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.

Looking at the Azure Services Training Kit I noticed that Windows Powershell is used.  With Powershell being included in Windows 2008 it looks like another Microsoft technology to learn alongside:

• Windows Server
• Active Directory
• DNS
• IIS
• SQL Server 2005/2008
• Group Policies
• Visual Studio
• .NET
• C#
• JScript
• Windows Workflow Foundation

Check the Microsoft Dynamics CRM Developer Centre for training resources.

Just come across this example to integrate OneNote 2007 with CRM 3.0 and CRM 4.0. I use OneNote a lot so this is quite interesting. It allows CRM Notes to be copied to OneNote and OneNote notebaoks can be uploaded into CRM

Details are here

The exam MB2-634 CRM 4.0 Extending Microsoft Dynamics is now available

If you are a Microsoft Partner and are interested there is a three day course (8969A) on November 18th in Maidenhead. Click here to book

PS Don't forget about Second Shot

The exam breaks down as follows

Extension Approach – 24%

• Choosing Extension Technology

• Licensing Requirements

• Extending the Outlook Client

• Security Considerations

• Deployment Considerations

Web Service Programming – 24%

• Connecting to CRM Web Services

• Using CRM Data Types

• Modifying Data

• Querying Data

• Using Requests and Response

• Using Metadata

• Exception Handling

Custom Workflow Activities – 10%

• Creating Custom Workflow Activities

• Deploying Custom Workflow Activities

• Troubleshooting Custom Workflow Activities

Developing Plug-ins – 16%

• Creating Plug-ins

• Deploying Plug-ins

• Troubleshooting Plug-ins

Application Programming – 26%

• Customizing Navigation

• Adding Menus and Buttons

• Using IFrames

• Using the Form Object Model

• Deploying ASP .Extensions

Well Microsoft have talked about a new Cloud based operating system which they have named Azure.

Dynamics CRM is included as Dynamics CRM Services. This doesn't appear to be Dynamics CRM online but the underlying web services. Will wait with interest for more details.

More at ZDNet and sitepoint

Seen at Dynamics Methods

The following accelerators will be released on PartnerSource

Today/Tomorrow:

• Extended Sales Forecasting
• CRM Notifications (RSS Feeds from CRM views)

Later this week:

• eService (an external service portal)
• Event Management
• Analytics

This book is aimed squarely at end users of Dynamics CRM 4.0 and Dynamics CRM Online. This is not a book about customer relationship management, customer strategy or customer handling. It is also not a book on how to install and configure Dynamics  CRM; for that you should look to the Working with Dynamics CRM 4.0 book. Instead it is good introduction to the core functionality of Dynamics CRM and how to make good use of the components Microsoft provides.

The book starts with an introduction to the web and Outlook clients, how to navigate around and the different parts of the user interface. Chapter 2 shows the undocumented feature of how to sort results using multiple columns.

Accounts and Contacts which are the cornerstone of Dynamics CRM are discussed as well as sub-accounts. One area not discussed is the use of addresses and when to use addresses rather than sub-accounts. Relationships between accounts and contacts are discussed. Accounts and Contacts have strong relationships but can also have additional (weaker) relationships and recording this information is very useful for other users of CRM. The chapter then runs through a number of functions such as attaching files, activating/deactivating, merging, assigning and sharing of records which I think deserve more attention that they get here.

The activities chapter is good and covers the types of activity and the importance of using the regarding field for a 360 degree view. The Outlook client chapter is very comprehensive and gives a real understanding of how the Outlook client works with CRM. The book is worth it just for this chapter alone. I really like the table of how delete works between CRM and Outlook. One omission in my view is a simple table showing which activities are synchronised into Outlook folders.

The Sales chapters cover leads, opportunity and quotes. The use of leads versus accounts/contacts causes confusion and some users will use leads and others won't. Dynamics CRM envisages that leads are used in a particular way and the book describes how to use leads and convert them to opportunities. For opportunities the importance of estimate value, probability and estimated close date are explained and how to use the Sales Forecasting report. It would have been easy to go further on forecasting but in my experience forecasting although basically is the same process at every company there little and subtle differences in implementation. Sensibly, the book concentrates on the standard functionality. The quote chapter shows how to add products to a quote and then to activate and revise it. It is an omission to exclude the Print Quote for Customer function that uses mail merge to generate a Word version of the quote. There are some areas excluded from the book e.g., how to create and use products, units of measure and price lists as well as territories.

The Marketing chapters cover marketing lists, campaigns, activities and responses. The chapter on marketing lists shows good use of Advanced Find and also I learnt something new in that you can copy members from one marketing list to another. The marketing functionality in Dynamics is, in my opinion, very good and links together so if used properly can generate useful information for the business. These chapters show you how to use the marketing functionality and to record the campaign responses (which are critical to evaluating the campaign) and then to convert the responses to leads/opportunities/quotes.

The Service chapters cover cases (service requests), knowledgebase, contracts and queues. I found the use of the service request terminology to be confusing especially in relation to activities. Cases can be used for a lot more than service requests e.g., complaints, order status enquiries etc. Contracts in Dynamics CRM are very powerful but are quote inflexible; allotment types i.e., automatic management of a number of cases or an amount of pre-paid time is possible with contracts but contracts have a state model that cannot be changed and doesn't work for most companies. Service Scheduling is omitted which I think a shame.

What is good about this book is that it spends a significant amount of time on data; importing, querying, duplicate detection, sorting, bulk editing, and reporting. Data is very important to successful use of CRM and users, once they grasp the use of Advanced Find and the power of the query tool find are suddenly able to do so much more and exploit the data held within CRM. The combination of Advanced Find and Dynamic Pivot Tables in Excel open up CRM data and this book shows you have to use both.

In summary the introduction and data management are excellent and show you how to make best use of CRM. The book is weaker in the functional parts; sales, marketing and service as there is a lot more to Dynamics CRM than covered in this book. However the authors had to draw the line somewhere and perhaps have got it right for users new to Dynamics CRM.

Problems printing SQL Reports from CRM after KB956391 installed on PCs

See http://www.technologystudio.net/blog/post/Microsoft-Update-KB956391-breaks-Reporting-Services-ReportViewer.aspx and download fix from here

For SQL 2000 Reporting Services download from here

I have uploaded the CRM 4.0 version of the postcode address lookup tool to the MSDN Code Gallery.

Instructions and source code are included.

The sample I wrote to lookup UK address from postcode in CRM 3.0 is available from the MSDN Code Gallery.

It is possible to make this work with CRM 4.0 - see DaneZ's comments , however I am currently working on a version for CRM 4.0 which I hope to publish tomorrow and I am also looking into creating a Silverlight version.