Microsoft Dynamics CRM

As you are probably aware, Dynamics CRM is undergoing some changes and one of them is a new name, Dynamics 365. My blog posts this month will focus on some of the functionality updates available in v8.2 and our next meetup will review them in more detail. Be sure to sign up and join us!

Historically, when you have activities associated with a custom entity, those activities do not roll up to the related account. This can be frustrating because you aren’t able to get the full picture from the account like you’d expect. Now you’re able to specify if activities roll up from custom entities. Open the relationship screen between the account and your custom entity. There will be an option to change the Rollup View from Cascade None to Cascade All. Save and publish your changes and you’re all set!

As you are probably aware, Dynamics CRM is undergoing some changes and one of them is a new name, Dynamics 365. My blog posts this month will focus on some of the functionality updates available in v8.2 and our next meetup will review them in more detail. Be sure to sign up and join us!

If your organization uses the activities entities (tasks, appointments, phone calls, etc.) then you are likely familiar with the social pane view that is available on the main entities. You may also know that the social pane is barely customizable so I’m very excited about this update. You can now determine how you want to sort activities in the social pane. By default, they are sorted by modified date and in most cases this might be fine but having the ability to change how the activities are sorted is very helpful.

Open the form editor and double click on the activities section to see the properties. Go to the Activity Wall to change how items are sorted.

You may also notice that one of the options is to sort by a field called Sort Date. This is a field that can be set in a workflow so each activity type can use a different sort date. For example, you may want to sort emails by their sent or received date while sorting appointments by their end date. If you set the sort date field accordingly, then you’re able to sort activities by the different dates.

The out-of-the-box tax field on opportunity and quote products is a write-in field which means that users have to manually calculate the sales tax for each item and then type it in. This method is error prone and adds many steps to the user’s process so why not automate it?

If only some of your items are taxable, you should create a checkbox so that users can control when sales tax needs to be added. For this example, I’m assuming that all products are taxable at a rate of 6%. Create a calculated currency field and for the calculation use the Amount field. This is the price per unit multiplied by the quantity. If you’re using item discounts, make sure you calculate the tax based on the total after the discount is taken. See the setup below.

The final step is to set the out-of-the-box tax field to your new calculated tax field. You need to do this because the final total calculation uses the out-of-the-box tax field. I used JavaScript – tune into the next webinar to see how this is done. (Or check it out on YouTube depending on when you’re reading this.)

If you regularly develop in a CRM sandbox instance, a good tip is to change the theme of  your sandbox so that it’s different than your production instance. Our production instance has the standard dark blue navigation bar across the top so we like to change that to bright orange for the sandbox. This way it is very obvious that you’re currently working in the sandbox. It’s an easy visual cue to remind yourself which instance you’re in.

Change your theme by going to Settings > Customizations > Themes.

The address composite forms are used to quickly edit all fields of the address and present all of the fields together in a visually appealing manner. The trouble is that you can’t customize these forms at all. You can’t add or remove fields so when I wanted to use an option set for a customer State/Province field, I had to figure out a workaround.

Luckily, business rules can be applied to all forms of an entity so I set up a rule to hide the out-of-the-box state at all times. Then my custom option set state field is placed on the main form. I have another rule that sets the out-of-the-box state field to the option set value so that the full address appears correctly. In the business rule, just remember to set the scope to entity so that it applies to all forms.