Auto Synch Address Book into Outlook from CRM 4.0 July 3, 2008
Posted by Joel Kriel in CRM 4.0 & .Net development.Tags: address book synchronization, crm 4.0 diagnostics, Microsoft CRM 4.0, outlook 2007, synch crm contacts into outlook, try catch
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One of the great features that CRM 4.0 posseses is the intergration to Outlook. However, setting up this quality integration of CRM 4.0 to Outlook (2007 in my case) isn’t really that apparent. For instance, the ability to automatically synch all CRM leads, contacts and accounts in your Outlook address book. To achieve this you have to do a few things…..
- Set up your CRM options to do so.
- Go into Outlook, pull down menu ‘CRM’, then ‘Options’ (this will bring up your personal options in CRM (not Outlook!).
- Go into the ‘Address Book’ tab
- Check ‘Match all contacts in Microsoft Dynamics CRM’ under Contacts.
- Check ‘Match all items in Microsoft Dynamics CRM’ under Contacts.
Now to the best of my knowledge (which is limited I admit), this sets up CRM to look to synch all contacts. In order for Outlook to actually perform the synch, you must go into your Outlook settings (which is provided by a seperate CRM Diagnostics tool) and enable the synch process. Kinda sounds like Microsoft right hand hasn’t met it’s left hand quite yet……
- Set up your Outlooks options to enable the synch.
- Go to ‘Start Menu’, ‘All Programs’, ‘Microsoft CRM 4.0′, ‘Diagnostics’.
- Click the ‘Support Mode’ (default tab that is brought up should be ‘Synchronization troubleshooting’)
- Check ‘Address Book Synchronization’.
- Check ‘Outlook Synchronization’.
This will now synch up your Outlook address book with your CRM Leads, Contacts & Accounts. Oh, you might want to close out of Outlook for the synch to take place. 
For more info on the diagnostic tool and it’s functions, see the informative post about it at the Microsoft Dynamics CRM Team Blog
Happy CRM’ing…..
Customizing Marketing List View in Microsoft CRM 4.0 June 20, 2008
Posted by Joel Kriel in CRM 4.0 & .Net development.Tags: All Members, Marketing List Members, Marketing List View, Microsoft CRM 4.0, try catch
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Upon trying to customize the view of the “Marketing List Members” in the Marketing List entity, I hit a road block (typical in CRM 4.0 I have come to realize..). My first instinct was to go under the Contact entity, look for the associated view and modify the view from there. Much to my surpirse, the view didn’t match what I was seeing in the Marketing List. Hmm….
After a short while on Google, I found that the Marketing List Members does not use a view that is available from the Contact entity. Of course it doesn’t! It uses a built in view call “All Members”. In order to modify this, you must use the Advance Find feature, pull up the “All Members” view and modify it there. See the details at Customizing Marketing List from the Microsoft CRM Team Blog site.
Good Luck!!
Deletion Service in Microsoft CRM 4.0 June 3, 2008
Posted by Joel Kriel in CRM 4.0 & .Net development.Tags: Act!, Data Migration, Deletion Service, Microsoft CRM 4.0, try catch, try catch consulting
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When performing a bulk load using the Data Migration tool in CRM 4.0, I ran across a huge issue on how the data is backed out. I am working on a large ACT! to CRM 4.0 migration which include 73 mapping for the Contact entity and of course, it is a trial and error process. Using the Data Migration tool is perfect since you can back out the successful records until you get a clean upload. The only problem is that the deletion process sets a flag on the entity level (DeletionStatusCode = 2) rather than actually deleting the records from the database. Then the Sync service will pick up the records for deletion and physically delete them. Now the limitation to this process is that the service will only run once a day and can not be run on demand…. until yesterday afternoon.
Welcome ScaleGroup Job Editor! Simply install on the CRM 4.0 server and now you can actually set when the delete service runs!!
Thank you to the East Region Microsoft CRM blog. I recommend checking this blog weekly for other very useful updates to all things CRM 4.0.
