the first four years, XRM Services was me. I hustled to find new clients and became relatively successful — back then success meant I could feed my family and pay my bills! I am certain hundreds remain in production, plugging away. Pop-ups were finally under control as the streamlined interface opened records in the existing context.
Business process flows were my favorite feature as they gave organizations an interactive way to visually integrate their business process with Dynamics CRM. For example, every entity must have a GUID primary key. You cannot have composite keys either, or unique columns. Since CRM puts these limitations in place, you can make certain assumptions, which allows the system to act in a very uniform manner and allows software built on top of CRM to be simplified by making those very same assumptions.
In addition to the limitations, CRM also adds a host of standard attributes to every entity. Because of the unified entity system, CRM enables the use of file attachments on every single Entity as well as a comprehensive security system that allows administrators to choose who has access to which entity types and how much control each user has over that entity.
As a CRM developer, you will want to interact with entities using C code. There are two primary methods of doing so. The first method is to interact with an entity within a CRM plug-in or workflow. Plug-ins and workflows are attached to a single entity type and executed when certain events happen for example, creation or modification of an entity record.
These objects expose a collection of property objects which you are free to modify, where each property represents an attribute on the entity. The other method of interacting with entities is to use the CRM Web Services, which allows generic access to entities using the DynamicEntity class, but also introduces typed entities.
One of the neat things about CRM is that when the data model is updated, the CRM system actually generates a brand new WSDL definition, defining all of the entities and attributes in the system as datatypes that can be consumed by Web service clients. For example, the CrmNumber class represents a bit integer and exposes a property named Value that allows you to retrieve the true value.
Most code has no idea what a CrmNumber is, but most code does understand what an Int32 is. Instead we had to extract the. NET base types first and then we were able to use them. On the external side, all of these classes are replicated via the svcutil. So while we could access an external DynamicEntity, it was a brand new class that looked identical to the internal DynamicEntity.
There are several commercial products out there which will generate an ORM layer. Most products will do what most people need them to do and are pretty good solutions. Ultimately we decided to roll our own code generator so we could tailor it to our unique requirements.
If you decide that your CRM project requires entity code generation to streamline the development process, I would definitely recommend looking at the commercial products out there first. Dynamics CRM presents unique challenges to overcome in order to support a team of developers working concurrently on the same application.
For one thing, it quickly became obvious to us that each developer needed their own CRM environment. However, as we began to implement more advanced scenarios it became clear that the multi-tenancy support did not easily apply to all the different ways we needed to extend the platform.
For example, if you are adding your own ASP. Furthermore, it was not uncommon during the course of development to find ourselves needing to recycle the CRM Web application pool or to stop and restart the Windows service that supports asynchronous operations in CRM. As you can imagine, that creates chaos when multiple developers are working in the same environment. We also discovered early on that it was far easier to develop when Visual Studio was installed directly on the same machine as CRM.
Remote debugging can certainly be a lifesaver when that is your only option, but in general it can be difficult to configure properly and the performance can be quite slow. It was also easier to automate the deployment of our build output to the CRM server when we were building the application on the same machine.
We leveraged MSBuild extensively to automate deployment as part of our development build process. We also created several utilities that we plugged into Visual Studio to help automate some of the more tedious tasks.
This included tools for registering our plug-ins and workflows as well as importing data into CRM, which are actions you will find yourself doing frequently during the course of development. Our developers were running desktop operating systems locally and it was not practical to have them switch to Windows Server. We used virtualization to overcome this issue, and each developer worked in their own virtual environment running Windows Server We sometimes struggled to keep adequate resources available to support this, even with server-based virtualization and reasonably powerful hardware.
You can deploy Dynamics CRM in many different configurations with various components of the platform optionally installed on separate machines. For development, however, we found it simpler to install all components of CRM on a single server.
We configured CRM and Windows consistently across our different environments. This greatly simplified the deployment of our application during the development cycle because we could engineer our build and deployment process for a consistent target environment.
However, it was still necessary during the QA cycle to test thoroughly on every configuration of CRM and Windows Server that we planned to support in order to expose any unanticipated issues caused by different configurations. The final piece of the puzzle for us was source control.
In general, source control for a CRM application is no different than any typical. NET application. Tracking our changes to the data model, on the other hand, was a different story. CRM allows exporting the data model to an XML file, and this file is the most practical way to store model changes in source control.
This XML file can quickly become very complex and extremely large, and it is not practical to modify or even read manually as may be the case with a SQL script. Furthermore, the order of the contents in the file can easily become scrambled as it is imported and exported from different CRM environments. This made it very difficult to determine what changes were made to the file and by whom. It was also very easy for one developer to accidently overwrite or remove changes made to the model by others.
We did our best to address these problems by documenting and adhering to a strict process for making model changes that required coordination across the team. We used utility programs to assist with comparisons with previous versions of the file, and to automate the export process to avoid human error. Finally, we split the components of our data model into several logical groupings and exported and maintained those groupings with separate XML files.
This made the data modeling process manageable and allowed us to have some level of traceability, but it was still not ideal. However, CRM offers enough flexibility in its modeling capabilities that you still need to have an overarching plan when designing your data model. You must decide how to optimize and normalize your data model to fit your needs, whether it should be optimized for fast data access or optimized for reporting.
