There are great many new features shipped in CRM2013 SP1 but let's not forget there are some eagerly awaited fixes as well (as described by http://support.microsoft.com/default.aspx?kbid=2941390) Since there has already been plenty of coverage of the new features, I thought I would pick out my top 3 fixes that I've been particularly waiting for…Queue up the charts count-down soundtrack!
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In at Number 3: Matching Connection Roles
Connections are a great way of providing users with an overview of a contact's involvement with all areas of your business. Right from within a contact record users can see the roles that the contact has across different record types such as accounts, cases, and opportunities. Roles are specified on each side of the connection and in many cases you need to have the same role on both sides. In CRM2011 this was possible but strangely with CRM2013 the same role could not be specified as the matching role with the issue being described by the KB article as "In Microsoft Dynamics CRM 2013, users are unable to set a Matching Connection Role to the same Connection Role." Up until now the work around was to create a different role but with the same name but I've tested this in SP1 and I'm pleased to report that it now works the same as it did in CRM2011.
New at Number 2: Importing solution fails when plugins attached to custom actions
The addition of custom actions to CRM2013 was fantastic for creating custom server logic that is called from JavaScript. Unfortunately when you attached a plugin to a custom action message and imported a solution containing that plugin it would fail (See the Microsoft Connect article for this issue). I have held back from using this feature up until now due to the pain it created during deployments but now that it is fixed in SP1 I'm going to be making a lot more use of Custom Action plugins!
UPDATE: Actually, the connect item for this issue is not entirely correct - this will be fixed in one of the next Update Rollups of CRM 2013 SP1
…and this Service Pack's Number 1 Fix is: "Found more than one RibbonDiff entity"
This message is likely a very familiar message to anyone who has made customisations to the Ribbon with CRM2011 (as described by http://support.microsoft.com/kb/2503029). The message was shown when importing customisations and was usually down to there being more than one element in the ribbon xml that had been given the same ID. When CRM2013 was released the message started popping up far more frequently. Initially I was worried it was due to an issue with Ribbon Workbench but eventually I tracked it down to the fact that elements were being duplicated when a solution was exported from CRM2013. The Ribbon Workbench resolves duplicate IDs automatically so the issue only caused problems when transferring a solution between environments through an export/import but what was more confusing is that the issue would only happen on the second import. There is a line in the KB article for SP1 that describes the issue as:
"When we import, the import logic creates two values for each entry within the RibbonDifBase. But When we export the application ribbon we do not have any check for this and we export 2 values directly from the DB to the XML. This if imported to a new org will create 4 values in the table RibbonDiffBase. If the solution is imported again to the same org causes an error"
The Microsoft Connect item for this issue is still marked as active but I've tried to reproduce the issue in SP1 and so far so good! Well done Dynamics CRM Product team!
Poptastic!
@ScottDurow