From the Microsoft Dynamics CRM Blogs: CRM 2013 Advanced Find; Business rules; Trace log reader; Merging entries

From the Microsoft Dynamics CRM blogs:

• Finding Advanced Find in CRM 2013;
• Creating If Then Else Logic in CRM 2013 Business Rules;
• PFE CRM Trace Log File Reader;
• Merging Entries in Microsoft Dynamics CRM 2011

Finding Advanced Find in CRM 2013

On his Surviving CRM blog, Jukka Niiranen notes that the user interface of Dynamics CRM has been cleaned up quite a bit in the latest 2013 version. And the number of buttons visible to the user has been greatly reduced in the browser client. Another significant change from a usability perspective is that Dynamics CRM now operates like any other web application or website: within a single browser window, allowing you to navigate back and forth with the browser's native buttons. However...

"The combination of these two factors has led to one side effect that may cause the users familiar with previous versions of Dynamics CRM to ask: "Dude, where's my Advanced Find?"

"In CRM 2011 the Advanced Find was always available in the main window of CRM. Unless you resized the window to a small enough size and made the Data tab of the CRM 2011 Ribbon collapse into a single flyout button, it was pretty easy to spot the familiar binoculars icon that represented Advanced Find. Being one of the most powerful features of the Dynamics CRM application, this button will have surely become familiar to all power users of CRM over the years."

In CRM 2013 the Advanced Find feature is not always so easy to locate, Niiranen says. He adds that he's seen a lot of experienced users struggle to locate the menu after the system has been upgraded.

You can click here if you want to find an easy way to launch Advanced Find from any place inside CRM.

Creating If Then Else Logic in CRM 2013 Business Rules

PowerObjects CRM superhero, Joe CRM, says in the past he's written about how to perform field validations to control field visibility and field requirement levels with Business Rules in Microsoft Dynamics CRM 2013. So now he wants to discuss how to create more advanced business rules using "if then" statements.

First a little background: Joe explains that business rules allow you to check for one or more conditions and then take one or more actions if the conditions are met. Although multiple conditions can be defined in each business rule, each condition will be processed using the AND operator. So if you create a single business rule with two conditions, both conditions must be met in order for the action to be executed.

"But what happens if you need to check for one condition OR another? The way it stands you'd have to create two separate business rules to do that - one to check for each condition and take the appropriate action. The only exception to this constraint is when your condition is referencing an option set field. When you set a condition for an option set field you can choose more than one option set value in the same condition statement and the business rule will process this using the OR operator."

Click here if you want to know how you can accomplish your requirement with business rules.

PFE CRM Trace Log File Reader

Blogger Walter Grow, part of the Microsoft Dynamics CRM PFE team, says sometimes you're going to have issues with a Dynamics CRM server, but the application log won't give you enough information to help you resolve the issue. Or you might be asked by the Microsoft CRM support team for a trace log of the server to help troubleshoot an issue.

Depending on the level of tracing, the CRM Tracing can provide very detailed information on what CRM is doing.  Grow says if you're interested in enabling tracing, read this post written by one of his teammate discussing how to enable the CRM Platform Tracing with the Registry or Windows PowerShell.

"Dynamics CRM Tracing produces a text log file that can contain information of the operation that the Microsoft CRM server performed. The trace file is difficult to read because there might be log entries between steps of the operation that you are interested in. The PFE CRM Trace Log File Reader Tool is supposed to help with reading the log file so you can get an insight on what the CRM server is doing. You can download the log reader here."

And you can see how it works here.

Merging Entries in Microsoft Dynamics CRM 2011

On the Webfortis blog, Jessica Coombes asks: Have you ever typed an account name into CRM only to find the account in the system twice but spelled slightly differently?

When you have more than one person entering data into your CRM, it's possible to make duplicate entries, she says. Dynamics CRM makes it easy to merge duplicates quickly and painlessly.

She shows you how to merge duplicate accounts here.