Aug. 29 — At the August meeting of the Dynamics CRM User Group (www.DynamicsCRMUserGroup.com ) we held our second session on Mobility Solutions for Dynamics CRM. Microsoft’s Bob Piskule presented on the Microsoft product, Mobile Express; and Ben Mitchell presented on TenDigits’ flagship product, Mobile Access.

This post contains a summary, some background information, and links to recordings of my intro, and the two main presentations.

Excellent new Microsoft training class available now, Integrating Dynamics CRM and SharePoint
Full disclosure: I recently wrote this class for Microsoft. So I suppose I’m not exactly disinterested…but I actually do think it’s an excellent class and I suspect readers of this blog will be interested in it. So here’s the official landing page on the Microsoft Learning [...]

May 8 — InsideView is an amazingly useful tool for prospecting accounts, and contacts at those accounts. They’ve got a great pricing model, the tool can sit inside an IFRAME on your Account or Lead forms, and if you need to prospect, I highly recommend you check it out. In this article I explain why it just might be the “ultimate CRM mashup”.

I’ll admit I’m skeptical about the value of market share. Here are just a few reasons not to put excessive focus on it:

Various definitions of ”the market” are essentially arbitrary, and share measures will be highly dependent on these definitions.
What are the important metrics? Revenue? Seats? Server licenses? Different vendors have different licensing models, and when you [...]

A BPOS Story with a Happy Ending
One of the first articles I posted on the re-launched Dynamics CRM Trick Bag was a bit of a rant about the Microsoft product Business Productivity Online Suite (BPOS, for short). This is Microsoft’s “cloud computing” suite of hosted Exchange, SharePoint and Live Meeting. I had a heck of [...]

Using the BDC in SharePoint
Once you’ve got the application definition file properly imported into your MOSS 2007 Shared Services Provider, using it within SharePoint is pretty easy. (again, this assumes you have some familiarity with SharePoint, know how to edit pages and use Web Parts! Apologies in advance if you don’t, but to keep the [...]

The Dynamics CRM 4.0 Enterprise Search Accelerator allows you to integrate Dynamics CRM 4.0 into a SharePoint deployment, in two main ways: by extending SharePoint search to include Dynamics CRM as a searchable content source, and by allowing you to use a set of special web parts to expose lists of Dynamics CRM entities on [...]

Web2CRM from CRM Innovation is an excellent add-on tool for capturing information on a web form and importing it directly into Dynamics CRM. Microsoft Dynamics CRM Online has a similar capability “out of the box”. This article contains a detailed look at Web2CRM, and a summary comparison of the Microsoft and CRM Innovation approaches.

This is an important topic if you need to integrate Internet marketing efforts into your overall marketing programs…and if you’re using Dynamics CRM for your marketing!
I’ll start with links to videos I recorded on these topics:
Dynamics CRM Marketing Fundamentals and Internet Marketing
This is a narrated slide deck on Dynamics CRM Marketing, campaigns and campaign responses…and how we might extend [...]

“URL Addressable Forms” just a fancy way of saying you can navigate directly to almost any form or window in Dynamics CRM directly — without drilling down through the UI to get there. This trick can save you time, save screen real estate, and in extreme situations might even save your job (if you break your site map and have an unforgiving boss, for example).