The CRM Grid – A Microsoft CRM Blog
Greg Owens’ rose-tinted MS-CRM mumblingsArchive for November, 2007
A (slightly) different approach to dynamic picklists
The MS CRM client-side SDK has an example for filtering dynamic picklist values – an example in widespread use (Ronald has a post on this too). I found this example wasn’t flexible enough for handling situations where the list of picklist options might grow in the future, since it relies on “related” options being consecutive in the list. It also meant that an option can only apply to one “group”
This query has also just been raised by Naaz in the Microsoft Forums.
Here is the solution I used. I find it much more flexible than the SDK example, it just required a bit more coding! Read the rest of this entry »
Set users’ default Start Page
The Announcements module in MSCRM is potentially very useful to your deployment, especially during the early days of implementation (in my opinion). By directing all users via the Announcements page, it is possible to make sure they all see pertinent news or articles. The problem is that by default, a user’s Start Page is the Activities screen and unless you have particularly motivated and/or habitual users it will be difficult to get them to check Announcements on a regular basis.
The solution? Force their default Start Page to be “Announcements” – but how? There is no out-of-the-box solution available to the administrator. In fact the only supported method is to request each user to change the value themselves. Far from ideal, right?
Dejan Dular encountered the same problem so he did something about it. The users’ Start Pane and Start Tab are of course held in the database. Dejan found the appropriate fields in the _MSCRM database and updated them. Simple!
The basic code is copied below, but please be sure to thank Dejan via his blog if you found this to be useful.
UPDATE [UserSettingsBase] SET [HomepageSubarea] = 'nav_news', [HomepageArea] = 'Home'
As with all good things, this change is unsupported by Microsoft so the usual caveats apply!
Incidentally, we will be using the Announcements section to post links to self-help articles or reference documents to assist our users during early days of the deployment and to announce the inevitable post-implementation bugfixes.
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