CRM–Drag and Drop not working

There are a few places in the CRM UI where drag-drop are used.  One place where this occurs is when you resize the columns in a grid view.  Another obvious place for drag and drop is in the forms designer.  The system customizer can drag and drop attributes onto their forms and use the mouse to position them on the form. 

This all works great 99.9% of the time.  But today I received an email from a customer where these drag and drop features were not working.  Not only didn’t it work on this gentleman’s computer, but it was broken on every other computer in their office.  So I did a bit of research and some testing and found the problem. 

It turns out that this is not a CRM 2011 issue at all.  Drag and drop is a setting in IE that can be turned off.  See the picture below.  In some large organizations, especially ones that are zealots about security, they may have pushed down a group policy to disable drag and drop.  That was the problem in this case – the IT department had disabled drag and drop in IE.  A simple IE setting change fixes the problem (or in their case, a business case justification with IT Security to change their group policy setting). 

If you are using CRM Online, ensure that the setting for the Internet Zone is set to enable Drag/Drop.  If you are using CRM On Premise then it would be the local intranet zone.  In either case, the setting is in the miscellaneous section on IE Options/Security/Settings for the zone.  Here is a screen shot of the setting. 

Hopefully this will save some other folks some time in the future.