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xRM Integration - make your systems play together

Morten Gad — Tue, 20 Oct 2009 11:00:30 +0000

Integration with Dynamics CRM is not the most popular task to do. But it can actually be done very easy and within a reasonable budget.

With the Rapidi Online integration solution you can easily hook up to any of the datasources that they support (see the bottom of this post) and setup transfers to distribute data from and to your different systems.

Rapidi Online - Service management

When signing up you get a personal workspace from where you can manage all your customers services.

To get started you will install a Rapidi Connector for each system you want to connect to, this will connect to the online Rapidi Platform and from here you’ll be able to read the datasource design.

To setup a transferyou start out by selecting source and destination. Next is source table and destination table and whether the transfer should add new data, do updates or both.

Then we have to create a transfer link - the transfer key - this can contain both fields and formulas bases on fields.

The field mapping - map fields from source to destination - data manipulation is possible through a variety of formulas that makes it easy to customize the transfer to the complexity needed.

Datasources supported by Rapidi Online:

Dynamics NAV - all the way back to the dos based versions, it requires the C-Front add on - and both Native and SQL - and through the NAS Connector
Dynamics XAL - Both SQL server and Oracle deployments
Dynamics C5 - SQL server and Native
Dynamics CRM 4.0
Microsoft SQL Server - from 2000 and up
MySQL
SalesForce.com
NetSuite
Lotus Notes
and ODBC Connections

xRM “The Danish Collection”

Morten Gad — Tue, 20 Oct 2009 09:50:07 +0000

Account Form from my "Danish Collection"

Default Account Form

When working with Dynamics CRM quite often I stumble over entities and attributes that seems very American or at least not very Danish! And it is a common discussion each time we work with a new customer what fields they want and which they don’t want. Often vi spent quite a lot of time discussing fields that always ends up being deleted because when put into a danish context they actually don’t work. Another issue is forms - here is some work to be done each time as well!

I think many of us working with Dynamics CRM by now has our own customizations we use to start out with! I know I have - this helps me in the initial discussions because it looks more like something my customers have seen before and this saves us time discussing fields that they decide to delete anyways! My “Danish Collection” project is a project with many iterations - and is maintained in a separate CRM Organisation within my development environment.

And now to the reason of this post: I would like to hear from others what their “Danish Collection” looks like and share my collection.

By now my collection consist of these entities:

Account
Contact
Lead
Opportunity
Quote
Order

Danish xRM Developer Network

Morten Gad — Mon, 19 Oct 2009 14:50:35 +0000

Isn’t it about time to start a Dynamics CRM Developer network in Denmark - It is my feeling that we are a group of few but very dedicated professionals who could benefit from such a network!

I have realized that I can’t be the best at every aspect of the Dynamics CRM Platform - though I have been working hard to be. And with this in mind my question to my self is “How do I make sure that I don’t reinvent the wheel over and over again?” This was how the network idea came into my head - personally I only know a few Dynamics CRM pro’s and I would love to know more.

This is a valuable way of gaining new knowledge, experiences and perhaps even a new job! So for now i would like to share my ideas of such a network.

1. The network must have a virtual interface that allows members to discuss issues and ideas, finding the right people for a specific task, post jobs and so on.

2. Face to face meetings - Social/professional meetings where network can be created, maintained and developed. This should be on low cost base - perhaps each attending individual should pay a little to attend or sponsors should cover most! Each meeting must have a highly technical content so employees would support and motivate their employers to attend.

3. Relations with other networks or groups - around the world there is a lot of groups working with Dynamics CRM. I belive that we should have some kind of ambassadors who makes these relations.

4. Certified Members Only - I’m not quite sure how this could be done yet but I have some thoughts - To secure the value of the network we must ensure that members has a certain level of x!

5. Relations to Microsoft - The key source for information about the product is Microsoft this relation is a cardinal point! The xRM Developer Network should be the information platform to Dynamics CRM Developers in Denmark

6. Relations to ISV’s - This could be a win win for the network and the ISV’s as they get a place to display their products the people who might help sell them and in many cases install and implement them!

