Exam Nuts & Bolts

• Multiple choice with only one answer correct (option buttons)
• Multiple choice with multiple possible correct answers

Topic Area Overview

• Business Units. Business units can be deleted in CRM 2011 under certain conditions, so be sure you know what those are. Make sure you are familiar with default teams for business units.
  
• Architecture Concepts, where and how to customize Dynamics CRM. Understand which customization options are different between Dynamics CRM Online and on-premise.
  
• System Settings. Understand the new system settings, such as currency precision, auditing, goals. Understand how Language settings work (on the Administration page), and how Currencies and Fiscal Year settings work (both on the Business Management page).
  
• Solutions. This is a big topic – I’ll cover it below.
  

• Security roles themselves work essentially the same in CRM 2011 as in CRM 4.0. But…there are so many new things to secure in CRM 2011 that there are a lot more options! For example, you can understand how the entity-based and task-based privilege model works, but if you don’t understand how in Dynamics CRM 2011 it’s applied to things like who can manage solutions, and who and how you can control access to charts and dashboards, and all the other new stuff, you’ll have a hard time with a lot of the questions on the test!
  
• Append and Append to. Just remember: if you don’t have append privilege on an entity you can’t append it to anything; if you don’t have append to you can’t append anything to it.
  
• Teams are a full-fledged security principal in CRM 2011. This is one of the most important improvements in the security model, and it’s well represented on the test. Make sure you know how to maintain teams, add users to teams, assign security roles to teams, when teams can be deleted and what the implications are, and so forth.
  
• Field Security is an important new feature and again well represented. Know what kinds of fields it can be applied to (custom fields only!), how it’s done, and who can do it.
  
• Maintaining user accounts is reasonably similar to how it was in CRM 4.0. Make sure you know what’s required to add users (e.g. you can add a user without a security role but not without a business unit), whether you can delete users (no), what happens to users if their business unit is disabled (they can’t access CRM but they still take up a license!), what happens to records owned by a user whose account is disabled (pretty much nothing), how to bulk reassign records, and the like.
  

• Option sets get a lot of coverage, and make sure you understand global option sets. For example, work through what happens if you use a global option set on forms for two different entities and change it from one of them.
• Make sure you have detailed knowledge of the different data types available for custom fields, and which field properties can be changed after saving a field.
• When you create a custom entity, which settings can be changed after saving and which cannot? If you define a new entity as an activity entity can you change your mind about that or about whether it’s displayed in the Activity Menus? (no and no). Can you change your mind about support for Notes, Activities, Connections, Sending e-mail, Mail-merge, Document Management or Queues? (no, no, no, no, yes, yes, no). How about Duplicate detection or Auditing? (yes and yes).

• Make sure you really understand the ins and outs and N:N relationships, especially the differences between native N:N’s and manual N:N’s using an intersection entity.
• Understand how Connections implement N:N relationships. (Connections are new in CRM 2011)
• Understand how you can access relationship properties (e.g., through form navigation – this is new in CRM 2011) and what you can customize once you get there (the difference between Parental, Referential, Referential (Restrict Delete) and Configurable Cascading – this is the same as in CRM 4.0)
• Know what mapping does and doesn’t do.

• Who can configure auditing?
• How do you configure audit partitions? Which ones can be deleted and when?
• What version of SQL Server (on-premise, of course!) do you need to configure audit partitions?
• Can auditing be turned on and off for an entity? If it’s on, which fields are audited by default? If it’s on, are schema customizations audited? (yes, all of them, and yes)

• How do you create multiple forms for an entity and what can they be used for? How are they assigned to security roles?
• What’s the difference between system-defined and public views? (same as in 4.0) Can public views be deactivated? (yes, new in 2011)
• Make sure you know the ins and outs of lookup, associated and quick find views.
• Can you export a chart’s XML definition file, modify it, and then import it? (yes) If so, what is that good for? (CRM can display multi-series charts, but the chart designer can’t create them, for example)
• Can you create a personal chart, export its XML definition file, and then import that as a system chart? (yes) If so, what’s that good for?

