CRM 2011 – Passed the Microsoft Dynamics CRM 2011 Applications Exam today

I passed the CRM 2011 Applications exam today.  It’s always a great feeling to pass the exam, not only for the proud certification you now hold but because I can now stop reading about CRM 2011 when I’m at home and should be relaxing.

I found studying for this certification very useful in my job.  The criteria for this exam is probably the widest among all the CRM exams because it covers Sales, Marketing, Service and Scheduling and new functionality like Charts, Dashboards and goals.   Basically this exam covers using all of the major functionality in CRM, which made studying for the exam a bit of a mammoth task.

You can see the criteria on the offical link

http://www.microsoft.com/learning/en/us/exam.aspx?ID=MB2-868#tab2

I would say the E-Learning for the exam is very good and I also used the excellent book Microsoft Dynamics CRM 2011 Step by Step , not to mention own adventures in CRM documented on this blog for your pleasure.

Recently I have had to work on projects for customers which have used the service section a lot, so learning about that and in particular Queues and Teams was useful.  I have recently written a proposal for a customer who was interested in using the scheduling functionality.  I found that brushing up on these areas was very useful.

Certifications tend to bring forth strong opinions from people.  I usually find the people who don’t have certifications and aren’t interested in getting them, often view them as worthless, stating it doesn’t help show you how good at their job the person is.  This can be particularly true for developers but then how can you really make a certification to test if someone can write good code, on time, to spec?

I think certifications are very useful (otherwise why would sit the exams!!) because they give me a broad range of knowledge about CRM.  I say certifications are useful because the studying and learning you have to do to pass the certification helps you learn about areas of CRM which you might not use on a regular basis but when you need that knowledge in the future.

If someone has a certification I am pretty sure that person has a good basic knowledge of CRM, it also suggests to me the person is ambitious because in my experience (which is limited I will admit) most people have to study for the certification in their own time.   This does show a bit of get up and go.  Also if I see a Microsoft certification on someone’s CV I at least know this isn’t something they can make up (or they will soon be found out when they are asked to associate themselves with the company on partnersource).

Anyway I will stop rambling now, next stop CRM 2011 Configuration and Customization but after I have had a bit of break.

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CRM 2011 – How to add/change resolution types for cases

Someone asked me today how to change or add resolution types to a case, he said he had been looking for this field but just couldn’t find it.

They had tried opening the Case Resolution entity but you cannot edit anything on that entity.

So where was it getting this value.

It is a bit odd but it also makes sense once you know where to look.

The Resolution Case types are values from the Status Reason field.  In the Resolved Status section

So if you want to add more resolution types then this is where you add them