Changing the CRM Icon

David Sutton, 14 June 2010

In CRM one easy customisation to do is to change the Favicon (the small icon that displays inside the address bar and browsing tab). The reason why you would change this is to incorporate and personalise CRM for you company.

Note: This is an unsupported customization by the Microsoft Dynamics CRM 4.0 SDK.

Changing the Favicon is a very easy customisation to make. First you need to design up the Favicon. The dimensions are 16x16 but you can go up to 48x48 pixels without losing any quality. The only recommendation I would make would be to keep the design simple.

Note: When you make links to specific forms (e.g. new account or new contact) this Favicon will then get pulled through and be used as the desktop icon so that is why I suggest that you make the favicon 48x48.

Want to make these desktop shortcuts? Check out this blog.

Once you have done your design you have to then save this as an .ico file with the name ‘favicon.ico’. Once that has been done you then need to go to either -

C:\Inetpub\wwwroot\

Or

C:\Program Files\Microsoft Dynamics CRM\CRMWeb\

Note: These directories may not work and they depend on your server set up, if you have CRM installed on premise or hosted and how you are accessing the server.

Once you have reached the right place it will have a CRM sail style icon with the file name ‘favicon.ico’. – This is the current icon. It is important to name the current favicon as something like ‘old favicon’ (this is so that if you ever want to use it again it will be there). The next step is to copy the new design into the same folder – and that’s all that needs to be done.

Now you may be wondering why you can’t see it and the old favicon is still there; that is because your internet cache is still holding the previous file. (The cache is there to save website information to speed up browsing and reduce load on servers) To clear the Cache in Internet Explorer you simply go ‘tools>internet options’ and under the ‘general tab’ and ‘browsing history’ you will find a button saying ‘delete’. Click on this and a dialogue box will come up, uncheck everything apart from the top two check boxes and then click ‘delete’.

Once that has been done restart your bowser and the new favicon should be there.

Note: Any changes made may be overwritten by any new rollups that come out.

Note: If you find that the favicon is not changing you may have to repeat the steps of clearing the cache or restart your browser. Also if you have it saved in the favourites it may help to remove that before clearing the cache.