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.

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.

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.

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...

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.

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.

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.

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?

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.

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.

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!

 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.

If you're unsure what ULS logs are or what they're used for, please see my previous post where I cover the basics. On a recent project, I was adding a new server to a SharePoint 2010 farm. After the join was completed, I went to go review the ULS logs to ensure all looked well and no serious errors or other issues came up. To my surprise, it was empty! It turned out to be a simple fix, but here are some things to check when this happens:

1. ULS logging is driven by the Windows service "SharePoint 2010 Tracing". Ensure this service is started, and if it is already running, right-click on it and choose restart. Then re-check the ULS logs.
2. If the above tracing service is started and re-starting doesn't help, it likely is permissions related. This was the problem in my case. To fix this, do the following:
   1. In this environment, the tracing service was running as the application pool account. We need to add that account to the local user group "Performance Log Users".
   2. Check the membership of this group on a working farm server, and ensure the new farm server has the same group membership.
   3. Restart the tracing service, and check the ULS logs again for entries.
3. If you still have trouble, check the other local security groups like WSS_WPG and WSS_ADMIN_WPG groups and ensure the problem server has the same memberships.

While you shouldn’t have to, it might be necessary to either perform an IISRESET on the problem server, or even reboot to ensure new credentials take affect.

I recently had a client that wanted to change the default text that appears in all search boxes. By default it shows “Search this site…” and the client wanted it to be a little more customized to their environment. It turns out this is very simple to accomplish, and no code! We just need to edit 2 XML files.

Awhile back I ran into an issue where I had some site collection backups that failed to complete. No big deal, but this caused the locks on the site collection to remain in place, as I curiously found my administrator account with deny permissions on all sites in the site collection. This begs the question “What other site collections could be locked?” That becomes a real problem if you have a large number of site collections. Who wants to check each one in Central Administration one by one? Being the non-developer type, I turn to my trusty friend PowerShell.

First, what are we talking about specifically? In Central Administration, click Application Management, then under Site Collections, click Configure quotas and locks. Choose your web application/site collection, and view it’s status:

If you’re like me, at some point in your life you have set out to search the internet for SharePoint for one reason or another. After you found what you were looking for, you take a few extra minutes to look at what other posts the site has and you realize, this is pretty useful, I want to grab the RSS feed. Or you are just building a list of your favorite SharePoint MVPs. Or maybe you’re new to SharePoint, and don’t know all the cool kids’ blogs. Well after a while, those really start to stack up in your RSS reader. Wouldn’t it be nice if you could combine all those useful SharePoint RSS feeds into one single feed?

Crawled properties are metadata properties that are exposed or derived from documents, lists, libraries and anything else that can be indexed. When you search in SharePoint, these crawled properties have to be mapped to managed properties, which will be displayed in search results and refinements. While you may already know this, consider the impact on your organization, or your client’s for that matter, if something goes awry with a key SharePoint component that boasts robust capabilities: Enterprise Search.

Recently while performing a client upgrade from CRM 4.0 to 2011 I ran into an issue with the SiteMap stripping out the Org Name in a URL. This particular client’s 4.0 environment had a SiteMap entry that brought them to a report to view. During a review of the system post upgrade I found that these links were broken. After further investigation I found CRM was stripping out the Org Name even though it was in the URL inside of the SiteMap. I struggled with this for quite some time. I discussed this with a few of my colleagues and we threw around some suggestions such as creating a dashboard which would then reference the report via an iFrame. However, this client had some special security policies around the SiteMap and we all know that there is zero security controls around a system dashboard so I kept digging. After some testing I figured out a way to get this to work 2011 without CRM stripping the Org Name out.

Dynamics CRM makes it easy to customize forms.  But businesses frequently require that a form needs to inherit some data from the parent record.  A hypothetical example of this is a part on a piece of equipment might inherit some information about the piece of equipment that it is a part of (in this particular case, both of these would be custom entities).  This article discusses some best practices for using JavaScript to inherit this data.

Updates are everyone’s favorite topic, and I just wanted to throw out a few good resources on how to keep up to date on the updates that Microsoft released for SharePoint 2010 and WSS 3.0 / MOSS 2007.

The Updates RSS Feed

First and foremost, to keep up to date on SharePoint updates, you need to subscribe to the updates RSS feed! These posts provide links to the KB articles and downloads for the various configurations (Microsoft Office, SharePoint Foundation, Server, Server with Project Server, Office Web Apps, FAST Search, etc.). Notice that this feed includes all Office products, not JUST SharePoint. Unfortunately Microsoft doesn’t publish an update feed just for SharePoint that I know of. Also, Stefan Gobner, a Senior Escalation Engineer with Microsoft support, does a bang up job also posting SharePoint CU releases on his blog, as well as when issues come up. Links:

• Office and SharePoint Updates RSS Feed
• Stefan Gobner’s Blog

I wanted to share this quick tip with PowerShell. Many times, we need to have an easy way to find the configuration database, and like a good SharePoint administrator, you want to try and use PowerShell. I have come across other blogs here and others that mention finding this with the registry, so this is just another way to do it.

