This is the second of a series where I try to document all the rarely used settings available to your Dynamics organisation to tweak the standard behaviour.

If you want to tweak your settings, see my previous post, or if you want to use a canvas app, see this post.

Alternatively, I have created an XrmToolBox tool to do this, documented here.

ActivityConvertDlgCampaignUnchecked

When you convert activity to an opportunity, you have the option to populate a related campaign and also record a closed campaign response. This setting implies that you can default the Record a closed campaign response to true, forcing the selection of a campaign, but in my environment, it isn’t working.

Someone prove me wrong

ActivateAdditionalRefreshOfWorkflowConditions

Redundant fix for what looks like an issue in a specific version

allowRoleAssignmentOnDisabledUsers

There are lots of times, particularly around migrating systems, where you are not ready for users to have access to a new system but want to import their data. Think about where you are migrating department by department. The long-term goal would be for users to all have access, so temporarily assigning the records to another user or a system user may not be appropriate. Ownership is usually an indicator and first point of contact in most systems and a driver for security, etc.

Toggling this setting to true allows assignment of roles, therefore records to disabled or stub users.

Set to false, it displays this error message when you save any changes.

ChangeDoubleQuoteToSingleQuote

This setting will do as it says, convert double quotes to single, but is only relevant for the old Knowledgebase Articles in your system, superseded by Knowledge articles that now have an appropriate WYSIWYG editor, this becomes redundant.

ClearSystemUserPrincipalsWhenDisable

ClientUEIPDisabled

This, apparently, disables the option to send feedback to Microsoft when you get an error, great little setting, but until I get a repeatable error, can not see it in action

CreateSPFoldersUsingNameandGuid

When you integrate SharePoint, a folder in the site is created for each defined entity, normally with the name of the record and a GUID of the record. This can be ugly and not necessary if you have account names that are pretty unique. This setting allows you just to use the record name.

This screenshot shows with the setting as the default, true, at the top and the setting as false for JKL Sales

DefaultHeightForWizardReports

Printing can be problematic with different paper sizes etc. Not really a problem with modern printers, but this setting allows you to configure default printing sizes to ensure printing works for your organisation.

DisableIECompatMode

Compatibility mode was a big thing, particularly in the IE10 / 11 era. Making sure your website properly displayed across multiple browsers with inconsistent approaches to standards can still be a big gripe, but thankfully a thing of the past, with modern browsers adhering to standards a lot better.

DisableInactiveRecordFilterForMailMerge

Mail Merge is a deprecated function, but if you still use it, when you call a mail merge from a campaign, inactive contacts or leads are not included.

Mail merge is similar to the quick campaign, and I checked that this flag does not override the selection for quick campaigns, but it seems to have no effect.

EnableActivitiesTimeLinePerfImprovement

In 2019 Wave 2, October 2019, enhancements were made to the timeline, to improve the density of activities and allowing the user to filter by multiple types etc. Details here.

The new timeline can be seen below, which is toggled with EnableActivitiesFeatures described below. This setting toggles improvements to the performance of the new timeline, which may have an impact on your application.

Thought the official line is that this is disabled by default, in any new environment it seems to be enabled.

EnableActivitiesFeatures

In 2019 Wave 2, October 2019, enhancements were made to the timeline, to improve the density of activities and allowing the user to filter by multiple types etc. Details here.

The new timeline can be seen below, toggled on and off by this setting.

Thought the official line is that this is disabled by default, in any new environment it seems to be enabled.

EnableBulkReparent

I am not sure this is relevant any more. I assume this is for where you have large datasets and on premise, that could (with cascading) lead to large data changes for each ownership change, but with my environment, I did not notice any change between the two options.

EnableQuickFindOptimization

Another one I assume has gone the way of the dodo for D365, this was initially configured to roll back the changes made to Quick find back in CRM 2011. I have toggle this on a new system and can not find any effect. This may be because of my minor data load etc and the optimisations that Microsoft has done since 2011.

EnableRetrieveMultipleOptimization

This is another one that is probably redundant for anyone not on CRM 2011, and I would think those that are administering these systems already know about these settings. There is a full table of the configuration for this setting in the linked document, tweaking the way (away from the default) for returning multiple records in a list.

As I do not have a CRM2011 environment and also don’t have the data volumes to see the effect, not sure I can or should add to this.

