Joel Lindstrom

As we have posted previously, one thing to monitor is the size of the system job table in CRM. If you have many workflows or other system jobs, the AsynchronousBase table can grow very large. Our friends at PowerObjects posted...

Update Rollup 12 for Microsoft Dynamics CRM 4.0

Joel Lindstrom

Microsoft has released Update Rollup 12 for Microsoft Dynamics CRM. Update Rollup 12 is a cumulative update including all updates in the previous 11 Update Rollups, as well as many new fixes. As usual, we recommend only installing the Update...

Our Annual User Group Conference is October 13 - 15, 2010

Hannah Mayer

Mark your calendars for this year's annual Customer Effective CRM User Conference. Hosted at the beautiful and historic Westin Poinsett in downtown Greenville, South Carolina, the 2010 Conference will once again highlight engaging customer presentations, break out sessions discussing tips...

Quickly Create Custom Entities and Attributes in Dynamics CRM

Joel Lindstrom

The other day I had a large custom entity to create in Microsoft Dynamics CRM. This entity had over 150 custom attributes of various types, and my brain and fingers were already starting to ache just thinking about manually creating...

Microsoft CRM 4.0 database structure (to find your data and report on it)

Mark Weilandt

Having become so familiar with the CRM database structure I almost take it for granted. There is great value in how Microsoft designed and built the database and how it handles creation of new entities. I found myself explaining the...

Customer Effective Joins Elite 2010 Microsoft Dynamics Inner Circle and Presidents Club

Customer Effective

Greenville, SC - - July 21, 2010 - - Customer Effective Inc., a Microsoft Gold Certified Partner focused on Microsoft Dynamics CRM, announces their appointment to the prestigious 2010 Inner Circle for Microsoft Dynamics and the President’s Club. The elite...

WPC 2010 News Roundup

Joel Lindstrom

The Microsoft Worldwide Partner Conference (WPC 2010) is happening in Washington DC this week. In case you didn’t have a chance to attend, here’s some of the biggest news coming from WPC regarding Dynamics CRM: Introducing Microsoft Dynamics CRM 2011...

Scribe vs. Biztalk

Joel Lindstrom

When looking at data migration or integration options, a frequent question is why should we use Scribe instead of Biztalk? Scribe has created a very detailed and unbiased white paper that compares the two solutions and explains when you should...

Microsoft Dynamics CRM 4.0 - xRM Application Scalability Study

Mike Rogers

This paper describes the details and results of a benchmark testing effort around the multi-tenancy and xRM capabilities of Microsoft Dynamics CRM 4.0, the virtualization features of Microsoft Windows Server 2008 R2 Hyper-V, and the enterprise capabilities of Microsoft SQL...

Scribe Insight 7.0 Released

Joel Lindstrom

Scribe Software released Scribe insight 7.0 this morning. Read details of the release on the Scribe blog. This is a major new release of Scribe Insight. There are many improvements, but in my opinion, the most significant new features are:...

Connecting to an Oracle Database with Scribe Console/Workbench 6.5

Heather Reynolds

On a recent client implementation we came across a challenge connecting to an Oracle 10g database via ODBC on a 64-bit machine with Windows Server 2008. We initially attempted to connect to the database through the Scribe 5.3 Oracle driver...

AgFirst Farm Credit Bank Microsoft CRM Success Story Video

Mike Rogers

Customer Effective is proud to announce a new Microsoft developed video on a Microsoft CRM success story with their client, AgFirst Farm Credit Bank This is the second of two videos highlighting AgChoice Farm Credit, MidAtlantic Farm Credit, and AgFirst...

Managing Employee Contact Information Part 2

Joel Lindstrom

On Friday I posted an approach to managing contact information for employees in Microsoft Dynamics CRM. This approach was to use the user record for both users and non-user employees, and expose read access to this entity to all users....

CRM 4.0 Workflow Challenges Part 2 (Update Picklist and Bit Fields)

Matt Putnam

As a continuation of my previous post on CRM 4.0 Workflow Challenges, CRM 4.0 Workflow Challenges – Part 1 (Fields on the Form and Read-only Fields) (http://blog.customereffective.com/blog/2010/06/crm-40-workflow-challenges-part-1-fields-on-the-form-and-read-only-fields.html), here is another post on workflow challenges. This post focuses on some suggested...

Plug-Ins vs. Workflows

Joel Lindstrom

The Microsoft CRM team blog has an excellent post about when to use a workflow or a plugin: http://blogs.msdn.com/b/crm/archive/2010/06/25/plug-ins-vs-workflows-in-microsoft-dynamics-crm.aspx This is a very common question from users, and this post does a great job of clarifying when each approach is...

