Changing the Workplace Icon in the Navigation Bar in Dynamics CRM

David Sutton, 02 August 2010

At the bottom of the navigation bar in CRM is the different Areas that CRM provides.

Here at Magnetism we have done quite a lot of customisation and, in turn, we have different areas than the standard ‘Out of the box’ product. Naturally, when new areas were made they needed new icons. Because you can’t change the icons in Dynamics CRM directly it means that I am able to use the .png format which, from my perspective, is much better than the .ico and .gif format that is currently supported by Dynamics CRM.

GETTING STARTED:
First you will have to make sure you know what size you are working with. I suggest downloading the CRM 4.0 SDK and looking through to confirm the size of the icon you are creating, and uploading.

For today I will give you everything you know to create this icon, but the SDK is a very handy tool to have for all aspects of CRM 4.0

STEP 1:
Open up your favourite image editor, almost every image editor will support the .png file format, I use Adobe Photoshop CS4 but I suggest any of the following: Gimp, Paint.net or IcoFX.

Open up a new file with the dimensions of 24x24 pixels, all you have to do is design up a simple icon that will look good.

STEP 2:
When it comes to saving the icon you have to be sure that you are saving the icon as a .png file because it provides better anti-aliasing than a format such as gif.

Once you have to access your server place it in the _img folder.

This can be found in one of the following directories:

C:\Inetpub\wwwroot\_imgs\

C:\Program Files\Microsoft CRM Server\CRMWeb\_imgs\

Name the file something that relates to the workplace, which in my case the icon is going to be called ‘Jigsaw’.

STEP 3:
From here you need to access the CRM sitemap, to do that you need to export the site map:

‘Settings>Customisations>Export Customisations’

Select ‘sitemap’ from the list and export it by clicking ‘export selected customisations’. When exported you will then need to extract the file and open it with a program such as visual studio. But for now I am going to be using Notepad.

You will then need to change the name that is highlighted to the name of the icon you created, also remembering to add .png on the end.

You will then need to save the sitemap and import it back into CRM by going to:

‘Settings>Customisations> Import Customisations’

Browse for the updated sitemap and upload.

Once that has been uploaded and you have refreshed the page (crtl+F5) you should see that the icons have changed.