Extending Max amount of components on dashboards only for onprem

Some of you might have found some sites like this https://msdynamicscrmblog.wordpress.com/2014/05/23/how-to-change-the-dashboardsettings-of-maximum-controls-limit-in-dynamics-crm20112013/
one:

I, Soupeurfaive, via Wikimedia Commons

or even the original MSDN or Technet sites regarding how to be able to change the maximum amount of components on a dashboard from the maximum of 6 to for instance 8 using PowerShell.

On the MSDN and Technet pages there are some default CRM version text in the header and footer but make no misstake, you can only do this change in a CRM onprem environment where you are the deployment admin.

As the change is deployment wide and you need to have deployment administrator access rights, you are also extremely unlikely (unless you have a dedicated Online environment) to get that set.

Gustaf Westerlund
MVP, Founder and CTO at CRM-konsulterna AB
www.crmkonsulterna.se

Federated user unable to configure CRM for Outlook

When using federated users in a CRM Online, we encountered an error where accessing the CRM worked fine, but accessing the system using the Outlook client (configuring it) or accessing it via the tablet client did not work. It seems that some additional settings were required on the AD FS server.

We we working with a customer who had set up a CRM Online with federated users to their AD via their AD FS. When accessing this via the web client, it all worked well, but when trying to configure CRM for Outlook we just got an error "An error has occured. Please contact the system administrator". Our customer's IT manager started a premier support case as I felt this was most probably a AD FS related issue (there were no problems with the non-federated users).

After a couple of screen sharing sessions we got some great help from Pedro R at Microsoft Support and I learned something new which I thought I'd share with you and that is this;

When using federated users in CRM Online and when using IFD CRM with AD FS you have to enable the Outlook and Tablet authentication to pass through the AD FS, otherwise it is blocked.

There is a Technet article on this which can be found here:  https://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/library/hh699726.aspx#BKMK_WS2012R2

I think this is often something that might be overlooked why I thought sharing it with you would be a good idea. Maybe you'll find it and save yourself some time!

Gustaf Westerlund
MVP, Founder and CTO at CRM-konsulterna AB
www.crmkonsulterna.se

New default Access Mode in Dynamics CRM Online

As some of you might have noticed when setting up a new Dynamics CRM Online 2015, for instance a 30 day trial, which can be done on this link, you will now see a much more limited view than before.

This is due to the fact that the default Access mode of the user that is created when the CRM instance is set up to "Administrative" not "Read-Write" as it used to be. The point of this is that it is not to use a license unless necessary.

To change it, go to the new location of user in Settings->Security->Users

The first thing we have to do is to assign a license to the user from the O365 portal. So click the link in the top information part of the user form to navigate there directly.

This will take you to the O365 provisioning, where you can assign a CRM license to your user.

Sorry, this is in Swedish, I tried provisioning Everything in English but the stripes don't seem to go out...

To edit the licenses for the selected user, click "Edit" in the pane on the right hand side.

Still in Swedish, it says, "Select License, choose location in the dropdown"

When you have pressed edit, you are able to edit the licenses for the user, select an appropriate location, and click in the box for Dynamics CRM and press save. Now go back to the user form in CRM, it should be on Another tab.

Scroll to the bottom of the user form and expand the "Administration" tab by clicking on it.

You will now see the Access Mode selector and see that it has been set to "Administrative".

Change it to "Read-Write".

If you do not assign a license in the O365 portal, you will see this error in CRM when trying to change the Access Mode.

Remember, that the sitemap has to be reloaded, so press F5 to reload CRM, and as you can see, Everything is turned on now.

Anybody notice that Microsoft might need to do something about the sampledata? :)

 

Good luck!

Gustaf Westerlund
MVP, CEO and owner at CRM-konsulterna AB
www.crmkonsulterna.se

Collation and MVP Renewal

When working with CRM systems in non-English countries you often need to take certain aspects into consideration that might have very dire consequences if set incorrectly, one of these is the database collation.

The collation of the database is simplified how it orders characters. For those of you not used to working with multi-language installation with odd characters this might not be something you have considered. As I am Swedish let me give you an example. The Swedish alphabet looks as follows:

abcdefghijklmnopqrstuvwxyzåäö

However using the collation that is default when using English as language in an on premise installation, which is "Latin1_General_CI_AI" (CI= Case Insensitive, AI = Accent Insensitive) the Swedish alphabet would be sorted as follows:

aäåbcdefghijklmnoöpqrstuvwxyz

This is why when installing an organization that is to be used in Sweden, despite the fact that you might have chose to have English as base language, that you need to select the collation that sorts the Swedish characters correctly which for CRM is "Finnish_Swedish_CI_AS".

