Microsoft CRM V3 was designed with performance in mind. We dedicated significant resource bandwidth and timeline to ensure that we tackle performance issues early and reliably. We laid out a performance plan during the engineering cycle, followed it closely...

Many people often forget to set the Customization Prefix when they customize CRM. When you create new entities and attributes CRM automatically creates tables and columns for you in its SQL Server database. It adds the Prefix to the names of those tables...

We were wondering why we weren't getting comments on posts...until we tried on comment on one ourselves. Our intrepid site manager Jim Glass has now fixed the problem with some errant script, so comments are back. Two recent posts (Sudip's post yesterday...

The grids in Microsoft CRM 3.0 don’t have related entity information. You can’t for example look at a list of opportunities and see the account rating or account territory of the opportunity’s potential customer on the same row. With the export...

I’m posting this blog so as to clarify the position of Multi-lingual support for Microsoft CRM from product prospective. Current Status Microsoft Dynamics CRM V3.0 although is available in 22 languages, there is no multi-lingual User Interface...

Do companies really gain competitive advantage by putting customers at the center? I thought for my first team blog entry I would take a stab at sharing a question CRM Product Planning has been thinking about for a while and would love your thoughts...

Things are hectic around here at the moment, and people tend to hide when I come to ask about blog posts, so I thought I'd take the opportunity to introduce us. On the day we finished v3.0, we celebrated a little. But before we kicked that off, a bit...

Scenario à Bikes Corp has implemented MSCRM 3.0 in order to ensure profitable customer relationships and happy customers. Bikes Corp. sells all kind of bikes to institutional buyers like government, schools etc. Charlie is the owner of the business...

I’m very passionate about Sales Force Automation (SFA) and I’m also a big fan of the Microsoft CRM Leads functionality. Recently I’ve noticed some misunderstandings (both inside and outside Microsoft) surrounding this core SFA feature. Hopefully this...

I want to introduce a feature we have in our Microsoft CRM Sandbox so that those of you who haven’t discovered it, will be able to leverage this capability of the Sandbox to your benefit. What’s Microsoft CRM Sandbox? It is a GotDotNet project...

In my last post, I showed you how you could personalize the Workplace. The Workplace is also configurable for the Outlook client, though perhaps doesn’t organize as nicely, since we rely on the Outlook folder structure to provide the navigation. Quite...

In my last post, I introduced the new navigation model in 3.0 and the Workplace concept. Let’s take a look at how you can personalize your navigation experience in the browser client: At the bottom of the navigation area of the Workplace,...

The New Navigation UI Did you notice that we redesigned the navigation model for V3.0? I’ll bet you did. In 3.0, we adopted the ever popular Outlook style navigation pane (a.k.a. the Wunderbar). Today, I’d like to introduce the Workplace concept...

If you look at Microsoft Dynamics CRM V3.0 web services APIs, you’ll notice a number of drastic improvements compared to the previous versions of CRM. Besides the facts that you will see a much deeper integration with Visual Studio (IntelliSense = self...

With Microsoft Dynamics CRM 3.0 a lot of work was done to allow users to get at the data captured by CRM in different ways. One of the key features in surfacing this data is the Filtered views. Filtered views expose a read-only view of the entities with...

One of the most exciting things for the Doc team about Microsoft CRM 3.0 is being able to continue writing for you even after we have shipped. Since then, we’ve published about 60 articles to give you end-to-end scenarios, quick tips, and help walking...

In 1.x, your options for what was synced between Outlook and CRM were pretty limited. You could have appointment/contact/task synching either on or off. (Actually, in v1.0 Alpha, you could have it on or on. Heard feedback pretty loudly. Added option....

CRM 3.0 shipped with some innovative but unusual functionality for a CRM application: service scheduling. This was a technically challenging project and some people on the CRM team are still wondering why we invested so much in this area. As with any...

Do you find yourself having manually to send out an email to each new CRM user with their login information? Try using an E-Mail Template and CRM’s Send Direct E-mail feature to speed things up. In fact, CRM comes with two e-mail templates out of the...

A product catalog contains the products that an organization sells. These products can be added to Opportunities/Quotes/Orders/Invoices as Opportunity Products/Quote Products/Order Products/Invoice Products respectively. This way the products can be tracked...

V3 has a nifty reporting feature that allows users to access reports inside of MSCRM application via the grid reports menu and to run those reports only on the records of interest. We built this feature after our usability studies showed...

I frequently encounter ‘Power Customizers’ who are unaware of a very basic customization feature: Add Find Columns. Each CRM entity has two special views: Quick Find and Lookup. The Quick Find view is the view displayed after an user invokes a Quick...

In this article I want to describe my favorite feature from Microsoft Dynamics CRM 3.0: Filtered Views. Background Dynamics CRM is built on top of a complex SQL Server database. The CRM Platform component was designed to manage access to the...

Hi, thanks for stopping by. If you're interested in Microsoft CRM, you'll know that there are already a bunch of really great blogs out there, regularly serving up quality posts about our product. If you haven't already, we highly recommend that...