MSCRM 2011 Problem Pricing Order Product Items

So, you've created your products, your price lists, your price list items and they're all nicely in the system. Now you go to add some products to your order and BAM! You get a pricing error. What gives?

We have a situation where we need unpriced or free items in our system. The gotcha isn't that you can't do it, it is HOW you have to do it. It seems that the only way CRM will be happy calculating a $0 price is if your pricelistitem uses the "Currency Amount" pricing method and an "Amount" of $0.

My experience has been that if you use any of the other methods with various values for Percentage and your product's referenced cost (List, Current Cost, Standard Cost) = $0 that an error will be displayed when the system attempts to calculate the Order Total.

Lesson Learned:
If you want to have an order-product to show up with a $0.00 price, set the order-product's pricelistitem "PricingMethod" to "Currency Amount" and the "Amount" to $0.00

Importing Data to MS CRM 2011 Online

After much struggling and gnashing of teeth trying to use MSCRM 2011's new feature that allows importing from .zip files, I discovered that zip files don't seem to support re-importing (updating). I was attempting to update the "Decimals Suported" field on all of our products (over 1000) and kept hitting a brick wall with the mapping. CRM wasn't recognizing the file as an import, it was trying to create the records and couldn't map the checksum fields. On a whim, I attempted to import the uncompressed file and viola, it worked. Silly me for trying to use the zip file to make the upload faster.

Lessons learned:
Use .zip files to create entities in CRM. This allows faster uploads for large files and the ability to associate records during the import process.

DON'T use .zip files to update existing products in the product catalog. (I have yet to determine if .zips will work to update other entities.) Use the uncompressed, modified file that you exported from CRM.