Implementing a Solution (13 percent)

When you consider that you get questions on this in other topic areas, it really means it accounts for more than 13% of the total questions. Plus it’s all new, so make sure you’re up to speed on topics like these:

• What are all the different components that can be part of a solution? Which of those components are form-enabled?
• What are the differences between managed and unmanaged solutions?
• When do you create a managed solution? (when you export it)
• What happens if you import several managed solutions on top of each other? How does conflict resolution work?
• How do solution versions work? What happens when you import a new version of an existing managed solution?
• What are managed properties for and where do you configure them? (they control whether somebody can customize components of a managed solution, but they are configured in the unmanaged solution!)
• You need drill-down detail knowledge about what the managed property options are for different components (e.g., entities, forms, views, fields and so forth), as well as for the differences between system entities and custom entities. Here’s an informal treatment of the subject:

Security Role Basics

I’ll start with a few basic facts about security roles. For the most part, security roles determine the access level a user has for privileges on every entity in Dynamics CRM. So what does that mean?

• Privileges are the verbs in CRM: Create, Read, Write, Delete, Append, Append To, Share, Assign.
  
• Access levels, from most to least generous: organization, parent-child business unit, business unit, user, none.
  
• Entities are the units to which a security role applies an access level for every privilege.   
  

This three-dimensional model is what accounts for the very colorful and initially somewhat overwhelming security role UI. The following two figures show the most generous and least generous out-of-the-box user security roles:

The CEO-Business Manager Security Role, Core Records Tab

The Salesperson Security Role, Core Records Tab

The Salesperson role is more interesting since it consists of things other than just completely filled in green circles, so I’ll explain these concepts in terms of this role. I’ll provide some examples to illustrate the trickier concepts.

Privileges

• Create: Create a new record
• Read: Read access to a record (if you search for it in Advanced Find or a data grid, can you see it?)
• Write: If you have a record open on a form, can you make changes and save them?
• Delete: The easiest one to understand!
• Append: Can you append this record to any other record? Example: if you don’t have any append privileges for the Contact entity, you cannot associate any contact record with a parent account.
• Append To: Can you append any other records to this record? Example: if you don’t have any append to privileges for contacts, you cannot associate notes or activities to contact records.
• Assign: can you change the owner of a record?
• Share: can you override the security model by sharing a record with somebody who otherwise wouldn’t have access to it?

Entities

These are the y axis, and it’s the intersection of these and the privileges on the x axis that determine how much of any particular privilege you have for a specific entity. Notice that the Core Records tab contains the customer (account and contact) entities, along with the “potential customer” entity (lead). It also contains Opportunity (not displayed in the figures, but it’s there!), Activity, Note, and a lot of other things.

Access Levels

Since it’s the intersection of the entity and the privilege that determines what you can do, I highlighted the Contact row in the figure. For most entities – all record types that can be assigned to a user, the so-called “User-Owned” entities – there are five access levels for each privilege, from least to most generous:

• None: The easiest to understand: you cannot do it!
• User: You can do it for records you own. Notice that the Salesperson role has user-level delete privilege for contacts. By default, a user assigned to this role can delete contact records assigned to them, so if you don’t want this, empty out the circle to set it to None.
• Business Unit: From User to Business Unit is a big jump, since it broadens out to include any record you own, plus any record owned by anybody else in your business unit. This is also the intersection between business units and security.
• Parent-Child Business Unit: This one only matters if your business unit structure is complex enough to have parent and child business units. If it is, the jump from Business Unit to Parent-Child Business Unit extends your access level down to any BU that is a child of the one you are assigned to.
• Organization: Also easy to understand, organization-level access means you can do it for any record owned by anybody in the organization. For example, notice that the account, contact and lead entities all have organization-level read privilege even in the least generous security role. Lots of organizations don’t want this level of visibility for a low-level security role, and thus might dial this back a little bit.

Customizing Security Roles

I’ve mentioned a few examples where many organizations will customize the default security roles. This topic has a few important basic facts of its own, such as:

• If you create new (that is, non-default) business units in your Dynamics CRM organization, every one you create will be a child of the root (default) business unit.
• That’s important for security roles, because every new business unit you create will inherit all of the security roles of its parent business unit. That is, security roles live at the business unit level, and any time you create a business unit, every security role of the parent is pushed down as an inherited role.
• And in turn, that’s important because inherited security roles can neither be deleted nor modified.

You might compare Dynamics CRM business units to sites in a SharePoint site collection: in SharePoint you can “break” security in a sense, configuring a child site in a collection to NOT inherit security from its parent site. You cannot do this in Dynamics CRM.

