2010 – Separating Work and Personal content

I have decided that seeing as it is a new year and a new Decade for that matter that I should clearly separate my community participation with regards to my personal life and my work life. I have had 2 blogs and identities for a while now and it has always been quite complicated and tedious determining what to post where, as a result all my personal thoughts and posts will now be posted on my personal blog http://www.dylanhaskins.com and all my work and CRM / xRM post will be posted on http://thexrmguru.com . You can also follow me on twitter accordingly @dylanhaskins and @thexrmguru

Windows 7 Quick Restore using Boot from VHD

Check out the post here at thexRMGuru.com

Microsoft CRM 4.0 Configuration Data Utility

The Microsoft CRM 4.0 Configuration Data Utility is a tool that I downloaded from MSDN at the beginning of the year. As with a lot of the tools that I download, getting around to actually playing with them doesn’t always happen as quickly as I would like.

I finally got around to playing with this tool a couple of weeks ago and it definitely has some great potential, both as a Configuration Data migration utility as well as an Import / Export utility for data that you may need to move around or pre-populate into your CRM system for testing purposes during UAT etc, as well as working very well for exporting and importing data from entities that you typically cant access using the Built-In Import capabilities of CRM, like Subjects.

I did however make one small change to the source code of this tool as by default it only allows you to Export and Import data from Custom Entities in the system, so I modified line 206 of ExportDataForm.cs as follows :

Original Code

   1: IEnumerable<EntityMetadata> entities = response.CrmMetadata

   2:     .Cast<EntityMetadata>()

   3:     .Where(entity => entity.IsIntersect.Value == false && entity.IsImportable.Value entity.IsCustomEntity.Value )

   4:     .OrderBy(entity => entity.DisplayName.UserLocLabel.Label)

   5:     .ToList();

Altered Code

   1: IEnumerable<EntityMetadata> entities = response.CrmMetadata

   2:     .Cast<EntityMetadata>()

   3:     .Where(entity => entity.IsIntersect.Value == false && entity.IsImportable.Value )

   4:     //&& entity.IsCustomEntity.Value

   5:     .OrderBy(entity => entity.DisplayName.UserLocLabel.Label)

   6:     .ToList();

Aside from this the tool is pretty easy to use.

You either Export Data to “.Data” files or you Import the “.Data” files back into your system.

Export then requires a Server URL and Organisation name

You then get a list of available entities

Add the entities you want, select an Output file destination

and Presto!!!

The Import process is even simpler.

Meet Jessica Sarah Haskins

Today my wife and I went for a 4D scan to have a look at our Beautiful baby girl, Jessica.

My wife, Tamara is going on 31 weeks pregnant and we are expecting our little girl around the middle to end of September.

The 4D scan was an absolutely awesome experience, although I am positive that there is no way I can really describe the feeling to anyone, it is something you have to experience for yourself. We got some really good photo’s today (as it was the second time we went for the scan as Jessica was very uncooperative the last time)

Thanks to Paul and Carmen (The God Parents) for sharing this very special occasion with us.

Enough waffle…. here she is, my little Princess :)

Open Source CMS Platforms

So, I have spent the last week playing around with and trying to setup a CMS platform using what is available in the Open Source marketplace, and I ended up surprising myself.

While there are a relatively large number of CMS platforms available, I am (currently) a Microsoft evangelist and so my primary search was for .Net based CMS platforms, these are a little more limited in terms of the offering available. I would have to say that the best available (as is quite widely known) is DotNetNuke, it is pretty easy to deploy and use with quite a large number of modules available, however I found it a little on the slow side and found myself wondering what the other non-Microsoft platforms were like, comparatively.

I broadened my search net and went looking through the different offerings and after playing around with all the flavours out there decided to have a look at Drupal after seeing some really awesome stuff while visiting my friend Mike Stopforth from Cerebra.

I have only 2 words…. Drupal Rocks !!!

The ease of use of deployment as well as working with the CMS are phenomenal, I thought I might have some difficulty not being too familiar with PHP, MySQL and Apache (or in my Hosting Environments’ case PHP for IIS) and the documentation from the drupal.org site is very comprehensive and easy to follow.

All in all a surprisingly pleasant experience, well done guys….. sorry DotNetNuke :(

Watch this space for more of my ever changing thoughts on the broader open source space.

Mobility Solutions for Microsoft Dynamics CRM 4.0

Microsoft have announced the release of the Mobility Accelerator for Dynamics CRM 4.0, this comprises of 2 offerings :

Microsoft Dynamics CRM Mobile Express, for always-on mobile access to CRM data and capabilities, this is currently in Alpha release the details of General Availability should be released in the next month.

TenDigits MobileAccess, for online and offline access to Microsoft Dynamics CRM. Go to TenDigits for more information or 3Fifteen for Implementation in South Africa.

Marketing collateral is available on PartnerSource.

CRM 4.0 Update Rollup 2

Update Rollup 2 has been released for CRM 4.0. You can get it here

For Information on what has been fixed in this update look here