I had a client call me the other day as he was having an issue with a couple of his SharePoint 2010 sites that seemed strange, the sites just stopped working. When anyone tried to access the sites, they would get HTTP 500 errors. I was able to resolve this issue for the client so I thought I should share some of my troubleshooting tips.

With Mobile Express you can access your Microsoft Dynamics CRM 2011 data wherever and whenever you need it! Follow the simple instructions below to get started with Mobile Express today.  

A database attach upgrade is the only supported method for upgrading SharePoint 2010 Products to SharePoint 2013 (unless you use a third-party migration tool). Database attach is used to upgrade SharePoint content and service applications. I was doing some testing with doing database attach upgrades from SharePoint 2010 to SharePoint 2013 and found an issue.

As a sales professional, here are 25 reasons why I love working with Microsoft Dynamics CRM (and why you should love it too)! Dynamics CRM automates every aspect of my job, making it easy to find and sort through information that I need...

The idea of web resources has always been a little overwhelming to me. In the past I associated them with something a programmer uses for the wonderful, amazing magic they do in Microsoft Dynamics CRM. As it turns out, even those of us who don't consider ourselves to be hard-core programmers have the ability to take advantage of web resources.

At C5 Insight, we use ClickDimensions with Microsoft Dynamics CRM for our email marketing and marketing automation. Recently we decided to upgrade to the newest version of ClickDimensions to take advantage of their new features. Much to our surprise, many of our Lead Source picklist values in Dynamics CRM got changed during the upgrade. As you can imagine, this made us a little nervous. After some investigating, we discovered the problem and learned a little-known limitation of managed solutions in Dynamics CRM.

This post will walk you through all the steps you need to configure an animated sliding accordion using the standard out-of-the-box SharePoint 2010 navigation functionality. It is pretty simple to do, you just need one line of CSS, a reference to jQuery and a few lines of JavaScript. Each section of the accordion will expand and collapse when clicked on, and only one section can be open at a time. It will automatically open if you are on a page that is linked to from your left navigation, to help your users navigate your site.

With so many technology consulting firms to choose from, it is often difficult for decision-makers to sort through the options and offerings and determine the best partner for their organization. Over the past 15 years in the IT industry and business applications realm, I've noticed some key traits that set top consulting firms apart. I hope my insights will help you make the right decision for your organization.

I got a call from a client recently where one particular user was unable to login to SharePoint via their User Principle Name (UPN).For those non-AD SharePoint folks out there, UPN refers to an attribute on the user account object in Active Directory. Anytime a user is created, at a minimum they will have a user logon name and a UPN suffix (domain name). The UPN is composed of the user logon name and the UPN suffix joined by the @ sign. Read on to see how I quickly resolved this issue.

For the IE users out there, I’m sure you’ve come across this dialog once or twice in your life. On several of our recent client projects I’ve been involved with, we’ve been doing a lot of changing over from unsecure to secure URLs via SSL certificates in SharePoint. Invariably, as soon as you enable SSL and log in to SharePoint, you get this wonderful prompt: Do you want to view only the webpage content that was delivered securely? Find out how to get rid of this for good...

“Paralysis by analysis” means having so much data that it becomes difficult to take any action. And it is an issue that organizations frequently run into with getting users to adopt a customer relationship management solution. Users see long lists of activities, leads, opportunities, cases and accounts - and they don’t know where to begin to manage their day in the CRM system. The results can be devastating to the bottom line and often include: failing to work the best leads, opportunities slipping through the cracks, key customers being ignored and follow-up commitments aren't met. Ultimately, it may lead your team to abandon CRM and go back to more familiar ways to manage relationships.

Our team recently took on a client that had several Microsoft Dynamics CRM 2011 online deployments. Due to this particular client’s complex business model and wide range of verticals, segregation has been required on every level of the project. When we were contacted to setup another Dynamics CRM deployment on their behalf, the fairly self-sufficient client told us that he failed to move a Dynamics CRM Solution from an earlier deployment to the newest deployment. Once I got in their CRM system and started digging around, I discovered why he believed the solution import had failed.

Customer relationship management (CRM) projects are particularly difficult to successfully deliver. In fact, research into CRM project failures over the last 10 years has consistently found a failure rate between 30% and 70%. A quick scan of the proposals that we have delivered to new clients for CRM projects over the past 12 months shows that fully 59% of new clients who approach us are dealing with a need to administer CPR on their CRM implementation. This is true across all CRM products (we have seen failed CRM projects across virtually every CRM solution on the market). In this article I’ll take a look at one of the most frequent causes of failure that we have encountered and will offer some guidance for avoiding this (or for recovering if you’re already there). I will also be doing a deeper dive into this topic during our CPR for CRM Webcast. 

