Interesting article: Microsoft CRM 2011 Multiple Forms basics
I’ve just found out this very nice post on multiple forms basics in Microsoft CRM 2011, so I wanted to share it with you all…
Microsoft CRM 2011: Multiple Forms basics.
How-to series: Send SMS messages from CRM 2011 (part 3)
Finally! This is the final part of my how-to series on how to send and track SMS messages in Microsoft CRM 2011.
The first post explained how to prepare the solution.
The second post talked about the Web front-end customization.
This last post will explain how to communicate with Clickatell’s gateway to send your SMS messages.
How-to series: Send SMS messages from CRM 2011 (part 2)
In the first part (see part 1), I explained how a SMS could be better to communicate with your customers and contacts, since it is instantly dispatched on the cell phone.
In this part, I’ll deal with customizing the CRM as to enable this kind of communication.
How-to series: Send SMS messages from CRM 2011 (part 1)
In a time where the information must be available quickly, there is an alternative to feeds, tweets, walls and emails….this alternative is called SMS, for Short Message Service.
Of course, one can always say that an SMS is the same thing as a tweet with roughly the same text length but who can say that its cell phone is always connected to the Internet? Not me, it is way too expensive here in Belgium!
On the same note, all cell phones can receive basic text SMS messages so this is an interesting alternative to emails and so on.
So in this series, I wanted to focus on a small plugin that would allow any of your customers to be alerted by SMS instead of by email, SMS that should be sent from Microsoft CRM of course 
This first part will focus on customizing Microsoft CRM to prepare for the plug-in that I’ll develop on the second part.
Pre-requisites to this series
For this SMS integration to work, you should consider using a Clickatell account (www.clickatell.com) and their set of APIs to connect to their SMS gateway (APIs available through HTTP, SMTP, SOAP, XML, COM, …)
This company offers 10 free SMS to test your code, then you can buy credits for sending ‘real’ messages throughout the world (I don’t have any acquaintance with them but I find that their site is clear and easy to understand; on the other hand, there are no real C# code samples).
If you need help signing-up with them, please contact me and I’ll try to help you.
How is this series divided?
This series will be divided in 3 parts:
- Part 1 of 3: Expressing the requirements and creating the CRM solution
- Part 2 of 3: Customizing the CRM for the new SMS activity
- Part 3 of 3: Developing the CRM plugin for sending the SMS
Expressing the business needs
Ok, down on the needs now
Let’s assume you want to be able to send SMS to your customers just like you would send an email from Microsoft CRM, how would you that?
Well thankfully, Microsoft CRM 2011 allows you to create new activity types (see previous post New activity types for dummies) so I’ll use this new awesome feature.
Creating the CRM solution
Ok, in this first post I’ll show you how to properly prepare a solution for your SMS implementation but you are free to do as you wish.
- Make sure you have a backup of your original CRM customizations before you start customizing your system
- Within Microsoft CRM, create a new solution called SMSMessaging; this solution will host our customizations for the new SMS functionality
- Open your new solution and add the following entities for now:
- Account
- Activity
- Contact
- Lead
- User
OK you’re ready to go…..it’s very easy for now but stay tuned and watch for the second part of this series, where I’ll show you some cool stuff! 
CRM 2011: Hide a button in a custom entity’s form ribbon
For all of you who wanted to know how to do this, here are the steps:
- Make sure the custom entity is part of the solution you want to export and modify
- Export the solution and edit the customizations.xml file
- In this file, each entity has its own <Entity> tag so you need to find the one that suits your needs (example: if your custom entity is called new_test, you should look for the node
<Entity> <Name LocalizedName="Test" OriginalName="Test">new_test</Name>[...]
- In this node, you should see a sub-node starting with <RibbonDiffXml>, which is the node containing the ribbons elements for your particular entity
- In this new section, you should only modify the <CustomActions /> node, which is the node containing all the custom actions for the entity’s ribbon: add a new button, hide a button, change the behavior of a particular button, etc.
- Under <CustomActions>, place the following code if you want to hide the ‘Save as complete’ button
<HideCustomAction HideActionId="CA_HideSaveAsComplete" Location="Mscrm.Form.new_test.SaveAsComplete" />
- Do not forget to close the <CustomActions> tag after it!
