Archive for the ‘Misc’ Category
CRM Timeline
Lauren Carlson over at Software Advice, has created a great interactive timeline showing the growth of CRM software over the last 3 decades. It’s very interesting to see how much has changed over the last 30 years and I can’t wait to see what happens in the next 30! Keep an eye on it, as it will be updated over time.
Internet Explorer 9 – First Impressions
I’ve just downloaded and installed the public beta of the next version of Internet Explorer, IE9 and wanted to share my first impressions.
Once installed, the first noticeable difference is how minimal the interface has become. The address bar and tabs section seem to take up roughly 66% less screen space, since the address bar, search box and tabs are now all located on the same row. As I usually have a lot of pages open, I didn’t think I’d like the repositioning of the tabs, but it really hasn’t caused me any problems.
The next thing I noticed is the speed. It really flies. Microsoft have added GPU acceleration to IE9, so a lot of image rendering is now performed by your graphics card rather than your CPU.
Another great new feature, is the ability to add web shortcuts to your taskbar. You just drag the favicon from the address bar to your taskbar to create a shortcut. This is great if you want quick access to applications such as your email and it really feels like you’re launching an app rather than a browser.
Checking SQL table sizes
I wanted a way to find which tables were using the most storage in my SQL databases. The stored procedure sp_spaceused will show this data for a single table, but I wanted to view every table at once. The below SQL query will run against any SQL 2005 database and show you it’s table sizes in descending order. As expected, the ActivityMimeAttachment table in my CRM database was pretty huge!
SELECT sys.schemas.[name] AS [Schema], sys.tables.name AS [Table], COALESCE([Row Count].[Count], 0) AS [Rows],COALESCE(8192 * [Data Pages].[Count],0) AS [Data Bytes], COALESCE(8192 * [Index Pages].[Count],0) AS [Index Bytes] FROM sys.tables INNER JOIN sys.schemas ON sys.schemas.schema_id = sys.tables.schema_id LEFT OUTER JOIN (SELECT object_id,SUM(rows) AS [Count] FROM sys.partitions WHERE index_id < 2 GROUP BY object_id) AS [Row Count] ON [Row Count].object_id = sys.tables.object_id LEFT OUTER JOIN (SELECT sys.indexes.object_id,SUM(CASE WHEN a.type <> 1 THEN a.used_pages WHEN p.index_id < 2 THEN a.data_pages ELSE 0 END) AS [Count] FROM sys.indexes INNER JOIN sys.partitions AS p ON p.object_id = sys.indexes.object_id AND p.index_id = sys.indexes.index_id INNER JOIN sys.allocation_units AS a ON a.container_id = p.partition_id GROUP BY sys.indexes.object_id) AS [Data Pages] ON [Data Pages].object_id = sys.tables.object_id LEFT OUTER JOIN (SELECT sys.indexes.object_id,SUM(a.used_pages - CASE WHEN a.type <> 1 THEN a.used_pages WHEN p.index_id < 2 THEN a.data_pages ELSE 0 END) AS [Count] FROM sys.indexes INNER JOIN sys.partitions AS p ON p.object_id = sys.indexes.object_id AND p.index_id = sys.indexes.index_id INNER JOIN sys.allocation_units AS a ON a.container_id = p.partition_id GROUP BY sys.indexes.object_id) AS [Index Pages] ON [Index Pages].object_id = sys.tables.object_id ORDER BY [Data Bytes] desc
CRM pop-ups in new tabs
With Internet Explorer, you have the option to open all pop ups in a new tab rather than a new window. I find this works great for CRM, particularly when working inside different organisations. I can keep my development organisation and all pop ups in one IE instance and my live instance in another. You can find the option to do this under IEToolsInternet Options and click the Settings button under the Tabs section on the General tab.
CRM iPhone homescreen icon
I sometimes like to check up on cases and activities from my iPhone and have a homescreen shortcut to our CRM mobile express site. By default, Dynamics CRM does not have an iPhone icon, so I created one for myself here. If you’d like to use it, download it, save it as apple-touch-icon.png and drop it into your CRM web root folder (mine is c:inetpubwwwroot). When you next navigate to your CRM mobile express site, add it to your homecreen and it will display a much prettier icon.
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