http://www.microsoft.com/download/en/details.aspx?displaylang=en&id=28712

For the list of new improvements and changes you can go through the below KB article

http://support.microsoft.com/default.aspx?kbid=2600640

In my opinion still some of the features can be improved as of now in order to accept this globally. But still what we have is lot to cheer about. Why I am dough ting at this time I will clarify later in this post.

Let see how we can use this and take the most out of it.  You can get the Activity Feed solution from the Dynamic Marketplace in CRM Settings tab or you can just do Google. The CRM 2011 server setup that was released before Nov 2011 does not contain this solution. So you have to download and import it manually. But in all the latest CRM versions that are coming after Nov 2011 have this activity feed solution installed from before whether it is Online or On- Premise.

Let’s understand the common terms associated with this. We can say it can act as a Twitter for the CRM users plus lot of many other functions.

Post:

Post is an Entity and whatever you write is saved internally as a record. So every item on your wall is a post. It is yet like another entity. You can create new post through Plugin, workflow etc. You can even trigger anything on different operation performed. We will see how to create a post from workflow to meet our business need.

Wall:

Wall is nothing but the UI html page what we see where all the posts are visible. Records even can have wall and a tab ‘Record Wall’ can be seen for that record.

Follow/Unfollow:

Follow and Unfollow are the two options that will be visible for all entities but will be enabled for only those entities for which the activity feed will be configured.

Configuration of Activity Feed

After importing the solution you will find three links in what’s New in the Workplace Area and the other two as shown below

Let’s configure some entities. Click Activity Feed Configuration and create records for the entities which we want to configure. Remember give the schema name of entity and not the display name.

The interesting thing I found that we cannot define Rules for the entities. Because we cannot find any add New Rule or Existing button. However the system creates few rules for the few entities that exist from before like Lead, Opportunity, etc.

We can configure for custom entities also but cannot define rule directly which I found the funniest part. I hope that issue gets solved in the coming versions /updates. At present if we want to define some rules for custom entities than we can do that by configuring with a workflow.

For following a multiple records we can do Advance Find select the records to Follow or UnFollow.

Workflow to create a Rule and Post Automatically for Custom Entity

We will see how we can configure activity feed for a custom entity. This can be done through a workflow.  Let’s take a custom entity called “Investor”. So whenever investor is created by any user then we will post stating that an Investor is created. Let it act as a Notification. Let it as simple as this. Anyways we can do a lot and configure the workflow for our custom logic but here we are going through a sample.

        1. Create a Process of category as “Workflow” and configure for ‘When record is created’ as shown below

          2. Now we will configure the properties.

Here we can see the Dynamic value assigned called “Post URL (Dynamic)“. This option is only visible when we have the latest Update Rollup installed. This is basically used to provide a link to that record. So we can open that record by clicking this. This is a new feature update from Microsoft in CRM 2011. Really this is very helpful while creating email form the workflow. We can directly open the record from the Email.

Anyways configuring this workflow save and Activate this workflow.

Result: Now whenever the Investor record is created automatically a post will be created. We can see this post in the What’s new  in the Workplace Area. Here we have created investor record DTest10.

Note: Yet a lot of things are missing and I think that it needs to be improved a bit more so that it can be accepted widely. Few things that are strange or lack in the current version of the solution are in my opinion are:-

1. We cannot create Rules as per our choice for the entities. Eventually we opt for Workflows to configure. 

As we can see that there is no New Button to add any Rules.

2.  The post lacks security. This means that anybody who can view that post can delete that post which will be deleted from the system. This means that the person that created that post is not the sole owner of that post. Even we cannot set anything from the roles and permission point of view.

3. The system creates rules for some of the predefined entities like lead, contact, opportunity etc. We can’t add the rules to the entities configured and yet there is Grid where it can be added.

So these were my concerns in terms of usability. Hope this gets better in the coming versions or update.

 Happy Reading !!!!!!!

