Document Storage and Management with CRM

September 22, 2014
Attachments, Notes, and Annotations

How do you handle document storage and management in CRM? While this is a prominent feature in SharePoint, it is not as obvious or as easy to use in CRM. However, if you have a need to attach and manage documents in CRM, there is a provided option.

CRM offers a Notes field that can be turned on and associated to any entity. This Notes field is actually a reference to an entity called Annotation. The Annotation entity holds your file attachment and a reference ID back to the entity that the attachment belongs to. This feature is turned on by default for some of the default entities, but you need to turn it on yourself for custom entities.  Read More…

Configuration Management for SharePoint With SPWebConfigModification Class & PowerShell

November 18, 2013
I recently needed to make several web.config changes to our production SharePoint 2010 web farm. Making all of these modifications manually would have been tedious and would have left a lot of room for error. After doing some research to find a better way, I discovered the SPWebConfigModification class in the Microsoft.SharePoint.Administration namespace.

This is basically  a collection of changes to be made to web.config files that can be stored and then applied to all web front-end servers in a farm. This class is available with SharePoint 2010 and 2013. Unfortunately, the class is poorly documented so I had some trouble figuring out how to use it. You could write a console application to use the SPWebConfigModification class or you could use a feature receiver, but I found that the easiest approach was to just use it with PowerShell. After some trial and error, I came up with the following four PowerShell scripts that can be reused to read, add, remove, and completely clear the SPWebConfigModifications on the server. Read More…