Fresh from the recent Microsoft Worldwide Partner Conference, here’s Bryan Nielson’s presentation on what’s new in the next release of Dynamics CRM, interspersed with demos by Andrew Bybee. Some of the new features in the transition from CRM 3.0 to 4.0 had a significant impact on development and customization techniques, and how we allocated our time to most efficiently utilize the new features. With the rapid growth of the XRM platform this will be an even bigger deal this time around, and this video is the most substantive sneak preview.

The terms “customizing” and “extending” are code-words for “getting Dynamics CRM to do more stuff than it does out of the box”. They’re actually pretty well-defined concepts, however, and here’s my attempt at summarizing the concepts and clarifying what we mean by extending Dynamics CRM.

July 6, 2010 – Dynamics CRM entities can have one form only, which seems limiting at first. But you can still create a custom view of a form based on a user’s security role and other factors. This article demonstrates a role-tailored opportunity form and includes copy & pastable JavaScript and instructions.

July 6, 2010 – People usually think “process” when they think “workflows”, but Dynamics CRM workflows can be helpful in lots of little ways that add up to big time savings. Here are some examples of a utility workflow to perform “intelligent data updates” when bulk edit or other techniques can’t do the job.