xRM Consultant

Hi All,

Recently our customers have been looking into additional ways to customize Dynamics CRM 2011 to support the processes of their teams. For certain customers, those who have exhausted all the options of "supported customization's", this requires some creative thinking.

Its interesting as this desire for more quirky changes to Microsoft Dynamics CRM 2011 is really a product of its own flexibility. CRM 4, while great, was fairly static when it came to processes. A lot of companies used it as a CRM solution in the more classic sense. Then came the big moon step forward that was CRM 2011. This gave organisations so much more flexibility in integrating systems and supporting processes. Trouble is, you give a customer a slice and they want the whole cake! For customers who have now been working with and adapting Microsoft Dynamics CRM 2011 for the last 2-3 years, the desire for configuring Microsoft Dynamics CRM 2011 to support the ever changing and unique processes of their business sometimes goes beyond what is possible under the heading of "supported customisations". The answer? Microsoft Dynamics CRM 2013 of course!!


In the meantime, when it comes to these sort of requests, we have to get creative! In line with this we had a customer recently who wanted us to remove the Save Record button on the duplicate detection window. The inbuilt duplicate detection, whilst it has its limitations, nicely gives you the opportunity to not save your newly entered record if a duplicate is found. However, you are also given the option to save the record even if a duplicate is found. This causes a problem when you have a large team of users who, to be frank, you don't trust to allow the to create duplicates. Thanks to a very helpful blog post from MS Dynamics CRM 2011 Tips we were able to disable the Save Record button fairly simply by taking the following steps:

1. Navigate to your CRM instance on your app server.
2. Navigate to \CRMWeb\Tools\DuplicateDetection\ViewDuplicates\
3. Edit this file in Visual Studio or Notepad.
4. Add this line to the ShowPage() javascript member or any member that is called by onLoad(): document.getElementById("btn_id_Ok").disabled="true";
5. Save your change.

This will disable the button. If you would like to get clever (like we did) you can add some further script to disable this button for users with a certain security role.

Nice little bit of code that can help with the usability of Microsoft Dynamics CRM 2011 in certain scenarios.

Thanks

xRM Consultant