CRM Online and the Organization Unique Name

Each CRM organization has two names associated with it:

The Friendly Name

This is the name that is displayed in the user interface:

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The Unique Name

This is the name of the database and can be found on the Developer Resources page, under Settings, Customization:

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The CRM Discover Service contains a message called: RetrieveOrganizationsRequest which allows you to retrieve all of the CRM organizations to which you have access.

Many developers, myself included, use this feature to allow a user to select and connect to a specific CRM organization.

The Problem

This week I noticed that the information found on the Developer Resources page did not match up to the information returned in the RetrieveOrganizationResponse object.

So, if you provide instructions to your end-users on how to retrieve their Organization Unique Name, there is a possibility that the information they provide and the information your application has access to will not be the same.

In my case, I use the unique name for licensing purposes and such a mismatch would cause a licensing failure which would limit or disable product functionality.

The Solution

It is my guess that a change was made recently to CRM Online so that the unique name actually matches the URL name, as you can see below:

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As of today, that is the unique name being returned when I query my organization.

An article for CRM Online 4.0 talks about a similar circumstance back in 2009:

http://blogs.msdn.com/b/crm/archive/2009/10/23/changes-a-foot-provisioning-unique-names-changes-in-microsoft-dynamics-crm.aspx

I am not sure if a similar scenario with CRM 2011 applies, but it sure looks like it to me.

Over the past couple of years, we’ve seen the following possible values returned:

  • The unique name as shown in the user interface
  • The URL name
  • The Friendly Name ( rare but occasional cases )

 

Note: this does not seem to be an issue with CRM On-premise.

 

So, if you are a developer and you are retrieving organizational information, keep in mind that the information you receive may or may not be what you expect.

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