CRM : Rescheduling the Update Contract States job

Update Contract States job is CRM 2011 (also for CRM 4.0) system job which runs daily and change the contract status based on contract start date and end date (i.e. change contract from Invoiced to active and from Active to expired).

One of customer’s CRM organization has this job running 10 PM at night and wanted to change this job on particular time (very early in the morning) to make sure contract status are up to date when users starts using CRM system.

There is job editor provided by MS to reschedule CRM system jobs but this does not include this specific job.

so following are steps we undertook with the help of CRM parter/MS support to reschedule this particular job in CRM system.

Step 1: run the following query to find the current Jobs in the relevant CRM organization. (note down the AsyncOperationid returned from this query as we will be using this in next step)

select AsyncOperationid,RecurrenceStartTime,postponeuntil,StatusCode, RecurrencePattern from AsyncOperation WHERE
Name = 'Update Contract States job'
and
StatusCode =10
and RecurrencePattern is not null

following quick details regarding important columns in this table.

RecurrencePattern is used to describe frequency and interval of the system jobs and please refer this article for more information on regarding this.

Postponeuntil is datetime field and indicate when this job will run next time. And it is UTC date meaning if this field contains “2012-10-23 09:08:00.000” and if your time zone is GMT + 1 then this job will run next time on “2012-10-23 10:08:00.000”

RecurrenceStartTime is also UTC datetime field which will be used to set next runtime of job, date part of this field is not important as long as it is set in the past.

Step 2: so using noted down AsyncOperationid in step 1 run following query to update recurrencestarttime, postponeuntil for this Update Contract States job .


update AsyncOperation set
RecurrenceStartTime = '2012-10-22 09:08:00.000',
postponeuntil = '2012-10-23 09:08:00.000'
WHERE AsyncOperationid = '5EB24ECB-60ED-4F59-801D-A6C19465C4D8'


So as per above update, this job will run at 9:08 AM (GMT time) in the morning every day.after job run if you verify the details then it would look as follows. So as you can see system will update postponeuntil (next run time) to next day (24th October) after this job run today (on 23th October).

****Important Notes regarding above change****
above change is unsupported so make sure you apply this change to Dev, Test environment before applying this to Live environment. Also make sure you take back up of database before doing this change.

Hope this helps..

Cheers,
MayankP:)

CRM 2011: Reassign or Transfer Personal Views

Recently come across scenario where one of CRM user left the company and that user owned specific views which need to be transfer to his replacement CRM users.

These views created by old user using CRM advanced find screen and hence they are personal view of that user and as per CRM security settings even system administrator can not able to view and transfer this views to new user.

So I decided use impersonation to resolve this issue and created small standalone application for the same.

This application is shared below.
CRM2011_ReAssignViews_EXE

Following is few more details regarding this application for the same.

Step 1: after downloading, CRM2011_ReAssignViews_EXE.zip and extract the files.

Step 2: after extracting run the CRM2011_ReAssignViews_EXE.exe from extracted files.

Step 3: provide CRM server name, relevant port number, organization name and provide relevant credential for the same and then click on “Retrieve List of User” button.

For further steps and information please refer to following screen print for the same.

Note: – Please note that both users needs to active in CRM to perform above actions.

Hope this helps..

Cheers,
MayankP:)

CRM 2011 Chart: Drill Down enable/disable

Recently we noticed few charts in CRM 2011 displays drill down while other does not display drill down for the same.

For example standard Sales Pipe line chart report does not display drill down, after little investigation found that chard is displaying drill down if field used to display data set as Searchable to YES (as shown in the screen print below)

So your chart will display drill down if axis displays a field which got value searchable set to Yes.

Hope this helps..

Cheers,
MayankP:)

CRM 2011 Tip: hiding start pane on CRM entities

Few of our users did not like this started pane in CRM 2011 and asking us if we disable this.

User settings

Following steps individual user can do to remove this started pane
Step 1: Go to File -> Options -> General tab
Step 2: un- tick “Show Get started panes on all lists” and click ok

System settings

System admin can switch this setting off for all users by doing following steps.
Step 1: go to Settings -> Administration -> system settings – > General tab
Step 2: set “Show Get Started panes on all lists of all users “ to “NO” and click ok

Hope this helps..

Cheers,
MayankP:)

CRM Outlook client Installation issue

One of my colleagues had following issue while installing latest CRM roll up for outlook client.

Installation cannot proceed: Setup cannot continue because a pending restart is required. Restart the computer and then try running Setup again

Please read this article for the solution regarding this.

Hope this helps…

Regards,
MayankP 🙂

CRM 4.0 Issue: IE window display full path in Title bar

Suddenly few of our CRM user started seeing full path in CRM IE Title bar.

After little trial and error method we found that issue was cause by change in Domain Policy and to fix this issue on individual users system we did following steps…

Step 1: open IE -> Tools -> Internet Options

Step 2: go to security tab

Step 3: select Local intranet/trusted sites deepening upon where your CRM sites are added

Step 4: Click on Custom Level

Step 5: and the go to the Miscellaneous section and find option called “Allow script-initiated windows without size or position constraints”

Step 6: Select Enabled and click Ok

Step 7: Restart all IE Sessions and this issue will be fixed.

Hope this helps,

Cheers,
MayankP 🙂

SQL Transaction: Small Tip.

While using CRM 4.0 many times we have to do unsupported changes directly to the database and there is risk involved in running the queries directly to change CRM database record or field.

I have small tip for this using SQL Transaction for this. Before running your Query run begin transaction Command then run your query and check the results.

If results are ok and as expected then run commit transaction Command.

Otherwise if result is not as expected then run rollback transaction Command and that will undo the changes.

see below image for explnation on this..

Hope this helps!!!

Cheers,
MayankP:)

Many to Many Relationship CRM 4.0

This thing just come to my notice that if you create N:N relationship on CRM 4.0 then other entities does not automatically gets displayed on Advanced find..

You need to go to particular entity and then you need to Change Display Option to either Use Plural Name or Use custom label..

if Display option is set to DO NOT DISPLAY then you these particular entity will not be available as Related Entity on Advanced Find Screen..

Again to understand all other aspects of Many to Many Relationship CRM 4.0, please refer to this article.

Hope this helps..

Cheers,
MayankP:)

Adding Email Signatures in CRM 4.0

I had a good question from one of the CRM users recently and thought I’d share the answer with you all….

Do you ever send email’s out through CRM and wonder how you can add your Signature to them, like it does in Outlook?

There is a way to do it, but first you need to create a template for your signature to go into.  

1. In outlook or on the Web version, go to Settings -> Templates à Email Templates

2. Create a New Template – Choose Global template

3. Add your signature into the text box on the template

4. Now… When you write an email to a contact or Account, type the subject, and body text as usuall. Before sending – click  Insert Template to insert your signature

 5.Select your signature template that you created and click OK

 6. Click Cancel when it asks to replace your Mail subject with the template Subject

DONE – Your email now contains your signature. You can simply add this template into all the mails you send from CRM. You can also make any number of different template if you have standard text that you would like to insert into a mail.