Tag: Microsoft

Using MS CRM “IPluginExecutionContext” to Tackle Business Needs: A 3 Part Series

The “IPluginExecutionContext” contains a property called “MessageName.” This is the name of the message that was called to perform the action. Here is a link to a list of messages: https://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/gg309482.aspx .   I couldn’t find my original source for this, so you can assume that each message name is just the class name listed without the request at the end. The one we are interested in is the “ConvertQuotetoSalesOrderRequest” or the “ConvertQuoteToSalesOrder” message. This is what is called when you click the “Create Order” button and can be called through the API as well. So to figure out if that is what is creating our sales order we would simply need to traverse the parent context list and check to see if the “MessageName” property equals “ConvertQuoteToSalesOrder”. Here is a code snippet to do that. 

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Best Practices in Properly Preparing Your Company for an Upgrade

At KTL Solutions we have worked with a lot of upgrade projects involving Microsoft business products, including Dynamics GP, CRM, SharePoint, Exchange, etc. In today’s post we will discuss the preparation you can do as a system administrator to prepare for an upgrade of Dynamics CRM. An upgrade project starts early on when we first investigate/review the existing state of the CRM environment. In most cases, we perform an upgrade by migrating to a new instance of SQL server. In case of multiple version upgrades, we do a migration, and then do an in-place upgrade.

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Using MS CRM “IPluginExecutionContext” to Tackle Business Needs: A 3 Part Series

STOPPING A SALES ORDER FROM BEING CREATED

Stopping an operation using a plugin is a simple process. All you need to do is throw an exception, but its best to not just throw any exception. CRM provides the “InvalidPluginExectionException” that allows you to pass in a message that will get displayed to the user. Using that, we can alert the user that the action they took is not allowed and guide them in the direction of the correct way to create an order.

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How to Pick the Right ISV

Almost every major software company encourages and solicits other companies, knows as ISV’s, to develop solutions for their packages to give them a broader appeal.  For those that aren’t sure what an ISV is, an ISV, called an independent software vendor, develops software that integrates or works with an application to add additional functionality.

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Dynamics CRM: You’re Only as Good as Your Data

Microsoft Dynamics Customer Relationship Management (CRM) is a fantastic tool for managing customers, accounts, cases, opportunity, sales people, etc. The possibilities with CRM are endless, which is why we often refer to it as xRM (the x can be anything you want it to be). As a CRM implementation, support, and development partner we often get questions from customer starting out with, “Can CRM do (insert request here)?” And the answer is usually, “Sure it can, but the question really is ‘Do you have the data to support a function like that’?”

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Design Best Practices to Build Killer Dashboards

When buying real estate its all about location, location, location.  Like real estate, dashboards or data visualizations are all about one thing – data, data, data.  With that in mind, here are some of my data visualization best practice design tips. Make your data visualization:

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laughing coworkers
Jeff Chamberlain

3 Ways to Use Humor in Business

I have always been a fan of comedy, since I was young and used to spend my weeknights in front of the TV watching a VHS copy of “SNL: Best of Chris Farley”.  Stand-Up, sitcoms, improv, sketch – I watch or participate in all the current and classic forms, but I wondered if there was a way to incorporate it into my job.  I mean, everyone likes to laugh, everyone could use a good joke, but how do I best utilize humor that not only maintains the respect your organization has built but also gets across a clear message. Here are the 3 points I use when figuring out how to use humor effectively at work.

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