]]> http://deepakexploring.wordpress.com/2012/01/05/activity-feed-in-crm-2011/feed/ 1 deepakkumar5035 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 http://deepakexploring.wordpress.com/2011/12/29/sharepoint-integration-with-crm-2011/ http://deepakexploring.wordpress.com/2011/12/29/sharepoint-integration-with-crm-2011/#comments Thu, 29 Dec 2011 12:40:45 +0000 deepakkumar5035 http://deepakexploring.wordpress.com/?p=200 ]]> CRM 2011 has introduced the concept of Document Management which is nothing but managing and keeping the document properly so that we can use of the documents in the most efficient manner. Integration with SharePoint was possible in the previous versions of CRM also but in 2011 things are really more efficient and organized. With the help of SharePoint we can avail and use most of the features of SharePoint in Microsoft CRM.

CRM 2011 can be integrated with both Sharepoint 2007 and 2010. But there are quite some difference visualization wise. If the CRM 2011 is integrated with 2007 we will be able to see the whole data in an IFrame, whereas with Sharepoint 2010 we have both the options i.e to see in an IFrame as well as properly organized documents list folder wise. We can create folders in Sharepoint with the CRM List Components in CRM 2011 which I will talk later.

CRM 2011 can be integrated with both On-Premise and Online and with the below versions

• Microsoft SharePoint 2010 – almost all versions.
• Microsoft Office SharePoint server 2007

CRM List Component

CRM List Component is a solution component that allows CRM to create folders automatically in Sharepoint and thus helping us to view the documents in the form of List in CRM. If it is not installed then the whole Sharepoint site will be visible in CRM in an IFrame. I strongly suggest to install the CRM List Component in order to get a good List View (Documents) in CRM.

You can download the CRM List Component from the below location

http://www.microsoft.com/download/en/details.aspx?id=5283

Now we will see how to integrate with Sharepoint with and without CRM List Component.

Integration of Sharepoint without CRM List Component

1. Go to Settings –>Document Management –>Document Management Settings

2. We can select the entities for which we want to enable the Document Management. By default some of the entities like Lead, Opportunity etc. will be selected. Provide the Sharepoint Site’s URL.

3. It will verify the Sharepoint Site and if everything is fine it will say that the URL is a valid one. Complete the configuration wizard.

4. Now we will configure for the lead entity. Open any Lead Record and Click on Documents.

5. After saving you can see the Sharepoint site in an IFrame as below.

Integration of Sharepoint with CRM List Component

With CRM List component we can see only the related documents in a list type and not the whole Sharepoint Site. Let’s see how we can install the list component in Sharepoint Server.

You can download as well as follow the instructions from the below URL.

http://www.microsoft.com/download/en/details.aspx?id=5283

After adding the solution component in the Sharepoint Server you should activate the solution.

Sometimes after installing the solution [CRM List Component] it gives a lot of pain while activating it. Because of my bad luck I went through the pain due to errors. If you are going through hard luck then you may get the error like ‘The sandboxed code execution request was refused because the Sandboxed Code Host Service was too busy to handle the request.’ Please follow the below link to solve the issue.

http://blogs.msdn.com/b/sharepointdev/archive/2011/02/08/error-the-sandboxed-code-execution-request-was-refused-because-the-sandboxed-code-host-service-was-too-busy-to-handle-the-request.aspx

Now after successfully activating go the CRM and try configuring this time. This time you will get a Window as below stating where the folders will be created.

After completing this wizard now if you will open any lead record and click on Documents then only the documents list will be visible and not the whole Sharepoint site.

I hope this really helps you. For more information related with Sharepoint Integration with CRM 2011 I found the below links very helpful.

http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/gg334702.aspx

http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/gg309548.aspx

Happy Reading!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

In CRM 4.0 it was very easy to get the Picklist Selected Text value. But in CRM 2011 the Picklist has been changed to Option Set and interestingly they have not exposed any Property to get Text value of the selected value.

