1. You no longer have to have price list items added to price lists in order to use system calculated pricing, and get the associated benefits (automatic pricing, creation of quotes, orders, invoices…). in CRM 2011 you can use write-in products on opportunities and go from there. This might sound small, but it’s actuallly important and makes system-calculated pricing a LOT more useful.

2. Records can now be assigned to users and teams.

3. Teams have security roles just like users do now, and a user added to a team will inherit the team’s security privileges.

4. Any record type can be enabled for queue support, although by default only cases and activities come with it turned on.

5. When a record is routed to a queue, a “queue item” (new entity type) record is created. There’s a built-in 1:1 relationship between the underlying record and its associated queue item.

6. The KB UI changes: the whole “queue” approach goes away, and KB articles are simply moved from one status value to the next in the approval process.

7. No more “In Progress” and “Assigned” queues for users. The way it works now is, every user gets a default queue when added, as does every team. e.g., Richard Knudson user will have a default queue called . As an option, you can have queue items automatically created in a user or team’s queue when they are assigned.

There are a bunch more — these are just some of the more obvious ones. I’l refresh the “Know Your Entities” article shortly in prep for the 2011 exams!

I was actually finding the whole of the applications prep a bit (whatever you may call it)… but after coming across this compilation … the way it is systematically streamlined… I am really grateful to you for actually compiling all of it in just one single web page!

Great Trick Bag!

Richard

Paul

Hmmm…well, have you looked at Service Scheduling? It might be that you could model your equipment as “facilities/equipment”, and then use the scheduling engine to book it out. What you’d do is to create “Services”, and then create “Selection Rules” which the scheduling engine would use to suggest available resources, and block them out when scheduled. Without knowing the details of your situation, it strikes me that it might work. If you have detailed questions, feel free to send me a private email at richardk@imginc.com. Cheers –

I’ve recently been given a position to look after the companies CRM 4.0 system. I have never had any training on CRM and was given a 2 week handover that taught me the very basics. If have recently had a request to record/hold an equipment product library on crm and also provide a bookings section that would then book out this equipment. Could you give me any direction on the out of the box functionality that would provide this. My thoughts were to use the product catalog for library and facilities/equipment for bookings, however the product library is not flexible for customisation.

Any help or guidence would be much appreciated.

Thanks

Thanks for your comment — I hope you find the content useful! Are you preparing for any of the exams? There’s lots of good exam prep content up here. You can see all the content for a category like this:

http://www.DynamicsCRMTrickBag.com/category/certification
or
http://www.DynamicsCRMTrickBag.com/category/workflow

Cheers — Richard

kind regards
Liam Merrins