Thoughts on Convergence 2014 Day 1 - Part II

In the first part of this series, I talked a little bit about how the Dynamics Business suite fits into Microsoft's overarching plan of delivering innovation to the customer, and also discussed some details on the Dynamics CRM roadmap specifically with the Spring and Autumn updates. One constant theme of Day 1 of Convergence 2014 was on products delivering amazing customer experience regardless of the channel they use.

Thoughts on Convergence 2014 Day 1 - Part I

This post is Part I of a series where I will be discussing the Keynote speeches and my thoughts/ opinions around the presentations. The posts will have a decidedly Dynamics CRM bent to it (which by the way has 40,000 customers and 4 million users worldwide).

Convergence 2014 in Atlanta, Georgia is the largest Dynamics party of the year for customers and partners associated with Microsoft's Business product suite. The first 3 days are all about keynotes and breakout sessions, with the last day focused on getting all your questions answered by Microsoft's team members or Dynamics user group communities. The are about 12,000 attendees for Convergence this year.

CRM 2011 Queue History Report

While working with a recent prospect, there was a very interesting report that they wanted to recreate in Dynamics CRM. The report would give details of the time the object (in this case incident) spent in each queue. For example, if incident "Incident_xyz" was in queue "A" for 5 minutes, and then was moved to queue B 20 minutes ago, then the report should show the time spend in each queue.

In Place Upgrade - CRM 2011 to CRM 2013

Now that the latest and greatest version of Dynamics CRM has been released, I was ready to get hands on with the new features. Since I had my own VM (details on building a VirtualBox VM here) to mess around with, I planned on doing an in place upgrade. Please note that this is not the recommended approach especially in production environments. A new install of CRM 2013 or a migration upgrade would be the best options for stage/ prod setups.

Here are the steps to follow for an in place upgrade from CRM 2011 to CRM 2013.

CRM 2011 Point of View - What is the scope of a deactivated View?

Views are a great way to provide the user with data filtered on a very specific criteria that is easily accessible. The view can be a system level view, which means that all users with the right security role can see the view, or the view can be a personal view, visible only to the user (which can then be shared).

In this post, I want to talk a little bit about the system views and what it means to have a view in the deactivated state.

Proxy web service to connect to Dynamics CRM

While Dynamics CRM 2011 webservice endpoints are available for theoretically any client, there seems to be a few challenges while it comes to a Java implementation especially using NTLM/ Kerberos authentication. One easy workaround is to create a custom webservice that can then be hosted in IIS which will act as a prxy between the java client and Dynamics CRM. In this post, I will walk through the creation of one such simple webservice which will create a case in CRM.

Manually Uninstall Microsoft Dynamics CRM 2011 Server

I recently had a very weird experience installing Dynamics CRM 2011 server front end role. The front end server would start the install process and make the connection to the sql server. Midway through the install the sql connection was getting terminated, resulting in the following error:

Action Microsoft.Crm.Setup.Common.Update.DBUpdateAction failed.
A transport-level error has occurred when receiving results from the server. (provider: TCP Provider, error: 0 - The semaphore timeout period has expired.)