When you’re in an entity such as Accounts or Contacts, toward the bottom is a list of letters that allow you to search records by alphabet. Most of the time you probably won’t need to change the configuration of this feature. But in some cases, such as when creating a custom field, you may want the alphabet search to use a different field or search criteria.

There are a couple different ways to configure the Alphabet Bar search. One is a new feature.

1. Changing the field alphabet search uses: This applies to both CRM 4.0 Online and On-Premise. It’s a simple change but not overly obvious because there’s nothing in the settings that reference configuring alphabet search. To change the configuration go to Settings, Customizations, and open the Entity (Accounts, Contacts, etc) you wish to change. Click Forms and Views, open a View (e.g. Active Accounts), and click Configure Sorting. The field that is showing in the Column picklist is what the alphabet bar search uses. Change the field to the one you want to search, Save/Publish, and you’re done. This change needs to be made to each individual View (e.g. Active Accounts, My Accounts, etc) that you want this change to apply to.
2. Customizing the Alphabet Bar: This is a new feature that is a little more complex and only applies to CRM 4.0 On-Premise. For companies who have implemented Update Rollup 15 for Microsoft CRM the Alphabet Bar can be customized. Details can be found on Microsoft’s MSDN site.

A while back I did a post about everything getting lost on the Leads Notes tab when converting a Lead to an Account, Contact, and Opportunity in Microsoft Dynamics CRM 4.0.

The summary of that post is:

• This doesn’t appear to be a bug or technical problem but is the way the system was designed
• The Notes and Attachments in the Leads Notes tab aren’t lost during the conversion, they just stay behind with the closed Lead
• I proposed a workaround of hiding the Leads Notes tab to just prevent people from even using it

So while hiding the Microsoft CRM Leads Notes tab works great for fresh implementations, and to prevent any more issues with existing implementations, what about all of the companies who need to access all of the Notes and Attachments in the old converted Leads?

The quickest and easiest solution I’ve seen is a workaround that adds a new “Leads Notes” tab to the Accounts, Contacts, or Opportunities entity. It looks just like a normal Notes tab but pulls the Notes and Attachments data from the original Lead using an Iframe and some scripting. 

Karl Iuel of Avanade posted a script with instructions of how to configure it.  Richard Knudsen of IMG also posted a script on his blog.

Before adding this to your MSCRM I’d suggest giving some thought to how your users will use this. The reason I say this is it’s your choice whether to add this to the Account, Contact, or Opportunity entity. My suggestion would be to add it to the Contact entity. Here’s why.

I tested Karl’s script on the Account, Contact, and Opportunity entities and converted a Lead.

With the Account version the Lead only transfers once. Meaning, if in the future you get a Lead who happens to be an employee of an existing Account in MSCRM that was a previously converted Lead, it will only transfer the Notes from the first Lead.

With the Opportunity version it depends on if you associate Opportunities with a Contact or Account. A user might get confused on where to look for the Lead notes if some of your customers are companies (Accounts) and some are individuals (Contacts).

With the Contact version the Leads Notes stay with the Contact. A Lead is somewhat of a combination of the Account, Contact, and Opportunity records. But to me it most closely resembles a Contact record. So when a user is later looking for notes of a closed Lead the first place they would probably look would be in Contacts records.

Again, it’s your choice where to put the new Leads Notes tab but it depends on how your company and users use your MSCRM. To validate which one works best I’d suggest having a couple of your key users test each version and perform tasks as they would as part of their normal day.

1. In Dynamics CRM for Outlook select “CRM” from the top menu (In the Web version select “Tools”)
2. From the dropdown list select “Options…”
3. On the window that opens look for the option to “Select the number of records shown per page in any list of records” and change the dropdown next to “Records Per Page” to the amount you would like to display. 
4. Click the OK icon.