For example, the security roles shown in the above figures were security roles for the root business unit, so if you wanted to make changes to them and apply those changes to any existing child business unit (or any child business unit that might ever be created in the organization), you could do that. But…if you’re careful you can select a child business unit in the security role data grid, like this:

If you do that and open up one of the security roles, you will see something like the following:

The scary red text tells you what you need to know! So what does this mean for customizing security roles? Here are some of the most important implications:

1. If you want to customize an existing security role, you can only customize it in the business unit it was created in. So make sure to select the business unit in the Business Unit drop-down as in the previous example.
2. If you do customize a role, the changes you make will cascade down to all existing or future child business units.
3. If you want to create a new security role and have it available for every business unit in your CRM organization, create it at the root business unit.
4. If you want to create a new security role and have it available only for a specific business unit, make sure to create it only after selecting the business unit in the Business Unit drop-down!

I get questions having to do with this last point a lot, so I’ll emphasize it here. If you click the New button in the following figure, you will be creating a new security role that lives in the West business unit. It will not be in the parent business unit or any peer business units.

On the other hand, the following figure shows the security roles for the root business unit (note that the organization name is the same as the business unit – that’s how you can tell, provided you haven’t changed the name of the root business unit!). If you click the New button with the root business unit selected, the security role will push down to any child b.u.’s as an inherited role, and you will only be able to customize it at the root b.u.

Create a New Role, or Copy an Existing role?

Finally, if you do need a new role, there are two ways to create it:

• You can click the New button.
• Alternatively, you can select an existing role, click the More Actions drop-down and select Copy Role…

Generally it’s better to select a role that’s close to what you want and copy it. If you create a new role from scratch you might freeze up when you see this:

Just remember: whether you’re creating a new role from scratch or copying an existing role, make sure you’ve got the right business unit selected in the drop-down before you do. Security roles are definitely hard-wired into the business unit they’re originally created in, so you have to be in the business unit the role is for before you create it!

 Security Roles in CRM 2011: What’s Different?

The core functionality of security roles is essentially the same in Dynamics CRM 2011 as it was in 4.0. For example, everything I said above in the current article works the same for 2011 as it did in 4.0 (with the exception of being able to rename business units in the new version).

But that being said…there are significant differences in the overall security model. How can that be? Turns out there’s more the security than just the “how security roles work” question. Two of the most important areas of difference in comparing the two versions:

• There are a lot more entities to which security needs to be applied. For example, charts and dashboards didn’t exist in CRM 4.0, and now that they do…we need security for them. Here’s an article I wrote on on example of that: Charts and Dashboards: who can see what?
• Teams are now a full-fledged security principle — that is, records can be directly assigned to teams. Here’s a short article I wrote on that topic: Managing Users, Teams and Security.

These are both important topics, and big enough ones to deserve more detailed treatment than those articles. More coming soon!

For now, let’s start with the basics:

Exam MB2-866 — Microsoft Dynamics CRM 2011 Customization and Configuration

This is my favorite of the three core exams. The main differences between the 4.0 and 2011 versions? Certainly Solution Management is the biggest one, but a couple of other features — charts, team ownership of records — also are new and figure prominently. Links, starting with the Microsoft exam page:

• Microsoft Learning (MSL) page for exam MB2-866

If you’re preparing to take this exam, consider my 4-hour test-prep session coming up on October 28!

Exam MB2-868 — Microsoft Dynamics CRM 2011 Applications

Applications, gotta love it. (Especially the official curriculum! ) Sales, Marketing, Service Management, Service Scheduling. Some things are the same as the 4.0 exam version: don’t take the exam without understanding service scheduling and the scheduling engine, for example. Some things are new: inline filtering and visualization (charts), and goal management, for example. Links:

• MSL page for exam MB2-868

Exam MB2-867 — Microsoft Dynamics CRM 2011 Installation and Deployment

What’s different from 4.0? Hmmm…where do we start? IFD is the big one, but there are plenty of other important changes that feature prominently: server infrastructure, deployment manager, upgrading, and reporting extensions for SSRS are perhaps the most important.

