I completed a three days training course at Firebrand training camp in CRM 4.0 last week.
The course was very beneficial as it was full of in depth understanding of what the changes are and how they can be applied in business scenarios. Also, the instructor Mr. Julian Sharp from Vigence who's a highly experienced instructor and was able to answer most of the queries put forward.
Anyhow, the course went through the following topics:
Overview:
Description of key new features of Microsoft Dynamics CRM 4.0 and general overview
Install & Deploy:
Upgrading CRM 3.0 to CRM 4.0 and one thing to note on this topic is that if you are upgrading CRM 3.0 to 4.0 server, the Outlook clients should still work fine as it is using the web service which does not get removed by the upgrade which allows you to keep the Outlook clients running until you get around to upgrade them to 4.0.
Also, went through the hardware and software requirements and one thing to note here is that CRM 4.0 requires SQL server 2005 SP2 and Windows Server 2003. Also, the E-mail Router has been
Configuration:
It’s all about being Multi!
- Creating multiple organizations (Multi-Tenancy)
- Having Multicurrency and reporting on the base currency!
- The multilingual user interface and the ability to import & export languages definitions and labels translation which allow you to add or modify the translation provided quite easily using excel spreadsheet
Data Management:
And export, edit, and import data by using the Import Data Wizard and the new Data Migration Manager tool. The ability to map exported fields to the existing CRM fields and saving these maps for future use. The job runs at the background and failures and successes are all recorded to be reviewed.
Also, the Duplicate Detection feature and the ability to identify duplicated records based on criteria the user specify when running the duplicate detection job.
Microsoft Dynamics CRM for Outlook and Business Applications:
Changes in Microsoft Dynamics CRM for Outlook and in particular the ability to switch between organisations without having to have different user accounts as long as the user is a CRM user in both organisations.
The Diagnostic Tool for Outlook to identify records that cause problems when synchronising and also identify and resolve CRM Add-ins that have been disabled. The diagnostics tool assesses the Network and connectivity, Internet Explorer settings, MS Dynamics CRM Office Client Configuration, Synchronisation, System Configuration, Updates to MS Dynamics CRM for Outlook and Performance.
Feature and User Interface Changes include the ability to promote up to 20 records at a time and the ability to syncronise telephone calls, letters and faxes too.
Also, changes to Advanced Find and Activity Report to export data from multiple entities if they are related.
In addition, a SQL connector is now used to not allow the reports to connect to SQL directly.
Customisation:
Nothing major has been changed apart from the addition of the customised translated labels in multilingual deployment.
Nothing has changed in the core and custom entities apart from the addition of relationships which made a lot of things easier and quicker to do such as having a many to many and self-referential relationships which used to be virtually impossible without having to use unsupported methods!
Additional enhancements include the removal of private views and the ability to display attributes from related records in a view.
Workflow:
The workflow in CRM 4.0 is set from within the client and accessible by users to be able to create, publish, and monitor their workflows. This is quite powerful and should eliminate most of the work that you used to write callout .net dlls for. In CRM 3.0 there were only a few record types supported but in CRM 4.0 there are more of these records supported and access to attributes from workflow is quite easy.
The sale process has been removed and now you have stages, steps, actions and conditions to utilise in workflows which in my opinion was a little confusing!
When upgrading to CRM 4.0, the workflows written in CRM 3.0 will automatically be shut down and CRM 4.0 takes over and still support the features of CRM 3.0 (Negotiable!!).
Programmability:
Callouts have been removed and CRM 4.0 or what they call it now is plug-ins which you would need to register using an SDK tool which is quite pain but there is another PluginRegistration tool v2.0 which has a better user interface which can be used to register dlls and edit it. More info and to download PluginRegistration tool v2.0, check this link: http://blogs.msdn.com/crm/archive/2008/02/04/crm-registering-plug-ins-made-easy.aspx
It should be noted that plug-ins model support both asynchronous and synchronous events.
Also, the SDK include the following web services:
- A new CrmDiscoveryService
- A reviced MetadataService
The CrmDiscoveryService is a global site-level service allow you to return a list of organisation that a specified user belongs especially in an internet-facing deployment (IFD) and Windows Live authentication. There are a few written materials on this.
The MetadataService can be used to create custom entities, add or update an attribute for an entity, either system or custom, create or delete relationship between two entities, add or remove an option from a picklist attribute and write an installation and uninstall program for your custom solution.
As mentioned earlier the previous Microsoft CRM 3.0 CRMService web service does not get removed when upgrading allowing you functionalities to work as usual until it comes the time to move them into CRM 4.0 web service.
For those who used to write unsupported web service calls from within the client using jscript, it’s now supported using XMLHttp from the client-side code. The web service method and parameters are defined in XML and included in a SOAP envelope using the usual XMLHttpRequest in IE 7or using the ActiveXObject in earlier versions of IE.
The above is just a brief overview of what we went through during the three days course which I felt it was quite beneficial to me and the rest of the team.
I’m not sure if I have missed anything, if so please add it below and do post your queries here.
Anyhow, I'll try to go through some of the above topics in details when I get the chance to do so.
Enjoy!
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