On a recent project I got to work with the out-of-the-box (OOTB) Chart Web Part in SharePoint 2010. My team just needed to chart some simple data, nothing fancy, but we had some fairly specific styling requirements. We tried Web parts from other vendors they already had and got close, but we just couldn’t get there. Luckily we were upgrading to Enterprise anyway, so that allowed us to use the Chart Web Part that comes with SharePoint OOTB.

In this post I explain how to use PowerShell to create a full SharePoint (2010 or 2013) training site or testing site environment. This is the proccess I used to prepare for a recent SharePoint training course where I needed each of my users to have their own site collection in my environment.

We use dashboards very heavily internally and have recently expanded our set of core metrics and KPIs to be about 12-15 charts and graphs (depending on special events we may have, etc.). In this post I will tell you about a fairly quick way to create rotating dashboards with SharePoint. SharePoint is the perfect solution for our needs because it allows us to stay within our core systems and leverage the platform.

While many people have enjoyed the “You Might be a Redneck If” jokes by Jeff Foxworthy, few people are aware of the applicability to the IT community. As a professional IT consultant for C5 Insight, I have saved a number of clients from unfortunate situations caused by their previous, not-so-qualified consulting partners.

In a few days, Microsoft will be hosting their annual event focused on Microsoft Dynamics CRM—Microsoft Convergence 2013. This is a valuable event for organizations that are either using or are considering Microsoft CRM. Read on for more reasons on why you should attend Convergence.

Successful user adoption, or the mental acceptance and use of something new, can be achieved in any organization. There are a number of methods that can be used to implement new systems, including "big bang" (single rollout) or "phased adoption" (gradual rollout). Regardless of the method you use to rollout user adoption in your organization, there are a few important items that must be factored into your plan.

Microsoft’s Rollup 12 is not as forgiving as previous versions when it comes to the Currency field. After applying Rollup 12 to an on-premise instance of Dynamics CRM 2011 (this one happened to be running the Internet Facing Deployment deployment) but not enabling the Enhanced User Experience (aka Flow UI), we noticed that we could no longer qualify leads.

Over the time I’ve been using SharePoint, I’ve been taking notes on the tools and that make my job a little bit easier. Lately I’ve focused on collecting a ton of tips for working with branding in SharePoint2010. To help other people working with branding in SharePoint, I thought I should share some of my information.

On a recent client engagement, we had a somewhat common requirement that we had solved several times before. It was part of a multi-month complete extranet solution with extensive branding and user interface design/layout. The site's overall feel from a UI and design perspective was intuitive, sleek and quite honestly, beautiful. Although the particular requirement wasn't overly complex or new to our team, we decided to solve this using an approach we had never tried before to maintain the sleek look and feel of the site.

In deployments with a decent amount of workflows that fire constantly (i.e., system jobs are spawned), the amount of records placed in the AsyncOperationBase table is quite impressive. However, when these system jobs complete (canceled or succeeded) they remain in this table until you decide to purge them. When these tables begin to grow into the millions of rows it imposes undue performance issues on the Async service and overall system performance may suffer as well.

I often find myself talking to a frustrated prospect who has just endured a disastrous implementation, and often he or she is looking to me to save them from their current partner/vendor. Coming into these situations, it seems there is an expectation that I will ride in on my white horse, rescue them and we will gallop off into the sunset with all of their IT problems behind us. If only it were that easy.

There isn’t a day that goes by, where I come across some type of challenge, situation, issue, or piece of new learning that isn’t worth sharing with others. This article encourages you to blog, explains why it's important, and provides ideas on how to make it a natural part of your day.

Receiving a Request for Proposal  (RFP) or Request for Quotation (RFQ) is generally thought of the same way as a dental appointment — a dreaded but necessary activity. As a result, most sales professionals maintain the belief that it's OK to slap a response onto a couple pages in response to the RFP because they have such a great bond with the prospect. I don't agree with this mindset and I'd suggest those professionals should consider a more systematic approach.
 

In our day-to-day client work, one topic we are very passionate about is user adoption. We talk about this topic both internally and externally on a daily basis. After all, we should never forget for whom we are solving problems and building solutions. Put another way - if a car manufacturer builds 1,000 cars and no one buys them, then what was the point?

A RAD Approach to CRM Projects

If you’re like a lot of other folks, you’ve taken advantage of the Managed Metadata functionality in SharePoint. You’ve created your taxonomy group, specified your term sets, and created some terms. Then you’ve created your managed metadata column in your site collection, and pointed it to your specified term set. You’ve then uploaded a lot of documents and specified terms for the metadata column, everyone is “happy happy happy”.

But then you need to rename one of your terms currently called “Information Technology Department” to just “Information Technology”. No sweat, you go into the Term Store tool, rename the term. Done right? To your surprise, when you look at properties of various documents tagged with your term, they haven’t been renamed. Hmm … what gives?