Links:

• MSL page for exam MB2-867

Related Content

As I said, more CRM 2011 specific will follow, but for now, if you want to see the kind of stuff I did for the CRM 4.0 certifications, here are some samples:

• Practice test for the CRM 4.0 Customization & Configuration exam
• Practice test for the CRM 4.0 Applications exam

• Business Units
  • Names can be changed.
  • Can change the name of the root business unit to something other than the name of the organization.
  • Can delete business units in CRM 2011. To delete a business unit, you must remove all users, remove all teams, and then disable the business unit. Then it can be deleted.
• Users and Teams
  
  • In CRM 2011, both are full security principles – i.e., records can be assigned to both users and teams.
  • Users must always be assigned to a business unit, and they can only be assigned to a single business unit at a time.
  • Teams must be assigned to a business unit also, but the teams you create can include members (users, that is) from any business unit.
  • Teams, just like users, can be assigned security roles.
  • When users are added as members of a team, they keep all security privileges included in any of the security roles they’ve been assigned, plus they inherit all of the privileges from the team’s security roles. Since security roles are “additive”, this means that adding a user to a team will never give them less privileges and may give them more.
• Default business unit teams are created by the system when a business unit is created. These teams behave differently in some important respects from regular teams. Default business unit teams:
  • Cannot be deleted.
  • Cannot have their names changed.
  • Cannot have members not in the business unit.
  • Automatically assign membership to every user assigned to the business unit; cannot have their membership changed apart from changing a user’s business unit.

I’ll review both “native” and “manual” N:N’s, using a simple Association to Contact relationship to illustrate. This is a classic many-to-many: each association should be able to have multiple contacts associated with it, and each contact should in turn be able to be associated with many associations.

Native N:N Relationships

With native N:N relationships, you open up an entity for customization, click the N:N relationships link, and click the New Many to Many Relationship button and select the entity to create the relationship to. For the Association to Contact N:N relationship, I’ll start from the Association entity:

In the previous figure, notice that Do no Display is selected in the Display Option for each side. I only show that to illustrate a point: what this will do is prevent the relationship from being displayed on either form. You won’t be able to open the association form and associate a contact, or vice versa.

Interestingly, it also turns out that if you select Do not Display in the relationship properties, you will not be able to create an Advanced Find query between two record types related with an N:N. So the Do not Display option apparently means “do not display in Advanced Find”, as well as “do not display on the form”.

Normally I’ll select the following option (Use Plural Name), so my users can actually access the relationship from the respective forms:

After saving and publishing these customizations, here’s what it might look like from the standpoint of an association form, with a few contacts associated:

Remember: if I’d used the Do not Display option I mentioned above, nobody would ever see the Contacts link on the Association form, so you wouldn’t be able to associate contacts with associations, or see any records anybody else had managed to associate!

Once you’ve got records associated in N:N relationships, there are a number of ways you can see them, besides navigating to a form like I just showed.

Here’s an Advanced Find query that will show all active associations with associated contact records:

I used to think you had to use the Select underneath Contacts to add a condition like “Contact contains data”, but you don’t. The way I show it in the previous figure does that implicitly.

The next figure shows the flip side: all of the contacts that are associated with associations.

If you work through examples like that, what you will find is that although N:N relationships are symmetrical as far as defining them goes, they aren’t quite symmetrical when it comes to Advanced Find: while you can filter on the related record type in Advanced Find, you can only include columns from the primary entity. For example:

• If Associations is in the Look for, you can see which associations have contacts, but you cannot add columns from the contact entity.
• If Contacts is in the Look for, you can return contact columns for contacts in associations, but you cannot add columns from the association entity.

However, you can still kind of get what you need…in a way, sort of. For example, here’s an Advanced Find query that will return information about all of the contacts in Association 1:

You can’t include any fields from the association entity, but you can drill through it in Advanced Find to query for a specific one.

With me so far? If you’ve got the patience to build a report, and your users don’t mind running it, you can create a report, using the Report Wizard, that does include fields from both sides of the N:N equation. For example, the following figure shows a report created with the wizard, where Association is the primary entity and Contact is the secondary:

This illustrates a general point about the difference between Advanced Find and reports created with the Report Wizard:

• With Advanced Find, you can start with the parent record and filter on values from the child record, but you cannot include columns from the child record.
• With reports, you can start with the parent record and filter on values from the child record…and you can also include columns from the child record, effectively “looping” through all of the child records for each of the parent records.

Advantages and Disadvantages of Native N:N Relationships

The primary advantage of native N:N relationships is how easy they are to create and understand.

