After performing the basic installation of MS CRM, you will have a system that contains the default entities with all their fields, forms and so on. The next step will be to modify the entity customizations to suit the business needs of the organization. Typically there will be a development and/or test environment where the […]
The haunted house of callouts
One of the integrations implemented for our CRM environment includes a feature that writes entries to a dedicated Error Log entity. This can be a convenient way to provide the end users access to error notifications, when the process itself is asynchronous and does not provide a way to prompt the user. During the development […]
Enterprise Scalability and Performance with Microsoft Dynamics CRM 4.0
As promised in my earlier post, here are some notes I wrote down during Convergence 2008 EMEA. In my opinion, the best session was “Enterprise Scalability and Performance with Microsoft Dynamics CRM 4.0” held by Amir Jafri. Not so much because of the original agenda and slides, but mostly thanks to all the questions and […]
Save your time by documenting
Documenting what your CRM environment looks like and what changes you’ve done to it can be such a drag. Compared to how fast you can perform and publish customization changes in Microsoft CRM, writing it all down and communicating it to the rest of the organization can take a lot more time (the same goes […]
Convergence 2008 EMEA
This was the first time I attended Microsoft’s Convergence, the conference for their Dynamics product family. The event turned out to be quite a positive experience. Sure, there was more than enough marketing hype for MS products, but it certainly wasn’t the only item on the agenda. Plenty of practical examples and real life success […]
Tabbed surfing with IE7 and CRM: the Quick Tabs bug
One of the prominent features of Microsoft CRM’s user interface is that all records are opened into a new pop-up window. While this does make navigation quite consistent throughout the different areas of the application, the downside is that it won’t take long before you have 20 separate browser windows open and you’re forced to […]
Microsoft Dynamics file exchange system
Reinventing the wheel rarely produces a perfectly round object. This is also the case with Microsoft’s attempt to enhance the basic operation of downloading a file from a website. If you have Software Assurance for Microsoft CRM, then you will probably also have the rights to use Microsoft Dynamics Customer Source. I know, figuring out […]
Eating your own dog food: deleted appointments
In my working team we’ve only recently started to use Microsoft CRM 3.0 for organizing our own work. The CRM system has been already rolled out to 200 users globally, but these databases have been reserved solely for end customer data. Now we finally have a separate CRM environment to manage our team’s internal customer […]
Works the way you do, almost
Matt Witteman, an MS CRM MVP, posted a nice wish list of 14 improvements that he would like to see in the product. Out of all these, I agree with almost all of them and would take them up on my list as well, except for the first one, which is the request to have […]
Optimizing IIS Peformance for Microsoft CRM, Part 1
If you ever need to access the MS CRM server from a remote office with not such a speedy connection, you will notice that CRM is not a particularly light weight application. In a WAN environment where the server is located in a different country or even on a different continent as the users, this […]