7. Desire to grow - wouldn’t it be nice if the network could become pan European network for developers. Still local meetings but global knowledge sharing!

8. Blog listings - The Internet is clustered with information - some is very useful some isn’t! A list of the main bloggers and a small review would be desirable when searching information.

This was some of the thought I have had about this - please if you have any oppinion at all let me know!

Thank you for reading!

Unlimited possibilities - MS Dynamics xRM

admin — Fri, 07 Aug 2009 21:09:21 +0000

MS is introducing the “one platform - many applications” campaign with this video

Only one usage of each socket address (protocol/network address/port) is normally permitted

admin — Fri, 07 Aug 2009 20:18:29 +0000

On my latest project we had to do some heavy BI. Not that it is rare but this time we were working with a large amount of data. All order and Invoice data in integrated from an ERP system. The integration tool is scheduled to run important transfers as often as every minute other transfers runs once every 24 hours.

The calculations are done using a scheduled custom tailored program. And this is where the error mentioned in the title came alive.

“Only one usage of each socket address (protocol/network address/port) is normally permitted”

What to do?

Well the problem started when we went from a virtual machine to a physical machine. The performance of the CRM server increased tremendously from being a little slow to being very fast – this was very good!

But…

After the change I couldn’t run my scheduled calculation for very long before the “error” appeared. And no matter what I did it didn’t seem to help. I tried to put tread.sleep’s in my code. but it didn’t do anything.

Then I started searching the problem and found a reason and a solution that seems to work.

The problem seems to be that whenever you make an webservice call a connection is created and closed again. When the connection closes it goes into a wait routine for 240 sec. (default) so 4 minutes for a connection to shutdown – and again as default the ports between 1024 and 5000 is used. This means you have almost 4000 ports to create connections on and each of them waits for 4 minutes to destruct after use.

And now, may I present: “Only one usage of each socket address (protocol/network address/port) is normally permitted”

There are a lot of solutions out there. What I did was:

1. Increase the number of ports by adding the MaxUserPorts key here “HKLM\SYSTEM\CurrentControlSet\Services\Tcpip\Parameters”.

2. Decrease the time of the wait routine after each connection again this is done by adding a key to the registry – same place “HKLM\SYSTEM\CurrentControlSet\Services\Tcpip\Parameters”. New key TcpTimedWaitDelay.

The values of these keys may vary depending on your system and requirements. But it worked for me.

MS CRM 3.0 - Export more than 10.000 records to Excel

admin — Thu, 02 Jul 2009 21:00:22 +0000

In MS CRM 3.0 when exporting to Excel the default number of records exported is 10.000. To alter this setting do the following.

Log on to the Microsoft Dynamics CRM 3.0 server as a user who has Write permissions for the following registry subkey:
HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Microsoft\MSCRM
Click Start, click Run, type regedit, and then click OK.
In Registry Editor, locate and then click the following registry subkey:
HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Microsoft\MSCRM
On the Edit menu, point to New, click DWORD Value, type maxrecordsforexporttoexcel, and then press ENTER.
Double-click maxrecordsforexporttoexcel, click Decimal, type the maximum number of records that you want to export to an Excel worksheet, and then click OK.
Close Registry Editor.

Export more than 10.000 records to Excel from Dynamics CRM 4.0

admin — Wed, 01 Jul 2009 20:44:57 +0000

In the default setup CRM will only export 10.000 records to Excel - wich can be rather anoying. Here is how to change this.

1. Log-in to the SQL Server where the Dynamics CRM database is stored (ORG_MSCRM)
2. Open the OrganizationBase table
3. Look for the Column: MaxRecordsForExportToExcel
4. Edit the value from 10.000 to the new value
5. Committ the change to the database
6. Type IISRESET in a command prompt - this will make the CRM server unavaliable for a few moments

Picklist names not visible in sql

admin — Tue, 21 Apr 2009 20:51:59 +0000

This might be because you use one or more languages besides your basic language. To be sure the values is passed through to sql you might need to translate them even though it’s the same in all languages.