Dynamics CRM 2011 Rollup 12 (Polaris) Disable Process Forms

Paul Nieuwelaar, 30 January 2013

With Dynamics CRM 2011 Rollup 12/Polaris, we now have a completely new Form UI for Contacts, Opportunities, Leads, Accounts, and Cases. For new customers who have not experienced Dynamics CRM ‘classic’ mode, this will be fine as they don’t have to unlearn everything about the classic forms. For existing customers however, it is a huge ask to adapt to a completely new user experience. For this reason, Microsoft have kept the functionality of the ‘classic’ forms available, which is only a few clicks away from any Process Form.

However, this is only a temporary solution, as the next time you open a record the Process Form will be the default again. You can prevent this on a per-user basis by changing the form while in ‘classic’ mode from ‘Contact’ for example, to the standard ‘Information’ form. The next time you open this record type, CRM will remember your previously viewed form and will open the classic form by default.

While this might work well for you, it means every user needs to go through this process, and you may just want to disable the Process Forms all together, so no users will accidently use this instead of the classic form.

To disable the process form for all users, first we need to open the Customization area for the current entity (in my case I will use Account). When viewing the available forms for the entity, you will notice there are 3 forms by default. 1 for the mobile form, 1 for the classic form, and 1 for the new process form. The process form will be named after the entity, e.g. ‘Account’.

To disable this form, all we have to do is simply select the form, and click ‘Assign Security Roles’ from the toolbar.

In the Assign Security Roles window, select the radio button to ‘Display only to these selected security roles’. You can then click the ‘clear all’ checkbox to uncheck all the security roles. At the bottom of the window you should also uncheck the ‘Enabled for fallback’ checkbox, so if a user has no access to any other forms they are not presented with this one.

Click ok, and then Publish customizations. When you, or any other user tries to open a record of this entity, the default form will be the ‘classic mode’ form. There will also be no option to change forms to use the process form. We can do the same for all the Process Form entities, to disable the process forms throughout the system.

This functionality can also be extended further by creating a single security role which toggles access to the process forms. This role does not need to contain any privileges, however on the process forms, instead of removing access from all security roles, you can assign access to only this new role. This will mean anyone who is assigned the new security role will have access to all process forms by default (if their other security roles give them access to these entities), otherwise they will only be able to see and use the classic forms.

If at any time you want to enable the process forms again, simply customize the forms and select ‘Display to everyone’ again.