Moving Forward

After almost 3 year, I am done with a global CRM implementation for a life science company in California. My travel between Chicago and Los Angeles finally comes to the end. Looking back at the past 3 years, I have learned a lot from this project and this customer. I also got to know many great people and got a chance to build good relationships with everyone of them. I really want to thank my team for everything that they have done on this project.  Thanks to everyone at Microsoft who supported this project as well.

Just for Laugh – Fun Facts for this project

• Airline Miles:  >1 million miles
• Hotel Nights: >500 nights
• Pound of Sushi: >100 pound consumed
• Celebrated Festivus: 2 times
• …

After the new year, I’ll be heading to a brand new project in Milwaukee, I’ll be missing a lot of airline mile.

CRM 2011 SDK Update 5.0.1

The SDK team announced the release of the latest CRM 2011 SDK.  I knew that they work really hard to improve the content in there.  They are just an awesome group of people to work with, they listened to our feedbacks and trying their best to provide samples to make our customization experience easier and better. You may download the latest CRM SDK on the download center and on MSDN.

Amy pointed out some highlights for the new SDK and here are some of them:

• Binaries updated to the latest version
• Samples now work on IFD deployments with improved authentication code
• New topics, samples and walkthroughs for using the SOAP endpoint for Web resources
• New PowerShell information and samples
• Updates and additions based on feedback from customers and reviewers

Thanks to the SDK team!!!

Retrieve Records filtering on an Entity Reference field using OData

I ran into a problem today trying to retrieve records filtering on an Entity Reference field using the OData endpoint.  Thanks to Jim Daly for helping me. An Entity Reference field contains several properties and Id is one of the its properties.  Usually when you are filtering using OData, all you have to do is use the keyword $filter, the search field, operator and the value.

For example, to retrieve all the accounts where address1_city equal Redmond, you’ll do the following:

/AccountSet?$filter=Address1_City eq 'Redmond' 

 

However to retrieve from an Entity Reference field is little bit different.  To access the properties in an Entity Reference field, you just need to use the forward slash “/” and then follow by the property name.

 

For example, to retrieve all the accounts where primarycontactid equal to {guid}, you have to do the following:

 

AccountSet?$filter=PrimaryContactId/Id eq (Guid'567DAA8F-BE0E-E011-B7C7-000C2967EE46') 

I hope this help in your next project.

Beta to RC Upgrade Error–Trial Period Expired

I upgraded my VPC from beta to RC today and I received an error telling me that the “trial period has been expired”.  The solutions are already in the CRM community.  I just want to post it here on my blog for my future reference and also for the folks looking for the solution to this problem.

So there are two solutions to this problem.

Solution 1 – Import/Upgrade (Preferred Method)

1. Install the RC bits for the CRM Server on an alternate computer. Note that you can install the RC bits on the same computer that is running Beta, but you must uninstall all Beta components and delete the MSCRM_CONFIG database on the SQL instance before doing so.
2. Install the CRM 2011 Reporting Extensions to the computer running SQL in the new deployment.
3. Restore the database backups of the Beta orgs to the computer running SQL in the new deployment.
4. Use Deployment Manager to Import the Beta orgs. The Import wizard will detect that the org is a Beta org and will upgrade it to the RC bits.
5. During import, use the Auto Mapping option to map CRM users to Active Directory.

Solution 2 – Connect to Existing (Note : This option requires the Administrator to update the license keys in the MSCRM_CONFIG database manually.)

1. Uninstall all CRM components from deployment computers.
2. Install the RC bits for CRM Server, and on SQL Server page of the setup wizard, specify to Connect to Existing. The Setup wizard will detect and upgrade the MSCRM_CONFIG database and the default org to the RC bits.
3. During the server installation/upgrade process, you likely will encounter the following error:

   “Action Microsoft.Crm.Setup.Server.AddLicenseAction failed. Your trial period has expired.”
   
   If this occurs, in the ConfigSettings table in MSCRM_CONFIG, in the LicenseKeyV5RTM column, manually enter the license key.

   use MSCRM_CONFIG
   update ConfigSettings set LicenseKeyV5RTM = 'MQM2H-JYYRB-RRD6J-8WBBC-CVBD3'
   

   Important : You can also complete this task with SQL Management Studio by using the following SQL statements:

   In the server setup dialog, click Retry , and the Server setup should complete normally.

