The Celedon Blog: Featuring frank advice, articles, tips and more from real consultants, solving real-world problems.
Case Study: Azure Disaster Recovery Configuration
The cloud enables new opportunities for organizations to build, grow and sell at unprecedented scale. It also means that companies no longer have immediate, tangible control over the servers that their own applications are running on. That can present an issue for...
Sitecore and Dynamics CRM: Driving User Experience and Product Catalogs
So I have talked about linking Dynamics CRM and Sitecore here and here, but I just wanted to drive home a sample use case for linking these systems together. Lets say a company(ACME Scooters for this example) makes scooters and parts for scooters. They have a mix of...
Disabling automatic database upgrades when upgrading Microsoft Dynamics or installing updates
When managing multi sever Dynamics implementations for our clients. It has always been beneficial to disable the automatic database upgrades which occur when you are either doing a full version Dynamics upgrade (ie. CRM 2016 to 365.) or applying patches/updates. If...
How to connect Microsoft Azure SQL to Office Access
In my previous post here, we discussed how to assign Office 365 permissions to Azure SQL databases. In this post, I will explain how to setup a ODBC connection with Access 2016. This post assumes you have already setup your Azure SQL database so you have the...
“Invalid User Authorization – The user authentication passed to the platform is not valid” error after upgrading to Dynamics 365
Above is a fairly common but vague error which I tend to run into often when doing a in-place upgrade, or organization import,/restore into deployment manager. This error generally appears for Dynamics 365 on-prem more then online. Depending on the situation, this...
How to setup Azure Active Directory/Office 365 Authentication with Azure SQL database (PaaS)
As more users are starting to move their SQL workloads to the cloud, one of the common questions is how to setup user authentication with their Office 365/Azure Active Directory tenant. There is of course some limitations. At this time, Azure AD authentication can...
Use CREATE OR ALTER For New SQL Object Scripts
When scripting out SQL Server objects in earlier versions of SQL Server, you've historically had the option to do so with "CREATE", "DROP and CREATE", or as "ALTER" scripts. Each option has advantages over the others for maintaining your objects in multiple...
Migrate Sage ACT! to Microsoft Dynamics CRM
Celedon Partners frequently receives requests from clients interested in migrating from an existing CRM solution to Microsoft Dynamics CRM. One of the more challenging source systems to work with is Sage ACT!. This system has been around for many years making a...
SSRS Reporting in Dynamics CRM Online
We’ve probably all dealt with CRM reports in the past. You know, the built-in FetchXML ones? But how many of us have dealt with a SQL report for an online CRM instance? Sometimes the client might ask for a report that is a lot more demanding than what the standard...
Know, analyze and improve your SSRS report’s performance
Part 1. Know your report’s performance SQL Server Reporting Services (SSRS) is a powerful report building and deployment tool that is frequently used by a large number of institutions. However, a report that needs a lot of time to be rendered is useless as users lose...