Microsoft CRM "du jour"

When you work on a deployment with a lot of different environnements like development, staging, training, integration, production; etc..; you sometimes have trouble identifying directly which environment you are running from which can lead to errors and confusion like testing a feature on the wrong environment.
After some mishaps, I had the idea to identify the environments by changing some color scheme in Microsoft CRM.

Warning, all changes described hereafter are changes to system files so are totally unsupported, may break your system and can revert if you apply hotfixes or rollup (and believe me, they will ;).
So, I tried to find a single setting, easy to change but which impacts to whole system without making it too ugly or unreadable.

CRM 4.0
After some trials, changing the table gobal setting made a nice visual effect over the whole application.
To make the change, edit <CrmWebsiteRoot>\_commons\styles\global.css.aspx, locate and modify the section table so that it reads as such
note: <CrmWebsiteRoot> is usually c:\inetpub\wwwroot or c:\program files\Microsoft Dynamics CRM\CRMWeb

table
{
cursor: default;
background-color: #yourHTMLColorCode;
}

Here's some results from colors codes I found nice : #FFDDaa (salmon), #BBFFAA (light green), but you're free to test any other combination; light colors giving the best look.

CRM 2011
I first tried the same setting as with CRM 4.0, but even if it did work, the visual aspect was not too nice on the eyes as you can see below

Time to go for other options. As the Ribbon is one of the proeminent feature of CRM 2011, I decided to go for it. A little use of the IE developper tools showed that the Ribbon styles are handled by cui.css.
To make the change, edit <CrmWebsiteRoot>\_static\css\1033\cui.css, locate and modify the section ms-cui-tabBody so that it reads as such

.ms-cui-tabBody{
overflow:hidden;
width:100%
background:#youHTMLcolorcode url("/_imgs/ribbon/wss/rbgbbg.png") repeat-x left bottom;
height:90px;
border-style:solid;

Here's a test with the color code set to #BBFFAA, as you can see, it gives a very lovely and discreet color to the ribbon

Now, while very nice, it may not be sufficiently visible for some usage, so let's go a little further and edit the css as such

.ms-cui-tabBody{
overflow:hidden;
width:100%
background:#youHTMLcolorcode /* url("/_imgs/ribbon/wss/rbgbbg.png") repeat-x left bottom; */
height:90px;
border-style:solid;

A lot more visible but less subtle as well. Personnaly, I choose the first option but this one is quite nice as well.

CRM 2011: Create dynamic ribbon controls 

CRM 2011 has added a count to all list views but this count is limited to 5000 records; if you have more than 5000 records, you will get "Records 1-x of 5000+".
If you have an On Premise installation, you can change this limit but beware of the following remarks: 

First, this is done for a good reason as counting all the records in a view for a given user is NOT a simple table count but has to use the view filter and the CRM Security model; so is a rather complex query which will induce records lock.
If a lot of records are being locked, SQL Server will (depending on configuration) escalade the rows lock to a full table lock for the duration of the select.
In a small system with a low data load, this has no much impact (it's just a count afterall) but if you have thousands of users; you will definitely feel the pain.

Second, changing system parameters directy in the database is totally unsupported; so beware of what you are doing as you may render your system unoperable (you have been warned).

All this said, fire Microsoft SQL Server Management Studio, connect to your CRM database instance and run the following script :

USE MSCRM_CONFIG

GO

By default, Microsoft CRM 2011 integration with Sharepoint 2010 creates a document library for each entity, and a folder for each entity record in which you can add documents.
Ie: you have a folder for Opportunity A and another for Opportunity B.
Now, the rough recommendations for sharepoint sizing are as such :

Sharepoint 2010 : 5000 folders and 5000 documents per folder (per document library)

With the CRM Sharepoint default integration, the number of documents per folder is not really an issue but the number of folders can.
Note that CRM 2011 only creates a folder when needed (ie: when documents needs to be uploaded), so this reduces the impact somehow as you can have 10.000 customers with only 20% requiring document management.

But what if you have something like 30K customers with most of them needing documents attached ?
Here's some options :

1) There's no real hard limits, so you can push more than 5000 folders in a document library but depending on your sharepoint infrastructure, the performance may start to degrade sharply when adding new documents or folder (as the 5000 limit is mainly due to table locking vs row locking on the database by the sql server)

2) Add more documents library. You could decide to have something like a document library by geographic region or another segmentation (large customer base are usually segmented for business reasons).
Then in the record itself,in the document part, you can add another location pointing to the new document library.
Usually, in a normal implementation, you would default the new location to the user instead of having it done manually as the CRM 2011 SDK offers the methods to manage Sharepoint Site and Locations.

3) Manage the Sharepoint integration without the default integration, which is definitely the option if you use Sharepoint 2007 as the folder management is only available for Sharepoint 2010.
You would then use the Sharepoint SDK to manage the integration (ie: vs option 2 which is using the CRM SDK)

For more informations on sharepoint sizing and limit, please read this document: SharePoint Server 2010 capacity management: Software boundaries and limits