Adding Icons to Your CRM Online Instance

By Eric Newell | October 23, 2012

In the earlier days of Dynamics CRM, when I wanted to use an icon for one of my custom entities, I'd just go into the general icons folder and grab another icon that was being used and repurpose it for my new entity. Someone less lazy could've downloaded a set of icons and dropped those icons in the _image folder and had more options. In Dynamics CRM 2011, you need to add a web resource for each icon you want to make available for your custom entities.  Here are a couple ways you can approach it: 1. Christian Espinoza put together a managed solution with 22 free icons that are uploaded as web resources as part of the solution.  Since it's a managed solution, you can't edit it, but you can use it with CRM Online.  This is a good way to get started.

  • If you want to pick the right icon for your solution, I recommend downloading a set of free icons and uploading each one individually that you want when you want them.  Yes, it takes longer to do, but this way you can select the right icon for this particular entity.

There are a couple ways to handle this - in Microsoft Paint you can save the file as a .bmp but change the extension to .ico.  You can install this software (I didn't test this but it's referenced on several sites: http://www.irfanview.com/).  Otherwise, you can simply rename the .png file to .ico.  I suppose it wouldn't be too difficult to create a quick app to rename all the files in the directory, but I'll save that for someone else. I'm also just concerning myself with the 16x16 icons, but to do it right, you'd want to use the same or a similar image for the 16x16 (web), 32x32 (Outlook) and 66x48 (Entity page) so it fits with all the different uses from images in CRM.  This is for an internal app, but for a customer, you'd want to look for ways to build icons that can fit all 3 purposes.

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