Customizing Microsoft CRM 330 · Modifying the Microsoft CRM Sales for Outlook client application beyond the configuration that was covered in Chapter 11 Let's clarify the first items in this list. You might be wondering whether you can add custom tables to the Microsoft CRM database. You can, but all data access in Microsoft CRM is handled through the CRM server application so, although new tables can be created, the data in them falls outside of the Microsoft CRM security model and query engine. The ability to allow developers to add new objects to Microsoft CRM is an important part of Micro- soft's Independent Software Vendor (ISV) strategy and is said to be planned for the version 3.0 release in late 2004 or early 2005. As far as modifying the core Microsoft CRM Web pages is concerned, you can do this, but any changes you make will be overwritten in a system upgrade. Because of this, Microsoft has provided the configuration tools and supported customization methods to allow you to make the Web page changes you need without modifying the pages directly. Regardless, most of the code has been compiled in ASP .NET code-behind assemblies (or DLLs) as opposed to being in the ASPX page itself. This means that your ability to edit the code and change the behavior of any given ASPX page is fairly limited. Microsoft CRM Configuration Files There are two key files that we need to understand before customizing Microsoft CRM. These are: · Inetpub\wwwroot\web.config · Inetpub\wwwroot\_Resources\isv.config Both files are essentially XML files that Microsoft CRM references to determine certain application behaviors as well as to know which customizations to display. web.config The web.config file consists of a group of application settings that Microsoft CRM uses to deter- mine behavior of the application. Table 14.1 lists the setting or "keys" housed in the web.config by default. Table 14.1. web.config Application Settings Key Help Catalog Name Aggressive Browser De- tection Overview This is the name of the Index Server Catalog to use when executing queries from Help. Default Setting: Microsoft CRM Help Attempt to detect the user's browser Service Pack Version. Currently, this only tests for IE 5.5 Service Pack SP2. This is optional because the test is done client-side and its accuracy cannot always be guaranteed. If clients are successfully running IE 5.5 SP2 or higher but are receiving error messages about their browser version, you might want to turn this feature off. Recommended Setting: On Values: On or Off Error Event Logging This option determines whether server-side errors are written to the Web server's Event Log. Currently, the non- developer error messages in Microsoft CRM are very light (most say only an error has occurred) in terms of the information they provide. For this reason, it is a good idea to leave this setting on. Other than taking a very small amount of disk space to house errors in the event log, the benefits of having this option on far outweigh the costs. Recommended Setting:On Values:On or Off Show Devel- oper Errors If a server-side error occurs, this setting determines whether Debug error messages are rendered to the user. Because of their descriptive nature, Debug error message are not recommended for production environments. However, they are extremely useful when developing or troubleshooting Microsoft CRM.