However, there are several disadvantages:

• As I showed above, you cannot use Advanced Find to build a view that contains columns from both sides of the relationship.
• You also cannot import data using the Import Data Wizard. For example, if you created the N:N between contact and association in CRM and then wanted to import a big list of association members (contacts) and get them attached to the associations while importing…this isn’t possible.
• You also cannot take advantage of workflows with the native N:N approach. For example, you might want a notification workflow to run automatically when a new member is added to an association. Or you might want a workflow to create a member record when some condition is satisfied. Sadly, neither of these are possible with the native N:N approach. L

Fortunately, there’s another way to create many-to-many relationships that solves all of these problems. And while it takes a little more work to do it, it’s not that much more work. And it’s definitely a lot less work than taking the wrong approach first and then having to change your mind and regroup afterwards! J

Manual N:N Relationships

The so-called “manual” approach to creating many-to-many relationships adds two components not used in the native approach:

• A third entity – often referred to as the “junction” or “intersection” entity – is used to contain “instances” of the relationship. For example, with associations and contacts, you’d create a custom entity called something like “Association Membership”, or maybe just “Membership”. If you were building an event management application, you might have contacts and events related with an N:N, and create a custom entity called “Registration” as the intersection entity.
• Instead of creating a direct N:N, you relate the two entities indirectly, by creating 1:N relationships to the intersection record type.

Here are two Visio diagrams that should help clarify the difference between the two approaches:

Native N:N Relationship between Contact and Association:

Manual N:N Relationship between Contact and Association, using Membership Entity:

In one sense, these two approaches are equivalent: a contact can be linked with one or more associations, and each association can have one or more contacts linked with it.

But in Dynamics CRM there are lots of differences, and you can see from the way I created the Membership entity that the disadvantages of the native approach are solved by the manual one:

• You can create an Advanced Find view on the Membership entity, and include any fields you want in the view, whether from Membership, Contact or Association.
• If you’ve got some combination of contacts, associations and memberships in spreadsheets, you can import them all into Dynamics CRM. (And for bonus points, the Data Import Wizard in CRM 2011 lets you create custom entities and fields on the fly, as well as associate child to parent records, so you could do everything in one pass: create the custom association and membership entities and import the data!)
• Workflows can run on the Membership entity, so the scenarios I mentioned above are possible along with anything else you can think of.

While the creation of both kinds of many-to-many relationships is conceptually similar in Dynamics CRM 2011 and CRM 4.0, the actual execution of it is a lot different, and a lot easier! And rather than a long drawn-out step-by-step, here’s a video that demonstrates how to do it:

Connections and Connection Roles

And just in case two ways to create many-to-many relationships weren’t enough, there actually is one more: Connections and Connection Roles. I’ve written a couple of articles about these, and if you review the most recent one, you might be able to tell from the title that these are really a specific implementation of the manual N:N approach I just reviewed. Basically, the Dynamics CRM team created a framework to give more exposure to these useful N:N relationships and to make them easier to use. In the terms I used here, you can think about it like this:

• The Connection record is the intersection record.
• The Connection Role defines the N:N relationship, specifically the two “parent” records each of which will have a 1:N relationship to the Connection record.

(So Many) Many-to-Many Options: Which to Use?

So…of these three approaches, which is best? As always, it depends on what you need to do, but here are some rules of thumb you can use as guidance:

Native N:N 

Probably the easiest to configure but the most limiting. Use when you only need to know that two records are connected to each other but you don’t need additional information about the connection itself.

 Examples:

• Custom entity Industry with an N:N to Account
• Add a custom N:N relationship between the Competitor and Territory entities to track which competitors are active in which territories
• Custom entity Color with an N:N to Contact (you don’t track your contacts’ favorite colors???)

 Manual N:N

A little more work to configure, but generally worth the effort. Use when in addition to knowing two records are connected, you also need information about the connection, such as its status, when it was created and so forth.

 Examples:

• Associations and Members
•  Events and Registrations (1:N from Contact to Registration, 1:N from Event to Registration)
•  Subscribers and Subscriptions (1:N from Contact to custom entity “Subscription”, 1:N from custom entity “Subscription Product” to Subscription)

Connections and Connection Roles

As I mentioned above, these are actually a specific implementation of the Manual approach. And if you delve into this a little, you’ll find that the Connection entity is a bona-fide customizable entity. You can even customize it, adding custom fields to the connection form and so forth. But…be careful about overdoing it: there’s only one Connection entity, and customizations made for one Connection Role generally will not be applicable to another one. 

