Top Dynamics CRM links in Q1 2012

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Posted on 16th April 2012 by Jukka Niiranen in Tips

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In addition to Surviving CRM, I also maintain a blog called Microsoft Dynamics CRM Links. However, it’s not an actual blog but rather my public bookmarking service for collecting interesting tools, solutions, add-ons, services and other sites that are related to Dynamics CRM. If I discover a useful new tool on, say, CodePlex, I simply create a new blog post using the tool’s name as the title, the URL as the body text and add a few tags for link categorization. I keep the list on WordPress.com because it provides a great cloud based app for managing any content, not just blog posts.

Even though the primary purpose of the site is for me to personally keep track of interesting links that I may need to come back to later on, there are also other people who have discovered the site, most likely through a search engine. One day I was looking at the statistics that WordPress.com collects and thought that this actually provides an interesting view to what the Dynamics CRM online community is currently searching for. In the spirit of open data, I decided to publish a snapshot of the website visit stats to show what’s hot in CRM right now and also promote some of the most useful tools and apps out there, to help more people discover them. So, without further ado, here’s the list of…

Most popular Microsoft Dynamics CRM links, Q1 2012

  1. Auto Number for Microsoft Dynamics CRM 2011
  2. Hierarchical Treeview for Dynamics CRM 2011
  3. CRM 2011 User Settings Utility
  4. Ribbon Workbench for Dynamics CRM 2011
  5. MS CRM 2011 Twitter Integration by Pragmasys
  6. MS CRM 2011 Pragma Toolkit: Ribbon, Sitemap Editor
  7. CRM 2011 TreeView for Dependent Picklist
  8. Silverlight CRM Attachment Image
  9. KingswaySoft SSIS Integration Toolkit for Microsoft Dynamics CRM
  10. CRM 2011 Visio add-in: Business Unit Org Chart
  11. Ribbon Editor for Microsoft Dynamics CRM 2011
  12. Dynamics CRM Dashboard for Microsoft Lync by Orbit One
  13. Powertrak In-line Editable Grids for Microsoft Dynamics CRM 2011
  14. Metadata Document Generator for Microsoft Dynamics CRM 2011
  15. CRM 2011 Attribute Mapping
  16. CozyRoc SSIS+ with Dynamics CRM Connection Manager
  17. CRM 2011 Attachment Image Browser HTML Web Resource
  18. Skype Connector Tool for Microsoft Dynamics CRM 2011
  19. Bing Maps Browser for Microsoft Dynamics CRM 2011
  20. Dynamics CRM 2011 Script# Xrm.Page library
  21. Web Resources Manager for Microsoft Dynamics CRM 2011

There we have it, the most in-demand apps or tools for Dynamics CRM! Just don’t take the list ranking too seriously, as this isn’t a very scientific way to analyze the true popularity of the links. Some of them have been published earlier, some during Q1. Some have better keywords for search engine optimization. The page view volumes are quite limited, as the top page received 145 hits during three months. Nevertheless, I think the data still gives a fairly realistic view of the functionality people working with Microsoft Dynamics CRM are typically searching for, such as:

  • Auto-numbering
  • Hierarchical data visualization
  • Ribbon & sitemap editing tools
  • Displaying images on forms
  • VoIP integration (Lync & Skype)
  • Customization documentation generator

One way to look at it would be that these are all features/areas where Microsoft could improve the out-of-the-box functionality that Dynamics CRM 2011 delivers. Luckily there’s an active ecosystem around the platform that is creating either commercial or free solutions to address these areas. Especially the open source tools on CodePlex or free code samples published on various CRM expert blogs are highly valuable resources that I’m thankful for, which is why I attempt to do my own little part by sharing the best links with others. I encourage you all to do the same.

Save your time by documenting

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Posted on 26th November 2008 by Jukka Niiranen in Configuration

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Documenting what your CRM environment looks like and what changes you’ve done to it can be such a drag. Compared to how fast you can perform and publish customization changes in Microsoft CRM, writing it all down and communicating it to the rest of the organization can take a lot more time (the same goes for planning your customization changes before rushing into doing them). Most people will learn the purpose of documentation only the hard way, after running into process errors resulting from a misunderstanding of what data goes where, what scripts affect which fields etc.

After fighting with one such case recently, where I had to perform checks on entity form contents of four supposedly similar CRM instances, I just got fed up with the number of browser windows cluttering my screen and decided to search for a smarter solution. I remembered running into a CRM documentation application some half a year ago, but since it required Excel 2007 which I didn’t yet have at that time, I never had the chance to try it out. Having now upgraded to Office 2007, I promptly surfed to CodePlex and looked up the Microsoft CRM Documentation Generator by Merjin van Mourik.

What a beautiful tool this is! Not only does it produce a neat list of all your entity forms, their scripts and picklist field lists of values, it does this “live” on your screen. Just export the customizations.xml file, load it up in the Excel add-on, then lean back and enjoy as the CRM server magically documents itself, one attribute at a time, for each of your hundred entities. After the show is over, you can copy & paste the information you need and quickly compare CRM instances side by side to track down the differences.

CRM Documentation Generator

The Documentation Generator tool is made for Microsoft CRM 3.0, so all you hip people already on 4.0 may be better off with Microsoft CRM 4.0 Form Reporter, which allegedly does the same thing in Word 2007 format.

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