Outlook.com – Hotmail goes Metro!

Posted on 01/08/2012 by Alistair Hunt

http://blogs.office.com/b/microsoft-outlook/archive/2012/07/31/introducing-outlook-com-modern-email-for-the-next-billion-mailboxes.aspx

The ‘name’ configuration element key cannot be null

Posted on 16/07/2012 by Alistair Hunt

When you create a simple .Net 4 WCF Service Application it generates a simplified web.config file with default endpoints. This is great when you need a simple service and don’t want a cluttered config file. However, I did come across a small issue with the default file when you try to open it with the Service Configuration Editor. When you try to open the file an error is displayed; ‘The ‘name’ configuration element key cannot be null’. To fix the problem just add the name attribute to the behavior node;

<behaviors>
    <serviceBehaviors>
        <behavior name="defaultBehaviour">
            <serviceMetadata httpGetEnabled="true" />
        </behavior>
    </serviceBehaviors>
 </behaviors>

CRM Anywhere

Posted on 31/05/2012 by Alistair Hunt

Ever wondered what CRM would like on an iPad? Your wait may soon be over …

http://crm.dynamics.com/en-us/roadmap

Windows 8 Consumer Preview – Getting around

Posted on 03/04/2012 by Alistair Hunt

Posted from my Windows 8 VM 🙂

http://windowsteamblog.com/windows/b/windowsexperience/archive/2012/03/08/getting-around-in-windows-8.aspx

CRM 2011 Email Router & Exchange 2010

Posted on 13/03/2012 by Alistair Hunt

As with all things technological the CRM Email Router I have been working with got upset when our Exchange Server was upgraded from 2007 to 2010. After making the required changes to the Incoming Configuration for the new Exchange server I went to check the configuration using the Test Access option in the Configuration Manager. I ended up with this error;

“Incoming Status: Failure – The underlying connection was closed: Could not establish trust relationship for the SSL/TLS secure channel”

Which pointed me to this KB article about the problem. I could see the problem if I navigated to the Exchange web service listed in my Incoming Configuration – https://<my.exchange.server>/EWS/exchange.asmx – as I was presented with an Invalid Certificate notification.

The change in Exchange Server meant a new Certificate was issued for the new server and this needed to be installed on my CRM Email Router machine, making sure it was added to the Trusted Root Certification Authorities section. Since the certificate cannot be validated by Windows you do get a security warning, but since I know it comes from valid authority (the Exchange Server) I can install it and everything is back to normal.

CRM 2011 Email Router : System.ServiceModel.Channels.ReceivedFault

Posted on 06/02/2012 by Alistair Hunt

Having installed the CRM 2011 Email Router on the server and configured the Incoming and Outgoing server options when I came to ‘Test Access’ I got the following error in both test results:

Incoming Status: Failure - Type 'System.ServiceModel.Channels.ReceivedFault' in Assembly
'System.ServiceModel, Version=4.0.0.0, Culture=neutral, PublicKeyToken=b77a5c561934e089' 
is not marked as serializable.

To solve this problem I had to do two things:

I changed the router service account (the account that is configured to run the email router service) to a valid domain user.
Since I was using the Access Credentials of Other Specified for the profiles the router service account needed to be added to the PrivUserGroup.

Once I had made these changes and restarted my CRM Email Router Service then the Test Access dialog indicated that both Incoming and Outgoing profiles had succeeded.

CRM 2011 Fields within Outlook 2010

Posted on 21/12/2011 by Alistair Hunt

When you create an Activity within Microsoft CRM 2011 using the web client it appears as if you get additional fields in the Details section that are not available when using the Outlook 2010 client. For example, my users wanted to be able to populate the Duration field when they complete an email so they can report on time against a particular client, account and/or case.

Fortunately the fields in the Details section are available within the Outlook 2010 client for CRM 2011 you just have to know how to find them.

Open up a new email message from within Outlook
On the Message tab of the ribbon bar is a Show button. Click this button to reveal an option to show the CRM Fields for an email (See image below)

If you haven’t already set the email as ‘Tracked’ within CRM you will receive an informational message (See image below)

Just click on the Track button on the Message tab of the new email ribbon and you should see the Details section containing the additional fields within CRM. (See image below)