Until now we have  no installation routine to for our Dashboards for MS CRM 2011. Therefore this blog entry describes how to upgrade/install the Dashboards in a MS CRM 2011 environment manually.

This installation will only work in an On-Premise installation and will not work in IFD and Claims-Based-Authentication-Mode.

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Contents:
Part One: Creating the Chart
Part Two: Creating the Drill-Down Click

Part One (Creating the Chart )
Pre required Steps:
Create the Fetch XML. To create a Custom Fetch it is advisable to use a fetch generator tool. If you have our DCP Add-on you will also find such tool. Otherwise you can use the Stunnware Tools for MSCRM.
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Error:
Dashboard does not open and you get the following JavaScript Error in the Browser:

Message: Unhandled Error in Silverlight x application
Code: 2104
Category: Initialize Error
Message: 2104 An error has occurred.

Solution:
For some security reasons the Dashboard Installer does not get access to the ISS and we can’t add the required Mime Types for Silverlight. Please see the following link how to add the Mime Types in your IIS/Dashbaord root.
http://learn.iis.net/page.aspx/262/configuring-iis-for-silverlight-applications/

Mime Types to add:
Extension     MIME type
.xap             application/x-silverlight-app
.xaml           application/xaml+xml
.xbap           application/x-ms-xbap

Important! For Dashboard Map-Charts you need also the following MIME types:
Extension     MIME type
.dbf              application/octet-stream
.shp             application/octet-stream

· Open your CRM
· Go to "Settings" in the navigation at the left
· Choose "mscrm-addons settings" from the navigation

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Basics:

Licensechecks are done each time the application is accessed by a user. Having an invalid license stops the whole product from working. And invalid license will never have any impact on the CRM, it only limits the addon itself.

Reasons for an invalid license :

• Wrong license OrganizationUnit
• Usercount has execeeded the granted licenses (Stops whole product, not only for the excessive users on all license models)
• Upgrading the product after having the support contract expired
• In Case of a time limited license (and a trial) : Reached the end of the license lifetime.

Licensetype normal license (aka perSite license)

Requires a license for each active CRM user, no matter if he uses the product or not. If new CRM users are added, the license needs to be extended with more users as well.

Disabled, ReadOnly users and Administrative users do not require a license.

Licensetype perUser license

Requires only as many licenses as you actually want to have, but starts at a minimum of 10 licenses and is double the price of a site license.

The license is a named user license and the license is activated via a checkbox on the Systemuser entity for a specific user. You may activate as many users for the access as you have licenses.

Exceeding the granted license count stops the product for all users.

 

In the Dashboard you can change your layout and create or save your own views. In the layout menu there are 3 views: “Single View”, “Vertical View” and “Horizontal View”. In this blog article we describe how to use and configure the different views.

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You have the possibility to start Dashbaord out of CRM. There are three options:

1.    Start Dashboard normal
http://server:prort/DashBoard/Dashboard.aspx?orgname=YourOrgname
Example: http://crm:5555/DashBoard/Dashboard.aspx?orgname=PTMEDVSystemeGmbH

2.    Start Dashboard with a predefined Dashboard
http://server:prort/DashBoard/DashBoard.aspx?orgname=YourOrgname&DBID={3223A69E-DFF9-DE11-A1CC-001CC4AA705A}&ShowMenu=true
(If you not define the ShowMenu parameter, the default value is false.)

3.    Start Dashboard with a predefined Dashboard and hide the Dashboard Menu. If you take this option the user interface is limited.
http://server:prort/DashBoard/DashBoard.aspx?orgname=YourOrgname&DBID={3223A69E-DFF9-DE11-A1CC-001CC4AA705A}

How do I find the desired Dashboard ID?

Got to "SETTINGS", choose "DASHBOARDS SL" and open your desired Dashboard.

Copy the market ID from the Browser Address bar.

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Dashboard for MS CRM4.0 provides several maps (World-map, Europe, U.S., Germany, Netherlands,…) in order to e.g. display customer-distributions.
This blog contains basic information on configuríng maps explained by a Step-by-Step- Setup of a “Customers in the U.S.A-chart”.

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The problem due to the fact, that MS CRM is using an HttpModule for multitenancy scenarios. This http module will be called with an anonymous user account and therefore fail when trying to request e.g the metadata webservice.

Solution: To make it work, a new entry (remove CrmAuthentication) has to be specified within the web.config file of the specific Add-On.

<system.web>
 ...
 <httpmodules> 
 <remove name="CrmAuthentication" />
 </httpmodules> 
 ...
</system.web>