I Have Been Re-Awarded MVP for 2013!

I am ecstatic to say that I have been re-awarded MVP for 2013.  This is a great honor and I am very glad to  to have received it.  I will admit that I didn't think I had been renewed because I didn't see my email and everyone else was shouting from the rooftops about their renewal.

Turns out the darn thing was in my spam folder.

:)

Happy New Years!

XRM Speed Builder for Microsoft Dynamics CRM is Here!!

First off, before I say anything, I would like to thank Jason Lattimer for all of the hard work he did helping develop this application.  I would not have reached my goal of having it out this year without him.

If you haven't been following, this new tool is designed to take existing applications and speed up the process of moving them into Microsoft Dynamics CRM as XRM applications.

Check it out and Download it here: http://xrmspeedy.codeplex.com/

What It Currently Does:
- Creates custom entities from SQL Server database tables
- Creates attributes from fields from database table fields
- Puts CRM 2011 fields on

Next Steps:
- Add other datasources (MySQL, Oracle, Etc...)
- Make it create relationships between created entities based on relationships that exist on database tables

We are always open to hearing about new feature requests.

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Oh Yeah, Evidently I Am Recognized as a Microsoft Community Contributer

So I was on the forums the other day and I noticed on my profile that my profile shows that I am a Partner, MVP, and Microsoft Community Contributor.  I emailed the MCC program and they said that they could only email my award info the info they had on file which was for some reason some email address that hasn't been active for over 2 years.  So as of yet I haven't received any details from Microsoft, besides that at some point during the last year I evidently won this award.

Cheers!

Ramping Up!! Something is coming

I got a fun announcement in the next few days.   Can anyone guess in the comments what it is?!?!

Stay Tuned!!!!!!

Dynamics CRM Org Merge Part 2: The Sandbox

So, if you haven't been following, I am working on a project where they have both a CRM 4.0 organization and also a CRM 2011 Organization and they need me to merge them into a single organization.   This is a bit of a different scenario than the norm in the Dynamics world but I am hoping to gain some economies of scale by utilizing the upgrade features of CRM 2011 even though we are not doing an upgrade.

Basically here is what it looks like:

Here are the steps:
-  We will create a new organization in the CRM 4.0 environment.
-  We will move the customizations to the new org but not data.
-  We will attach the database to the CRM 5.0 environment and thus upgrade it.

This will do a few things for us:
- Will give us a clean environment to test upgraded customizations in before moving them to the real development environment to see what worksand what needs to be remediated.
- Can easily move things like jscript, web resources, plugins, workflows and entities that don't already exist in the current 2011 system as it makes sense as solutions.  Some things like workflows would otherwise need to be re-built entirely based on our scenario if we didn't have this upgraded space.

Thoughts?

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Org Upgrade/Merge Scenario Part 1

I am doing something a little different from previous CRM upgrade projects I have been a part of.  The client has a CRM 4.0 organization and a CRM 2011 organization and they are used by two different sets of users. Now they want to upgrade the org to 2011, but they don't just want it upgraded, they want the 4.0 organization merged into the 2011 organization.  

This is an interesting scenario and I think I will cover how it goes and the steps required to get there.

Hopefully the story over the next couple months will help someone.

Overriding the CreatedOn Attribute On Entities in Microsoft Dynamics CRM 2011

I wanted to write a quick blogpost because I think there are a lot of people out there that have never used the overriddencreatedon field that is on all CRM 2011 entities.  If you have ever tried to manipulate the createdon field manually using the CRM sdk you will find that it is basically read-only.

There is a workaround for this though.
If you populate the overriddencreatedon field when you insert your entities you can specify your own datetime for the createdon field.  Now when the field is saved the overriddencreatedon field datetime is put in the createdon field of the entity and the REAL createdon field is still saved in the overriddencreatedon field.

So all you have to do is populate the overriddencreatedon field and it will in turn populate the createdon field and the real date will then be saved in the overriddencreatedon field.

There is a limitation to this.
You cannot insert a datetime in the future.  This will throw an error.  If you are using an application on another server and using datetime.now you might want to also use .addminutes(-5) or something to that effect because if the server times are out of sync by even a little bit and the application server tries to insert a time that is in the future for the CRM server, it will fail.

-Happy Tuesday