I am proud to share that CAPTRUST Financial Advisors was just featured in a newly published Microsoft Case Study.

I started working part-time with CAPTRUST in January of 2008 and was hired for a full-time Application Developer Associate position in June of that year. My initial role was to put together Javascript behaviors and to re-write the fiduciary portal to connect with the recently-installed version 4.0 of Microsoft Dynamics CRM (xRM).

It has been almost two years now, and I have been frequently impressed with the xRM system. As a package, it comes preset with many of the options one would need to manage corporate relationships between clients, employees, and vendors. In my opinion, however, the greatest strength of the software is in the ability to extend it, customize it, and also to integrate external applications or processing with it.

There is a bit of technical detail lost in the case study, and obviously some trade secrets that prevented screenshots, but they have captured the essence of what the last two years have been like. I’ve gotten the chance to work on a lot of great projects, and been able to learn some new things in the process. This case study gives me some personal satisfaction for recognition of what I have done.

Associated views in Microsoft Dynamics CRM can be enhanced to provide relevant historical information about related entities.  By showing inactive records, and giving them a unique visual style, the data takes on new meaning.

Below, I have detailed the process followed to display inactive records, and then format the rows of the associated view (from within the parent entity’s OnLoad event).  Please look through what I have done, use it freely, and change it to your liking.

The solution that I have implemented involves attaching to a succession of functions on elements related to the associated view. WARNING! The suggestions that follow do not come with any warranty or guarantee of service, and are most likely not supported by Microsoft. Use at your own risk!

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The comments do not appear to be working on the CRM team blog, so I wanted to post this here for anyone else that might be having the same struggle that we did. The error message we were facing during auto-update of the CRM Outlook Client was:

Installation package for Microsoft Dynamics CRM 4.0 for Microsoft Office Outlook cannot be found. Try the installation with a valid copy of the installation package ‘Client.msi’

The installation package for Microsoft Dynamics CRM Update Rollup 4 for the Outlook client has code that looks for the original installation path of the client. When it cannot find the “client.msi” file in the location stored in the registry it will throw an error.

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I have been tasked with documenting our Microsoft Dynamics CRM 4.0 plug-ins and workflows, and have created a simple way to visualize the contents exported by the CRM Plugin Registration Tool.

The tool exports details about selected assemblies into XML format. An easy way to create visualizations for XML is to utilize XSLT (XML stylesheets).  I have created a simple XSLT, which results in the exported file looking like the image below:

The result of applying the XSLT

The nice thing about this is that using basic XSL the contents of the export can be manipulated into a variety of different visual representations. I have chosen a very simple, tabular layout with the items grouped by entity, then sorted by message, order of execution, and finally by the name of the plug-in. The XSL is posted after the break.

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