4. Use Deployment Manager to upgrade the remaining Beta orgs to RC.

微软中文MSCRM论坛终于来临了！

Google 的论坛不知不觉的就开了两年多了！谢谢大家对论坛的支持！经过英国我和Jim Wang 的努力，终于在现在CRM产品组的论坛上加了中文版的论坛。新的论坛是CRM产品组所创建的，所以产品组的成员，partners，MVP 们将经常来光顾的。现在论坛已搞好了， 请大家多多支持！

我和Jim Wang，国内的刀客将到那边的论坛上支持，我建议大家现在也到新的论坛上去提问， 如果微软看到新论坛的人气旺，一定会对这个中文论坛有一定的重视。这样还可以让大家都有一个统一的地方去搜查答案。

关于Google 的论坛，我不会把他关掉，因为已经积累了很多大家所提供的答案，如果你在这里提问，也可以，但我建议到新的论坛那里问。

我在这里感谢产品组，Jim Glass，还有微软里的员工帮助我们创建这个论坛！

新的论坛资料以下：

中文界面：http://social.microsoft.com/Forums/zh-CN/crmchinese/threads/
英文界面：http://social.microsoft.com/Forums/en-US/crmchinese/threads/

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欢迎您来到微软中文CRM论坛！本论坛给您介绍微软商务解决方案之一：客户关系管理系统 (Microsoft Dynamics CRM)。 微软CRM专家，合作伙伴，MVPs 会为您解答 Microsoft CRM 的安装，使用，编程技巧上的问题。本论坛还有助于大家更了解微软CRM 的好处，拉近您跟客户的关系。帮助企业提高销售成功率，提供良好的客户服务，作出正确、高效的业务决策。

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谢谢！

安装语言包

做第一个video 来测试一下看看能不能在Blog里放 Video。看来还可以。:)

http://content.screencast.com/users/DarrenLiu/folders/CRM4.0/media/1a4d0008-c020-4ac7-ba9a-2902ef57efb8/InstallCRMLanguagePack_controller.swf

CRM 4.0 List Web Part 可以下载了!

CRM 4.0 List Web Part 可以下载了。 比较来说，新的版本支持 多组织, IFD, 64bit 和很多新的功能.

System Requirement:

• Windows Server 2003 or Windows Server 2008
• Microsoft Dynamics® CRM 4.0
• Microsoft Windows® SharePoint® Services 3.0 SP1
• Microsoft® Office SharePoint® Server (MOSS) 2007 SP1
• Microsoft® Internet Explorer 6 with SP1 or later versions

大家可以到以下的连接下载：

http://www.microsoft.com/downloads/details.aspx?FamilyID=3b6eb884-ec15-4288-a2a3-d0b47e057458&DisplayLang=en

Developer Ramp up Kit for Microsoft Dynamics CRM 4.0

如果你想学习开发 CRM 的， 你们可以参考以下的 Video， 材料跟我在中国做培训的非常相同， 只是以下的Video是英文的。 如果有什么问题，请到论坛提问吧。

http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/cc720132.aspx

使用 SSIS 做 CRM 的集成

很开心, 我的文章在 CRM Team Blog 出了， 如果你们想使用 SSIS 来做集成，请参考参考吧。希望能帮到你的CRM项目。如果只是跟CRM做集成， 那么可以不用 BizTalk 来做了。:)

我尽能力把它翻译成中文给大家参考吧。

http://blogs.msdn.com/crm/archive/2008/05/07/integrating-crm-using-sql-integration-services-ssis.aspx

CRM 4.0 Sample 数据出了 – 25种语言

Microsoft CRM 4.0 Sample 数据出了，有以下的语言，大家可以到以下连接下载：

English, German, Dutch, French, Spanish, Chinese PRC, Danish, Italian, Japanese, Brazilian Portuguese, Chinese Taiwan, Korean, Chinese Hong Kong, *Finnish, *Hebrew, *Norwegian, *Swedish, *Iberian Portuguese, *Russian, *Turkish, *Czech, *Hungarian, *Polish, *Arabic and *Greek.

* 有英文数据在

http://www.microsoft.com/downloads/details.aspx?FamilyId=D5F77EE7-3D01-4944-B5DC-C8CDC8123DF4&displaylang=en