Scribe recently released their adapter for CRM 2011. I was very excited when I saw this release and wanted to test it out ASAP. After downloading and installing the adapter I ran into a few snags on the connection. The issues I ran into were my fault so I thought I would pass my lessons learned out to you. My issues revolved around connections to CRM 4 On-Line and CRM 2011 On-Line and what should be supplied for the “Organization” connection parameter.

For CRM 4 you need to supply the “Unique Organization Name” to find this in CRM 4 On-Line you will need to browse to: "Settings > Customization > Developer Resources.” Once in the Developer Resources area you will see the Unique Organization Name.

For CRM 2011 you need to supply the “Friendly Organization Name.” To find this name all you have to do is login to your CRM 2011 Org and look in the top menu bar on the right hand side. The name will be listed directly under your user name. Make sure you include any spaces or punctuation.

I hope this helps you out when making your CRM connections! Good luck with your DTS creations!

I had setup a test environment to test out and play with the new hosting functionality of SharePoint, also called multi-tenancy.  When you create your main web application that will be used to house the tenants, you have the option to have it use Claims Based or Classic Mode authentication. 

While configuring a SharePoint farm for a client the other day, I came across a simple but problematic error with search.  We had requested a full SSL certificate for the farm, but I was a self-signed certificate so I could work with the site.  After configuring search content sources and I kicked off a full crawl, I got this error in the crawl log:

“The secure socks layer (SSL) certificate sent by the server was invalid and this item will not be crawled.”

Wells that’s a bummer.  Luckily there’s an easy fix.  What you need to do is configure search to “Ignore SSL certificate name warnings” via Central Administration.  TechNet has the documented steps.  After making this change and running a full crawl, voilà!

Success!  Of course you should get an official SSL certificate, but sometimes you get by with what you have. 

Microsoft has released the first Update Rollup for CRM 2011. The knowledgebase article is located here, and the rollup can be download here. (Note that there are separate downloads for the server, clients, BIDS extension, E-mail Router, and SRS Data Extension.) This update rollup includes fixes for a number of items as the KB article details. In particular, there are a few fixes that I've been looking for: One that fixes a script error that is thrown frequently when switch rapidly between areas of the CRM web UI Another that enables intranet access to CRM when it is configured for Internet-facing deployment. Another big one that I'm eager to get past is a problem that occurred configuring the Outlook client if the client machine also had the Windows Live Sign-in Assistant installed.: "Assume that you create an email address for a queue that is owned by a team entity. In this situation, you cannot approve the email address." (This one had me stumped until I assigned ownership of the offe ...

 

Customer relationship management systems typically handle relationships between records in a linear format. For example, in the image to the left, an account (aka a company) may have a relationship with one or more contacts (aka the employees of that company).  Similarly, the account may also have one more more opportunities associated with it.

In the strictest sense, this is how the business views the relationships.  Everything is nice and tidy and linear.