ExportedExcelRetentionWindow

Learning is great isn’t it? Researching this one led me to a great article from Bhavesh Shastri about the settings that may affect storage size, which has this setting in it.

Basically, when you export a data set into Excel, D365 stores the result in a temporary table so that you can get back to the result quickly. There is a deletion service that goes and tidies up these temporary tables and this setting defines how old these records are before it removes them. If you have a very active system, these records could adversely effect the size of your instance.

ExpireChangeTrackingInDays

This is another storage related one like the previous, again jump over to Bhavesh’s blog to get more detail. This setting doesn’t appear in the Microsoft KB article where the others are, even more confusing and makes me wonder what else Microsoft are hiding

If you have change tracking services running and worry about deleted records, this setting can be configured to increase the time these records are stored. Obviously, this will impact on storage if nothing else.

EnableTDSEndpoint

This, as it says, allows you to enable the CDS SQL TDS Endpoint, which allows you to use SQL Studio to query your live CDS environment. This is only recent, but is a great addition if you need more complexity in your queries.

Mark Carrington did a great set of posts on it’s usage here

ForceRetrievePublishedMetadataForRetrieveAllEntities

FullTextSpecialCharactersToRemoveFromSearchToken

GrantFullAccessForMergeToMasterOwner

Another one of those security options that most people don’t know about. I would hazard to guess that most people don’t know that the owner of a subordinate record in a merge has the new master shared with them. Mark Carrington has a great explanation of this setting and the next in his blog here

The default setting puts a row in the Share table for the original owner, even if it is same as the new owner, which is useful in a lot of cases, but also could break your security model if the owner changes again.

With the setting put to false, the original owner does not have the record shared with them

The wording of this setting implies that only the master owner will have the sharing stopped, but it seems that the original does as well.

GrantSharedAccessForMergeToSubordinateOwner

If you have a contact and merge the account, the contact will be moved to be owned by the master owner, but the owner of the contact will have the master record shared with them too. Obviously, this just makes the system work, but doesn’t help if you have a specific security prinicple in place.

Please see Mark’s blog to fully understand these values.

HideStageAndUpgrade

Back in 2016, Microsoft gave us the ability to stage an upgrade solution, which means we can more easily remove parts of a managed solution, rather that using holding solutions.

Nishant Rana has an excellent blog here that describes the process. The process relies on having the Stage for upgrade tick box available to you, which is now hidden by default presumably because Microsoft has provided us the ability to create patches for solutions and it is no longer needed.

HierarchyLevelForHierarchyFeature

Another security tweak. There are 2 security models that may be in use in your instance, namely managerial or positional security.

Both can take into account a number of managers above you who have the same access to records that you do, which is traditionally 3, and anything above this can cause performance issues. As you can set the hierarchy level on the hierarchy configuration, this setting is now redundant I think, as any change you make to the org setting is not reflected in the setting on the Hierarchy setting screen.

IfdAuthenticationMethod

This setting is for on premise only, as it defines which SSO an internet facing deployment (an external facing on premise deployment) uses to establish the user has the right access credentials.

This blog has a more detailed explanation.

IncludeHTC

This setting is only applicable to CRM 4, I know there are still users out there, but I can not get access to a system to try out this setting & assume even the CRM 4 people won’t be using this feature still

inheritedRolePrivilegesFromTeamRoles

Earlier this year, Microsoft gave us the ability to give security permissions to all the members of an Azure AD group, rather than having to duplicate security across Azure and Dynamics. This can be a time consuming god-send for your administrative staff, but also can impact performance. Setting this value to false forces the old method of security, with each user having to be configured with a role in D365.

Debajit Dutta has an excellent walkthrough on how to utilise this functionality here.

IdsCountBeforeUsingJoinsForSecurity

IdsCountForUsingGuidStringsForSecurity

IntegratedAuthenticationMethod

An On-premise property, which I can not find anything on.

JumpBarAlphabetOverride / JumpBarNumberIndicatorOverride

I didnt know this was a thing, but only for CRM 4.0. Basically, you could override what appears at the bottom of a search display.

Shivam Dixit has a walkthrough here

ListComponentInstalled

This was a bug fix to force display of the SharePoint list instead of the page in a SharePoint created folder when a list is available.

LookupNameMatchesDuringImport

I have no access to CRM 4 to create a solution to test this out, but if anyone can create me screenshots, I’ll add in.

