Wors World
All About Wor

I’ve recently moved into using a multi-tenancy setup within CRM 4.0.  I added a CrmService reference to my VS2008 project and discovered that I could not see my customisations.  It took me a long time (feeling slow today) to discover that I need to use the following url http://server:port/MSCrmServices/2007/CrmServicesWSDL.aspx?uniquename=client get WSDL specific to my client.  Once I sussed it my customisations were there for me to see.

 

 

I moved my CRM development over to Virtual PC a couple of weeks ago, I used a VPC image from Microsoft as the starting base – it had VS 2005 on so I removed that and replaced it with VS 2008 as the .Net framework 3.5 is what we are currently targetting.  The VPC is great as I can copy it to my Maxtor 500Gb One Touch USB drive and take it with me when I’m out and about with my laptop.  The downside is that the VPC I’ve got is crammed with all kinds of other goodies such as Sharepoint Server, Performance Point etc etc and it takes masses of RAM and runs a bit on the slow side – even on my dual AMD 64 bit processes and 4Gb of RAM.  I might have a go at converting to a VMWare image and see if it’s any better or I might just trim some of the fat from the VPC and see how that goes.

 

I sometimes find odd things happening as well such as when previewing a CRM form and changing a tab, the current IE session gets yanked from memory and is gone – amy customtisations that you have made in that session wihtout saving are yanked as well

 

Prior to the VPC I was working remotely to a  CRM server deployed at ID offices which suffered from connection drops and comms lag.  I reckon that VPC is the way to go – if I could just eliminate those little irratating issues.

I attended a partner event at MS Reading yesterday all abou the MS Sure Step methodology.

 

Sure Step is a "comprehensive implmenetatin methodology that provides prescriptive guidance, project management strategies, tools, and templates that Microsoft partners can use to implement Microsoft Dynamics products for their customers".  Sure Step supports CRM, AX, GP, NAV and SL.

 

What that means is that MS have provided a huge amount of presentation templates, document templates, spreadsheets and project plan templates that can be used to when implementing a Dynamics project – meaning you don’t start from a blank piece of paper.  The methodology is end to end, scalable, systematic and based on a number of modules of which yu can use some or all.  The Sure Step methodology comes to you as a web site that you host on your local machine allowing you to take the methodology out to client sites and inform them of the methodology that you intend to use.

 

The documents, spreadsheets etc may all be branded for your own company use and the web site content maybe easily changed using the supplied Sure Step editor.  The product we used was version 1 and version 2 was promised in the next 4 – 6 weeks.  The details of what’s in version 2 have not been released but as version 1 is project based and has no Program Level functionality we can maybe make a guess that MS will be plugging that gap.  Look out for version 2.  Version 1 is available to download from the Partner Source portal.

 

Anyway, I’m going to have a closer look at this and see what’s relevant to what we do at ID.

This is one of the best MS CRM sites I’ve come across http://www.stunnware.com/crm2/.  If you’re doing CRM development go and have a look…..Now, go right now, don’t hang around!