As a company that provides customer relationship management (CRM) services, we’re big advocates of using your CRM system to track and approve sales commissions.  But sometimes it can be impractical to do this.  This is particularly true in complex organizations, small organizations or fast-growing organizations where you need the flexibility to quickly adapt your commission model to a changing situation in the marketplace.  Long-term, everyone should aim to handle commissions in their CRM system, but what do these organizations do in the short-term?

The good news is that SharePoint is an excellent tool for giving you all of the flexibility you need, while still having an efficient process for setting, tracking and distributing commissions.  Here’s how it can work for you.

I was working with PowerShell to update a managed metadata field that accepted multiple values in a publishing page library today and it was more difficult than it seemed like it should have been, so I’m posting here what actually worked for me. It turned out to be much simpler than I was trying to make it.

Using Global Option sets in CRM 2011 can simplify the process of mapping option sets.  But what if you have a local option set in one entity and a global option set in another?  This blog explains how to map data from a local option set in one entity to the equivalent in another via workflow.

On a recent project, I hit an issue with databases that was interesting. We were restoring a lot of databases over to a development environment from production, as well as the managed metadata database. I had gone through the whole deal, backed up the database in the old server, restored it to the development SQL server, etc. There was an issue with the Managed Metadata service that required to have service application re-created. This lead to a situation where the service application database was unprovisioned, but not deleted.

So, if you have ever moved a calendar from one place to another, either as part of a site move or a list move, you will be greeted by the fact that your calendar overlays no longer work because the URLs to the overlaying calendars are hardcoded into the list view. This calendar had 3 overlays and there are other calendars with more overlays. I am trying to set up an automated restore from production to development, so having lots of broken calendars isn’t great. Fortunately, all you have to do is run a few lines of PowerShell to fix this.

Our Project Managers use Microsoft CRM to manage and track all of our projects – including the project plans, financials, time tracking and expenses.  When combined with SharePoint, our Agile Project Management solution has become a great way to carefully track all the details of our projects and communicate with our clients.  During a recent update to this solution, our Project Managers asked us if we could use a different view for the Time Tracking entity than the associated view.

After doing a bit of research we found that this is possible to some extent, but it is not well documented.  So here are some options for changing the associated view on a specific Microsoft Dynamics CRM 2011 form.

I don’t believe Microsoft Expression ever had a huge following from web developers and graphics designers, but it served a purpose. Whether you liked it, hated or loved it, Microsoft has done what it does best again.

In case you haven’t visited their website lately, you will notice some major changes with Expression. Basically, they are rolling the Expression products into Visual Studio 2012 and beyond, forgoing the standalone tools. For the time being, they made Expression Web 4, Expression Design 4 and Expression Encoder 4 free for download. That may not be a big deal to some, but I think it could prove useful to some.

Microsoft Excel is an amazing tool both in terms of the diversity of functions that it can provide and in the depth of data analytics and business intelligence that it makes available to people at every level of an organization.  But too often businesses find that they are using it to solve problems that are much more complex that Excel was intended to solve - and paying a price in terms of employee productivity and costly decisions made using bad data.

So how do you know you've taken your Excel application too far?  And what do you do about it?

Why should you care that the mainstream support phase is ending for Dynamics CRM 4.0 in April 2013? Read this article to understand what this really means for your deployment of CRM 4.0 on-premise, and how you can decide when it's time to upgrade to Dynamics CRM 2011.

So you’re going about your business in SharePoint, say when you want to publish an article page. You open the page and click on Publish, and the Schedule option isn’t there! Ack! Oh the humanity! If you’re uploading a document, the schedule items appear on the edit properties (editform.aspx) dialog.

You may be asking, what scheduling option? Well, it’s the option for being able to publish pages at a future date and time and is activated at the document library level. If you have a publishing site, this feature should already be activated on the Pages library. But it can be enabled on any site/library under the right conditions. This is very likely a simple fix. Let’s review the items to check.

Microsoft will be rolling out Update Rollup 12 (UR12), also known as the Polaris update, for Microsoft Dynamics CRM 2011 Online and On-Premise in January, 2013.  This update contains some exciting new functionality that your users will love.  But it may also require that you make updates to the JavaScript on your CRM forms or you may experience errors.  Be careful - if you're not prepared, your CRM 2011 could stop working as expected and slow your team down!

This article was updated on 1/23/2013 with additional information about UR12.

This article contains the information you need in order to make sure that your CRM is ready for this update.

