Hope you have explored the new options available in CRM 2015. One of the coolest features is changing the themes and the logo.

This post will help you to quickly understand how to change the themes in CRM online:

1. Navigate to Settings – Customizations.

1. Observe the new feature of Themes. You can change theme as per your requirement. For each navigation and UI elements you can change the color according to the HTML codes as shown below:

1. After changing everything you can see the modified theme by clicking on preview.

1. After cross checking everything you can publish theme to make it available in CRM.

That is all!! It is simple to change the theme in CRM 2015.

This post will help you in creating notes attachment into CRM programmatically.

// Open a file and read the contents into a byte array

FileStream stream = File.OpenRead(@"c:\testfile.pdf");

byte[] byteData = new byte[stream.Length];

stream.Read(byteData, 0, byteData.Length);

stream.Close();

// Encode the data using base64.

string encodedData = System.Convert.ToBase64String(byteData);

// Instantiate an Annotation object.

// See the Entity Metadata topic in the SDK documentation to determine

// which attributes must be set for each entity.

Annotation createAnnotation = new Annotation()

{

Subject = "PDF Attachment",

FileName = "File Name",

DocumentBody = encodedData,

MimeType = @"application\pdf"

};

// Create the Annotation object.

_annotationId = _serviceProxy.Create(createAnnotation);

In the above code snippet you can change the MimeType based on the type of file that want to upload into CRM. For ex., application/msword for Microsoft Word, application/pdf for PDF etc.,

Hope this helps.

Thanks,

Vishnu

Are you trying to host Microsoft Dynamics CRM for your customers?

This link will become handy for the complete documentation in setting up Microsoft Dynamics CRM for your customers:

https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/download/details.aspx?id=14259

Hope this helps.

Thanks,

Vishnu

Did you know the fact that you can run the diagnostics within Microsoft Dynamics CRM online?

All you have to do is change the URL of your CRM application and append with /tools/diagnostics/diag.aspx.

For ex:

If this is your URL:

https://orgname.crm.dynamics.com/

You can check the diagnostics by this URL:

https://orgname.crm.dynamics.com/tools/diagnostics/diag.aspx

This will give you the data point and its respective status and results summary.

Hope this helps.

Thanks,

Vishnu

Recently I have encountered a scenario where the data has to be imported into Microsoft Dynamics CRM online. Microsoft does not support import of .bak files directly into CRM online.

So I have explored the other options which are possible to achieve the same. If you have a .Bak file with you and want to import data into CRM online you can try the following options:

1. First we can extract the data into an excel file from the .bak file. This can be done by leveraging the SQL Management studio. Open your SQL database which has the .Bak file.

    

2. Right click on the object explorer and click on export.

   

    

3. On click of which you can see the wizard to export the data.

1. Here select the data source, server name, database name.

    

1. Now choose the destination file as Excel sheet.

1. Now you can get the data in excel format by copying one or more tables.

1. Now select the tables which you want to import and extract them into excel.

1. After getting the excel file you can import the data either through import wizard as shown in the below link: https://www.microsoft.com/en-US/dynamics/crm-customer-center/import-accounts-leads-or-other-data.aspx

    

2. You can also import data progrmmatically using SDK: https://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/hh547396.aspx, https://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/gg309694.aspx

    

You can also leverage the partner solutions like Scribe for data import.

Hope this helps.

Happy reading!!

Thanks,

Vishnu

Are you planning to implement something new with Microsoft Dynamics CRM? You can check out what is up for the next release in the following link:

https://www.microsoft.com/en-US/dynamics/crm-customer-center/get-ready-for-the-next-release.aspx

Very cool indeed and this will help you to be updated with the next releases!

Hope this helps.

Keep reading.

Regards,

Vishnu

This post will help you out in getting the complete list of metadata of Microsoft Dynamics CRM application.

1. For this first download the Microsoft Dynamics CRM SDK from the following location: https://www.microsoft.com/en-in/download/details.aspx?id=40321
2. After downloading and extracting the file and navigate to the location of Tools, Metadatabrowser.
3. Now here you can see two files out of which one is a compressed file and other one is readme file:

1. Now the managed solution which we have as shown in the above screenshot will help us out to import into CRM.
2. Now navigate to CRM application. Go to Settings – Solutions. Now click on Import to import the solution

1. Select the MetadataBrowser_2_0_0_5_managed file from the SDK. Import the solution into CRM.
2. Now after importing the solution you can see the solution in this way:

    

   

    

3. Here you can either open the metadata browser or the entity metadata browser according to your requirement. As shown below:

    

   

    

    

   That is all!! It is simple to get the metadata details of your CRM application.

