Sonoma Partners Release the First CRM 2011 Book

The Sonoma partners are an all action bunch. Days after giving away a free app on the CRM dynamics MarketPlace they are the first people to get a CRM 2011 book out.

Yes CRM 2011 Step by Step book is released today, well it says that on their blog but on Amazon it’s says it isn’t released until the 4th

We used the previous step by step book often to give to users or people who have no or little experience of CRM.

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We targeted the material in this book at end users of the CRM system, and it explains all of the basics of working with the CRM system on a day-by-day basis.

The 18 book chapters are:

Introduction to Microsoft Dynamics CRM
Getting Around in Microsoft Dynamics CRM
Working with Account and Contacts
Working with Activities and Notes
Using Microsoft Dynamics CRM for Outlook
Working with Leads and Opportunities
Using Marketing Lists
Managing Campaigns and Quick Campaigns
Working with Campaign Activities and Responses
Tracking Service Requests
Using the Knowledge Base
Working With Contracts & Queues
Working with Filters and Charts
Using Dashboards
Using the Report Wizard
Using Advanced Find
Reporting with Excel
Bulk Data Importing

Talking of CRM books, David Yack has released details of two new CRM 2011 books, you can find more details about that here, the downside is we will have to wait a few months for the Yack attacks new books

Using Silverlight with CRM 2011 – Target Release March 2011

One of the cool new things in CRM 2011 is its support for making Silverlight a first class way to extend the user experience. This book will focus on all the different ways you can extend CRM 2011 using Silverlight including on Forms, on the Dashboard and many other creative ideas. The book also includes enough basic Silverlight information so if you are new to Silverlight you can get started right away.

CRM 2011 as a Rapid Development Platform – Target Release May 2011

A lot has changed since 2008 when the book was first published for CRM 4.0. At the same time, CRM 2011 is even more compelling for building a wide variety of applications that aren’t just limited to CRM. In this update to the popular CRM 4.0 book we will be focusing on providing deep information that developers need to build applications with CRM 2011 and the xRM Application Framework.

I am very interested in these books because they are more focused on developers and the development process. This is something which I still struggle with a bit because it is quite different from standard programming practices. Although in some ways I do enjoy that because it means you can quickly build on the CRM 2011 framework and just extend it (rather than spend time on the actual framework).

I would definitely look to buy the Silverlight book (and will probably buy the other one as well) because I haven’t used Silverlight yet, so I think it would be a good way to learn because it would mean I would improve my CRM programming and learn how to add Silverlight applications to CRM.

It’s interesting watching things progress with CRM 2011, I missed this when CRM 4 was released because I wasn’t working with CRM. It certainly feels like there is a lot of buzz and activity around CRM 2011 at the moment.