Calendar Overlays was definitely a welcome new feature when SharePoint 2010 was released. They provide decent basic functionality for being to have a nice view of multiple calendars at once (up to 10 calendars). Suppose you are in a situation where you want to do some calendar overlays, but you only want to show a filtered set of calendar entries on the calendar overlay view? This turns out to be much easier than it might sound. Now you could write a simple workflow that runs on the child list and copies the list item on the child calendar to the parent calendar, but that’s not really an overlay is it?

As I said, this is actually extremely easy to configure. It feels like it should be illegal to be this easy, so enjoy the moment! So what do we need to do? Here are the overview steps:

• Create at least 2 calendars (one child, and one parent used to display the overlay)
• Create items on the child calendar
• Create a filtered Calendar View on the child calendar (e.g. only show items where category=X)
• On the parent calendar, configure the overlay, and be sure to choose the new filtered view
• Sit back, have a drink and bask in the awe of your coworkers and boss as they bow before you in the view of this incredible display of SharePoint awesomeness

Last week, C5 Insight attended the annual SharePoint Conference in Las Vegas. It was a very full and eventful week, which was the primary reason I did not blog each evening on the daily events as I have in the past. My goal for this blog post is to summarize the overall conference highlights and some of the features that we see as very promising in SharePoint 2013.

While the contacts list is usually filled out for contacts that are outside the company, there are times when you would use a contacts list to store internal and external resources. Wouldn’t it be nice if you didn’t have to re-type your internal contacts’ information that are already in the system? Now you can with a little InfoPath customization on the contacts list.

Here’s our plan:

• Create the contacts list, and open in InfoPath
• Create a data connection to the User Profile web service
• Customize the form adding some text, a people picker and a button
• Create InfoPath rules that will populate the contact fields from the user fields in the User Profile store

Today I want to welcome you to the world of Flows. We will break this down into a couple different blogs since this is a large topic to cover in one day. However, I first want to introduce you to them and explain how they can assist you in your SFDC organization.

Flows were designed by SFDC to help you create a more complex workflow without having to know or understand APEX. APEX can be very hard to jump into if you are a non-developer, so this is a great alternative for the everyday admin of SFDC. Basically, flows does exactly what it sounds like. It is a guided user experience based upon a set of steps and questions you predefine in your flow. For my example, I set up a flow that will guide a receptionist or a Tier 1 support user through a set of questions that will automatically create a case, activity and update my account with a last contacted date. The goal for setting up this flow is not only creating a better experience for the user to create a Support Case for your customer, but also creating a process in which your users will not miss any details when creating a support case. This also helps to save time for your users with their everyday duties.

Several days ago I wrote a post in response to the successful South Carolina cyber-attack (that earlier post can be found here).  Although the security benefits alone are enough to justify starting the move to the cloud, there are numerous other cost-saving and productivity improving reasons for state and local governments to consider making the move. 

As I work with various clients with different skill levels with SharePoint, I have on more than one occasion needed to compile a list of training resources. Microsoft (and others) provide a good number of resources so I thought I would try and compile a list in one place. These resources can be a mix of delivery methods including blogs, whitepapers, online videos, tutorials or courses. Let’s start with resources for end users, then move to the IT Pros, then to the developers. I started writing this for the purpose of training, but the lists quickly grew to include other resources, so I hope you find it a useful resource.

For the sake of this post, all resources will be for SharePoint 2010. But with the very soon to release SharePoint 2013, I will provide some information in another post. Stay tuned!

Earlier this week it was announced than an international hacker had successfully made off with over 3 million social security numbers and almost 400,000 credit and debit card numbers from the state of South Carolina.  State and local governments have collectively spent billions of dollars trying to secure their data systems.  In spite of this investment, a hacker was able to identify and exploit a weak spot in their armor.  As public sector budgets are continuing to shrink, there is pressure to add more software applications to automate tasks and lower costs; increasing pressure to cut costs on security for these applications; and increasing pressure to extend the life of less secure and aging legacy computer applications.  The result is that our government agencies are at increasing risk of successful cyber-terrorism through a greater number of applications, lower security standards, and aging applications that should be replaced.

How could South Carolina and other state and local governments cost-effectively protect vital citizen, business and government records?  The answer comes from an emerging private-sector technology: cloud computing.

 The latest update rollup for the Dynamics CRM 2011 client fixes some compatibility issues with Outlook 2013.  However, we are finding some issues with users that have upgraded from Outlook 2010 to Outlook 2013.  There was a similar issue when Office 2010 was released.  At that time, we had a client who purchased new computers that had Office 2010 pre-installed, but their corporate standard was Office 2007.  They uninstalled Office 2007 and installed Office 2010 – and CRM for Outlook no longer worked.

By now, most of you reading this have likely heard a little about SharePoint 2013, Microsoft's next version of its best-selling collaboration platform. In this short blog, we wanted to highlight some of our favorite features that will be in the next version of SharePoint.