Microsoft Dynamics CRM UK Reseller

SharePoint is becoming more and more relevant to CRM deployments. There are few of our customers who do not use SharePoint and we have been integrating CRM and SharePoint for at least 3 years now e.g., creating Document Libraries or web parts and SQL reports in Dashboards.

My company, Vigence, has recently been awarded the Information Worker Solutions competency and we intend to do more with WSS and MOSS.

I took the 70-631 exam which covers Administering SharePoint Services (WSS) 3.0 and I found a lot of familiar themes to CRM e.g., IIS, AD, SPNs, NLB/clustering. If you know these well and have experience setting up and using WSS then you should have no problem with 70-631.

This isn't available yet but should be soon. However it will still be like the 3.0 version i.e., a lightweight HTML 4.0 client.

There is still no support for appointments or service activities which is very limiting and as there will be no source code this time so will not be able add them as I did in 3.0.

So for all but the most basic of mobile requirements, CWR Mobile or TenDigits will be necessary.

Some posts I think are worth reading:

Matt Witteman on Survive or Thrive

Terry Forsey on where the negativity is coming from

and Vlad getting right to the point as always

This set of patches and updates is available here

Useful tips on how to deploy to Outlook clients on the CRM Team Blog

The WSS list web part for CRM 4.0 has finally been released. This is a big relief I used to make a lot of this in SharePoint Dashboards with CRM 3.0 and I have a customer who I have held back from upgrading as this wasn't available

You can download it from here

The Accelerators for Microsoft Dynamics CRM can be found on CodePlex.

Available now:

• Extended Sales Forecasting
• Notifications (RSS Feeds from CRM views)
• eService (an external service portal)
• Event Management
• Analytics R1

I took the Extending Microsoft Dynamics CRM 4.0 exam (MB2-634) over Christmas and passed. I had the 3.0 certification and this exam contained new 4.0 features i.e., plugins and organisations but there was a lot in this if you are familiar with 3.0 development.

I wouldn't advise taking this exam without having 3.0/4.0 experience in writing plugins and workflow activities and using IFRAMEs and I would also recommend taking the Extending CRM with .NET course, 8969A.

New data centre in Stockholm

via Philip Richardson

The MCT Blogs site provides a list of Microsoft Certified Trainers that blog

Whilst importing a set of customisations from an upgraded CRM 3.0 to 4.0 system into a vanilla CRM 4.0 I got the error "Failure: Opportunity_VIG_Expenses: Invalid name prefix". Basically CRM didn't like the name of the relationship between Opportunity and my custom Expense entity.

The solution I found was to edit the customisations XML file and change:

<EntityRelationship Name="Opportunity_VIG_Expenses">

to

<EntityRelationship Name="VIG_Opportunity_VIG_Expenses">

i.e., I added the customisation prefix to the relationship name

Update: There is also a problem with the Quick Campaign entity after upgrading from 3.0 to 4.0. This is discussed in KB948588 and is ficed in Update Rollup 1.