TIDBITS on the Microsoft Power Platform

The Human Factor - Dynamics CRM Skills

Over the years I have been asked what skills are required for a really good Microsoft Dynamics xRM (CRM) Master?

Needless to say when I saw this post, on some of the interview questions used in a Microsoft Dynamics CRM Developer interview, I thought they were fun to share.

The other resource, that perhaps many have not yet tapped into, is the job descriptions carefully documented as part of the Microsoft Dynamics CRM SURE STEP application.

Do you have favorite interview questions for the next or current generation of Master Dynamics CRM resources? (Developer, Subject Matter Expert, Customer or IS Test Lead, Installation and Infrastructure support, Business Analyst, etc.)  

Thank you Microsoft Dynamics CRM Support

A big shoot out to Microsoft Dynamics CRM Support. I know they cringe (or run) when they see it is a rare support call from Anne, but I did want to say that I really appreciate all the hard work that the guys in North Dakota put into solving some of the toughest problems. They use team work, a win/win attitude and have they have a keen ability to listen with an open mind to get to the root of things.

All you CRM GURU, GURUs in the field - if you have not shared your latest edge case discovery with support lately then I would encourage you to document and post to the appropriate CRM Forums. "Help thy neighbor, helps thy self."

 

 

User Adoption

Well said, overall well said

“Over my 12 year career in the CRM space, I have seen customers take a variety of approaches to creating training materials.  From leveraging software manufacturers’ user guides to multi-deck power point presentations, I believe I have seen it all.  More often than not, these approaches are nothing short of failure.  Expecting users to learn your CRM philosophies and strategy from software reference material is akin to expecting one to learn how to drive by simply reading a vehicle’s owner manual.  To be successful we must know the rules of the road, or in this case, the business rules to support CRM strategies.” More on the same subject at http://www.dynamicscare.com/blog/index.php/increase-user-adoption-with-effective-training-materials/

Workflows vs. Plugins

There is so much to learn about Microsoft Dynamics CRM from a development perspective, but for the user the ramp up can be extremely easy.

The key to understanding Microsoft Marketing is to know who they are talking to. Is their audience business users or the development teams?

Arvind's has a good post this week to help kick off discussions around making the decison for using either Plugins or Workflows when adding customizations and extensions to the Microsoft Dynamics CRM v4.0 platform.

When it comes to this topic it is also important for both the business, the customer, the developers and the partner to have an educated discussion. In my years working for a high performance cutting edge solid state storage vendor I learned the following lesson:

Performance is rarely all about hardware or all about software; although many people have very strong opinions on the subject. It is much more about knowing where the bottleneck is, what is causing it and if you remove it where will the next bottleneck appear. Sometimes this requires Infrastructure understanding, sometimes database understanding and sometimes development insight. In fact sometimes it takes all three. 

I have attended Oracle Open World and wearing my chatty networking hat I did an informal survey. You can easily have debates and discussions with either the "it is all about the hardware" or "it is all about the database(s) and software" camp. Needless to say education is key.

Alas when it comes to Microsoft Dynamics CRM - the app scales and it scales big, but it also requires mastery, understanding and current active learning. I hate to say it, (as I am also one of these on most apps) but too many technologists, business users, IS professionals and others try to teach themselves applications and the price to develop these scars one by one is high.   

 

I tried but Microsoft Dynamics 2011

I really will continue to focus on Microsoft Dynamics CRM v4.0 because there is TONS of features that are in the field today that are unused, but I could not resist sharing this little small lick of the ice cream on Microsoft Dynamics CRM 2011.

Living in Outlook in Microsoft Dynamics 2011

Blogosphere - Performance, SQL and DLL Registration

A couple of great posts today that just spurred me to get back on the blogging band wagon.

OK, there was another reason. Over the last couple of weeks I have found that both in Twitter (follow me @CRMLady) and on Facebook and Yammer I have been having a hard time sticking with 140 characters and I am not about to change my entire language to one letter words soo blogging is a better tool for deeper (or perhaps just more wordy) thoughts.

Credit for the posts that caught my eye goes to Sean Shilling from Customer Effective. (Sean you are going to need to get your name added to the list of authors ;)  These posts motivated me to first start sharing via e-mail and then kicked me back into blogging gear (Thanks Sean!)

CRM and SQL : for those with slightly bigger Microsoft Dynamics CRM databases, performance is something you want to think about. This includes standard performance items like indexing the database. To get started take a look at this post to learn more about the CRM SQL Tables.

CRM Plugin Registration and Un-registration Utility: for those who manage a number of different teams, different developers and different environments. You might want a more graphical interface for plugin registration. You can read more about that here.