MaximumChildUsersCountLimitBeforeUsingJoinForHSM

As mentioned, hierarchical security model gives your manager (or managers manager etc) the same access to your data that you have. As a manager with lots of reports, this can cause performance problems, so limiting the maximum unions it makes when deciding on your access makes sense. After this number is reached, an outer join will be used to improve performance.

If you have scenarios that require that number of child users to a manager, I would recommend not using Hierarchical security.

MinRowCountForFKIndexCreateInReferencingEntity

In the D365 world, the back end SQL optimisation is out of an administrators hands mostly, with indexes automatically been created for Primary keys or alternative keys for example. This setting tweaks the creation of indexes for FK keys.

If an account has a foreign key to a location entity, there needs to be more than 100 rows (by default) before the system will create an index on the account table using the location foreign key.

OfficeDocumentPersistenceTimeInDays

When an office document is retrieved from the database, it is stored in the cache, by default for 7 days. This can be altered. This is one option that impacts the size of your tenant.

PageSizeForHierarchyFeature

I assume that this is used in the same way as the MaximumChildUsersCountLimitBeforeUsingJoinForHSM setting, but I can not find any documentation for it

ReassignAllExtendedTimeout

If you have a security model that relies on a cascade of ownership, when a parent owner is changed, this ownership is also done for children and children of children etc.

This can be a time-consuming process which you can increase the time-out for, possibly temporarily if you have an occasion that required it, though the default 15 minutes is a very long time.

RecordCountLimitToSwitchToCteSecuritySql

I didnt know this was a thing, but only for CRM 4.0. Basically, you could override what appears at the bottom of a search display.

This setting is for On-premise only, impacting the switching to use a temporary table or CTE (Common Table Expression) to generate the results. I have not got enough data to check if this still has an impact on D365 environments.

The linked paper has a lot of good stuff about optimisations, that thankfully the more modern SAAS environments have taken care of.

RetrieveMultipleSharingCountThreshold

This is another setting that is for optimisation of the on-premise architecture, defining the number of shared records the user has for the entity being searched for (either direct or via teams) that the system will convert the query to joins rather than table value functions.

As sharing with individuals should be an increment to your security model rather than the main part, having 1000 shares per entity would be pretty rare.

SecurityQueryHint

I can’t find any information on this. Will update when I find out.

SharingLimitForPOASnapshotTable

I can’t find any information on this. Will update when I find out.

skipAadGroupObjectIdValidation

If you use the new functionality to connect teams to AD groups, allowing a single location to manage security, setting up the teams needs a link back to the AD group.

As AD group creation takes time to propagate to the various caches, the group you want to link to might not be available, so, by default, no check is made to see if you have got the GUID right. This can be forced if you need that extra piece of mind by setting this value true.

SkipGettingRecordCountForPaging

When you have a large dataset, knowing that you have thousands of records rather than just the 100 the view is showing is invaluable, but this query has to be done, as well as the query to retrieve the data, impacting performance

With the setting applied, the query doesn’t display an accurate number, but it does display a number, which is mis-leading in my opinion.

SkipGettingRecordCountForPagingForAudit

This is the same as the previous setting, but just for the auditing views, which are notoriously large.

SkipSuffixOnKBArticles

Pretty self-explanatory, but for old KB articles rather than the new Knowledge Articles.

TabletClientMaxFields

These tablet settings are not for D365, v9 as Unified interface has removed the limitations

TabletClientMaxLists

These tablet settings are not for D365, v9 as Unified interface has removed the limitations

TabletClientMaxMashups

These tablet settings are not for D365, v9 as Unified interface has removed the limitations

TabletClientMaxTabs

These tablet settings are not for D365, v9 as Unified interface has removed the limitations

traceLogPersistenceTimeInDays

This is another setting that can impact the size of your instance. The logs are stored by default for 30 days, if you have a heavily used system, this will be a lot of data, so reducing this will reduce costs. Trace logs are part of a separate pricing tier now, but still worth a look.

UseOrganizationServiceForMultiEntityQuickFind

Retrieve multiple plugins can do a little more security to prevent the display of records or adding in data to a record set if you need it to be really truly accurate.

Whilst this is frowned upon as is a real impact on system performance, it might be necessary. If you need this functionality, quick view doesn’t honour this logic as the queries run in parallel. Toggling this to true makes each quick query run in serial, allowing retrieve multiple plugins to work.

WorkflowXamlValidationErrorReport

I can’t find any information on this. Will update when I find out.