Configuring the CRM 4.0 Outlook client with IFD

Rob Parrott — Tue, 28 Oct 2008 15:28:58 -0400

When configuring the CRM 4.0 Outlook, there are a few considerations to keep in mind if the user plans to connect to CRM via IFD either some or all of the time. In the most typical scenario, the user will need to access CRM over the internet only part of the time, while in most other instances the user connects via the intranet to CRM either through a local connection to the network or via VPN. In this scenario, the user needs to be connected to the intranet prior to running the configuration wizard and specify both the intranet address and extranet web address accordingly. While this is very straight-forward, if users are planning to connect via IFD exclusively (for example, if the user works remotely and does not ever connect to the intranet via vpn), then this needs to be taken into consideration when providing instructions to users on how to configure the CRM 4.0 Outlook client as I've found this method of configuring the outlook client a bit confusing to end users and administrators alike when presented with the available options in the configuration wizard.
When the wizard is first launched, the user is presented with two options for connecting to Microsoft Dynamics CRM - "My company" or "An online service provider". While at first glance the option for "online service provider" might appear to be applicable only for users connecting to Microsoft Dyanmics CRM Online (The CRM online hosting service provided by Microsoft), this option is in fact applicable to any users planning to use IFD exclusively to connect to their companies on-premise CRM system. If a user in this scenario chooses the "My company" option, the intranet address field is required. If the user who does not have access to the intranet fills the internal URL into the intranet address field, the connection verification test will obviously fail, and if the user attempts to put in the IFD URL in both of these fields, the connection verification test will also fail due to the connection mechanism the wizard uses. The simple solution is to make sure that in this instance users are always choosing "An online service provider", which will only prompt for the external IFD URL.

Considerations when configuring sitemap to display dashboard reports

Rob Parrott — Tue, 28 Oct 2008 11:37:18 -0400

When using dashboards in CRM, in most instances these objects will be exposed through a Sharepoint webpart, but keep in mind that dashboard reports can also be exposed in CRM via a URL in sitemap. While this method doesn't offer quite the flexibility as that found in Sharepoint, if a client doesn't have a sharepoint server or has issues with authenticating to Sharepoint (as can happen when users access CRM via IFD), this can be a good alternative. One thing to keep in mind with this approach is that the report might be using a URL with what an xml parser would consider reserved characters such as an ampersand symbol, which can be a common delimiter in report URL's. This can extend to other types of reserved characters but in our example we will talk about the & exclusively.
For example, consider the URL listed below. If I were to paste this into a browser in the source system, it would resolve the dashboard report just fine in a browser, but attempting to use this same URL in sitemap (an xml document) would render the xml malformed and error out when attempting to import it into CRM.

https://crm.customerserver.com/NOD/crmreports/viewer/viewer.aspx?id={93B4703E-E693-DD11-B0C9-0050569B3651}&helpID=BookingsDashboard1.rdl&action=filter

The solution in this case is to use a pre-defined character reference for the & symbol so that the resulting XML in sitemap can be parsed properly. Using our previous example, this is how the URL should appear in sitemap. Note that the & is now followed by amp;

https://crm.customerserver.com/NOD/crmreports/viewer/viewer.aspx?id={93B4703E-E693-DD11-B0C9-0050569B3651}&helpID=BookingsDashboard1.rdl&action=filter

Keep in mind that attempting to use this URL in a browser URL address will result in errors as it's not going to be able to interpret the character reference . So the true test is to put copy this URL into sitemap (customizations.xml) and opening it in an xml parser - the xml parser should now be able to clarify which part of the code is the content and which part is the tag and transform the URL accordingly, as shown below:

</SubArea>

- <SubArea Id="nav_reports" Entity="report" Url="/CRMReports/home_reports.aspx" DescriptionResourceId="Reports_Description">

</SubArea>

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Configuring the CRM 4.0 Outlook client with IFD

Considerations when configuring sitemap to display dashboard reports