January 6, 2011 – Hosk's Dynamic Blog

I have been looking at Add on’s for CRM.

Here are some good links to places where you can find some good CRM add ons. Most of these links are for CRM 4 and a lot of these might be included in CRM 2011 as standard, which is another good reason to upgrade. but not all the features in these add on’s are included so it might be useful to check them out.

this site had some good reviews from some people on linked in, he mentioned they were willing to custormize the add on.

http://www.mscrm-addons.com

This blog is really good, the person has done a great job of keeping a list of all the Crm Add on’s he has come across

http://customery.co.uk/crm-add-ons/

Someone said aximom has a credit card solution for CRM.

http://www.axonom.com/crm_solutions/powertrak/pt_crm_overview.html

this is a good one for people who want to use CRM for a helpdesk tool

C360 ITSM including ITIL best practices for IT service desks and help desks such as incident management, configuraiton management (CMDB), and service level management (SLAs).

Someone also advised me to look at this, which sounds quite useful but I would say the person who recommended it does work at the company

Hi Ben, Take a moment to check out Akvelon’s Global Search ( http://www.akvelon.com/Products/Dynamics%20CRM%20global%20Search/default.aspx ). Global Search is essentially a search engine that searches across all entities (including custom) with one single search. You can customize what it searches, and can even search email contents. Visit the link above to try it out with the demo, or even download the free 2 week trial to test it in your own environment. Since it’s not industry specific it is quite useful for all user types.

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I am currently reading about Solutions in CRM 2011.

The solutions are a great enhancement to CRM 2011 but they do have quite a few quirks or things to watch out for. I’m sure these will become second nature in the future but at the moment when everything is new, you have to keep you wits about you.

The first thing I have noticed is a solution can be managed and unmanaged. An unmanaged solution is one which you can change and modify. This is basically how you will have the solution whilst you are testing and developing it.

A managed solution is a solution you don’t want anyone to change.

Another thing I was wondering about, what about plugin registration. If you supplied a solution with plugin’s do you need to register the plugins. The answer is yes, although you can include already registered plugins in the solution. This seems a bit misleading to me and I haven’t quite figured out what you do if this was an app in the CRM market place. Would he user have to register the plugin themselves or are we expected to write some code to do this programatically.

Managed solutions also cannot be exported.

Deleting a managed solution will uninstall all of the solutions components.

An interesting aspect of Managed Solutions is you can create properties to allow the user to customermize aspects of the solution.

Solutions can be layered and it matters what order you import solutions into CRM.

Solutions only include the changes which are different from the system. This means you can merge solutions together.

if two solutions both change the same area then the last solution imported will be the winner. Which is something to remember, especially if you want to layer solutions and try and modularise coding in CRM.

it’s interesting and the more I read about it the more the way it works makes sense. but it certainly helps to read the SDK and articles about solutions