This year’s main event for Microsoft Dynamics product line is now over and done with. It was the second time I attended Microsoft Convergence, and the first one on US soil. Here are some of my miscellaneous notes and thoughts on the event. First of all, getting to Convergence 2010 in Atlanta this year was […]
Dynamics CRM Online: what does it look like?
Like I mentioned in my previous post, cloud-based services are quickly becoming the default mode that people expect a CRM application to be delivered to them. Microsoft is clearly focusing their efforts on responding to this change of environment, but so far the availability of Dynamics CRM Online has been strictly limited to North America. […]
Driving towards the cloud through the CRM mist
This week I attended the fifth annual CRM user days by Mepco Oy. This time the line-up included also international guests from Microsoft US and UK, namely Kim Smith and Patrick Pando. Not surprisingly, their presentations included a hefty dose of the MS Software-plus-Service mantra, presented from the Dynamics CRM perspective. The slides had a […]
Looking ahead at Microsoft Dynamics CRM 5: screenshots from PDC
Back from a long time of inactivity, I decided to resurrect this blog with some content taken from the recent PDC09 sessions. Just like last year, presenting the feature set of the upcoming CRM version wasn’t really the main point in PDC (that’s what Convergence is for), but when someone gives a developer demo using […]
The price of customization
Although this excellent article by Vjekoslav Babic is written from the ERP and MS Dynamics NAV perspective, the same list holds true for the CRM side as well: Top 7 reasons why to avoid (much) customization Regressions can be tricky to hunt down and fix Go-live schedule can be delayed if the customizations are not […]
Attribute maps and importing customizations
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 […]