SSRS security with CRM 4.0

So I am knocking my brans out trying to add a couple security groups to a custom report folder I created on SSRS and the answer is deceivingly simple.

The problem was that after I created the folder, it needed permissions for a couple additional groups: ReportingGroup and SQLAccessGroup. when I typed one of those names in the New Role Assignment for my folder security, it said the group did not exist. The solution is to copy the group name _and_ the GUID that follows it and paste it into the new group name field.

CRM Auto Filtering

I have been reading up on MS CRM auto filtering which allows you to create a report that you can associate with an entity and then use it on a view or a single record (http://blogs.javista.com/2009/03/18/microsoft-dynamics-crm-pre-filtering-tips/). I started creating some reports this way, but then decided that I also wanted to call the reports programatically and for that I would need parameters. My solution is to make my actual report work with parameters, then create a 'wrapper' report that uses the auto filtering capability, then calls the real report as a sub-report.

Adobe Flex Grid Column Sort

Lately I have been doing some work with Adobe Flex because it has some very nice data manipulation features, such as the DataGrid. One item that came to my attention was that when I sorted a column, I wanted the grid to jump to the top of the data set.

Here is my solution:

1. add a "headerRelase" attribute to the DataGrid tag that will call an event handler

<mx:DataGrid id="ratesGrid" headerRelease="ratesGrid_headerRelease(event)" >

2. create the new event handler

private function ratesGrid_headerRelease(evt:DataGridEvent):void {
ratesGrid.validateNow(); // allow sort to occur
ratesGrid.selectedIndex=-1; // turn off selected/highlighted row
ratesGrid.scrollToIndex(0); // move to top of data set
}

Need more women in IT management roles

When someone told me a few years ago that Microsoft SharePoint and CRM were disruptive technologies, I was a bit hesitant to believe it, but I can see it now.

Historically many computer jobs grew out of the engineering fields dominated by men such as computer science. According to some recent polls (http://www.ncwit.org/pdf/BytheNumbers09.pdf), women only occupy 24% of jobs in the IT sector. I believe that this statistic will be changing for the better.

The "disruptive" part of these technologies is that it is changing how IT departments (and consultants like me) will be supporting the clients. In order to make implementations work, it now requires people to have good business process and people skills as compared with the “days of yore” when programming skills were central to an implementation. If you think of an IT worker as just a programmer, then you need to re-think how you are managing your IT services.

Since I have been working with clients on implementing Microsoft CRM and SharePoint technologies, the majority of people I have worked with were women, and all of their implementations have been successful. In the end, my clients were able to extend the usefulness of the product without having to engage other IT resources.

The pre-registration statistics at the June 2009 SUGDC.ORG SharePoint conference indicates the workforce is changing with over 40% of the attendees to be women. I believe this is because these two products (and others like them) give the client the ability to customize the product to fit a particular business process without the help of typical IT staff, and thus giving women more opportunities to engage in the implementation process and join the ranks of IT professionals.

MS CRM Address Sync Workflow

In Microsoft CRM, you can have many contacts connected to a single account. When you initially create the contact, it takes the address from the account record, but the user has the option to change the address. This is a nice feature because it supports companies that have employees who are not all located in the same building. But what happens when you change the account address? All those contacts end up staying at the old address. You could manually change them, but there is no need because you can automate this process. The Microsoft CRM Team blog has some suggestions to remedy this problem, but it requires building a custom program (which they provide) and installing it on the CRM server. This could be problematic for users of CRM On-line, so I have a solution using the workflow tool.

In the Contact entity, create a couple new attributes: one will be called “Sync with Account Address” as a bit field (yes/no), and the other is wfDateOfAddressSync (Date & Time). Allow me to digress on the name of the second attribute. I use the “wf” in front of attributes that will not be visible on a form, but are used by workflow to control actions. This makes it easy for me to distinguish them from user attributes, and serves as a reminder so that in the future I don’t delete it because it appears to be unused. Place the new bit attribute on the form in a conspicuous location in the address section and publish the changes.

In the Account entity, create a new field attribute wfDateOfAddressChange (Date & Time) and publish the changes.

Now create a workflow called Trigger Address Sync for the Account entity. This workflow should execute when a new Account is created, or when one of the address fields changes. It will update the account record and place the Workflow Execution time in the wfDateOfAddressChange attribute. Make sure the workflow Scope is set to Organization and Publish it.

Next, create a workflow for the Contact entity. Set this one up to “Start When” the a Contact is created, or if either the “Sync with Account Address” attribute or wfDateOfAddressSync attribute changes. Now add a condition to only execute the rest of the workflow if the Sync with Account Address attribute is Yes, then add a timeout condition that will wait for the wfDateOfAddressSync on the Account entity to not be equal to the Contact entities wfDateOfAddressChange attribute. The final step is to update the contacts’ address fields to be the same as the Parent (Account) address fields, and update the wfDateOfAddressSync attribute to take on the value of the Parent (Account) wfDateOfAddressChange attribute. This last item will create a loop by triggering this workflow to start again (by changing the date attribute) and wait for the next Account address change. Make sure the workflow Scope is set to Organization and Publish it.

Remember, this new Contact workflow will not start synchronizing until they have either been manually applied to existing contacts, or someone updates one of the Start When fields (mentioned above) fields.

Now go test it and have fun!

Change multiple records in CRM the easy way

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.

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.