I immediately subscribed myself.

When I got the welcome mail I noticed saasplaza.com in the url. SaaSplaza is a global Microsoft Partner that hosts Dynamics CRM solutions with a big office in the Netherlands. So when I connected to my free 30 day trial environment, I was not surprised to see it was the hosted version of Dynamics CRM 4.0. I think it is a good thing that Microsoft is actively pushing the online capabilities of Dynamics CRM in the Netherlands.

You can see it for yourself after subscribing at: http://www.microsoft.com/netherlands/dynamics/product/crm_online_formulier.aspx

If you want to subscribe to a trial of the real Microsoft Dynamics CRM Online offering you can use this link: https://signin.crm.dynamics.com/portal/signup/

Hopefully the Online version will soon be available in the Netherlands, so we can offer our customers Freedom of Choice in the Microsoft Software + Services world with the on premise, hosted AND the Online version of Microsoft Dynamics CRM.

Another option is to improve the tooltips.

The modifying and maintaining of the tooltips will be discussed in this post.

A tooltip is a small box, which contains a brief text message explaining the field. It appears below the label of a field on the MS CRM forms when the pointer of a mouse passes over or rests on that label and which contains a brief text message identifying or explaining the object. When the pointer moves away from the label the tooltip disappears.

Tooltips are available on every field on a MS CRM form. The current tooltips show the text of the label, which, in my opinion, does  not have any benefits. If you can read to label, you can read to tooltip. But the good thing is, we can change the contents of the current tooltips.

At the moment the only restrictions to the tooltips are that only unformatted text can be used and that the total amount of characters is no more than 512.

The onLoad code:

crmForm.all.new_attribute_c.title = “contents of the tooltip”

Example:

Microsoft Dynamics CRM 4.0

• Introduction
• Planning Guide
• Installing Guide
• Operating and Maintaining Guide
• Microsoft Dynamics CRM SDK
• Report Writers Guide
• Appendix A: Security Roles and Privileges
• Glossary
• Technical Articles

The workaround I presented was to move or copy the E-mails from the Shared Mailbox to the Personal Mailbox and track the E-mails from there. It works, but with every workaround, it is a workaround.

I kept searching for a structural solution. And I have found it finally.

On the page “Microsoft Dynamics CRM 4.0 updates and hotfixes” (http://support.microsoft.com/kb/949256) there is a section “Hotfixes that have limited distribution”. In this section hotfix number 953812 is mentioned with the title “A hotfix that enables you to track an appointment in a shared calendar in the Microsoft Dynamics CRM 4.0 client for Outlook is available“.  The details of this hotfix describe it not only works for Shared Calendar, but also for Contacts and Tasks.

After some experimenting I found out it also works for Shared Mailboxes !!!

Problem solved.
The message “Only items in the default Microsoft Outlook store can be promoted to Microsoft dynamics CRM.” is History!

Only catch, the solution is supported, but the functionality I use it for isn’t, so it can be undone with a future rollup pack or something. I have succesfully tested it with Rollup 4. (With Rollup 2 it didn’t work.)

1. Make a nice view in advanced find with one or more columns to identify the records and the columns you want to enrich.
In this example I use the First and the Last Name to identify my Contacts and I want to enrich the Home Phone.

2. Export this view to Microsoft Office Excel and add a column to the left with the name of the entity in the heading. Put the Guids corresponding to the records in this column. And enrich your data.

3. Save your Excel file as CSV (comma delimited) and Create a new Data Import. Select your saved CSV, select Data Delimiter ‘none’ and Field Delimiter ‘Comma (,)’. On the next screen select your entity (in this case Contact).
As you will see at the top of the screen the possibility to ‘Enrich data by updating records rather than creating new records.’ is given.
This was the big surprise:

And the full screen:

4. After clicking a couple of times on the next button and some patience you can open your Advanced Find view to evaluate your results.

5. Next to that, if you open the Import record, you can see that the Contact records are actually updated and not created.

A small addition to this post. I got a lot of questions on how to get the GUIDS. If you want to get the GUID you can make an export directly from the database. This is not really userfriendly, but it works.
Furthermore my article was more to show that the option within the standard application still exists, than to really give my opinion on the best way how to enrich data.

Another (better) option to enrich data is to use a free tool from codeplex: http://mscrmimport.codeplex.com/

Have fun with it, but use it with care.

Microsoft descibes a workaround for this in their article: The fields that have the OnChange event enabled are unavailable in the Edit Multiple Records window in Microsoft Dynamics CRM 4.0.

For example, assume that you have a custom entity table that is called AuditTrailExtensionBase. The following foreign key is added.

ALTER TABLE [dbo].[<databasename>_AuditTrailExtensionBase] ADD CONSTRAINT [FK_<databasename>_AuditTrailExtensionBase_<Databasename>_AuditTrailBase] FOREIGN KEY ([<databasename>_AuditTrailId]) REFERENCES [dbo].[<databasename>_AuditTrailBase] ([<databasename>_AuditTrailId])

After the upgrade process is complete, this foreign key is no longer present.
To resolve this problem, add the missing foreign key constraint to the custom entity table.

(source: http://support.microsoft.com/kb/947061)