So now we can get the value only from the Metadata. It’s not huge but simple to implement. Below is the method which returns the Selected Text Value on Passing the Integer Value.

public string GetPickListText(string entityName, string attributeName,int optionSetValue,IOrganizationService service)
 {
    string AttributeName = attributeName;
    string EntityLogicalName = entityName;
RetrieveEntityRequest retrieveDetails = new RetrieveEntityRequest
 {
    EntityFilters = EntityFilters.All,
    LogicalName = EntityLogicalName
 };
 RetrieveEntityResponse retrieveEntityResponseObj = (RetrieveEntityResponse)service.Execute(retrieveDetails);
 Microsoft.Xrm.Sdk.Metadata.EntityMetadata metadata = retrieveEntityResponseObj.EntityMetadata;
 Microsoft.Xrm.Sdk.Metadata.PicklistAttributeMetadata picklistMetadata = metadata.Attributes.FirstOrDefault(attribute => String.Equals(attribute.LogicalName, attributeName, StringComparison.OrdinalIgnoreCase)) as Microsoft.Xrm.Sdk.Metadata.PicklistAttributeMetadata;
 Microsoft.Xrm.Sdk.Metadata.OptionSetMetadata options = picklistMetadata.OptionSet;
IList<OptionMetadata> picklistOption = (from o in options.Options
 where o.Value.Value == optionSetValue
 select o).ToList();
string picklistLabel = (picklistOption.First()).Label.UserLocalizedLabel.Label;
 return picklistLabel;
 }

Now by using this we can easily get the selected option set value of any attribute of any record. Now to retrieve the text value we need to pass the value of the option set.

For e.g [How to call] To Get the selected text for Shipping method for a contact record

IOrganizationService service = GetCrmService();//Get the Crm Service 
string textValue=GetPickListText("contact","address1_shippingmethodcode",5,service) ;

I hope this really helps. HAPPY Reading !!!!!

Many times as a developer point of view we get some requirements which are complex in terms of designing and to meet such type of requirement we look to find an alternative solution.

Recently in my project I faced an issue regarding the Security Role for a Specific Type of User(Role). I would like to share the scenario. I had to filer the records of a particular entity dynamically based on a PickList value of that form. I mean in real the problem and the requirement was much more complex but let not focus on that. Let’s see how we can filter the record on top of the role privileges.

To solve my problem I wrote a plugin and registered for a RetrieveMultiple message.

// Obtain the execution context from the service provider.
IPluginExecutionContext context=(IPluginExecutionContext)serviceProvider.GetService(typeof(IPluginExecutionContext));
if (context.Mode == 0 && context.Stage == 20 && context.MessageName.Equals("RetrieveMultiple"))
{
  if (context.InputParameters.Contains("Query"))
  {
     if (context.InputParameters["Query"] is QueryExpression)
     {
         QueryExpression objQueryExpression = (QueryExpression)context.InputParameters["Query"];

       if (objQueryExpression.EntityName == "entityName")
       {
          IOrganizationServiceFactory serviceFactory = (IOrganizationServiceFactory)serviceProvider.GetService(typeof(IOrganizationServiceFactory));
          service = serviceFactory.CreateOrganizationService(context.UserId);
          ConditionExpression conExpress;
          string role = string.Empty;

          role = getUserRole(context.UserId);//Method to get the role of logged In User
          if (role.Contains("roleName"))
          {
             conExpress = new ConditionExpression()
             {
                AttributeName = "attributeName",
                Operator = ConditionOperator.Equal,
                Values = { "1" }
              };
            }
           else
           {
           // show all for legal , finance, system admin

           conExpress = new ConditionExpression()
           {
             AttributeName = "attributeName",
             Operator = ConditionOperator.In,
             Values = { "1", "2", "3" }
           };
        }

       FilterExpression newFilter = new FilterExpression()
       {
           FilterOperator = LogicalOperator.Or,
           Conditions = { conExpress }
       };

       objQueryExpression.Criteria.AddFilter(newFilter);
       }
     }
  }
}

Here I have used the method getUserRole() but not shown in the code. We can get the role easily by using Linq, FetchXml or any other means. Anyways that was not the agenda for this article.

I have tested this plugin & its works fine without any Performance Issue. Below I have shown the registration steps for this plugin.

Note: If you are checking the entityname inside the plugin then its fine you can register the plugin as above otherwise you c an mention the entityname also in the Primary Entity in the above registration  step.

