Dec. 23, 2010 – Recently I was asked how to manage vendors in Dynamics CRM. I’m a big proponent of using the account record type for things other than just “customers”. But the simplest approaches to categorizing accounts are too restrictive for many organizations…which is where “many-to-many” relationships come in. These are both easier to create and easier to apply in CRM 2011 than in 4.0, and in this part 1 of 2 articles, I show you how to create them and use them to classify accounts.

December 13, 2010 – Both CRM 4.0 and CRM 2011 allow you to attach a file to most record types. But you don’t get versioning, check-in/check-out or other collaboration features. But Dynamics CRM 2011 has a simple and productive integration with SharePoint…that does have all of those features. Here’s a quick look at it.

December 2, 2010 – If you ever had to manually synch up the values in a similar picklist on two different entity forms in CRM 4.0, you will like global option sets in CRM 2011. If you ever had to do it for three picklists on three entity forms in CRM 4.0 you will LOVE global option sets in CRM 2011.

November 30, 2010 – If you customize Dynamics CRM the upgrade from 4 to 2011 will definitely end up saving you time. This little day-in-the-life video illustrates four features each of which is so far in my “top ten timesaving new customization features”. Let me know if you agree, or if I missed any of yours!

November 12, 2010 – Web Resources are new in CRM 2011, and are an important new foundation feature for customizing the platform. Described in the SDK as “virtual files”, they will definitely improve your (professional) life, if you happen to be a Dynamics CRM customizer or developer. They make certain things easier, other things possible…and necessitate your learning a new object model for CRM 2011 forms, which isn’t so bad once you get used to it and in any case is worth the tradeoff. This article (and the accompanying recording) is a condensed version of a presentation I gave at the recent Extreme 2010 conference.

Sept. 24, 2010 – Here’s the customization demo from Session #1 of the CRM 2011 What’s New lunch & learn series. I love the new form design environment! Drag and drop, new form sections for headers and footers, drag and drop customization of navigation (no more having to remember where that Display Order is!). Plus I show a couple of other things: the sweet new lookup field, how to filter a lookup…enjoy!

September 2, 2010 – Sometimes, old-fashioned is the way to go. This is often the case when it comes to many-to-many (or “N:N”) relationships in Dynamics CRM. I’ve had a few questions lately about this, so I wrote up a summary that compares the two main approaches for doing this, and recorded a video on how to create old-fashioned (”manual”) N:N’s. Enjoy!

August 2, 2010 – When it comes to maxims, the pithier the better, I always say. Most of the CRM 4 maxims in this article fail the truly pithy test, but I hope they make up for it in usefulness. Let me know what you think.

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.