Welcome 2014 and a look back at 2013

It’s my first day back at work after a lovely 2 week break over the Christmas period.

Ciber the company I work for want everyone to update their database of skills, which basically means updating your CV with the things you have done over the last year. In fact it is exactly that because they want the information displayed in a Ciber CV format and the hardest part about the whole process is the formatting in word. At least I have my linkedin profile which is almost up to date but yet it is a very slow and painful process.

Looking back over the last year it was an exciting time for me, I moved to Ciber at the start of the year and was working on a large CRM project as a developer. On a personal note I also welcomed into the world and heir to the Hosk throne, with the arrival of George Hosking, whom I am glad to say is almost sleeping the whole night through.

Previously I had worked on small CRM projects in various different roles, consultant, developer, support and installer/configuration. The project was an agile project which was interesting because we have a morning scrum and you get a quick overview of what people are doing and an idea of if this sprint is on schedule. This was very important and useful because at some stages of the project we had 10-15 people working on it and in three different locations.

I was also interested in see the architecture of the project, we had lots of customizations, plugins, javascript, Silverlight, WCF, sharepoint, windows tasks. I got to learn the architecture in detail when I was one of two CRM developers and two infrastructure specialists who had to install the solution on 20 plus servers all with no internet.

I learnt a lot on the job last year but I was a bit slack with academic learning. I passed on CRM exam – Extending CRM 2011 and in December I started to look at CRM 2013. I also was guilty of not doing much blogging or contributing to the Microsoft CRM Dynamics community and answered very few forum questions. So I certainly have lots of things to improve on.

Now is also the time for new years resolutions, although perhaps I am a day late which isn’t a good sign.

I was thinking about CRM new years resolutions

My main CRM resolution is to learn CRM 2013 , I plan to do this by playing around with CRM 2013 and in particular the new features, studying and passing the certifications and writing lots of blog posts about it.

I plan to take 3 CRM 2013 certifications this year and will soon begin reading the MOC’s for configuration and customization. I am going to try and document my learning and create an exam study guide to help myself and others who are studying for the exam.

I hope to answer more forum questions, so I can get some CRM badges. You can see my current badges here

https://community.dynamics.com/members/hosk/scorecard.aspx

My final CRM resolution is to blog regularly about Microsoft Dynamics CRM.

So after a break I am bright eyed and bushy tailed and looking forward to the year 2014, hopefully this year will feel a bit longer, 2013 seemed to fly in a blink of an eye.