Microsoft Connect - Obscure Smartlist Reminder Issue

Tonight I decided to clean up my “future blog posts” folder, where I dump in screen shots and brief snippets of text for future posts, hoping I remember what I was thinking at the time the entire topic would look like!  This one is a snippet and a URL that I’m lacking screen shots on so I’ll do my best to describe it.

The Issue

Bear with me, you might need to read this a couple times to make sense of what I mean!

If a user has a custom homepage reminder set up, based on a smartlist in Sales or Purchasing, the reminder will not actually open the Smartlist to the proper object if the user does not have access to the Vendors smartlist (for a Purchasing related smartlist) or the Customers smartlist (for a Sales related smartlist).

To Reproduce

Since I don’t have a screen shot to illustrate this, here is how to reproduce it, with an example that my customer ran into.

1. For a GP user, ensure that they don’t have access to the Customer smartlist, for instance, but give them access to something else, such as Sales Transactions or Sales Line Items. In my customer’s case, it was the shipper/receiver that didn’t have access to customers but he needed SOP smartlists to see lists of what isn’t shipped yet etc.
2. Create a reminder, based on one of these smartlists, for anything. Let’s say “Open Orders” under Sales Transactions or something, where the reminder will display a reminder whenever the count of records <> 0. Make sure your smartlist returns some results.
3. Refresh your homepage so you can see the reminder showing you there are some open orders.
4. Click on the favourite. It should open *that* Smartlist Object and Favourite.
5. What actually happens is random. It may open that smartlist object but not that favourite. It may open the Smartlist window but not select any specific object. In other words, it doesn’t work.
6. Go back and give the user access to the Customers smartlist.
7. Repeat steps 3 to 5. The smartlist object and favourite opens and displays the open orders.

Strange eh? (<– obligatory Canadian moment!)

Microsoft Connect Suggestion

I first googled this and then I posted a question on the Microsoft Partner Technical Community site but the answer was what I semi-expected: this is “by design”… my favourite (not) explanation to anything ever.

So, I created a Microsoft Connect product suggestion for this (links removed, no longer valid)

If you feel so inclined, give it a vote! It’s a long shot this will ever get fixed, and it’s pretty obscure, but what the heck! If I ran into this issue, I’m sure I’m not the only one.