- Under <CustomActions>, place the following code if you want to hide the ‘Save as complete’ button
- The complete code should look like this:
<RibbonDiffXml>
<CustomActions>
<HideCustomAction HideActionId="CA_HideSaveAsComplete" Location="Mscrm.Form.new_test.SaveAsComplete" />
</CustomActions>
<Templates>
<RibbonTemplates Id="Mscrm.Templates"></RibbonTemplates></Templates>
<CommandDefinitions />
<RuleDefinitions>
<TabDisplayRules />
<DisplayRules />
<EnableRules />
</RuleDefinitions>
<LocLabels />
</RibbonDiffXml>
After having saved the modified customizations.xml file, compress all the solution files in a new ZIP package and import it back in Microsoft CRM.
Once the package has been published, you should “see” that the ‘Save as complete’ button has disappeared on your entity’s form 
CRM 2011: The RC version is here!
As stated on various blog around the world, the Release Candidate version of Microsoft CRM 2011 is finally here!
I’ll updating soon, if not today, to see what has changed and what has been corrected 
Stay tuned!
Some links:
CRM 2011 Server RC
http://www.microsoft.com/downloads/details.aspx?FamilyID=c3f82c6f-c123-4e80-b9b2-ee422a16b91d
CRM 2011 Outlook Client
http://www.microsoft.com/downloads/details.aspx?FamilyID=22dc423a-7194-491e-a169-6ace16bfdd36
Language Pack
http://www.microsoft.com/downloads/details.aspx?FamilyID=db44c564-2338-407e-980a-c9c83ad37729
Email Router
http://www.microsoft.com/downloads/details.aspx?FamilyID=a995f6ad-0099-42fd-9b22-cf7b3d40a2bf
BIDS
http://www.microsoft.com/downloads/details.aspx?FamilyID=64a09b75-8376-4b9d-aea3-8a83a1837c4d
SharePoint Connector
http://www.microsoft.com/downloads/details.aspx?FamilyID=23c0f351-8694-4d92-9ddf-34a949aec6a7
CRM 2011: Global launch event
“Thursday, January 20th, 2011 at 9am PST” is the date you can’t miss!
Quote from the web page http://crm.dynamics.com/2011launch/:
“Attend this FREE global virtual launch event and watch Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer introduce Microsoft Dynamics CRM 2011. Learn how it is designed to help you boost sales, improve marketing, enrich customer service interactions, and accelerate line of business application development through xRM.
Hear keynote presentations by Kirill Tatarinov (Corporate Vice President, Microsoft Business Solutions), Michael Park (Corporate Vice President, Microsoft Business Solutions), and Brad Wilson (General Manager, Microsoft Dynamics CRM).”
“In addition, you’ll be able to:
- Get a sneak peek view through engaging demos.
- Hear success stories from real customers who put Microsoft Dynamics CRM 2011 to work for them.
- Choose from 15 different tracks especially designed to suit your business, industry or IT needs.
- Chat live with Microsoft experts and other customers in real time during the event.”
Ready? Register here.
What’s in my personal queue?
This is an update of my personal projects based on Dynamics CRM (I’ll talk xRM here), which will be explained in details on this blog:
- Organization tree in Silverlight
- Display of all the business units
- Display of the account’s contacts, with various methods of data retrieval
- Display of all the linked elements under an account or a contact
- Reporting in Silverlight
- Various KPIs
- Web portal in Silverlight (for outsiders)
Quite a lot of stuff here and I work on them on my spare-time so do not expect to see tons of update soon…
But here is my first attempt at Silverlight 4 with Dynamics CRM 4 data:
This is an organization tree returning the business units hierarchy and is based on the awesome work of Drazen Janjicek (http://cid-dff01c5367c1f660.office.live.com/self.aspx/Silverlight%20Stuff/OrganizationChartDemo.rar) and needs some refining but I’m pretty happy with the results!
Stay tuned!
xRM…or the natural evolution of CRM
Has any of your clients asked you, one day, how the “Sales” module in Microsoft CRM c
ould be used in a “purchasing” environment?
Usually, Quotes are created for product you sell, not for product you buy!
Eventually, my last client asked me about it: how can I map my purchases in Microsoft CRM? Of course, one could always tell him to use an ERP software but in this particular case, the client can either buy or sell products.
Let me explain:
I work for this client as a supplier meaning that I “sell” my services and my client “buys” them. He wants to be able to track this behavior in his CRM. Which led us to a peculiar discussion around all the process involved and the way he could achieve it in Microsoft Dynamics CRM (4.0 in this case).
