Setting the entity owner to a team using Scribe Insight and Dynamics CRM 2011

While working on migrating data from a legacy CRM system to Microsoft Dynamics CRM 2011 using Scribe Insight, I decided to set the owner of all migrated entities to a specific team (rather than the default, which is the Dynamics user specified in the Scribe connection). To do this seemingly would require one simple steps: to look up the GUID of the team, and set the value of the Dynamics CRM “ownerid” to that value.

To set the “ownerid” I used the DBLOOKUP command to look up the team by name, and return the teamid: DBLOOKUP( “MyTeamName”, “CRM”, “team”, “name”, “teamid” ). This worked fine, but on its own, Dynamics threw an error, saying that the GUID wasn’t valid.

The problem lies in how Dynamics manages owners: an owner can be a user or a team. The owner of an entity is assumed to be a user unless you change the “owneridtype” field, which is visible in Scribe but is not listed in the Dynamics data dictionary (as far as I could tell). If the owner is a user, the “useridtype” should be 8. If the owner is a team, the “useridtype” should be 9.

After setting the “useridtype” to 9, Dynamics accepted the GUID of my team in the “ownerid” field. Problem solved!

An exercise in frustration: Getting product keys and support using the Microsoft Dynamics CustomerSource web site

“Microsoft Dynamics CustomerSource is an information-packed, password-protected site for customers who use Microsoft Dynamics products.” (Microsoft’s words, not mine.) I decided to use this information-packed, password-protected site to get my recently purchased product keys for Dynamics CRM 2011.

Below is a summary of my experience.

First, I go to the Product & Service summary page on the My Account page.

Then, I click on Registration Keys.

Then, I choose the appropriate version (2011) and upgrade option (No) and get the following message: “The keys you are trying are of Volume license, hence they will not be shown from MBS.” (I have no idea what MBS is.)

Frustrated, I try getting support by clicking the support link on the “Contact Dynamics Operations” page.

Which yields a very unhelpful support page that tells me, “Our apologies…An unexpected error occurred.” At least they are apologetic.

Despairingly, I click the ROC Contact Information at the bottom of the page (I have no idea what “ROC” is) and get a different apologetic error.

Pretty unimpressive, even for Microsoft.