Takeaways From The 2012 CRMUG Summit In Seattle

Posted by Sonoma Partners on October 23, 2012  |  Comments (0)

Today's guest blogger is Jacob Cynamon-Murphy, a Technical Specialist at Sonoma Partners

At the CRM UG Summit last week in Seattle, I led a training session for the CRMUG Academy, entitled CRM Administration for the Part-Time Administrator. In this session, our goal was to get new admins up-to-speed on key techniques and tools to make their lives easier and get common tasks done efficiently and accurately. Over the course of the session, we discussed several resources that I wanted to be sure to share with everyone in the community, whether or not you made it to the session. If you have any tools or resources that you recommend, I encourage you to add them in the comments below.

• Site Map
  • Tanguy's Site Map Editor - my site map editor of choice. It's fast and easy, with no server-side components.
  • Microsoft Dynamics CRM SiteMap Editor - another viable option. This one is a managed solution, so you can edit your sitemap from within the configuration page of the solution in CRM, without needing a client application.
• CRM Ribbons
  • CRM 2011 Visual Ribbon Editor - I love that this app shows me a visual preview of the ribbon... as I edit it. With auto-complete for web resources, like icons and JavaScript files, I find this an indispensible tool in my CRM customizing arsenal.
  • Microsoft Ribbon User Experience Guidelines - this is a bit of a heady document, but has some good nuggets if you will be actively enhancing your native CRM ribbon.
• Views
  • Tanguy Toussard's View Layout Replicator for Microsoft Dynamics CRM 2011 - although I haven't presonally used this, I figured it was worth sharing. It doesn't look like it supports personal (user-defined) views, but it's open source, so we could build that for you if you wanted it.
• Workflows
  • CRM Manipulation Library - Carlton Colter wrote a library of workflow activities that you can deploy to your CRM environment. This package requires some familiarity with the CRM SDK Plugin Registration Tool. If there is sufficient interest, I can build this as a managed solution for you - just let me know.
• Activity Feeds
  • Microsoft Activity Feeds managed solution - you'll need this solution in order to deploy the Activity Feeds functionality in an on-premise instance of Dynamics CRM 2011. Online users have likely had the solution deployed already.
  • Light "Spackling" for Your Activity Feed Walls - I mentioned a console app I threw together to add Activity Walls to forms, useful when the entity has multiple forms and the wall is not added automatically.
  • Introduction to the Activity Feeds Solution - if you're brand-new to activity feeds, this resource center article will give you a good introduction and point you to additional articles to get youin-the-know.
• Mobile Access
  • CWR Mobility Trial - if you're looking for something more robust than the Microsoft Dynamics CRM Mobile Express, I recommend checking out CWR Mobile. It's great starting point if you need to enable a few users with a mobile, online/offline capability. If you have any questions about CWR Mobility, let me know - I'm a certified CWR Mobility Specialist ;-)
• Troubleshooting
  • Fiddler - hands down, the best web traffic tool I have used. It's easy to get started and powerful as you familiarize yourself with its features.
  • CRM 2011 Diagnostics Tool - Another great tool from Tanguy Toussard. He's updated the CRM 4.0 diagnostics tool and enhanced it with some new capabilities.
  • CRM Trace Log Viewer - it was built for CRM 4.0, but the trace logs have the same format, so it works just as well when things go wrong in CRM 2011. The download button is in the top-left of the page; if you find the product useful, consider donating a few bucks to StunnWare.
• Performance Tuning
  • Optimizing and Maintaining the Performance of a CRM 2011 Server Infrastructure - pointers for optimizing the performance of your CRM servers
  • Optimizing and Maintaining Client Performance for Microsoft Dynamics CRM - pointers for optimizing the performance of your CRM clients
  • Sonoma Partners Universal Setting Utility - newly-released utility to easily change settings of your CRM organizations to optimize performance