leaving CRM back to Salesforce

Well after less than 18months after being forced onto Dynamics CRM, and then upgrading to CRM2013,  users have rebelled against the apparent complexity of CRM 2013 and we reverting to Salesforce.

 

Why?

1. Salesforce isn’t Microsoft.  Have a large OSX based community who shudder at the M word..(!)
2. Cloud Based – ok CRM can be as well (though we were using the on-premise version).
3. Integration into other products eg Jira, Skype is easier / free
4. User interface – so much better say the users.  Actually I like the new CRM 2013 UI – it’s simplified, and once – “once” – you get used to menu items and how is been setup, life is quick to navigate around.  Alas, my sales users don’t share the same opinion.
5. etc etc

 

CRM 2013 Login Error “Invalid Action”

Using Microsoft Dynamics 2013, today we had this quite informative error   “Invalid Action – The selected action was not valid” which was preventing all users from logging in!

 

After confirming it wasn’t the ADFS server at fault checked the services on the CRM server  checking the services found that  the “Microsoft CRM Asynchronous Processing Service” had stopped.

Starting this then allowed all users to log back onto the CRM server again.

Dynamics CRM EMail router – failing to load data

On a client site it was decided to switch to using SSL and using the Email Router to allow communication from Crm to Exchange.

The configuration profile was set to use email type – Exchange 2010 and auto discover the location for the exchange Webservices.

however, this didn’t and have some lengthy triaging realised we had to change this to full https address eg https://[servername]/EWS/Exchange.asm

CRM – Disable Users by Business Unit

My company is organised into regions and this is reflected in CRM as separate Business Units.

If we wish to prevent all users attached to the business unit from logging in, we can either disable each user individually or at a BU level.

Setttings> system > Administration > Business Unit

Then just tick against the BU you require

More actions > Disable.

The great thing with this it will also disable any currently logged in users.  So when they next try to perform an action, they will be denied:

How to send email to a distribution group list in CRM 2011

Using Dynamics CRM 2011, needed to send an email to a list of people.

Marketing lists don’t really apply here as it could include a bunch of internal users etc.

Quite simple it turns out.

steps

1. Using Exchange, define the group and the group members.  eg crm-test@domain.com

2. in CRM, create a contact with the primary email address as per step 1.

What happens next when sending the email from CRM it will connect as normal to the email server thereby picking up this email distribution group.