Dynamics CRM: Sales pipeline funnel bug

Not sure if I should be happy about it, but a couple of months ago I discovered my first bug in Dynamics CRM 2011. I am confident I am not the only one to have bumped into this issue. Microsoft just confirmed to me that this is in fact a bug.

I noticed that when viewing the sales pipeline funnel chart while user has another currency selected that it is not the base currency, the funnel is not rendered and the user is presented with a blank chart.

I opened an incident with Microsoft and they managed to replicate this issue. It seems that when the user selects a default currency that has a conversion rate lower than 0.5, the values in the sales pipeline funnel chart seem to round to zero; thus rending the chart useless.

At the moment the “workaround” (note the quotes here) is to set a conversion value equal or higher than 0.5 (not really a workaround if you ask me).

The feedback I got from Microsoft is that this issue will be fixed in the Update Rollup 4, which is scheduled for mid October/2011.

I raised this issue on Microsoft Connect (ID 665233) on 27/April/2011. Here is my original post about this issue on the Microsoft forums.

Dynamics CRM: Adding a Country/Region option set using ISO 3166-1

In Dynamics CRM, there is one particular bit that I always find myself customising, no matter the client size, region or industry: Country/Region fields.

By default in Dynamics CRM the country/region field is a text field, which means users could type anything they want. This of course can lead to confusion. The solution is to add an option set (a drop-down menu), which can be localised into multiple-languages. The problem is giving the values to the option sets. People often tend to give values starting from 1 to the options in alphabetical order (e.g.: 1 = Afghanistan; 2 = Åland Islands; […]). But this can often lead to issues as options are added or removed from the list.

What if I told you that I think I came up with the perfect solution, but that would mean that you should give specific values such as 4 for Afghanistan, 705 for Slovenia and 858 for Uruguay? I didn’t come up with these values out of a whim. They actually make a lot of sense. If you haven’t figured out the meaning of these values yet, read on for the explanation.