On-premise setup of CRM - ability to select Finnish_Swedish_CI_AS collation
despite using English as base language

When setting up an organization in CRM online, you cannot chose the collation explicitly which is regrettable and I hope there will be some advanced setting in the future which will allow for this when provisioning new organizations. Check out what happened when I provisioned a new organization in English indicating that I was in Sweden.

The first pick list is for country - I selected "Sweden", the last is for language and I changed from "Swedish" to "English", which were the two only options.

After going through all the three steps you are shown a last instance configuration step.

In the instance configuration screen you can select the base language but there is no selector for collation. I selected "Engelska", which if you have any imagination, means "English".

After, a few seconds, yes, the new installation process is great and really fast, my org is up and running and I jump in to contacts and create to contact and check out the sorting. Any bets?

As you can see selecting English language will also implicitly select Latin1_General _CI_AI as collation which is incorrect from a Swedish perspective, I would have liked to see Östen Svensson at the end of the list, not sorted as "O". 

Collations are integral to the configuration of the SQL database and there are many features of the database like ORDER BY and indexes that depend on the collation why changing collation of a database is very very tricky. It is actually so tricky that it is not supported if you manage to do it with an on-premise, which I have heard rumours of that some people have managed to do. On an online you cannot request it. You will be recommended to migrate the data from the old org to the new.

So let's hope Microsoft will enhance the provisioning experience for CRM Online so that it includes a selector for collation. In the meantime, if you need a special setup, like the one I tried to set up above, English with Finnish_Swedish_CI_AS collation on CRM online I would suggest contacting Microsoft Online support to get their assistance in setting up the instance correctly. Hopefully they can assist in this.

And on another note, I was awarded the MVP award for the third year! A great honour and this very article is dedicated to the very award as two of my fellow MVP:s Shan McArthur and Niel Benson provided with background information to this article. I extend to you a humble thanks!

Gustaf Westerlund
MVP, CEO and owner at CRM-konsulterna AB
www.crmkonsulterna.se

Snowden, Prism and if there is anything new under the sun

If you have been reading my blogs previously you might have noticed that I several times (More on the insecurity of data, External posting on if your cloud system is safe from the law) have written about the fact that I think that many companies are viewing clouding a bit too lightly, especially from the legal perspective that many countries governments perceive themselves of having the rights to your data if the data either resides in that country, travels through that country or is owned by a company in that country.

From this perspective, I must conclude that the Snowden case is not very surprising. It mearly confirms what I expected to be true all the time and I would say that anybody being surprised is rather showing exceptional naivety towards our governments.

Hence I would just again remind you, that if you have sensitive data, beware of all the threats to the data. There are hackers, lawyers, FBI agents, and XYZ-agents and you have to assess the interest of all potential parties to you data. Then understand and handle the risk in a controlled manner.

Gustaf Westerlund
MVP, CEO and owner at CRM-konsulterna AB
www.crmkonsulterna.se

More on the insecurity of cloud data

As I previously discussed in a guest posting at Software Advice, the legal aspects of cloud computing are interesting and an article recently in "Computer Sweden" (Swedish) again raised this issue with references to the law at hand in the US.

The article references the law Foreign Intelligence Amendments Act, FISAAA, and describes how it can be used without any court order or by-case permits required. According to the interpretation of the law it has some limitations but can rather freely be used to gather non-american data. It does not have to be political data, but can just be data from a forign region affecting US foreign affairs.

As it does not require case-by-case permissions, the interpretation of the law is probably handled quite far down the ranks were this is deemed necessary. The interpretation could hence also be quite wide and I would not be surprised if data such as defence industry business opportunities fall within this area and probably other related areas. Foreign affairs is a wide definition, automobile export, telecomunication equipment and software export is defintley within the boundaries.

I would hence, strongly advice against putting data in countries with legislation similar to this (USA is definetly not the only country). When using the Microsoft Dynamics CRM Online service in Europe, the case is a bit better as the data is stored in countries within the EU:s juristiction. The US law is, however, interesting in this part as it focuses on the companies being american and not where the data is actually stored. Hence, the fact might be that the US government might be able to push Microsoft/SalesForce/Google or any other american cloud systems supplier into handing over data backed up by this law even if the data is stored in other countries.

To be on the safe side, from the legal aspect, storing the data in your own servers run by your own people, is always the safest. Their loyalty lies with your company and you have control over the physical storage of the data. Do not that this, however, is no safeguard agains hackers.


Gustaf Westerlund
MVP, CEO and owner at CRM-konsulterna AB
www.crmkonsulterna.se