One specific advantage of these is that a single connection role can connect records of different types (e.g., contacts can refer other contacts, accounts and opportunities)

This is a judgment call, but I’d say to use these when you need to track some information about the actual connections (such as when they’re created and how many there are…), but not that much.
Examples:

• Referrals (Contact to Contact, Contact to Account, Contact to Opportunity)
• Former Employee (Contact to Account, Lead to Account)
• Board of Directors (Contact to custom entity “Board”, Lead to Board)
  

In Dynamics CRM lingo, the word “customizing” is conventionally used to refer to “schema” customizations: customizations to forms and views, entities and attributes, relationships, and the like. These are “schema” customizations since the changes you make are actual changes to the database schema, and are stored as metadata in the SQL database. These are, for the most part, no-code customizations, and the amazing mileage you can get out of them is a big reason for Dynamics CRM’s exploding popularity as a customization platform.

Extending

While schema customizations have many advantages, they also have some limitations. These can be overcome by more advanced techniques supported by the Dynamics CRM architecture and generally referred to as “extensions”. Specifically, these include:

• Programming with the Dynamics CRM API
• Customizing the CRM UI with SiteMap and ISV.Config
• Developing ASP.NET applications that integrate with Dynamics CRM
• Building and deploying “Plug-ins”
• Building custom workflow activities

These extend Dynamics CRM in a number of ways. First and most important, they let you build extra functionality. For example, if you wanted to build a custom CRM front-end with a richer GUI than the standard CRM web forms offer, you can develop an ASP.NET application that reads and writes to Dynamics CRM via supported web services. Or if you have a requirement that custom business logic execute before a Dynamics CRM record is deleted, that’s something a custom Plug-in can do. Another way in which these techniques extend CRM is that they generally are NOT stored as metadata in the SQL Server database. Plug-ins and custom workflow activities get compiled and their assemblies get deployed onto your CRM server. ASP.NET applications are copied onto your CRM server, by convention to a special folder (”ISV”, for “independent software developer”) underneath IIS (specifically, under “inetpub”).

Extensions are more complex to develop, they require professional development experience and tools (.NET and Visual Studio being by far the most common), and the fact that they’re deployed as external files means you don’t have the convenient all-in-one-place deployment model of a pure schema-customization approach. And by the way, this last point – that they’re deployed as external files – has up to now meant they are also not available for CRM Online, since you can’t just copy your DLLs up to Microsoft’s big IIS in the cloud!

But in return for some increased complexity of development and deployment…you get a lot of cool customization possibilities. These are the main topics I cover in my new Extending Dynamics CRM one-day live online class, and I’ll lay them out in a little more detail in the following table:

Extension Approach	What it’s for, how it works	Examples
API programming	Through compiled code or form script, use a web service such as “CrmService”, which exposes methods such as “Create”, “Delete” and “RetrieveMultiple” (you can probably guess what those methods do!)	Custom dashboards Retrieving and summarizing information for related entities Programmatically changing the schema (adding entities, attributes, etc.)
SiteMap and ISV.Config	Customize two XML files, SiteMap for the left navigation area, ISV.Config to customize the built-in form and grid toolbars, and menus	Customize SiteMap to augment or replace the standard “Resource Center” with your own pages Modify ISV.Config to add custom buttons to the Case or Opportunity forms, which in turn can run code with custom business logic
ASP.NET application development	Build and deploy custom ASP.NET web applications	Create standalone CRM front-end applications for a richer form experience, or as client “portal” applications for external access Create applications to be consumed by an IFRAME on a CRM form, for example custom grids, KPIs and so forth
Plug-ins	Server-based DLLs to implement event-based custom business logic and processing. Complete event pipeline supports both pre- and post-event processing.	Unlike form script, these are not dependent on a form being loaded, so can guarantee code execution regardless of how a record is created, modified or deleted. Unlike the native web UI workflow designer, Plug-ins can fire before a record is deleted or saved, so give you more granular control.
Custom workflow activities	Server-based DLLs to add custom actions to the native web UI workflow designer. Similar to Plug-ins, except designed for use by workflow designers, rather than as event-driven business logic.	These are good for situations when you, as a coder, need to make custom functionality available to people who use the Dynamics CRM workflow designer to build workflows. Do your workflow designers want to calculate aggregate statistics on child records and store them into fields on the parent record? A custom workflow activity can do things like that.