Managing Employee Contact Information in Microsoft Dynamics CRM Part 1

Joel Lindstrom

Many people use Microsoft Dynamics CRM to manage contact information for people outside of their company and provide a central address book of business critical external contacts; however, what about internal contacts? CRM can also be a very useful tool...

Marketing Effectiveness with Microsoft CRM

Dan Griffin

Whether your company has a mature CRM program fostering growth and managing relationships or your company has recently decided to add a CRM solution to support your business model, we are finding that customers are starting to increase their focus on marketing capabilities. Microsoft CRM provides users with a great starter set of tools for everything from managing marketing campaigns, to building dynamic marketing lists, to tracking and analyzing the productivity of your efforts. I am not going to write about the individual feature sets within Microsoft CRM for marketing, but instead I am going to focus on some guided stages to ensure marketing success when coupled with an effective marketing management solution.

Invalid Argument Error When Posting A CRM 4.0 Report

James Diamond

Just in case you make a whole bunch of changes to a report and then get an “Invalid Argument” error when you finally post it to CRM, try the following first. If the report used to have a parent report...

CRM Picklist Values for Your Report Parameter

James Diamond

It’s pretty common to have a pulldown menu for your report parameter, but what if you wanted to use the same picklist value that’s in a CRM form? Here’s one way I go about it: SELECT DISTINCT crm_picklistvaluefield, crm_picklistvaluefieldname FROM...

Securing Sensitive Reports in Microsoft Dynamics CRM

Joel Lindstrom

A question that I get from time to time is how to be sure that certain reports are only visible for certain people. This can be for security reasons—for example, a sales manager report that shows activity levels of employees...

Customer Effective Top Finalist for the 2010 Microsoft Dynamics CRM Partner of the Year

Customer Effective

Greenville, SC - - June 23, 2010 - - Customer Effective Inc., a Microsoft Inner Circle and Gold Certified Partner focused on Microsoft Dynamics CRM, announces their selection as a finalist for the Microsoft Dynamics CRM Partner of the Year...

Microsoft Dynamics CRM Rapid User Creation

Joel Lindstrom

Sometimes in a large deployment of Microsoft Dynamics CRM, it can be a challenge to create users. When you have 25-50 users, it’s not hard to manually create each user record, or to use the add multiple users tool to...

New Microsoft Dynamics Podcast Listen and Learn why RCN selected Microsoft CRM

Mike Rogers

RCN (WMA, 06-20 min) With over $740M in annual revenue, RCN is a competitive broadband services provider, delivering all-digital and high-definition video, high-speed internet and premium voice services primarily to Residential and Small and Medium Business (“SMB”) customers under the...

Microsoft Dynamics CRM Leads new Forrester research for Midsize and Large Organizations

Mike Rogers

Microsoft Dynamics CRM is positioned as the top Leader in the Forrester Wave for CRM Suites. Microsoft CRM is positioned above other competitors for Midsize and Large Organizations. We’ve moved ahead of other vendors including salesforce.com & Oracle/ Siebel! See...

Finding Your Inner Report Server: Why?

James Diamond

Previously in this series, we blogged about how to find the report server URL. This blog will cover more of the why we would want to do such a thing. Specifically, we’ll show you how to use Jump To URL...

CRM 4.0 Workflow Challenges Part 1 (Fields on the Form and Read-only Fields)

Matt Putnam

While the workflow engine in Microsoft Dynamics 4.0 is a very powerful tool, there are a few challenges when designing the workflow rules – especially around building an ‘update’ step. Here are a few challenges and some suggested workarounds for...

An Easier Way to Monitor Your Scribe Integration Processes

Jason Farmer

For anyone that's used Scribe to develop integrations between Microsoft CRM and any other application, you know the importance of monitoring your Scribe Integration Processes for potential errors. It's extremely important to notify administrators of potential problems or errors as...

Child report changes not showing when published for external use

Mark Weilandt

I ran into an interesting issue while working on a subreport that is published for external use. I was tasked with adding an additional column to the subreport that listed the Contacts for this Account. I made the change and...

Randomly Missing ISV Menus and Side-NAV Items

Jason Farmer

In a recent deployment, a client was experiencing seemingly random disappearances of side-navigation items that had been added via ISV configuration. These were meant to appear as side-navigation items on both the Account and Contact entities. The symptoms were that...

CRM with Outlook 2010/UR11 + Workaround for Missing ISV Menu items

Scott Sewell

Outlook 2010 looks great with CRM11 - although a current bug causes the ISV add-ins to be hidden. - A workaround is provided.

CRM Data Imports, CSV, and Leading Zeros

Joel Lindstrom

If you import data into CRM from CSV files via the CRM Import Untility or a tool like Scribe Insight, one frequent headache is columns with leading zeros. This most frequently comes up in postal codes or phone numbers that...