This RetrieveMultiple can be used for multiple purposes for eg for filtering of records in Lookup etc. I hope this really helps.  HAPPY READING !!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

Microsoft has provided the developer toolkit for CRM 2011. But it is unfortunate and sad that lot of people are either not aware or after knowing also do not like to use for their development purpose. But I found it really helpful for development as it can really increase the speed of the development. This tool is integrated with the Visual Studio 2010 to accelerate the development of custom code for Microsoft Dynamics CRM solutions.

This tool comes with the latest CRM SDK version 5.0.7 You can download this from

http://www.microsoft.com/download/en/details.aspx?id=24004

The Developer Toolkit can be found in the following location in the SDK .sdk\tools\developertoolkit folder. Just run the crmdevelopertools_installer where your Visual Studio is present. Just remember you need VS 2010 with Silverlight 4 for proceeding with this developer toolkit development.

Please follow the below link to get a good picture…. It’s really nice …

http://community.dynamics.com/product/crm/crmtechnical/b/crminogic/archive/2011/11/14/crm-2011-developer-toolkit.aspx

Happy Learning ….!!!!!!!!1

Before going through the usage of oData in CRM 2011 first let us understand what is oData and why it is introduced in CRM 2011.

What is oData ?

oData is also referred as Open Data Protocol. CRM 2011 mainly uses Windows Communication Foundation (WCF) data services framework to provide oData Endpoint which is nothing but a REST based data service. The address for the endpoint is:

http://{OrganizationRootUrl} /XRMServices/2011/OrganizationData.svc

Now What is REST ?

REST(Representational State Transfer) is an style of referring data in which every resource can be referenced by a URL mainly in Microsoft CRM. Here resource is nothing but the entity or record or an image etc. So now in CRM 2011 we can reach to the record collection by the URL (properly defined syntax).  Microsoft has provided some syntax styles  which should be followed to access a resource.

oData uses some data  format for sending and receiving the data. Basically it uses the following two formats.

1. ATOM: It is an Xml based format mainly used for the RSS feeds.
2. JSON: JavaScript Object Notation is a text formats which makes very easy for the developers to understand the response what we get. For more info please visit:  www.json.org

For eg: For getting all the contact record set the URL can be like

http://{OrganizationRootUrl} /XRMServices/2011/OrganizationData.svc/ContactSet

We can also select few attributes by using a” select “command.

          http://{OrganizationRootUrl} /XRMServices/2011/OrganizationData.svc/ContactSet?$select=FirstName,LastName

This will give a collection of First Name and Last Name for all the contacts. Lot of other stuffs is also possible like filtering, ordering, paging etc.

Now we will see how we can implement in Jscript in CRM 2011. Below is the sample code for fetching the Contact’s PrimaryEmailId form an Account form. Save the code as some js file and upload as a WebResource(Jscript). Refer this in accounts WebResources and call the function OnLoad() in the OnLoad event of account entity.

function OnLoad() {
    var serverUrl = "http://" + window.location.host + "/" + Xrm.Page.context.getOrgUniqueName();
    var primarycontact = Xrm.Page.getAttribute("primarycontactid").getValue();
    var primarycontactid = primarycontact[0].id;

 // Creating the Odata Endpoint
    var oDataPath = serverUrl + "/XRMServices/2011/OrganizationData.svc";
    var retrieveReq = new XMLHttpRequest();
    var Odata = oDataPath + "/ContactSet?$select=EMailAddress1&$filter=ContactId eq guid'" + primarycontactid + "'";
    retrieveReq.open("GET", Odata, false);
    retrieveReq.setRequestHeader("Accept", "application/json");
    retrieveReq.setRequestHeader("Content-Type", "application/json; charset=utf-8");
    retrieveReq.onreadystatechange = function () { retrieveReqCallBack(this); };
    retrieveReq.send();
}

function retrieveReqCallBack(retrieveReq) {
    if (retrieveReq.readyState == 4 /* complete */) {
        var retrieved = this.parent.JSON.parse(retrieveReq.responseText).d;
        var EmailAddress = retrieved.results[0].EMailAddress1;
        alert(EmailAddress);
     }
}

Test: Create a contact record and put some email id in the Email field. Save the record. Now create one account record and refer this contact in the primarycontact field.  Now whenever you open a account record that has primarycontact the email id will be alerted.      Note: The name of the attributes in the select and the filter criteria are not the actual attributes names but these are the schemas names for that fields so please be careful while referring to the values.Hope this gives a basic idea of oData in CRM 2011…… Happy Reading !!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!1

Before starting the development we should see the Services involved

1. IDiscoveryService : The IDiscovery Service is a global service used to determine the Organizations that the system user is a member of, and the endpoint address URL to access the IOrganization service. This is basically used when we have multiple organizations in the same CRM Server and we need to know all the organization and their IOrganization Services URL’s at runtime or  through the code.

