'Append' & 'Append To' The Way I See It

I'll explain you this through an example.

Let's take Accounts and Opportunities where "Accounts" is the parent and "Opportunities" is the child (i.e. There are multiple Opportunities per Account.)

Now the User can relate an Opportunity to an Account either through the Potential Customer field on the Opportunity, or through the Opportunities item at the navigation bar of an Account. In this case the User needs to have "Append permissions on Opportunities and Append To permissions on Accounts."

In the present continuous tense "You are Appending the Opportunity, and Appending To the Account."

Significance of Update Rollup 7 for MS Dynamics CRM 4

Update Rollup 7 has been rolled out and apart from vast improvements to the platform special focus has been given to advances in Dynamics CRM Mobile Express and Dynamics CRM Outlook Client. More information @ this link.

SIGNIFICANCE OF THIS RELEASE - CRM Server Update Rollup 7

• Update Rollup 7 adds support for Windows 7, Windows Server 2008 R2 & SQL Server 2008 R2
• Update Rollup 7 Client can be installed before upgrading the server to Update Rollup 7
• Update Rollup 7 Client cannot be un-installed because there has been schema changes to the offline database. All other Update Rollup 7 components (Server, SRS, Language Packs....) can be un-installed.
• Update Rollup 7 Client package will be a pre-requisite for all future Client Update Rollups. i.e. All future releases of Client Update Rollups starting from Update Rollup 8 will not install if Update Rollup 7 Client is not found.

Update Rollup 7 has new requirements
#1 - Internet connection is required for successful Client installation.
#2 - Client update 7 installation will take longer than all previous UR installations. Microsoft asks to be patient.
Visit here to know more about Update Rollup 7 release.

DMM Import Error - Source data is not in the required format

While importing data recently, I recieved the above error message. With the application of my brains I understood that Dynamics CRM and Office Excel Date formatting did not match.

I changed the Date format to mm/dd/yyyy in Excel and CRM (Tools > Options > Format) to maintain consistency and I had a favorable outcome.

Many Applications, One Platform

A short introduction to xRM

CRM Client for Office Outlook over VPN

Recently I was working on a project where the CRM Client for Office Outlook needed to be connected to the CRM Server over the VPN. It seemed obvious that this would work seemlessly without much configuration(s) involved. Once you establish a connection or open the VPN tunnel, it's likely that CRM Client would automatically connect to the Server and load the CRM Toolbar in Outlook, which wasn't the case at my end.

I will conclude this post with the steps I took to get the CRM Client for Office Outlook running over the VPN.

1. On the Client machine. Navigate to C:\Windows\System32\drivers\etc
2. Open the file "hosts" with notepad.
3. Add an entry with the CRM server name and the IP address in the following format
   servername (HIT TAB) IP address.
4. Save the file.

CRM Client must now connect successfully to the Server. The above steps confirms that NSLOOKUP command to the CRM Server works fine with correct resolution.