In my opinion, however, the most exciting role for Dynamics CRM is as a “customization platform”. Recently we’ve started to see people referring to it as “XRM”, with the “X” indicating its adaptibility to any line of business application area. Essentially, if you need to build a database application and use the Internet as your delivery platform, you should consider Dynamics CRM as your app foundation.

I’m excited about the next release; I think Microsoft is really going to push this XRM concept, and make the platform both easier and more powerfully extensible. 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 a couple sample videos I’ve recorded on the topics:

• 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!
• Read this article on Status and Status Reason values on the MS Dynamics CRM Resource Center, and then save it to your Favorites for a reference. Having this link handy has saved me lots of time over the years, and if you need to customize CRM, you’ll find it useful too!

And finally, if you really DO want to take the exam, click this link for 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! )

And even more finally, here’s the practice test I wrote for the CRM 4.0 customization & configuration exam. Enjoy!

I hope you found this useful; and if you do take the exam, good luck!

Richard

The Dynamics CRM 4.0 Applications Exam (Microsoft exam MB 632) is a very difficult exam. One of the things I didn’t like about it is that it’s got a lot of questions that require detailed recollection of the web and Outlook user interfaces – for example, whether the Outlook client you click “Set Regarding” from a grid with a row selected, or whether you have to open up the entity form first. Generally speaking, I don’t see a ton of value in remembering UI facts like that, unless you have to write step-by-step instructions from memory, or if you’re in a situation where all the lights are out and you can’t see the screen very well and have to work from memory.

But beyond the UI memorization aspect of the test, I thought some things about it were actually pretty good, and as I studied to take the test a second time I had to develop a more detailed understanding of the various entities in CRM; and not just the obvious ones like Account and Contact, but also ones you might not use every day, like Subject, Knowledge Base Articles and Templates, and so forth. Certain aspects of these – like what relationships they have with each other, what Status and Status Reason values can they have, and which ones can be deleted as opposed to deactivated, and under what conditions – come up in a lot of the exam questions, and in my opinion it’s actually useful to know things like that if you’re going to be a Dynamics CRM consultant, which I guess is the ultimate goal of most of us, so I thought I’d review some of the most important of them here. I’ll present them ordered by the Dynamics CRM module they’re exposed in, which pretty much maps to the section of the test you’ll see questions on them.

I hope you find this helpful, and good luck on the exams!

Status and Status Reason Fields

This is an important topic for the Applications exam, as well as (especially!) for the Customization and Configuration exam. I discuss it in context throughout the rest of this article, but for the best single treatment of an important CRM topic, you absolutely must read this article, from the MS Dynamics CRM Resource Center:  http://rc.crm.dynamics.com/rc/regcont/en_us/op/articles/statestatus.aspx

Activity Record Types

Surely you know which 8 activity record types can be created from the Dynamics CRM UI? (hint: appointment, e-mail, task, fax, phone call, letter, service activity, and campaign response)

Sales

Product. If you’re an Administrator, you can delete a Product record from the Product Catalog (Settings/Product Catalog/Products). You can view and edit information about products from Sales (Sales/Products), but there’s no delete available from there.

Products can both be deleted and deactivated. If a Product is associated with another record – say, an Opportunity – it can’t be deleted, but it can be deactivated. When a product is deactivated, you can’t change anything about it – say, its price – but it’s ok to deactivate a Product even if it’s associated to an active record like an open Opportunity.

Suppose you change the price of a Product in the Product Catalog (remember: it has to be Active to do that). If you have an open Opportunity that has an Opportunity Product based on that product, do you have to open it and click Recalculate for it to update? No: as soon as you open the Opportunity form the price will update reflecting the new catalog price!

Opportunities. Remember that an Opportunity must be associated with a Price List containing Price List Items in order to use System Calculated Pricing. And if you create the Opportunity using the wrong Currency and want to fix it, the only way to do it is to delete the Opportunity and recreate it – once the record is saved the Currency can’t be changed.