For eg: https://{ServerName} /XRMServices/2011/Discovery.svc

2. IOrganizationService : The IOrganization Service is Basically used for accessing the organization data and metadata with the help of the WCF implementation. This is the main service for the operation of all  Create,Update ,Delete,Retrieve  etc.

For eg: https://{ServerName} /XRMServices/2011/Organization.svc

Steps  to be done before Development

1. Registration of Device using Device Registration Tool Provided in the SDK.

Eg:

C:\>deviceregistration.exe /operation:Register – Go to the location where the exe is there and then run with the following command.

This will register you device and give Device Username and Device Password. This Device Id Username and Password is basically used while generating  the class which is used for the development though early bound class.

The device Username and password is basically used for the Authentication of the Services (mainly for Claim Based Authentication) which we want to use. The CRM 2011 online supports only claim based authentication so the device username and the password is very important and a necessary component for generating the code{class} for using the Organization Service data and metadata.

Note: The Device Username and the password is not necessary in the other form of Authentication like On- Premise, IFD  etc.

1. Creating the Class using the CrmSvcUtil.exe Tool  which is again the part of the SDK and can be used for generating the Early bound Class. The syntax for using this tool is given below.

For Eg:

CrmSvcUtil.exe /url:https://{servername}/XRMServices/2011/Organization.svc /out:E:\GeneratedCode.cs /username:USERNAME /password:”********” / deviceid:”11yjcvqjo4ynpdoi5dfyo19yth” /devicepassword:”^Va/oCyeCy~Fbbko0fZ~m;lf”

Note: Please replace the USERNAME with the username with which you logs the CRM for the given URL.

After using this tool a class file will be generated which we need to include in our Project for accessing all the entities and data of the Organization.

Sample Code

1. First create a class that will contain the configuration details which we can use in our code for creating the proxy class. This class will contain all the details about the Authentication ,the Organization URL information ,Device Credentials, user credentials etc.

So let us create a class called ServerConnection  which also contains a class called Configuration which holds the different  variables like Server Address, Organization Name, Discovery URL, Organization URL , Device Credentials, Credentials etc.

public class ServerConnection
        {
            public class Configuration
            {
                //Declare the variables like Discoveryurl,
            }
        }

Now we will create a method called GetServerConfiguration() for defining the variables.

public virtual Configuration GetServerConfiguration()
        {
            config.ServerAddress = "{ServerAddress}";
            config.DiscoveryUri = new Uri(String.Format("https://{0}/XRMServices/2011/Discovery.svc", config.ServerAddress));
            config.DeviceCredentials = GetDeviceCredentials();// only for CRM Online not required for On-Premise and IFD
            config.Credentials = GetUserLogonCredentials();
            string baseurl ="https://{ServerAddress}/XRMServices/2011/Organization.svc";
            Uri uri = new Uri(baseurl);
            config.OrganizationUri = uri;
            if (configurations == null) configurations = new List<Configuration>();
            configurations.Add(config);
            return config;
        }

Here we can find that we are using certain methods like GetDeviceCredentials(),GetUserLogonCredentials(), so we are going to define all those methods now.

protected virtual ClientCredentials GetDeviceCredentials()
        {
            ClientCredentials credential = new ClientCredentials();
            credential.UserName.UserName = "11yjcvqjo4ynpdoi5dfyo19yth";//Give the username that you get after registering the device.
            credential.UserName.Password = "^Va/oCyeCy~Fbbko0fZ~m;lf";// Give the Device Password .
            return credential;
        }

Now we will define the GetUserLogonCredential() for getting the User Credentials

protected virtual ClientCredentials GetUserLogonCredentials()
        {
            ClientCredentials credentials = new ClientCredentials(); ;
            String userName;
            String password;
            userName = "{Windows Live ID Username for logging into CRM.}";
            if (string.IsNullOrWhiteSpace(userName))
            {
            return null;
            }
            password = "Windows Live ID Password.";
            credentials.UserName.UserName = userName;
            credentials.UserName.Password = password;
            return credentials;
        }

After our ServerConnection Class is ready tharn we can Proceed for the Application part where we can use this class for creating a proxy class for talking  to the IOrganization Service through code.

