Dynamics CRM: Stepping into organisation management

One of the core concepts in Dynamics CRM concerning organisation management is Business Units. Business units are containers used to represent the business hierarchy, where the organisation created during the installation of Dynamics CRM is at the top (that is, the root business unit).

Business Units are similar to an organisational chart, but not quite the same. Combining with other organisational management settings such as sales territories and sites, this can lead to a lot of confusion, and I’ve seen a lot of implementations where business units haven’t been properly considered.

I wrote this post as a kick-start guide for those who are unsure on how to structure their organisation in Dynamics CRM. Read more >>

Dynamics CRM: AND/OR in filtered views

Views play a pivotal role in Dynamics CRM. Not only it is the main method with which interact with records of given entities, but it is also the foundation for creating charts.

For a client, I had to particularly create several views for the Goals entity. In this process I noticed that the “My Group’s Revenue Goals for This Period” doesn’t show exactly what it says it does. This isn’t necessarily a bad thing, but it can be slightly confusing. Read more >>

SharePoint: Mount-SPContentDatabase returns an “update conflict error”

I am currently on the process of upgrading our SharePoint 2007 infrastructure to SharePoint 2010 using the database attach procedure. However for the past two days I have been stuck with the following error when I tried to mount the SharePoint 2007 database in SharePoint 2010:

An update conflict has occurred, and you must re-try this action.

I was breaking my head crawling Google, Bing and Microsoft forums in trying to find a solution for this problem, until today when Microsoft forums saved the day. Read on for the solution.

Dynamics CRM: Automating record names

In every application that makes use of a relational database in a multi-tier architecture, beyond the unique identifiers for records within a table, it is common practice to allow records to be named in a way that would help users easily retrieve the relevant records, be it by search or browsing. In Microsoft Dynamics CRM is no different. Accounts are named by the company name while opportunities are named by their topic, and so on.

Since the idea of naming records is for the identification and retrieval of records, it makes sense to me that users can name Accounts and Contacts to their liking. However, this isn’t the case for Goal records in my organisation.

When creating Goals, users can type anything they want in the name field, which could range from sensible names like “James W Revenue Goal for Q4/2011” to cryptic names like “JW Rev Q4/11”, or anything but professional, like “Show me the money”. Sure we could come up with a naming convention that users should follow. The problem, evidently, is making sure that users will follow it.

The objective of this post is to propose a step-by-step solution for the automatic naming of Goal records following a naming convention through the use of one Javascript.