Opportunities can be deleted. They can also be Closed (either as Won or Lost), and if you Close an Opportunity with a Status Reason of Lost you can assign a Competitor at that point.

Quotes. If you’re working with an Opportunity that has System Calculated Pricing and you’ve added Opportunity Products to it, you can create new Quote records based on the Opportunity and the information from the Opportunity (e.g., the Est. Revenue from the Opportunity) will come over to the Quote. You can create as many Quotes as you want for an Opportunity, and you can also create a Quote from scratch if you want to.

If you want to use information from a different Opportunity to populate your Quote with, that’s what the “Get Products” command from the Actions menu is for.

You can also use the Look up Address command (toolbar or Actions) to use the More Addresses from the Account record for Ship to and Bill to addresses, if any have been entered.

In a sense, a Quote is like a Contract, in that once you Activate it (analogous to Invoicing a Contract) it goes into lockdown mode (status of Active), and then you can’t change it. Quotes, however, have a revision process you can use to negotiate with customers: once it’s Activated, a Quote can be Revised (Actions menu), and then you can make changes; CRM will keep track of revisions with the Revision ID (auto-generated in whole number increments, starting with 1), as you go through the negotiation process.

When a customer is ready to accept a Quote, you can use the Create Order button (or use the Actions menu), and you’ll have the option of closing out the Opportunity at the same time, provided that there are no other Quotes for the Opportunity in an Active or Draft state at the time (remember: Opportunity to Quote is 1:N, so there could be any number of Quotes for the Opportunity!)

Orders. You can create a new Order from scratch, by using the Create Order command from a Quote record, or from an Opportunity record directly (skipping the Quote stage). As with Quotes, Orders will use the information from your Opportunity if you’ve used a Price List and added Products to the Opportunity.

Orders are different from Quotes in that if you create one, it goes into Active status directly, and it doesn’t have the revision process that a Quote record does. Plus, you can delete Active Orders. 

Marketing       

• Campaigns and Quick Campaigns. Know the differences between these. For example, a single Campaign can have multiple Campaign Activities (Email, Phone Calls, etc.), and each of those Campaign Activities can have multiple Marketing Lists it gets distributed to. But a Quick Campaign just lets you perform one Activity at a time on a group of records. Also, there’s no built-in reporting for Quick Campaigns the way there is for Campaigns. So for example, if you wanted to compare the performance of two Quick Campaigns there’s no easy built-in way to do that.  

Campaigns and Quick Campaigns can be deleted, but not deactivated. Also, Quick Campaigns can be viewed and Campaign Responses monitored by going to the Quick Campaigns tab in the Marketing area. But they can only be created by going to the entity you want to create one for (Account, Contact, Lead), and using the Create Quick Campaign function from there.

• When is a Campaign over? This is a tricky one. Create a Marketing Campaign and then see if you can close it out. See what I mean? the Campaign entity is different from most entities in CRM, in that it only has ONE status value – ”Active”. So when it comes to Dynamics CRM Marketing Campaigns…they ain’t over until you say they’re over! (or until you delete them. then they’re REALLY over.)   
• Marketing Lists. Probably the most important thing to remember about Marketing Lists is which entities they can be created for (Leads, Accounts, Contacts), and that each list can only contain records of one of those entity types – no mixing and matching Leads and Contacts, for example.

Marketing Lists can be deleted or deactivated.

Service

• Case. Know what’s required to create a Case record. (Title, Customer, Subject, in addition to the usual Owner, which is filled in by default.). Note that Contract is an optional field on the Case form, but if you do enter a Contract (and to do that you’ll need an Invoiced Contract for the current Customer, and you’ll need to be within the contract period of that contract!), you will need to select at least one Line Item from that Contract. A Case record can be deleted, even if it has open Activities associated with it. A Case record can be resolved, but not if it has open Activities – all of the Activities must be Closed (have Status values of Completed) before you can Resolve the Case.

Note that when you Resolve a Case, all of the time spent on each of the Activities will be totaled up and the total will be put into the Billable Time field on the Case Resolution Activity record that’s created when the Case is Resolved! There’s a lot going on behind the scenes here, so I’d recommend you work through a few examples and make sure you understand it.

Also: a Resolved Case can be Reactivated (select the Resolved Cases view and open up one of the ones you see there) by using the Reactivate command from Actions. Suppose you reactivate a Case and then spend some more time on it, in the form of Activities that you close out, and then Resolve the Case a second time. If the Case record is not associated with a Contract, then the total time spent on ALL of the Activities for the Case are included in the second Case Resolution record. But if the Case has a Contract associated with it, only the time spent on the “new” Activities (after the first Case Resolution record was created and the Case Reactivated) are included in the total – no double counting on a Contract!

• Subject. As an Administrator, navigate to the so-called Subject Tree by going to Settings/Business Management. You can only add, edit or remove (delete) Subjects – there’s no deactivate option when it comes to these things. And if you have a Subject that’s associated with an active record, you can’t delete it from the Subject Tree.

Example: suppose you have an active Case record with a Subject referred to (and Subject is required for the Case entity!). If you try to delete it from the Subject Tree you’ll get an error message. If you remove that Subject from the Case, and there are no other references to it anywhere, you can then delete it from the Subject Tree.

You might think that you can Resolve the Case and then remove it from the Subject Tree, but that doesn’t work either. Even if the only references to it are on Resolved Cases, you still can’t delete the Subject. So you’d either need to delete all of the records that are associated with the Subject in question, or remove all of the associations to it from those records, and then you could delete it.

• Knowledgebase Article. K-base Articles have a built-in workflow to edit and publish them. If you have Create permissions on the Article entity, you can navigate to Service/Knowledge Base, and then you’ll see the special Queues for K-base Articles: Draft, Unapproved, and Published. First create a new one, based on a template. That will create it in Draft mode. Then it needs to be Submitted, which puts it into an Unapproved status. Then, assuming you have permissions, you Approve it, and everybody who has Read permission on Articles (and all security roles do by default) will be able to see it. Articles are all or nothing – if you see them you see all of them. (They can be seen from the Notes and Article tab on the Case entity, where you can search on them for assistance in resolving a Case.)

Articles can be deleted, but NOT if they are Published. You first need to Unpublish, and then you can delete an Article from either the Unpublished or Draft areas.

• Knowledgebase Article Template. All K-base Articles are based on Article Templates, which Administrators can maintain by going to Templates/Article Templates. You can edit the templates that come pre-configured (4 of them), or create your own. You can only delete an Article Template if there are no Articles that are based upon it…even if they are not in a Published state.

• Contract. Contracts are different from other entities in some important ways. First, they have more required fields than most do: Name, Customer, Start Date, End Date, and Bill to Customer (defaults to Customer). If you create and save a new Contract, and you’re within the contract period (current date between the start and end dates), you can then add Line Items for the Contract. Only after you add at least one Line Item can you then Invoice the Contract (More Actions/Invoice). Only after a Contract has been Invoiced does its Status change to Active, and then you can use it to enter Activities against on a Case opened for the same Customer as the Contract is for.

Here’s another important thing that’s different about Contracts, then: once it’s Active, you can’t make changes to it. At that point it’s locked down and available for booking Case Activities against, but what if you made a mistake and need to edit it? For example, if you enter the wrong End Date for the Contract and want to change it, here’s what you do: use the Copy Contract command (from More Actions on the Contract form) and that will duplicate the entire contract for you, creating the new one with the same name (but a different contract number) and putting it in Draft status. THEN you can make your changes to the new one, and Invoice it, and then Cancel the first one and delete it (or not).  

And remember that the Allotment Type – the units in which the Contract will be budgeted, essentially – are entered at the Contract Template level. What that means is that every Line Item for a Contract will contain the same Allotment Type. So, for example, you can’t create one Contract with a Line Item for “Number of Cases” and another one with a Line Item for “Time” – all of the Allotments must be the same within a Contract.

• Service Activity. Remember that the “Initial Status Reason” that you set when you’re creating a Service record (Settings/Business Management/Services) appears to users on the Service Activity form in the “Show Time As” field. One of its functions is to flag conflicts on the Service Calendar, for example if the same resource has a schedule conflict. Experiment with different values of the Initial Status Reason to see how this works, and to see how schedule conflicts are flagged on the calendar.

• Facilities/Equipment. Note that these can be deleted, but not deactivated or disabled like some other entities. Also, they are included with Users in the general category of “Resources” when it comes to defining selection rules for Services. You can use the Facilities/Equipment entity to proxy for a person if you have somebody you want to schedule for a Service using the scheduling engine…and you’re too cheap to pony up for a CAL.  (just kidding – anybody who ever got this far in reading one of my geek-posts wins my undying loyalty and I’d never accuse you of being cheap) 

Assigning and Sharing Records

• You can Share a record to give somebody privileges to it they wouldn’t otherwise have. So if a colleague in a different business unit can’t see your Account records, you might Share them out to her so she can mind them while you’re on vacation. Here are a few fun facts about sharing:

o   You can only share to a User, or to a Team. Beware of exam questions that tempt you to think you can share out to a Business Unit or to a queue or something like that.

o   Your security role determines if and what you can share out, so you might not be able to share records at all. If you can share, you can never share out a privilege you don’t have! So if you don’t have Delete privilege on the Account entity, you can’t give anybody else the ability to delete your accounts by sharing those records.

o   Activity records (can you name the 8 you can create from the UI?) cannot be shared out directly!  You can only share out Activity records by sharing a record that has a primary relationship to them. By default, if you share an Account record, you also share out all of its Activity records. And if you un-share that Account record, you un-share all of those activities.

o   You can share many records at a time…but you can only un-share one at a time! You might forget this as soon as you’re done reading it. But after you share out 157 Account records and then go have to through them one by one to un-share them, you’ll remember it! The workaround is to only share to teams. That way, all you have to do is remove the members from the team, and then all of the records may still be shared with the team, but not the users you removed from the team. Don’t forget this!

Miscellaneous

• Entity Relationships. This is a broad topic, but one way you can get some intuition for it is to open a form for a record of each different entity type and compare them. The most important are Account and Contact, then the sales entities (Opportunity, Quote, Order, Invoice), then the service entities (Case, Contract). It’s easy to gloss over Competitors, Sales Literature and Products, but I wouldn’t recommend it if you want to pass this test! Understand what entities can have relationship to other entities. When you’re on an entity’s form, everything in the left-hand pane is what the entity has a 1:N relationship to.

• Finding and reporting on related Entities. If records have relationships between each other, how do you see that? Advanced Find and the new Report Wizard are both good ways to do it, but they work differently in a subtle way. Suppose you want to see all of your Contact records, and for each Contact all of the Quotes that Contact has. There’s a built-in 1:N relationship between Contact and Quote, so you know you can do this. In Advanced Find you’d start with the Quote entity as your primary entity (Look for), because in Advanced Find you work “up” from the Child record. But if you’re using the new Report Wizard, you’ll want to start from the Parent rather than the Child record!

This is important in substantive ways apart from just taking the test. For example, in Advanced Find in 4.0 you can include columns from related entities, which you couldn’t do in 3.0. And the Report Wizard didn’t exist at all in 3.0. So, taken together, these two options give you a LOT better ability to find and report on the various CRM entities you have and how they’re related to each other.

• User. Users can never be deleted, only disabled.
• Business Units. Business Units can never be deleted, only disabled. 
• Record Status. Any time you’ve got an entity form open, you can see the Status of the current record in the lower left part of the form. (on the “Status” bar, of course)

Good luck on the exam!