The Mail Owl Scrolls

Successes with CRM security

Ever since I’ve been developing modules for Microsoft CRM I’ve tried to use proper abstraction and call the web services to “wrapped classes” and work with the returned data as objects and collections rather than the raw XML.

So far I’ve been quite successful and for each project I’ve brought across these classes, added to them and extended them when I was working on custom fields.

The failing of my classes is that each time I instantiate them, I’ve needed to pass server host name of the CRM web service and a username, password and domain with which the class uses to authenticate against the web service.

Today I’ve figured out the security portion of CRM and more specifically how to get the logged in users ID.  I’ve been working on the problem for a couple of weeks and suddenly it all just clicked.

This means that besides being able to save the user’s details to custom records that I’ve developed, I can let my wrapper classes use the cache’s user details and all I need to supply is the host name.

The catch that kept me from understanding the security, was that I was developing on my own machine which can not (I don’t understand why) have Digest Authentication, and you need to be running in the CRM application pool.  I loaded a whole bunch of test pages and applications on the live CRM server and everything just worked beautifully.

Now I’m stuck with the problem of being unable to develop on my machine as I’m using the new security wrapper class in my project which, as stated above, needs to run in CRM’s application pool.

I’ve been breaking all the rules of development and testing by uploading my half finished projects to the live server but as I’ve crashed the server twice today this has to stop.

The problem is, and as I understand it’s the same with Sharepoint, is that CRM is too resource heavy to have as a virtual machine on my laptop and my company can’t justify giving me my own little pc to use as a test server.

Anyways, if you’re reading this and you’re interested in my wrapper classes or are looking for advice on Microsoft CRM 1.2, email me and I’d be happy to help.

January SA Developer Braai - Conclusion

Everyone seemed to enjoy themselves at SA Developer Johannesburg’s first social of 2005 and here are the incriminating pictures to prove it.  I really need to invest in a proper camera for these events rather than relying on my phone.

A special thank you to Tina for bringing more supplies for the party.

I hope to see you all again at February’s SA Developer social where we’re having an iLAN session and challenging Cape Town to a couple of rounds of Dawn of War

Writing and managing Microsoft CRM Crystal reports

It’s sad that CRM comes with such useless reports, just basic lists sorted by different attributes.  Anyone just thinking for 5 minutes could have come up with something simple, yet useful, to ship with the base installation.

I’m still not quite sure why Microsoft chose to do their CRM reporting through Crystal Reports rather than their own SQL Reporting Services.  Thankfully, the company I’m working for is a Business Objects Enterprise Partner, so I’m surrounded by Crystal Guru’s.

Rant and promotion over, I’ve tracked down an evaluation copy of the correct version of Crystal Reports to use with the Microsoft CRM Crystal Enhancements (Crystal Reports v 9.2.2) and while looking for something completely different in MSDN, I found Microsoft’s release of the APS Manager for Crystal Enterprise, Report Manager.

CRM Duplicate Checker

This module that plugs into Leads records searches in other Leads, Accounts and Contacts for duplicate records information.  Currently it only searches on First Name, Last Name and Company Name; but I want to expand it to use telephone number and email address.

The plug-in is assigned user login rather than using the logged-in user’s details so that users who might be limited to viewing a smaller data set can at least check for duplicates in the rest of the Organisation.

Unfortunately, because this was written for my company, the classes (while “universal” for CRM) are in my company’s namespace, but I want to offer this module to other CRM developers to get ideas.

On that note, I’ve gone to pains to make classes that “wrap” the CRM web service results into manageable object collections and I’ve especially proud of my ability to send a query to CRM and push the results into the correct record type.

I’m going to only put the standard fields into the CRM classes and created inherited class in an expanded namespace to cater for custom added fields.  This will allow me to use my CRM classes for any project and “should” be extendible into CRM 2.0.

Below is a screen-shot of the Duplicate Checker that has found duplicates.

With the details of the record I was searching on, my Duplicate Checker found 1 other Lead with the same company name.  The first name and last name are different though and, in brackets, I can see that the record belongs to another user and that the status of the record is still New.

February SA Developer LAN Session - Johannesburg, South Africa

Another SA Developer event coming up is the iLAN session in February on the 12th February 2005 from 15:00.

The key feature of this session is that it’s an iLAN (internet LAN) session.  We are challenging the SA Developer members in Cape Town to a couple of games of Dawn of War.

Location
11 Monterosso
Barbet Rd
Halfway Gardens
Midrand

My Mobile 083 410 7702

Please RSVP by replying to this post.

Good Hunting

[updated: 31 January 2005 07:56]

Here are directions to my house

[updated: 02 February 2005 13:51]

Changed the starting time from 11:00 to 15:00

Januray SA Developer Braai - Johannesburg, South Africa

I’m having the first Bring-and-Braai for SA Developer of 2005 in Johannesburg on the 29th January 2005 from 11:00 at my place in midrand.  Girlfriends/wives (not both at the same time) and kids are welcome.

Location
11 Monterosso
Barbet Rd
Halfway Gardens
Midrand

My Mobile 083 410 7702

Please RSVP to this post so I know how many people are coming.

[Update 25 January 2005 11:18]

Thanks to Neale (Gumpie121) for pointing out that my place is not in any mapbook!  Please find a map below