xRM Consultant

Hi,

We have a client who uses workflows to guide their sales and marketing process very heavily and relies on certain emails being automatically sent as notifications from their CRM instance.

When we first set-up their solution we used the Outlook plug-in to send emails but as the minimum polling time for emails using the plug-in is 15 minutes this wasn’t going to work either. So, we set about using the Email Router. It was installed, setup and configured properly but for some reason there was this random delay in sending emails. Sometimes an email would be sent within a minute or 2 and other times it would take over 10 minutes. Sometimes a single email would be delivered and at other times 4 or 5 would come through at the same time?!!



We found out today what the problem was.

The issue lies firmly in the XML configuration file for the email router. The polling time for outgoing mail was set within the Microsoft.CRM.EmailAgent.xml was set to 1000 seconds. This polling was obviously based on the system time. So therefore, if the CRM Email Router polled the CRM at 10:00am and someone sent an email at 10:01 it not be delivered until 10:16ish, therefore the user would be aware of the delay. On the other hand if the user sent the email at 10:15, they would think that the emails were sending immediately “as they should be”. The solution was to change the polling time to 60 seconds (we didn’t want to push it!) and it worked a treat.

To make the change follow these steps:

1. Go to your exchange server (the server where the email router is installed)
2. Navigate to C:\Program Files\Microsoft CRM Email\Service
3. Copy the Microsoft.CRM.EmailAgent.xml file to a safe location as a backup.
4. Edit the Microsoft.CRM.EmailAgent.xml within Notepad (I prefer PSPad)
5. Find the SchedulingPeriod element
6. Change the value to 60 (it should be 1000 currently)
7. Save the file.
8. Open up the CRM Email Router and publish the changes
9. Restart the Microsoft CRM Email Router service
10. Your done!

Credit to Michael Cross for a great forum post

Enjoy!

Hi,

Sorry its been a while…..



I have had this REALLY annoying issue on my desk machine for a while. Anytime I accessed our internal CRM system, even though I had the System Administrator  security role, I could see everything except for the Customizations navigation option. This was very frustrating as I would have to VPN into our CRM server to do any work.

However, after a quick search I found the answer today. It relates to the Site Map and having Outlook open when using CRM via the Web interface.

Apparently, if you have the Customizations navigation option configured to web only, when you run CRM using the outlook interface and the try using the web interface it wont display!!! Weird
Anyway, easy to fix…..

1. First I would recommend that you delete your browsing history, stored passwords, cookies etc as this will clear any stored logon information that may be muddying the waters.
2. Export your Site Map from your CRM instance. I know this goes without saying but ALWAYS store a backup of your Site Map in case everything goes pear-shaped!
3. Find the following entry…
4. Change Client=”Web” with Client=”All”
5. Save the changes to the Site Map and import into CRM.

Credit to the following brilliant blog post by Peter Gernburd

Enjoy!