Here’s one that had me tearing my hair out. I had been tasked with creating a number of document templates in CRM Dynamics for our Project Managers to use to generate boiler plate notices to the customer at each stage of the project. Not rocket science. I’ve been using Word for a long time and I know my way around formatting a good looking page.

And Microsoft has some pretty detailed instructions for how you do the whole template bit. Here’s a link. They even tell you what security privileges you need to turn on for the users to access and use the templates.

Open up a security role associated with the users who need to use the templates and select the Business Management tab. Enable the Document template privileges.

Enable privileges in the Business Management tab to access Document Templates

But that’s not all of them!

It took me an hour or more of searching to find out that you also need to enable the Document Generation privilege in the Privacy Related Privileges section that’s down at the bottom of the same tab. On the page I found this tidbit, they said that they had not been able to find this requirement in any Microsoft documentation and had written to Microsoft to point out that it needed to be in their instructions. That was four years ago!

Don’t forget to enable the hidden privilege that actually allows the role to use your templates

Now my users can access the templates I create for them and everybody’s happy.

Until we find the next missing detail!

Be sure to tell the Captain about your own experiences with CRM Dynamics, and what you have found to Save the Day!

I’ve spent the last several weeks struggling with our new Field Service plug-in, trying to make sense of how it all works and set it up in a way that will be useful to us without having to adjust a million different settings. Not much luck in the last area. Microsoft does love those nested privileges. Set this, and by the way, we won’t tell you this, you’ll have to find it on some diligent bugger’s blog, you also need to set that, or it won’t work.

Case in point: Giving someone the privileges they need to drag and drop Scheduling Blocks on the Scheduling Board. You’d think that given that person the Dispatcher role would do it, right? But you’d be wrong.

You’d think that assigning the Role to the User would be enough, right?

You also have to go into the Field Security Profiles, select the Field Service — Dispatcher Role and add the user to the list of users for this role. Is this item anywhere in Microsoft’s documentation? Not that I can find. It’s on a dynamics.com forum, but this is so typical of Microsoft. They tell you only half of what you need to know to make it work and then you have to find the rest yourself.

But no. You have to assign the the User to the Role as well!

Don’t worry. Captain Dynamics is on the job, finding all these little Gotcha’s! — so you don’t have to.

Stay tuned!

Security Roles for Document Templates

Field Service Plug-In