2007 December

towels in NYC

On December 14, 2007, in Meanderings, by Mitch Milam

I'm in New York City this week visiting a customer. Evidentially the hotel in which I'm staying has a quota of towels per room or per guest. You're given so many at the beginning of the week and they are removed as you use them. Not to be replaced by new towels at all.

I'm not sure what would happen if I was to be here for another day or so. Either I would be down to a single washcloth or I'd have to ask for more. Either they don't like people wasting towels or they don't like people staying more than a week.

Altering the SiteMap to better display Quick Campaigns

On December 13, 2007, in Customization, Dynamics CRM, by Mitch Milam

While cleaning up the navigation at a customer installation today, we ran across something rather interesting. If you export the CRM SiteMap and look for any of the Quick Campaign entries, you will find the following:

<SubArea
    Id="nav_minicamps"
    ResourceId="Menu_Label_Mini_Campaigns"
    DescriptionResourceId="Quick_Campaign_Description"
    Icon="/_imgs/ico_18_minicamps.gif"
    OutlookShortcutIcon="/_imgs/olk_4400.ico"
    Url="/MA/home_minicamps.aspx">
    <Privilege
        Entity="activitypointer"
        Privilege="Read"
    />
</SubArea>

The Privilege setting instructs CRM to only display this SubArea if the current user has Read Privileges to the ActivityPointer Entity.

I thought this to be rather strange since just about everyone should have such access. What we wanted to see what to have Quick Campaigns only visible if the user had the ability to create a regular Marketing Campaign. This would pretty much restrict the creation of Quick Campaigns to those in the Marketing department. Should you also have such a requirement, you need to make the following change to the above SiteMap sample:

<Privilege Entity="campaign" Privilege="Create" />

You will need to make this modification for each instance where you see the SubArea "nav_minicamps."

Import the modified SiteMap and launch IE using a CRM user with only Marketing privileges.

Random thought of the day. 12/12/2007

On December 12, 2007, in Meanderings, by Mitch Milam

While on-site at a customer today saw a screen saver that said, "it is, what it is." That reminded me of a joke so old I can only remember part of the punch line:

I am, what I am

It is, what it is

I be, what I be

I think the first line was by Popeye, the Sailor Man.

12/12/2007: I am here…

On December 12, 2007, in Meanderings, by Mitch Milam

Just upgraded to the final version of Windows Live Writer and wanted to try out the Insert Map feature. Works pretty good.

Word of the day: Automagically

On December 12, 2007, in Meanderings, by Mitch Milam

Defined: to happen automatically, as if by magic.

Should I add this to Wikipedia?

Oops. Too late. Already in Wiktionary…

An error occurred promoting this item to Microsoft CRM

On December 11, 2007, in Dynamics CRM, Outlook Client, by Mitch Milam

I have run into this several times recently and almost every time, there is a different cause.

The current situation happened at a customer where one user could not promote any emails into CRM, either from customer contacts or other CRM users.

Digging around a bit, I found this newsgroup thread with a mention of the following KB Article:

933234: Error message when you try to track an HTML-formatted e-mail message that contains an image in the signature in Microsoft Dynamics CRM 3.0: "An error occurred promoting this item to Microsoft CRM"

This particular article lists two possible causes:

• The forms cache in Microsoft Outlook is corrupted.

• The Microsoft Outlook temporary folder contains too many files. By design, Outlook has a limitation of 99 duplicated names that can be saved to the same image. Therefore, Outlook cannot read the embedded image when you have more than 100 e-mail messages with the same image.

In my particular case, the solution was to delete Outlook's temporary Internet files.

Thanks to Guy Shokrani for posting the solution on the newsgroup.

Random thought of the day: Failure

On December 7, 2007, in Misc, by Mitch Milam

Last night I was recuperating from a very late and very long business meeting by browsing through the Discovery/Science Channel/History Channel loop I have set as my favorites on my DVR when I ran across a short program on Robert H. Goddard, the father of rocketry.

I find his story fascinating because he actually conceived of the idea of using a rocket to travel into space in 1899, almost four years before the Wright Brothers first airplane flight in 1903. A mere ten years later, in 1909, he published a paper describing the possibility of a liquid-fueled rocket using liquid hydrogen and liquid oxygen as fuel. But, it wasn't until 1926 that he was actually successful in making a rocket fly using liquid propellant.

You need to remember that he was pioneering a field of research that pretty much did not exist so everything they did was pretty much a logical application of trial and error. Otherwise known as, "by the seat of their pants."

He was also an extremely patient man who regarded failure as, "valuable negative information."

This sentiment has been modernized with the phrase, "Fail fast. Fail often."

I bore you with this story because of the correlation I drew between Goddard's work and the meeting I had last night. We received a sales lead from Microsoft from a local entrepreneur who wants to create a service-based web site. He came to talk to us about some of the customer-relationship aspects of his idea.

I showed him CRM and explained how we could use CRM as the data storage mechanism to back-end his web site. This, of course, brought up many "what if" and "could we" questions from the prospect. Most of which could be addressed with the proper application of various web, CRM, and database technologies.

One thing that I stress to all of my customers is that most things they need are possible, but some things are just not practical.

Many things look good on paper and in theory, but in practice, they prove to be infeasible. This is where the concept of rapid-prototyping comes into play.

CRM almost always provides at least two paths to implementing any solution. What continues to amaze me, even after all this time, is the fact that we can consider implementation alternatives in an extremely rapid fashion to arrive at a solution that is both practical and feasible. I consider this to be a case of rapid prototyping, but I'm not sure most people would.

So if you're still awake at this point in my story, here's my advice when designing a CRM-based solution:

1) Define the requirements.

2) Identify the possible methods of implementation.

3) Begin with the implementation of the most theoretical possibility first.

4) When you hit a wall, try something else until you find something that fits.

Hopefully, you'll arrive at a practically feasible solution. :)

References and Additional Reading:

http://www.clarku.edu/research/archives/goddard/faqs.cfm

http://www.lifeclever.com/fail-early-fail-often-my-first-taste-of-rapid-prototyping/

http://www.leepoint.net/notes-java/principles_and_practices/40fail-early-fail-often.html

http://blogs.msdn.com/micahel/archive/2005/08/17/FailFast.aspx

http://www.managementtoday.co.uk/search/article/548074/fail-early-fail-often-ideo-service-design/