Microsoft Dynamics CRM Community is awesome

Develop an attitude of gratitude, and give thanks for everything that happens to you, knowing that every step forward is a step toward achieving something bigger and better than your current situation.

Brian Tracy

 

Develop an attitude of gratitude

We get help in many ways by many people but rarely do we thank people and organisations who have helped us.

It’s a small effort to thank someone for helping you, which makes it puzzling why it doesn’t happen more often.

This last year I have learnt lots of great things from my colleagues

• ideas
• conversations
• opinions
• best practices
• new technologies/tools

We learn little when we are talking but have the potential to learn lots by watching the actions/work of our colleagues.  You will benefit from actively listening to our colleagues.

We have two ears and eyes and one mouth, try to watch and listen more than you talk.  Do it intelligently to make sure you pick out the important points, understand them and incorporate these things in your work.

I read this advice in the book How to Win Friends and Influence People by Dale Carnegie, the advice is  simple, honest and concentrates on long term giving.

“The difference between appreciation and flattery? That is simple. One is sincere and the other insincere. One comes from the heart out; the other from the teeth out. One is unselfish; the other selfish. One is universally admired; the other universally condemned.”
― Dale Carnegie, How to Win Friends and Influence People

Microsoft Dynamics CRM is awesome

I enjoy working with Microsoft Dynamics CRM for these reasons

• Microsoft Dynamics CRM is a great product evolving and improving
• It offers a great starting point for solutions
• CRM professionals are self motivated
• CRM is moving towards the Mobile and Internet of things
• Azure cloud functionality

Microsoft Dynamic CRM projects are challenging and rewarding,  CRM Online projects where CRM is acting as a hub in the centre of lots of services and applications.

What makes Microsoft Dynamic CRM projects great is you can create solutions which help the users do their jobs effectively.

People are the glue which hold CRM projects together, most CRM professionals are focused on learning and improving to enable them to create CRM solutions which enable users.

Feedback and comments

Thanks to those who read my blog, particularly those who take the time to comment on my blog posts.

Comments are a great way to add extra information, personal experiences and a different perspectives to a blog post.

Make it one of your new years resolutions to add more comments to blog posts you have enjoyed, it’s a great way to contribute to the CRM community.

I’m thankful for the feedback someone gave me about the Hosk CRM blog, they were not sure I knew much about Microsoft Dynamics CRM.  I had written 400 blog posts, so I wondered why they would think that.

This was the spur for me to stop reblogging other people CRM blog posts and write more original blog posts.  Writing original content it harder but more rewarding for me because I have to think more.

The Microsoft Dynamics CRM Community

The Microsoft Dynamics CRM community is awesome, with lots of great free content, tools, talks, tweets happening every day it’s fantastic.

When I have a Microsoft Dynamics CRM problem, there is always a blog posts on the subject.

Everyone has something to teach you but only if you want to listen and learn – Hosk

I learnt from watching and listening to my colleages, a great piece of advice

“Always ask for feedback“

When you write code, deliver a workshop, present, etc, etc, ask for feedback.  If you have given training or presented, email the attendees and ask them what you did well and what could be improved.

Get senior developers to code review your code.

One of my goals is to continuously improve, replace things you suck at with things you which are OK, keep improving and do things better.

To improve you have to practice, understand what you are doing badly so you can stop it and what you are doing well so you can do more of it.

I piece of advice I got about a solution document I wrote, the person told me to ask this question to all the parts of the document

“What is the purpose of this“

I used to write documents copy formats of similar documents or examples, I realized I should question the content of my documents and justify all sections and paragraphs.

There is too much waffle in documents, get rid of the parts you don’t need and create a clear document with simple language not buzzwords and techno babble.

Junior developers

Trying to explain CRM development to someone who has no experience gave me a different perspective on CRM development.

Explaining development best practices seem illogical, below are articles I wrote last year trying to explain why to junior developers.

• Why understanding abstractions can help you write better code
• CRM 2015 – CRM developers should think in Entities
• Are your CRM plugins creating technical debt?

• Unit tests are a vital part of emerging code design
• Good coding practices – Information hiding
• Why CRM Developers should unit test their code
• Why Code Readability is important
• Why your CRM code and customizations should be simple
• Why rushed projects/code doesn’t save time and reduces quality

I will leave you with this famous thanks

This was the fourth book of the fantastic Hitch hikers guide to the galaxy by Douglas Adams

So Long, and Thanks for All the Fish: 4/5 (The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy)