The trick to editing more than one record is to use the Edit option under the More Actions button. If you have specific records that you want to change, use the Advanced Find feature of CRM to find the ones you want, then select them on the screen (using the checkbox, or shift-click, or Ctrl-click like you would with other Windows apps) and then click on More Actions and Edit. This will give you a blank form – any field you change there will update all the _selected_ records when you hit the save button. Warning: there is no Undo feature.
The reason I underlined the word “selected” is that all your views are limited to a certain number of records, between 25 and 250, depending on your setting under CRM’s Tools/Options/General/Records per page setting. So, for example If you have 1000 records to change, you will have to hit the Next page icon in your view and select the next group of records and do the More Actions/Edit again.
Tuesday, April 22, 2008
Sunday, April 13, 2008
Install and Delete MS CRM organization from deployment manager
I have been doing a lot of customizations for my clients Microsoft CRM packages version 4 has made it so much easier to manage all those different packages. I have Server 2003 (with Active Directory as my own domain) and the enterprise edition installed and the deployment manager allows me to have any number of organizations installed at one time - compared with version 3 which forced me to use a different VM for each customer which was slow and disk hungry.
For one client however, I needed two copies running at one time (for testing and development purposes) with each one installed as its own organization. The process was very simple. The client created a backup of their CRM4 version from their server and I restored it on my laptop. Then using the deployment manger, you can Import that DB as a new CRM organization. During this process it will ask you where your SSRS is located so be prepared for that. For development of reports, I created a separate virtual folder in SSRS for that client so that I never overlap my customer customizations.
During this process, it will re-assign ownership of all the records because of the way Active Directory works; the GUID's of CRM users in their domain would be different from users in my laptop's domain. For my purposes, I just let the system assign them all to my admin account. This whole reassignment process can take a while to run if you have a large database.
When I was done, I decided that I wanted to delete the extra organization, but there wasn't any evidence of an organization Delete function in deployment manager, just a Disable link. After a bit of poking around, I discovered that you must first Disable the organization, then you will get the options to either re-enable it or delete it. When you choose to delete, it will _not_ delete the database; you can do this on your own.
For one client however, I needed two copies running at one time (for testing and development purposes) with each one installed as its own organization. The process was very simple. The client created a backup of their CRM4 version from their server and I restored it on my laptop. Then using the deployment manger, you can Import that DB as a new CRM organization. During this process it will ask you where your SSRS is located so be prepared for that. For development of reports, I created a separate virtual folder in SSRS for that client so that I never overlap my customer customizations.
During this process, it will re-assign ownership of all the records because of the way Active Directory works; the GUID's of CRM users in their domain would be different from users in my laptop's domain. For my purposes, I just let the system assign them all to my admin account. This whole reassignment process can take a while to run if you have a large database.
When I was done, I decided that I wanted to delete the extra organization, but there wasn't any evidence of an organization Delete function in deployment manager, just a Disable link. After a bit of poking around, I discovered that you must first Disable the organization, then you will get the options to either re-enable it or delete it. When you choose to delete, it will _not_ delete the database; you can do this on your own.
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