Here comes my next and an interesting post. This post will help you out to send bulk emails from your CRM application through .Net code. And wait it is not just about sending emails and you can monitor the status of the operation as well in your application.

1. Open your Visual Studio and create a new project.
2. In this example we will create a new Windows Forms Application. You can use any other application as per your convenience.

1. In this example we will not go through the initial connection string to connect to CRM. This post is assuming you know the basic connection to CRM application. Place this code in the form load along with the connection string with CRM.

    

        // Get a system user to use as the sender.

WhoAmIRequest emailSenderRequest = new WhoAmIRequest();

WhoAmIResponse emailSenderResponse =

_serviceProxy.Execute(emailSenderRequest) as WhoAmIResponse;

// Set trackingId for bulk mail request.

Guid trackingId = Guid.NewGuid();

1.  

   SendBulkMailRequest bulkMailRequest = new SendBulkMailRequest()

{

// Create a query expression for the bulk operation to use to retrieve

// the contacts in the email list.

Query = new QueryExpression()

{

EntityName = Contact.EntityLogicalName,

ColumnSet = new ColumnSet(new String[] { "contactid" }),

Criteria = new FilterExpression()

{

Conditions =

{

new ConditionExpression("contactid",ConditionOperator.In, _contactsIds)

}

}

},

// Set the Sender.

Sender = new EntityReference(SystemUser.EntityLogicalName, emailSenderResponse.UserId),

// Set the RegardingId - this field is required.

RegardingId = Guid.Empty,

RegardingType = SystemUser.EntityLogicalName,

// Use a built-in Microsoft Dynamics CRM email template.

// NOTE: The email template's "template type" must match the type of

// customers in the email list. Our list contains contacts, so our

// template must be for contacts.

//Here modify the guid with your record.

TemplateId = new Guid("07B94C1D-C85F-492F-B120-F0A743C540E6"),

RequestId = trackingId

};

// Execute the async bulk email request

SendBulkMailResponse resp = (SendBulkMailResponse)

_serviceProxy.Execute(bulkMailRequest);

1. Now comes the interesting portion of monitoring the bulk email:

    

// Now that we've executed the bulk operation, we need to retrieve it

// using our tracking Id.

QueryByAttribute bulkQuery = new QueryByAttribute()

{

EntityName = AsyncOperation.EntityLogicalName,

ColumnSet = new ColumnSet(new string[] { "requestid", "statecode" }),

Attributes = { "requestid" },

Values = { trackingId }

};

// Retrieve the bulk email async operation.

EntityCollection aResponse = _serviceProxy.RetrieveMultiple(bulkQuery);

// Monitor the async operation via polling.

int secondsTicker = ARBITRARY_MAX_POLLING_TIME;

AsyncOperation createdBulkMailOperation = null;

while (secondsTicker > 0)

{

// Make sure the async operation was retrieved.

if (aResponse.Entities.Count > 0)

{

// Grab the one bulk operation that has been created.

createdBulkMailOperation = (AsyncOperation)aResponse.Entities[0];

// Check the operation's state.

if (createdBulkMailOperation.StateCode.Value !=

AsyncOperationState.Completed)

{

// The operation has not yet completed.

// Wait a second for the status to change.

System.Threading.Thread.Sleep(1000);

secondsTicker--;

// Retrieve a fresh version the bulk delete operation.

aResponse = _serviceProxy.RetrieveMultiple(bulkQuery);

}

else

{

// Stop polling because the operation's state is now complete.

secondsTicker = 0;

}

}

else

{

// Wait a second for the async operation to activate.

System.Threading.Thread.Sleep(1000);

secondsTicker--;

// Retrieve the entity again

aResponse = _serviceProxy.RetrieveMultiple(bulkQuery);

}

}

// When the bulk email operation has completed, all sent emails will

// have a status of "Pending Send" and will be picked up by your email

// router. Alternatively, you can then use BackgroundSendEmail to download

// all the emails created with the SendBulkEmail message.

#region Check success

// Validate async operation succeeded

if (createdBulkMailOperation.StateCode.Value == AsyncOperationState.Completed)

{

MessageBox.Show("Operation Completed."); }

else

{

MessageBox.Show("Operation not yet Completed."); }

#endregion

Hope this helps.

Happy coding!!