Certification Options

If you’re interested in Dynamics CRM certification, you’ll find a pragmatic distinction between these two concepts expressed in the following two exam prep pages, courtesy of Microsoft Learning:

• CRM 4.0 Customization and Configuration
• CRM 4.0 Extending Microsoft Dynamics CRM

I’m excited about the next release; I think Microsoft is really going to push this XRM concept, and make the platform both easier to customize and more powerfully extensible. There are also some interesting licensing considerations: think of what it would look like if you could license it without some of the core functionality, or perhaps with some additional functionality.

An early example of a shipping XRM app is Dynamics CRM Online for Non-Profits, which is available now on the Dynamics CRM Online platfrm, and can be licensed for $9.99 per-user per-month. According to Microsoft, “The solution provides out-of-the-box constituent relationship management functionality as well as customizations for donation and pledge management, basic membership management, basic volunteer tracking, campaign management, dashboard reports, and support for online payment solutions.”

But in the meantime, we’ve got the 4.0 release, and if you are new to customizing CRM, or if you need to pass the Dynamics CRM 4.0 Customization and Configuration exam (30-631), here are some suggested ways for you to learn what you need to know:

If you want to pass the 631 exam, I’ve got an E-Learning library we sell on a subscription basis, including the full recorded instructor-led training sessions from a certification bootcamp training class I used to run. Here are a couple samples from the subscription:

• Core customization topics. Watch this video for Dynamics CRM 4.0 core customization concepts. This is a good 30-minute (or so) overview of the various ways you can customize Dynamics CRM: form and view customizations, entity and attribute customizations, entity relationships and mappings, workflows, .NET extensions.
• Here’s a detailed (and longer!) video that covers configuration topics (business units, users, security roles). Even though they aren’t really customization topics, per se, you really do need to understand them to be an effective customizer of Dynamics CRM. The first 10 minutes covers program-related information, so you can skip that if you want to go directly to the meat of the content!
• Here is a walk-through of a 631 practice test, with commentary (from me). These practice tests were posted on Microsoft.com/learning for a while, but I think they took them down — at least I can’t find them. (If you ever find them, please let me know where they are! )

A 6-month subscription to the E-learning Library costs $100, and if you want to subscribe or have questions, please e-mail Mary Annino at marya@imginc.com

If, on the other hand, you simply need to learn how to customize Dynamics CRM 4.0, I recommend the Customizing Dynamics CRM and the xRM Platform class from my Dynamics CRM Essentials series. This is a one-day live online class I deliver monthly. The registration fee is $300, and starting in June 2010, this registration fee includes a private one-hour session (phone and Live Meeting) during which we discuss and prototype your “XRM” requirements.  Most people are pleasantly surprised (some are blown away) by how much can be accomplished in an hour-long session with somebody that knows the platform as well as I do. Here’s what you get with your registration:

• Attendance at the one-day live online session, plus you can re-attend of the other regularly scheduled sessions for the next 6 months.
• I record the sessions and circulate links to each month’s participants.
• The one-hour design/prototyping session I mentioned above.

Here’s a link to the outline of topics for Customizing Dynamics CRM and the xRM Platform, and here’s an 8-minute video that describes what you’ll learn.  

Richard

Even a casual reader of the Trick Bag will know that I never ever would have survived by writing ad copy. The headline of this article is another proof of this point, but I wanted something snappy to communicate the essence of the Dynamics CRM Essentials training series I’m delivering in the coming months, in conjunction with United Training. Here’s the spiffy new logo I had my designer (me) create:

The Essentials are a series of 1-day live online training sessions, delivered by yours truly. Here’s the schedule current as of late January, 2010

• Friday, Jan 29 2010: Building Workflows in Dynamics CRM 4.0
• Thursday, Feb 4 2010: Customizing Dynamics CRM and the XRM Platform
• Thursday, Feb. 25 2010: Building Value on Dynamics CRM Applications

I’ve designed the training content myself, and I think for a lot of people it will be just the right combination of efficiency and learning effectiveness. The one-day format is aggressive for a product as broad as Dynamics CRM, but here’s why (and for whom) it will work:

1. These sessions are targeted to experienced users, power-users, customizers and IT professionals. You do NOT have to be an expert to take these (the point is to turn you into one!), but if you don’t have any experience in Dynamics CRM you’d be better off with a more traditional training delivery.
2. I cover a lot of topics…but I use my editorial judgment about what are really the most important things for you to know. (Hence the “Essentials” bit). There’s no fluff, for one thing. For another, I’ll simply skip topics that would be covered in a longer format class (For example,  I won’t cover how to create resource selection rules for the scheduling engine, nor will I cover how to work with contracts. Not that those both aren’t cool feature areas…but for most people they really aren’t essential)

In fact, I believe in this training so much, not only will you get a full refund if you aren’t satisfied, but I’ll also give you my recipe for made-from-scratch buttermilk pancakes!