Things got even more complex, since we were designing software that would be sold to customers, who in turn would change the base data model we shipped. This introduced a lot of interesting issues that CRM had not initially been designed to handle. The first two are really equivalent, and CRM just switches between the two names depending on which entity you are currently looking at.
One of the very first limitations we ran into was the lack of a One-to-One relationship. More specifically, CRM lacks the ability to create entities which inherit from other entities. This is a pattern that many people end up needing when designing database models.
For example, you may have many different types of people stored in your CRM database: customers, contacts, users, accounts, and leads. Most of these entities will share common fields, such as name, address, email, and so on.
Furthermore, it reduces the referential integrity of your system because you might have a related table that should only be related to customers, but not contacts. However the relationship would have no way of automatically determining that the person it is linked to is actually a customer.
Enter the conceptual one-to-one relationship which can solve the problem for you if you have a base table containing common fields and then child tables linking to the base table. This is great from a normalization point of view because a given piece of data only exists in one place and you never have to worry about synchronization issues. However, we ultimately rejected this approach due to several usability concerns, the most grievous of which was record editing.
In the end, our solution to this problem involved replicating fields across multiple entities. When the replicated fields needed to be synchronized, we ended up using plug-ins to automatically transfer the values from one to another. One of the huge disadvantages of this solution is the fact that the names, types, and sizes of the fields across all entities must remain synchronized at all times or else the synchronization process will fail.
This means that if a field on one entity is changed, related fields on the other synchronized entities will also have to be modified accordingly. Picklist fields are like enumerated types; they hold a given domain of values. We found that the domain of values in any given picklist is going to vary far more often than any other attribute type in a data model.
This is mostly because picklists are a lightweight method of introducing a data relationship without creating a new table in the database. Ultimately the solution was to just bite the bullet and create new tables for fields that were previously picklists in our model.
A new update is available for the time zone and daylight saving time changes in Microsoft Dynamics CRM 4. A workflow is unexpectedly triggered when you update a record that has a duplicate record in Microsoft Dynamics CRM 4. The existing custom security roles are not granted hidden privileges after you apply hotfix in Microsoft Dynamics CRM 4. The default precision of a money field is set to two when you use the Korean language or the Japanese language in Microsoft Dynamics CRM 4.
You experience slow performance or timeouts when you try to access some views in Microsoft Dynamics CRM 4. Administrators can unexpectedly view Active Directory users who do not belong to the administrator's organizational unit in Microsoft Dynamics CRM 4. The e-mail router moves unsolicited e-mail messages to an undeliverable folder if the at symbol is the first character in a sender's display name in Microsoft Dynamics CRM 4. An account that is no longer the parent account of a child account can unexpectedly view the child account records in Microsoft Dynamics CRM 4.
A tool is available to extract the tracking token from the e-mail subject and update the tracking token column of the e-mail table in Microsoft Dynamics CRM 4. A hotfix that enables you to track an appointment in a shared calendar in the Microsoft Dynamics CRM 4.
Some records in the offline database are lost after you ignore a problems that occurs when you go online in Microsoft Dynamics CRM 4. An entity form loads slowly after you add many fields of several different attribute types in Microsoft Dynamics CRM 4. When you create a campaign or a quick campaign to generate an e-mail activity by using the "Assign to a queue" option, the sender is set incorrectly as owner of a bulk operation job in Microsoft Dynamics CRM 4. An unexpected error message occurs although you change the customer opportunity role from duplicate one to a unique one in Microsoft Dynamics CRM 4.
You receive a "stack overflow" error message if the OnChange event is enabled for a lookup field in a entity form and if this field is changed after a duplicates detected message in Microsoft Dynamics CRM 4.
Error message when you create multiple users at the same time by using the Service. Select another domain logon and try again". Error message when you try to change a domain name of an existing Microsoft Dynamics CRM user in a trusted domain: "The domain name does not exist". The service calendar does not show service activities or regular appointments that begin before the display interval.
Error message when you try to save changes that you made to a security role in a business unit in Microsoft Dynamics CRM 4. The database of a new organization does not contain the metadata hotfixes after you apply the metadata hotfixes to the new organization in Microsoft Dynamics CRM 4. SqlException: Subquery returned more than 1 value" error message when you try to use the Advanced Find option to add members to a marketing list in Microsoft Dynamics CRM 4.
You experience slow performance or the application becomes unresponsive when you query email messages under a serializable isolation level in Microsoft Dynamics CRM 4. A time-out occurs or you experience slow performance when you save an Appointment activity after you run the Internet Information Services reset in Microsoft Dynamics CRM 4. The postal code of a contact appears in an incorrect position after you synchronize contacts from a Microsoft Dynamics CRM 4. The status reason of the workflow remains Waiting when you run a workflow to send an email message from an email template in Microsoft Dynamics CRM 4.
The synchronization process enters an endless loop when you synchronize data to Outlook in the Microsoft Dynamics CRM 4. Applications using the Microsoft CRM Deployment web service may experience time out errors in deployments that have large domains and multiple sub domains. Dynamics CRM 4.
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