One item to make it easier to give Thanks this year…

 

While I do generally try to keep this blog to technology, my one main exception is with our very dear friends who’s son literally has only one-half of a heart.

It is with great excitement that I am helping them “get the word out” about Amanda’s (the mom) brand new book that she is just finishing: Informed Consent, A Memoir of Hope.

To help with creating the viral buzz around the book, which will help her get it published, I am asking everyone to join in the effort to help get this book published, and it won’t cost you a single penny!  I invite you to PLEASE go visit the book’s blog, read up about Liam, and sign up to become a Follower. Help create an incredible viral awareness of children with critical heart disease like Liam’s by simply visiting and registering to follow a blog.

And, if you are feeling super-thankful, please read my other blog about Liam and how you can support all the children with critical heart disease.

May you, your family, and all your friends have a wonderful Thanksgiving holiday!

Now, go visit the book’s blog!!!

Robert
- One is pleased to be of service

Technorati Tags: Congenital Heart Disease

The report parameter ‘xxx’ is read-only and cannot be modified.

 

One of our teams deployed some SRS reports to their Dynamics CRM production environment today. The reports worked fine in both their development and test environments, but definitely did not work in production.

When attempting to run the reports in production, they would get the following [ever so un-helpful] error:

Thankfully, they did already have tracing turned on, so I was able to take a look into the trace files where I found the following exception:

>Crm Exception: Message: The report parameter 'CRM_FilteredAccount' is read-only and cannot be modified. (rsReadOnlyReportParameter), ErrorCode: -2147220332, InnerException: Microsoft.Reporting.WebForms.ReportServerException: The report parameter 'CRM_FilteredAccount' is read-only and cannot be modified. (rsReadOnlyReportParameter)

Searching through the blog-o-sphere, I found 2 discussions that suggested re-installing the SRS Connector. Which I did. Which did NOT fix the problem. So, save yourself the time.

Eventually, I found a reference to this article that provides the solution to the problem.

The issue is, that when you import a custom .rdl report into CRM, the Parameters’ visibility setting gets over-ridden and put in a state that causes this problem. 

In this team’s case, they had marked all of their Parameters as “internal.” To fix this, they must all be marked as ‘hidden’, but this MUST be done within the SRS report management console and not Visual Studio.

Again, this article will give you the details on how to do this.

Moral of the story:  If you have a report with one or more “internal” Parameters, And you get the exception above, you may have to mark them as “hidden” in the SRS Report Management console for them to work correctly.

Robert
- One is pleased to be of service

 

Technorati Tags: Dynamics CRM,SRS,SQL Reporting Services,Reports

An automated mess, is a very fast mess. However, it still remains a mess!

 

As a Business Solutions Architect, I spend a good amount of time with the the business management and stakeholders in helping everyone understand exactly what, and how they do business.  Subsequent to getting everyone on the same process page, we can then look for opportunities for automation. Unfortunately, I come in on the tail end where the order of that interchange has already occurred, but in the backwards order.  The client has automated first, then tried to figure out exactly how it is that they should really be doing business. Reminds of the old Dilbert cartoon where the pointy haired boss tells the team to get started coding while he goes upstairs to figure out what the requirements are.  To re-phrase for our conversation:  “You guys automate all our business processes now.  We’ll tell you what they are later.”

I was recently involved in an internal discussion here at CIBER around a general discussion of the automation of business processes.  In the course of that conversation, one of our thought leaders (Mark Kurt) summarized the conversation quite well:

“I may be partial, but I believe workflow (human process automation) applications definitely have a place in enabling business results - but like everything it can be over used or applied to the wrong processes.

I think business process management and business process re-engineering are often confused with business process automation - but they are distinctly different. Business process management is about aligning business processes with strategic and operational goals. In analyzing business processes, opportunities for automation may be uncovered, but those opportunities must be viewed in light of the overall goals.

While we often look at strategic goals mentioning efficiency or results (however they may manifest themselves: cycle time, inventory turn, etc.) and then look to the supporting processes as ripe for automation - the root cause of the inefficiency may not be ameliorated through automation (e.g., legal review of a contract, credit review by finance, etc.). But that is not to say that efficiency is always the goal in workflow automation - sometimes the drivers are things like compliance, visibility, and fear of losing institutional or tacit knowledge.

So in a long answer to a short question, I would say that workflow applications are an obstacle to getting results under the following conditions:

1. The processes chosen to automate do not support strategic or operational goals, and therefore do not add business value (i.e., creating additional "busy" work).
2. The root cause of inefficiency was not identified correctly, and therefore workflow has increased the efficiency of everything EXCEPT the bottleneck.
3. The purpose of automation was not communicated (e.g., employees looking for efficiency while management is looking for compliance - this can also be evidence of misalignment between goals and incentives)”

Well said Mark!

Everyone say thanks to Mark for his contribution!

Another good friend of mine (Steve Jacobowitz) states it this way:

“A poorly planned process automated will only get you poor results faster!”

Thanks Steve!  I like it.

Robert
- One is pleased to be of service

 

Technorati Tags: Business Process,workflow,BPR,BPM,BPA

Dynamics CRM SDK 4.0.13 now available

 

I am frequently amazed at how many CRM developers attempt to do deep CRM development without the use of the full SDK installed on their workstation!  I consider the full SDK one of my mandatory tools to be successful!

So, I, of course, got excited when Microsoft released another update to the SDK.

If you have never installed a SDK at all, START NOW!

If you are running an older version, I again encourage you to update.  Especially since this version has updates to the xRM libraries.

Speaking of the xRM libraries…

These will give you a sneak peek into the CRM 2011 development patterns and practices coming just around the corner.  So, if you don’t have time to play with CRM 2011, but have the opportunity to introduce the xRM libraries into your current 4.0 project… DO IT!!!

You can download the new SDK from here and from MSDN.

Happy coding!

Robert
- One is pleased to be of service

Technorati Tags: Dynamics CRM,Dynamics CRM 2011,SDK,xRM