Size Of A Cow... One of the most common questions partners ask me is how can I install all the CRM components on a single Virtual PC image for development, test & demo purposes. At a minimum CRM Professional requires 3 Virtual PCs: Server...

Pour Some Sugar On Me... It's taken a while, but I have finally got round to finishing my MapPoint integration code for CRM 3.0. There's a whole bunch of things you can do with Microsoft MapPoint, but the most obvious is to display a location map based...

I Walk The Line... With CRM 3.0 we had a pretty robust model for building custom business logic extensions, known as callouts, which allowed developers to write C# or VB.NET code to handle pre-stage and post-stage events for platform operations such...

The Battle Of Evermore... OK, I admit it. I've caught the CRM development bug. What started as a harmless bit of fun working on document library integration between CRM & SharePoint has now developed into an obsession. In this post I will describe...

All Over The World… I don’t know about you, but I have always struggled with our dashboard story in CRM 4.0. It’s not that we don’t have plenty of dashboard capabilities, with solutions such as the Analytics Accelerator that...

Tiger Feet… A couple of weeks ago, one of my CRM 2011 prospects asked for details about which features are/aren’t available when using older versions of desktop software. Like many large enterprises their standard desktop is based on Windows...

I Wish… I realise it has been a while since I last posted, but I have been mega-busy working with some of the top UK financial services organisations and selling Microsoft Dynamics CRM 2011 into various divisions such as business banking, corporate...

Carwash… A couple of months ago, we released a new add-on for CRM 4.0 called the Customer Care Accelerator (CCA). Although new to those of us in the world of CRM, CCA has been around since 2005. The Customer Care Framework (CCF) was originally...

We Are Finding Who We Are... Not a week has gone past in the last couple of years where I haven't been asked by a customer or partner where they can obtain/find the correct license key for their CRM implementation, and quite frankly we didn't make...

Try A Little Tenderness… Yesterday (Thursday 19th July 2012), we took another step towards the convergence of our CRM Online and Office 365 cloud services. Anyone signing up for a CRM Online 30 day trial, will now automatically be set up on...

Get Down On It… Although I have posted several CRM code-samples on my blog, I don’t think of myself as a particularly expressive or creative developer. Sure, I can code a plug-in in VB (and more recently C#), or knock out the occasional...

Screaming In Digital… For those of you lucky enough to have access to the Microsoft Partner Network portal, you can now access 10 new technical training courses, totalling more than 15 hours of recorded video. This training is recommended for...

Without You... In my earler post , I found we had changed the rules for upgrading CRM 4.0 Trial and MSDN license keys. In order to help you understand what upgrade choices you have if you are using one type of license key and need to upgrade to another...

Can I Play With Madness... Now that I have a custom site definition that incorporates a minimal master page my next task was to automate the site creation process. I decided to build a custom workflow activity rather than a plug-in as this give me...

Distant Early Warning... Following on from my previous post Current List of Microsoft Dynamics CRM 4.0 Posts (Part 1) , here are more links to recent CRM 4.0 articles: 12th October 2007 Titan: Workflow 13th October 2007 Using Pre...

Aces High... I just spotted the short, but perfectly formed announcement on Michael Lu's blog here that CRM 4.0 RTM (Release To Manufacturing) was signed off by the CRM product team on Friday 14th December 2007. If you are a Microsoft Dynamics partner...

Are You Gonna Be My Girl.... Over the last couple of months I've been spending quite a bit of time with the SDK, building custom workflow activities and plug-ins for CRM 4.0. One of the problems working with the IPlugin interface is that you are forced...

Going For The One… I’ve been head-down working on closing out Q4 CRM deals here in the UK, but wanted to share a couple of tweaks that have made a small improvement to the speed of my demos running on Virtual PC 2007. 1. Prevent your PC from entering...

The Myth of Fingerprints... I've noticed that many large corporate and enterprise customers are starting to evaluate Microsoft CRM 3.0 with a view to deploying it at a divisional level. An extremely important part of the product evaluation process...

Zoot Allures... I recently came across a web-site that provided a free database containing a list of virtually every town in the UK and Ireland, along with the associated county and country - that's a total of 48,421 towns across 127 counties in 5...

Whole Lotta Love... There appears to be very little information about the capabilities of Microsoft CRM service scheduling, and as a result there may be some customer opportunities slipping by that we are actually very well positioned to solve. After...

Wake Me Up Before You Go Go... Although most installations of CRM 3.0 succeed with the minimum of fuss, some do go a bit awry. Fabio, one of my colleagues in Brazil, came across the following installation error message: " Action Microsoft.Crm...

Monkey Wrench... After speaking with the rest of the UK CRM team and some of our CRM support folks, there seems to be a lot of confusion surrounding Microsoft CRM 3.0 product license keys, and in particular when and where to use the 90-day trial keys...

Sign Of The Times... A few weeks ago I came across a problem in Visual Studio 2008, whereby it seemed to hang every time I added a web reference to the CRM web service , and then tried using IntelliSense to discover the attributes of an entity . Looking...

Comfortably Numb... So much CRM goodness in one day - now everyone can download the full version of Microsoft CRM 4.0 with a 90-day evaluation license from the Microsoft Download Center: Download details: Microsoft Dynamics CRM 4.0 Trial Versions...