Working with PHP and Microsoft Dynamics CRM Online 2011 - Helpful Resources

Its been a few weeks now that I've been working on PHP code to create entities with Microsoft Dynamics CRM 2011. It's actually my first time to encounter Microsoft Dynamics CRM 2011, or any Customer Relations Management system for that matter, so there was a bit of a steeper learning curve and longer research time to create simple tasks from a PHP code into the CRM.

I've also learned that the Microsoft Dynamics CRM 2011 is actually the cloud version of Microsoft Dynamics CRM 4.0 which can be hosted on a Windows Server on-premise or online. The two have basically the same except that for CRM 2011, you need to purchase the subscription per user on an official Microsoft-hosted platform (http://www.dynamics.com), whereas in CRM 4.0, you can deploy it on a Windows server in your local office network (on-premise) or host it on a Windows server in the Internet (online).

Disable Email For Single Account on WHM / Cpanel

If you are setting up MS Exchange for your domain hosted on a WHM / Cpanel server setup and migrating from a POP3 / IMAP account to an Exchange email account, soon you will realize that the emails sent by the local server is not being forwarded to the MS Exchange account but rather on the old POP3 / IMAP account. Similar to the situation of this administrator asking people from the Cpanel forums:

"Relay Access Denied" Error When Sending To Office 365 Email Account - How To Fix Microsoft Online Services E-mail Setup

When setting up your new Microsoft Online Services account to your Outlook, you might run into trouble receiving emails coming in but your outgoing emails are sending correctly. For example, you tried using your gmail account to send an email to your Microsoft Exchange email using the Office 365 platform and you get the error: “550 5.4.1 Relay Access Denied”. For this, you might need to do some configurations on your Office 365 account. This requires you to run your PowerShell command prompt. Here are the instructions based on Chris's Blog:

How to Determine The Visitor's City, State, Province & Country Automatically with Javascript using Google APIs - Get your Visitors Location with Javascript

If you need to get your visitor's city, state, province & country using javascript, you can do that by using Google APIs. Its very easy to do with a few lines of code and can provide a lot of possibilities because you can determine your visitors location with javascript. You can set your site's language, timezone, or design according to your visitors location. Here are the instructions:

How To Fix SmartBro Slow Internet Connection & Get 2 Mbps Speed

SmartBro gave me some problems with their customer support the past week regarding my slow SmartBro internet connection (I detailed it in my previous entry). Here are the instructions of the things I did to get 2 Mbps with my SmartBro plan 999 canopy-type connection:

My Slow SmartBro Internet Connection (And How To Fix It)

Let me warn you now that this will be a long post, since I wanted to detail out my experience with Smart Bro customer support and their lack of experience in handling my situation.

Update: Here's my post on the steps I did to achieve 2Mbps speed: How To Fix SmartBro Slow Internet Connection & Get 2 Mbps Speed

About a week ago, our SmartBro canopy antenna fell down from its installation because of the strong winds. I immediately called up their hotline *1888 (on my Smart number) and told them the scenario. The rep told me they will be scheduling the deployment asap. Luckily, their installation team (the rep pertains to them as the "contractors") arrived at our home the next day.

JQuery: How To Get URL Parameters & Values

While developing on a Drupal website, I was using the URLFill module to automatically fill in the form fields with some GET variables in the URL (something like http://example.com?var1=value1&var2=value2). For some reason it is not filling-up a Content Taxonomy field where the widget is set as autocomplete. So what I did was to implement the auto-filling of the said field with JQuery. This was the function I used:

15 Sites Web Developers and Designers Should Know

Creating a good website isn’t an easy task, but there’s a few tools that can definitely make your developer or designer life easier. In this article, I have compiled 15 extremely useful website that any web developer or web designer should have bookmarked.

Drupal 6: Embedding a View in a Template using views_embed_view

If you need to embed a view inside a template or a node if the input type is PHP code, there is a very simple function called views_embed_view() which will allow you to do so very easily.



I posted another method of doing this before here but this one is much simpler. The views_embed_view has 2 default arguments. The second argument allows you to enter the display_id of the view (example: default, page, block, etc). Any additional argument you specify will be passed to the views argument handler. For instance, if you wanted to embed the block view and pass it a list of nodeIDs as an argument:

<?php
$viewName = 'MYVIEWNAME';
$display_id = 'block';
$myNodes = array(1, 2, 3);
print views_embed_view($viewName, $display_id, $myNodes);
?>

Source: http://thedrupalblog.com/embedding-view-drupal-6-using-views-embed-view

Windows: 8 Desktop and Window Management Shortcuts

If you are serious about productivity, one of the best "upgrades" you can pull up in your computer knowledge arsenal is learning a few nifty Windows shortcuts to manage your desktop and the arrangement of your windows. Here are 8 Windows shortcuts that uses the Win key to organize the open program windows on your desktop: