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Showing posts from September, 2014

Getting Your Developers on Board with Dynamics CRM

Many businesses and government agencies are adopting Microsoft Dynamics CRM to automate sales and customer service or even extending CRM for other business functions using the xRM approach. Even with all the features and benefits of Dynamics CRM, one group is not always thrilled about adopting it -- your software developers.  Here are some thoughts and hints that may help adoption: 1.  Stress the career advancement .  Learning a new product helps developers expand their skills and increase their value to employers -- so show your appreciation. 2. Tailor training to developers . Find a condensed training or self-study to learn how Dynamics CRM operates out of the box and then move on to development topics.  3. Find a first project .  Don't start training until you have one or more projects to jump into.  4. Identify mentors . Tap someone to lead the group and be a resource when people run into problems. 5. Collaborate as a team .  Work together to create development sta

Dynamics CRM Developer Skills Self-Assessment Checklist

In order to deliver developer training on Microsoft Dynamics CRM, you need to understand where your developers are starting.  We use the list of relevant skills to have the developers assess themselves, writing years of experience in the second column. Skill Area Years Exp Searches and Views   Activities, Assignment and Audit   Using Charts & Dashboards   Sales: Lead, Opportunity, Quote, Invoice   Marketing: (Outreach) Lists, Campaigns   Service: Case, Schedule, Calendar, SvcActivity   Service: SLA, Entitlement, Rules,   Contract   CRM Wizard Reports   Security Model   Entities and Fields   Relationships   System Views     Forms   Business Rules   Business Process Flows   Dialogs   Actions   Workflows  

Development Standards for Dynamics CRM

In xRM development, nearly every solution requires some custom development in order to extend Dynamics CRM for business scenarios outside CRM functions such as sales force automation and customer service.  As with any software development, strong naming standards will help your developers and testers save time and produce a better solution. Here are some modest suggestions: Be generous in comments inside your code.  The next developer who takes over will thank you. Provide unified coding standards on the JavaScript libraries. Use consistent file naming conventions. Use only one .JS file per form for the form-specific logic. Don't write JavaScript event handlers from the control property window rather than as part of the JavaScript file associated with the form. Create standard common function libraries, to address common functionality across forms.  Use JavaScript or business rules (in Dynamics CRM 2013) to show/hide/enable/disable controls rather than creating multiple s