Now we will create a class where we can consume this. Lets create a class called ConsumeIorganization.cs

Now first create a Proxy class for establishing a connection to the IOrganization Service and call this method in the page load or any constructor so that before using the classes of the Organization the proxy is properly created.

public void Run(ServerConnection.Configuration serverConfig)
        {
            try
            {
               using (serviceproxy = new OrganizationServiceProxy(serverConfig.OrganizationUr, serverConfig.HomeRealmUri,
               serverConfig.Credentials, serverConfig.DeviceCredentials))
                {
                    serviceproxy.ServiceConfiguration.CurrentServiceEndpoint.Behaviors.Add(new ProxyTypesBehavior());
                    service = (IOrganizationService)serviceproxy;
                }
            }
            catch (FaultException<Microsoft.Xrm.Sdk.OrganizationServiceFault>)
            {
               throw;
            }

         }

Now the next step is to use the class in our project which we have got by the tool [SvcUtil.exe ]. Include the class in our Project and start using to get all the classes of the CRM Organization. By adding this class you can use all the data and metadata in your Project.

So Let’s start using this to consume in our code. In the Below code I have written a method which Creates an Account Record.

public void CreateAccount()
        {
            Account account =new Account();
            account.Name="Sample Account Record Without Service Reference(WCF).";
            account.AccountNumber="10000000000000";
            accountid = service.Create(account);
        }

Note: Here service is the object which we have defined while creating a Proxy Class. So not forget to Declare in the beginning  of the class. You can declare as follows

IOrganizationService service;

OrganizationServiceProxy serviceproxy;

Both are part of the DLL [using Microsoft.Xrm.Sdk,using Microsoft.Xrm.Sdk.Client]   which is provided in the CRM Sdk .

So Now we are all set to run the. After running the Application you will find that a Account Record will be created in the CRM server.

So Its Easy …………………………..Enjoy………………………..!!!!!!!!!!

It is basically used to capture the data when the form loads. That is the data which is present by default when the form loads.  The syntax for using the PreEntityImages in CRM 2011 is changed as compared to CRM 4.0. Remember the PreEntityImages cannot be registered for “create” operation.

Syntax Used in CRM 2011 :

Suppose you registered the Plugin and added a Image with name “PreImage ”

Entity preMessageImage;

if (context.PreEntityImages.Contains(“PreImage”) && context.PreEntityImages["PreImage"] is Entity)

{

preMessageImage = (Entity)context.PreEntityImages["PreImage"];

accountnumber = (String)preMessageImage.Attributes["accountnumber"];

}

Here Entity is an Class that is available in the Microsoft.Crm.Sdk.dll

PostEntityImages :

The Post Image contains the attributes value which are finally changed. We can capture the changed data before the database operation takes place. And can do any kind of validation based on the changed data. Remember it can only be registered  for update message and cannot be registered on create message.

Syntax Used in CRM 2011 :

Suppose you registered the Plugin and added a Image with name “PostImage ”

Entity postMessageImage;

if (context.PostEntityImages.Contains(“PostImage”) && context.PostEntityImages["PostImage"] is Entity)

{

postMessageImage = (Entity)context.PostEntityImages["PostImage"];

accountnumber = (String)postMessageImage.Attributes["accountnumber"];

}

The PreEntityImages and PostEntityImages are Very useful in Scenarios where we want to compare the data that is changed by the user. Based on the changes the custom operation can be performed.

The below PLugin shows the use of PreEntityImages and PostEntityImages.The plugin creates a contact record when a account record is updated. The plugin uses late binding or Dynamic Entity concept for the creation of the record.