CRM 2011: Modes

What is Application mode?

When this option is enabled MS CRM launches into a special Internet explorer window that does not have menu bar, address bar, and tool bar. This option is to hide additional features which are not required for normal users. However, this option has an annoying behavior where a message box is shown before MS CRM is opened in another window. (This was default behavior of CRM 3.0)

Below image shows the same CRM windows when the setting is OFF.

How to set Application mode On/Off?

Navigate to Settings–>Administration–>System Settings

And then move to ‘Customization’ tab, where ‘Open Microsoft Dynamics CRM in Application mode’ check box is located. If this is in disabled mode, then your version of MS CRM must be Online.

If the check box is enabled, you make Application mode On/Off very easily. You must log out of MS CRM to see this setting in effect.

What if Application mode is disabled?

If you’ve MS CRM 2011 On-line subscription and didn’t use any legacy customizations (i.e., migrated from CRM 3/4, where the application mode setting was enabled), then this option is always unchecked. But if old customizations were imported into the On-line version, then this option could be checked but disabled.

This is what happened to for a client we deal with, when MS CRM 4 customizations were moved to MS CRM 2011 On-line including the Application mode set to on. Now the client wanted us to remove it. But how do we do that?

This is where IE Developer toolbar comes to the rescue. Do the below to uncheck the Application Mode:

1)      Open the System settings window and navigate to Customization tab.

2)      Hit F12 to open the IE Developer toolbar.

3)      Since System settings are displayed in a model window, IE Developer Toolbar will be floating. Move and adjust it so that we’ll have full visibility of the Customizations tab.

4)      Select the   icon and move it over ‘Open Microsoft Dynamics CRM in Application mode’.

‘HTML’ tab of the IE Developer toolbar will highlight the HTML element ‘ckEnableAppMode’, with ‘disabled’ property set.

5)      Click on the “disabled” property, which makes it editable.

Hit the delete button to remove the property and go back to the ‘Open Microsoft Dynamics CRM in Application mode’, which should be enabled now.

6)      Uncheck the option and click ‘OK’ button to commit. Close all open MS CRM windows and re-login, and voila you no longer see the Application mode annoyance.

In the end if it reminds you of ‘If the mountain won’t come to Muhammad, then Muhammad must go to the mountain’, simply substitute mountain with Microsoft!!!

Form Mode:

In the System Settings there is also a section for ‘Form Mode’. This was added with the rollup update 7. What does this do?

A read-optimized form displays a record very quickly. The record just displays the data, with no ribbon, Web Resources, or form scripts.

Clicking on ‘Edit’ displays the form in Edit mode.

**But there is an exception here.  If your form calls a web resource, then irrespective of your user setting (either Read-Optimized or Edit mode) the form will be displayed in Edit Mode only.

According to Microsoft they are planning to continue refining the read-optimized form experience in future releases, and that these read-optimized forms will eventually become the default record-viewing experience.

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