For more information (including downloadable PDF files with detailed outlines) or to register, here’s the Dynamics CRM Essentials landing page on our web site.  I hope to see you in one of these upcoming sessions!

I mentioned we’re doing these  in partnership with United Training, North America’s largest consortium of independent Microsoft training firms. Here’s a link to the United Training web site.

Sorry! I didn’t mean to disrespect this exam (even though I didn’t like it as much as the Customization and Configuration exam, and not nearly as much as the Applications exam which I liked so much I took it twice!)

I’ll start out with some links to resources that will help you prepare for the exam:

Here’s the Microsoft Learning exam prep page:
http://www.microsoft.com/learning/en/us/exams/dynamics/633.mspx

Here’s the single best source of exam prep material (the Implementation Guide): http://www.microsoft.com/downloads/details.aspx?FamilyID=1ceb5e01-de9f-48c0-8ce2-51633ebf4714&displaylang=en – (memorize the planning and installing chapters and you’ll get 40% of the required 70% right there!)

I recorded some of the instructor-led training sessions I made as part of the Partner Readiness Bootcamp Series I delivered for Microsoft over the course of the last couple years. (I really like them although I may not be the best judge as I always like my own stuff!) You can find a complete set of links to the recordings on the Learning Center on my new web site, www.IMGinc.net.

• Here’s a link to the Certification page in the Learning Center.
• Here are three videos I recorded that should be helpful in preparing for the 633 exam:
  • Pre-installation planning and requirements
  • Installing Dynamics CRM 4.0
  • Redeploying, Upgrading and Repairing

I hope you find this helpful, and good luck on the exam.

Applications

• Course: Applications in Dynamics CRM 4.0
• Link to MS course page: http://www.microsoft.com/learning/en/us/syllabi/8913b.aspx
• Certification exam: http://www.microsoft.com/learning/en/us/exams/dynamics/632.mspx
• Editorial comments:  The Applications class is quite good (if you get a good instructor!), but it is not sufficient to prepare you for the Applications exam, which in my opinion is the hardest of the three core exams to pass! You will need a lot of Dynamics CRM experience, and you will need to know the web and Outlook UI’s very well to pass the exam.
• Here’s an article I wrote on this exam that a lot of people tell me they’ve found helpful.
• Here’s a link to the Applications practice test for Dynamics CRM 4.0.

Customization

• Course: Customization and Configuration in Dynamics CRM 4.0
• Link to MS course page: http://www.microsoft.com/learning/en/us/syllabi/8912a.aspx
• Certification exam: http://www.microsoft.com/learning/en/us/exams/dynamics/631.mspx
• Editorial comments: The Customization and Configuration exam is an excellent exam, in my opinion: it’s relatively difficult, but it’s well-written and it tests concepts that you actually need to know to be an effective customizer and configurator (if that’s how you’d say it). The Configuration part is what’s new in the 4.0 exam compared to the 3.0 version: to pass this exam, you need to understand business units and security, system settings, and multi-currency and multi-lingual issues (in addition to the core customization topics).  
• Here’s an article I posted recently specifically on The Dynamics CRM Customization Platform and Exam 30-631. (But be forwarned: I reveal my true inner geek in the videos linked to from the article) 
• Here’s a link to the practice test for Customizing and Configuring Dynamics CRM 4.0.

Installation

• Course: Installation and Deployment in Microsoft Dynamics CRM 4.0
• Link to MS course page: http://www.microsoft.com/learning/en/us/syllabi/8911B.aspx
• Certification exam: http://www.microsoft.com/learning/en/us/exams/dynamics/633.mspx
• Editorial comments: Installation and Deployment is an OK exam – not fantastic but not terrible either. The trick about this exam is preparing for it. I always emphasize to students that the single best resource for preparing for this exam is the Dynamics CRM 4.0 Implementation Guide – not the Microsoft Official Curriculum course. Memorize the Planning and Installing chapters and you will get at least a 40% on the exam (of course, you need another 30 points to pass it!)
• Here’s an article I wrote specifically on preparing for the Installation and Deployment exam.  
• Here’s a link to the Installation and Deployment practice test for Dynamics CRM 4.0