It has come to our attention that the Activity Feed solution is temporarily unavailable for download from the Microsoft Marketplace (the link for the download had been: http://pinpoint.microsoft.com/en-us/applications/microsoft-dynamics-crm-activity-feeds-12884926310).

Fortunately, we had downloaded a recent copy of this for a client deployment. If you need a copy of the file, please contact us (click here) and request the file and we will email it to you. To install it:

1. Be sure you are running UR6 or later (we have tested it on UR8)
2. Import the .cab file into CRM as a solution

It is provided without warranty, but we have installed it in a test environment and it works without an issue. If you become aware of the download becoming available again, please reply to this post so we can update it accordingly.

Thanks!

UPDATE 6/11/2012: The solution is now available from the Microsoft Marketplace again. You can now visit the above link to download it directly. Cheers!

The more I learn and get to know PowerShell, the more I love it. I am able to perform what used to be time-consuming tasks (many hours or days) in seconds (after you write the script of course). While writing a script recently to perform some tasks on numerous SharePoint sites (webs to be precise), I was constructing URLs for the sites and using as variables and I needed only part of the URL (the managed path). After a little poking around, I found a nice easy way to do it.

This is my third blog in a series concerning data integration. In my first two blog entries we overviewed some of the data integration hurdles as well as some of the common methods used to discover the net-change data that will need to be translated. Here in my third blog I’ll discuss some of the benefits of not integrating in real-time, but creating a batch job to perform the integration. We’ll also look at the Business Rules that may need to be applied within the integration process.

In my previous blog focusing on the hurdles of real-time, two-way data integration, I highlighted the hurdle of how to discover the data you need translated. In most cases, discovering the net-change data is all you want to translate on a real-time basis. Remember, a two-way integration means net-change data going in two directions or more (depending on the number of systems you’re integrating) at a rate determined by how many end-users there are on each of the systems being integrated. Business systems with a significant amount of end-users can create substantial volumes of net-change data.

I am back home from Convergence and still trying to digest the wealth of information that was shared!

Of course one of the most anticipated parts of the Microsoft Convergence 2012 event in Houston was learning about the future of Dynamics CRM … what new features and functions does Microsoft plan to add?  I must say that Microsoft did a better job than normal in providing a vision of what the future may hold.  The very short summary is that over the course of the next 12 months, you will see Dynamics CRM become more: anytime, any device, any business – than ever before.  In this article we’ll take a deeper look into exactly what that means and how to expect this to translate into changes in the platform over the next several releases.

In some cases, if not all too some extent, integration between Dynamics™ CRM , Salesforce® or/and SharePoint® with your back-office system is the key to user adoption. Real-time, two-way data integration allows all segments of the business to access the very latest transactional data, and the information that the data contains.

This weekend I’ll be packing my bags and heading off to Houston, TX to attend Microsoft Convergence 2012 to experience all of the Microsoft Dynamics CRM goodness I can get.  I’ll plan to publish at least a couple of blogs while I’m there on whatever news or tips I can pick up.  Feel free to leave a comment here if you’d like to request any specific topics

Are you planning to attend?   Great!  Ping me and let’s plan to chat.  It would be great to network with individuals who are looking for career opportunities or who would like to chat about the challenges that you are experiencing with your CRM project.  I’ll hook you up with a free copy of our CRM 2011 Bible if you don’t already have one (or if you want a second copy for your nightstand).

Have you finally gotten users to start creating contacts in CRM only to find out that they are often forgetting to associate them with an account?  For B2B organizations, this can become a significant data quality issue.  Most B2B organizations are business centered rather than contact centered.  What this means is that users tend to use the account entity in CRM to search for information.  So if a contact is not associated with an account, then users are not nearly as likely to find it.  This problem is exacerbated by Outlook integration features, such as the ability create a new contact directly from an email address.  In this blog, I’ll offer a couple of practical solutions to aid you with creating higher quality data by ensuring that the Parent Customer field is always populated on contact forms.

One of the most common issues I hear when implementing SharePoint for new clients, or supporting an existing SharePoint environment is the dreaded login prompt. There are multiple reasons for the password prompt, but I'll try and cover the basics here.  Personally, I haven’t had to login to our internal company SharePoint in at least 6 or 8 months!  How can you achieve this SharePoint nirvana? Let’s walk through the common steps to avoid having to login to SharePoint, whether opening the site or when opening documents. Here’s a quick rundown.

1. 1. Internet Explorer Security Zone
2. 2. Windows Credential Store
3. 3. Prompts When Opening Documents