Managed VS Unmanaged Solutions

This is a debate that most of the developers of CRM 2011 have. Whether to us a managed solution or an unmanaged solution in UAT and Production environments?

Some prefer to use managed solution as this way the customer will not be able to change the solution attributes that the developers have added. Some don’t think like that as they tender to think about the advantageous that using an unmanaged solution would give.

I would prefer having an unmanaged solution in the development and managed solutions in the UAT and Production environments as it would keep the control in our hands. However there are pros and cons to this as well.

There is a great article that has been written by Gonzalo Ruiz regarding this topic of managed and unmanaged solutions at the following link.

http://gonzaloruizcrm.blogspot.ca/2012/01/managed-or-unmanaged-solutions-in-crm.html

Also he has written another nice article about deleting an attribute from a managed environment in the following article.

http://gonzaloruizcrm.blogspot.ca/2012/05/crm-2011-deleting-attributes-entities.html

Both these articles are great articles to read if you are person working with CRM. This would give you some insight of how the things are happening and how you can cope up with them.

ISV Config button enabling

In CRM3 when we wanted to enable ISV buttons all we had to do was to go to the CRM web Config and change the ISV elements value to the required value (Web). This would have displayed the ISV buttons.

But in CRM4 this is not the case. This has been taken from the web config and have embeded to the web site. I have given below a link which helped me to find this.

http://blogs.msdn.com/jannemattila/archive/2008/01/10/crm-4-0-and-isv-config-modifications.aspx

Thanks for the helpful link.

CRM 4 Entity Import Error

There was an issue with importing customizations from one CRM4 environment to another CRM4 environment with one of our projects. Both the environments were upgraded ones from CRM3 and both contains the same customizations. How ever we were not able to import customizations.

So what we did was to enable the CRM trace and then read the trace. We used the stunware CRm diagnostic tools for this(Thanks a lot for making these tools which makes the life easier for any developer). We found out NullReferenceException form the trace. So after googling we were able to find more porsts simmiler to what we were facing. Finally we found one article which helped us.

http://thecrmgrid.wordpress.com/2009/03/10/corrupted-entity-nullreferenceexception-when-publishing-or-exporting/

Also some time you might get timeout errors when you import customizations. Then you need to change some registry values. Please find a very useful link for this issue below.

http://support.microsoft.com/kb/918609

CRM 4 Bulk Edit form

When we upgraded from CRM 3 to CRM 4 one of the issues we faced was this form. Javascripts that we have written for this particular form didn't work at all.

After doing some research through google we found out that with CRM 4 javascripts are not supported in the bulk edit form. Also if a field has javascript enabled that field would be disabled from in the bulk edit form.

After searching again we found a good article written in stunnware which we were able to use. I have pasted the link below and it contains some unsupported customization. Thanks to stunnware web site we were able to get it done.

http://www.stunnware.com/crm2/topic.aspx?id=BulkEdit

Customizations in CRM 3.0

When you add a new field or an entity to CRM you should first do it in your development eneviornment. i'm sure that all of us are doing that corectly. but there are some certian times that we have to do them in live enviornment without doing that in the other enviornments.

Don't do this. because when you create a field or an entity CRM created a guid value for them and if you don't use the same customization then you cannot publish them in the other enviorments. If you have to the correction in live directly take a customzation of that entity and try to publish that customization in the ther enviorments. How ever when you do that if you have been doing some changes in the development eneviornmnet you will loose them. So you need to be very carefule about this.

SO try avoiding doing any direct customizations in the live envionments as long as they have something to do with create.

Site map XML

Do you guys now where CRM stores the site map?

Recently I had to check orgnaizationbase entity in the CRM for some reason and i found that it contains a field named Sitemap in the table. When checked the data in this field i found that the current site map is being stored there.

So if anyone wants to check the site map you should check the organizationbase table in the CRM database.

String map entity

This table in the CRM is holding valuable information regarding all the pick lists that we add to CRM. it contains the attributename and the entity object type code with the values that we specify to the attributes.

But probably we don't think that doing a change that is not accurate here would cause the CRM to give the unauthorized access error. Well, it does. Recently we did some data insertions to a CRM server with wrong object type codes and it caused the system to give errors. What we didn't realise is that it caused the system failure. When we deleted those records from the string map entity(Luckily we knew the data we have inserted) CRM started working fine.This was a very good lesson for us and would be for you all out there.