CRM 2011 Opportunity Revenue field is read only

November 14, 2011 Leave a Comment

I’ve just had a slightly strange situation with some customisation for a CRM online project I am working on that I thought I would share in case anyone else has a similar experience with this particular scenario or other odd results of customisations which may have a related cause.

Customising the Opportunity form

I have been customising various entities and forms to build the system to suit the particular customer’s requirements. One of the things I was changing was the Opportunity form. I added some of the custom fields, moved some things around and tidied is up generally. Published and everything seemed fine.

Estimated Revenue always read only

Then I noticed that I could not put a value in the Estimated Revenue field. It was dimmed as unavailable, read-only, “move along, nothing to do here…”. Nothing I did would change this, Est. Revenue was always read only.

I had quite deliberately already changed the “IsRevenueSystemCalculated” field default to “User Provided”, and this is the value it correctly showed up on the form.

In general this organisation will be quoting their clients as part of longhand written proposals or formal RFPs for very flexible services work which does not lend itself well to using the Product Catalogue, although they may do that later for standard, fixed price, “commodity” services they offer. So their Opportunities will be used to manage the sales pipeline but not to figure out the values for them, and user provided figures are the most sensible way to handle this.

If I changed isrevenuesystemcalculated to “System Calculated” it correctly added in a value (£0.00 at the moment since I have added no line items) and it remained dimmed, as it should. Change it back to “User Provided” and nothing happens, still read only and unavailable. Currency was set, no Price List was added (and none needed as there would be no line items). All very strange.

What else could be causing this?

I had included Est. Revenue in the form header, and thought this might be causing the problem in some way because it would be a read-only field, but I removed it and it made no difference. I checked and rechecked that there were no scripts or anything else that could be affecting this behaviour. Nothing.

But one other thing that I had changed from the default OOBE is the way the field was displayed – rather than a pair of radio buttons I had chosen to save some space on the form by showing isrevenuesystemcalculated as a picklist since the user would only very rarely want to change this.

Switching back to radio buttons fixed the problem.

Why would this be buggy?

So it seems that the built-in functionality which is triggered by changing this field and updating the Est Revenue field accordingly is not particularly flexible. As far as my testing shows, it looks like it explicitly uses the status of the radio buttons as part of the DOM, rather than the underlying value of the bit field to figure out the state of the user selection in the isrevenuesystemcalculated field.

I would argue that this is a bug, since it should be possible to display this field in any way I choose. Albeit if I chose a single check box the label would need to be more explicit than simply “Revenue”, and I have a feeling this would not work in any case as I am not sure if selecting and clearing a checkbox triggers an “onChange” event in the way other operations do.

Have you had any similar experiences where the built-in functionality is very picky about how things are displayed, or where changing the default forms has affected things in strange ways? Please feel free to share via the comments.

Filed under CRM 2011 Tagged with , , , , ,

Don’t let CRM overload users’ email inboxes

October 10, 2011 Leave a Comment

EmailSpam

Matt Keenan wrote an interesting post about some of the CRM deadly sins over at his Dynamics Café blog. One of his categories that I particularly see happening all too often is “too much notification”.

Why do people do this?

I see this in initial customer specifications and requirements documents quite a lot, usually in the form of “When foo happens, send an email to person/group X”.

This is often born out of naïvety on the part of the person who has been tasked with figuring out how their processes should be managed using a system they have never seen yet. They respond by falling back on what they know and try to use their existing mechanisms (such as email) to tell people when something important happens.

I also find this in existing systems, sometimes where the original consultant has simply felt that if that is what the customer asked for, that is what they should be given. In other cases it is because not enough time has been spent on looking at alternatives or on training end users how to find information for themselves without having it pushed out to them over old channels.

I tend to be a bit more argumentative and ask “why do you want it do that?” “have you considered other options such as…”. Of course, if someone insists loudly enough I deliver what the customer has asked for, but I do at least try to explore with them whether they are taking the best approach.
Find out how to replace notifications, and when they are the right option»

Filed under Dynamics CRM Tagged with , ,

Annoying file format warning when exporting CRM records to Excel

July 1, 2010 4 Comments

Pointless error message dialog box

When you export from CRM to Excel the data is derived as XML, saved with an XLS file extension and Excel is invoked to open the temporary file. Unfortunately Excel checks to see if the file being opened is actually of a type which matches the file extension and tries to be helpful. Normally this is to help overcome problems such as a comma-separated variable (CSV) file being saved as an XLS file extension, which ought to mean Excel tries to read the XLS file, fails because the contents are nothing like a real Excel binary file and gives up. Instead, Excel actually looks at the content, spots that it looks very much like a CSV and allows you to open it just as if the file extension was correct in the first place. However, this cleverness is tempered somewhat by the fact that the default setting for this is to ask the user every single time what they want to do.

As always, this is probably intended to be a helpful warning and prevent people opening files which might have insecure content, but it fails to do so because most users do not understand the implications and the longwinded message is probably not even read properly anyway. Certainly the 50th time someone sees a dialog like the one below, they just click “yes” without reading and it no longer provides any benefit whatsoever (by the way, I have done nothing to this, it displays in this ridiculously wide, un-resizable window on my machine).

Click to see larger version - CRM Excel export error message

Whenever I have managed people in IT support roles I try to eliminate fixes which involve things like “ignore that error message, just hit OK and it will work fine”. This not only numbs people to the meaning of that particular error message but to these sorts of warnings in general. Too often I have heard users explain why they did not report a problem until it was too late, saying “well, I got an error every day saying something about faulty disk or something but I just clicked OK, like John said we should with that other one…”. Find the root cause, eliminate the error, or suppress the error somehow, don’t teach people that errors don’t matter or they just ignore them. If you went to your doctor and said “it hurts my neck when I lift my arm up” you would not be impressed if she replied “then don’t lift your arms up!”, would you?
Read on to find out how to stop Excel asking unhelpful questions when you export records from CRM»

Filed under CRM 2011, Dynamics CRM, Excel, Group Policy, Office 2010 Tagged with , , ,

Outlook client for CRM 4 with rollup 10

June 30, 2010 Leave a Comment

MS Dynamics logo

Finally Microsoft have released a client installation package with a recent rollup already included in the package (“slipstreamed”). Unfortunately, nearly 4 weeks after the release of update rollup 11 it is only rollup 10 that is included. While this is a move forward from the rollup 7 client that was available, it still means that most people are going to need to install the client and then immediately apply a patch to UR11, so it is probably of limited help really. Thanks but no thanks.

Get the new CRM 4.0 client for Outlook with Update Rollup 10 if you are using the on-premise or partner-hosted (“service provider”) versions of CRM. If you are using CRM online you are stuck with installing the original version of the special online client and patching it yourself. Note: CRM on-demand from Microsoft is only available in the US and Canada despite the announcement back in April about worldwide release, because it seems that will only be for the next release, version 5 available later this year.

Hat tip to The CRM Business for the original heads-up on this one.

Filed under Dynamics CRM, Patching + hotfixes Tagged with , , ,

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