Which browsers are actually supported?

I sometimes get people complaining to me that CRM doesn't work in Firefox. What i usually ask them when I hear this if they are running Mac, which of course is the reason why it isn't working. 

The simple fact is that Firefox isn't supported for Mac. The only supported browser for Mac OS X is Safari. And Safari isn't supported for PC.

Below is a simple matrix showing the support matrix for the browsers (for CRM 2016).

	Windows 7	Windows 8/8.1	Windows 10	Mac OS X	IPad	Google Nexus 10 Tablet
IE 10
IE 11
Edge
Firefox
Chrome
Safari

Green = Supported, Red = Not supported, Grey = Not applicable

However, do note that there is a difference between "not working" and "not supported". The latter just means that you can't open a support case with Microsoft and complain that CRM looks weird in some of the non supported combinations described above.

So why is this? Are Microsoft just lazy? No, Just like everyone else, they have a limited amount of time, money and resources. So, they can't test all possible combinations unless the price of Dynamics CRM were to go through the roof, and I think we all agree that we prefer it not to.

Do refer to the official documentation from Microsoft on what is supported for more detailed information.

https://support.microsoft.com/en-us/kb/2669061

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

CRM 2015 Spring wave excel and browsers

Been working lately with a customer in CRM 2015 Spring wave and I must say I really like it! My number one feature is the lovely menu which I enjoy every time i use it!

If you havn't noticed the excel export/import functionality now supports .xlsx (finally!) which is great. I did have an issue with importing data into CRM from xlsx-file once, which might have been due to the fact that I had added a column by hand (with the correct field name!). The sad thing was that I got an error when uploading this and no option to download a log file. So, I don't really know what was wrong, but I think my new column was it. It was easily solved, anyway, I just saved the document as "XML Excelsheet 2003 format *.xml", which is the format used when exporting excel-templates in CRM 2011 and 2013. Importing that worked great. Some of you might think that csv-files are better, as the overhead is smaller in these, but I would warn against using these as I have had some issues with these. The most obvious being that the csv-format is regions sensitvie. With a en/us locale it will use the comma (,) as the separator but in Sweden (se/sv) it will use semi-colon (;). This will mess up a lot of.

Spring has come - when is summer comming?

Another messy thing of CRM 2015 Spring wave, that I think most users of it have noticed, if they are not blind, is that form customizations cannot be done in IE11. I cannot understand how this bug could have escaped Microsoft quality control, and it will most certainly be fixed. Hence I use Chrome when customizing CRM. This made me notice another bug, that being that when using Chrome, I cannot save new mappings, which works perfectly well in IE11. Isn't the multi-browser world wonderful! Just imagine the amount of money Microsoft must pour into this.

And on the subject of pouring money, we all want Microsoft to get us a lot of nice shiny features for CRM, and fix all the bugs, so how are we doing on the upgrades ourselves? Maintaining a lot of different code trees costs a lot of resources, which could have been used to other stuff. Think about that when you are requesting fixes for CRM 4.0.

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