According to my Twitter sources, Microsoft announced today, at Convergence 2010, that “CRM 5 will be released by the end of the year with CRM Online first then on-premise.” Now that’s the first time I’ve heard the release date officially pinned down that precisely. I’ve been hearing Q4 and even early Q4 2010 for a while now. [...]
Filed under: Architecture, Development, ISV, XRM | Tagged: Beta, CRM "5", CTP, Microsoft Dynamics CRM, Transition, Upgrade, Version | Leave a Comment »
I put this page together to keep track of useful links related to Microsoft Dynamics CRM. I did it as much for my own use as anything but if anyone else finds it useful, all the better. Workflow Microsoft Dynamics CRM: Workflow Authoring Best Practices Gonzalo Ruiz, Business IT Professionals, Inc., Microsoft, January 15, 2010, [...]
Filed under: Architecture, Development, Hosting, Operations, Platform, Tips & Tricks, Troubleshooting, XRM | Tagged: Hosting, Microsoft Dynamics CRM | Leave a Comment »
Here’s a quick tip if you are trying to import data into CRM that uses a foreign character set and you are getting gibberish. If you save your data from Excel to a .CSV file, it will be saved in ASCII/ANSI format which uses 8-bit encoding. In simple terms, encoding means mapping characters to numbers. [...]
Filed under: Tips & Tricks, Uncategorized | Tagged: Microsoft Dynamics CRM | 1 Comment »
It seems like only yesterday we finished updating servers and clients to Update Rollup 2. I guess that’s because it pretty much was yesterday. So, here we go again. Looking at the content of this rollup, a couple of things jump out at me: Very few hotfixes that were released as individual hotfixes The issues [...]
Filed under: Operations | Tagged: Microsoft Dynamics CRM, Update Rollup, Updates | Leave a Comment »
Part 2 of the “Hosting Toolkit for Microsoft Dynamics CRM” covers the free trial or buy now form and provisioning workflow. It also covers some lessons learned in automating the provisioning process using the Microsoft Dynamics CRM deployment service and CRM web service.
Filed under: ISV, Operations | Tagged: Architecture, CRM, Hosting, Infrastructure, ISV, Microsoft Dynamics CRM, SaaS | 2 Comments »
2nd Microsoft Dynamics CRM Incubation Week Announced (Boston, 20th April). To submit nominations, visit Sanjay Jain’s blog.
Filed under: Entrepreneurship, ISV | Tagged: CRM, Entrepreneur, incubation, Innovation, ISV, mic, Microsoft Dynamics CRM, Startup, Venture Capital | Leave a Comment »
The Outlook interface is a big selling point and makes the CRM experience much better in my opinion. However, if you have ever been involved in technical support for Microsoft CRM, you know that the Outlook client is far and away the source of the most support issues. So, if you host CRM 4.0, here are my questions:
Filed under: ISV, Operations | Tagged: Hosting, Microsoft Dynamics CRM, Outlook, Update, Update Rollup, Updates | 5 Comments »
In Part 1 of this series of posts I’ll summarize the parts of a toolkit an ISV needs for hosting Microsoft Dynamics CRM…a control-panel is only part of the solution. As an ISV, you want to offer customers a simple sign-up process that starts with a free-trial and is completely self-service. If they have to call you to order your software, many potential customers will move on to the next option, your competitor.
Filed under: ISV, Operations | Tagged: billing, control panel, Hosting, Microsoft Dynamics CRM, ordering, provisioning, SaaS, toolkit | 11 Comments »
Microsoft released a new version of Update Rollup 2 for Microsoft Dynamics CRM 4.0. Keeping up with deploying updates can be a lot of work. This is why, unless we need an update to fix a problem, we’ll wait for 3-4 weeks and let everyone else regression-test it first.
Filed under: Operations, Troubleshooting | Tagged: Colocation, CRM, Data Center, Hosting, Infrastructure, Microsoft Dynamics CRM, Patching, QA, Sandbox, Servers, Testing, Update Rollup, Updates | Leave a Comment »
