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XRM Architects’ team

I was happy to accept invitation to XRM Architects’ team. Please see the whole team: http://www.xrmarchitects.com/meet-the-team/

A designer of CRM / AX technical architecture, Mariusz knows how to deliver a polished and beneficial implementation of Dynamics 365. He can manage the full project lifecycle for any Dynamics 365 project and seamlessly works with us on a temporary basis.  Mariusz works with us on a temporary basis when projects require his specialise skillset.  He is from our Dynamics 365 partners TopOneCRM.

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Set up Personal Settings

Because I receive many queries on Linkedin how to set up personal settings at D365 using User Settings Utility please find my answer in following post. I usually set up Personal Settings that way for CRM systems based UK. I hope it helps you – as a good example.  I published one post about it on Linkedin as well. Here is url: https://www.linkedin.com/feed/update/urn:li:activity:6277245355968995328

I would like to introduce/recommend User Settings Utility for all readers . It is a part of XrmToolBox. That way you can easily set up the personal settings for ALL CRM users in ONE GO e.g. time zone (UK), default currency(Pound),… Recently this tool saved me a lot of time. It is a little thing, but it really makes a difference, doesn’t it ? – a CRM’ game changer.

Usually I set up these 7 Personal Settings for All users (UK based CRM systems) like on following screenshot:

1,2,3. General Settings at CRM

4,5,6. Email Settings at CRM


Particularly setting number 5 on my screenshots is very interesting. It is important in tracking emails. Shortly I will write a post about tracking emails related to Case at D365 – a good example to understand tracking emails at CRM.

5. Select the e-mail messages to track in Microsoft Dynamics CRM – the following summarizes the various options. I usually choose All e-mail messages rather than E-mail messages in response to CRM e-mail.

  1. All e-mail messages – This will track all e-mail messages regardless no matter if it is a Dynamics CRM record or not
  2. E-mail messages in response to CRM e-mail  – This will track e-mails in response to current e-mails based on either the Tracking Token or Smart Matching configuration in System Settings. It looks to see if this e-mail has already been tracked in Dynamics CRM as well as the tracking token if one is being used.
  3. E-mail messages from CRM Leads, Contacts and Accounts – This will only track e-mails only if the sender is a lead, contact, or account.
  4. E-mail messages from CRM records that are e-mail enabled – This will track e-mails from all record types (all entities), including custom record types (custom entities) that contain an e-mail address field.

6. Automatically create record in D365

I usually select NO, because we don’t know for 100% sure it should be created automatically Contact or Lead, but I image it can depend of very specific requirements and you want to create Contact/Lead every time.

7. Error notification

I usually disable the errors notification to not frustrate the users. By the way I opened a very interesting discussion about it on Linked. Please look at this post.

 

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Unit testing is important but… where do I start?

If you have attended the increasingly popular CRM Saturday conference, you probably gained some valuable insights around the key aspects of delivering successful CRM implementations, and how to overcome the main challenges one may face during the implementation.

If not, I encourage you to visit the web site, it has great speakers, great content, and lots of networking opportunities… not to mention is one of the few Dynamics events out there where attendance is 100% free.

Two of the sessions were around test automation and how to implement a true DevOps strategy for Dynamics CRM, two key areas and best practices to increase the overall quality and healthiness of your CRM implementation, which, in turn, would give you the following benefits:

  •     Turning your customers into even more happy customers  (external)
  •     Making your colleagues a bit less stressed because of regression / production bugs will be reduced (internal)

If you are still not convinced about why your team should unit test your code, here’s another blog post with the slides of the test automation presentation.

Once your team realises how important unit testing is, the next immediate question probably is:

  • “Ok, I have an implementation which has been running for years , and I have a bunch of existing code, not tested. At the same time, I have a limited set of resources and trying to unit test everything would be mad… where do I start?”

Ideally, one should achieve a code coverage above 90%, but if you have limited resources, my advice would be: the 80/20 rule.

Try to find the 20% of your code which represents at least the 80% of the total number of executions or executed time, just because if there is a bug in there, then it is likely to affect more users than a piece of code which is executed from time to time only (this might be actually more complex as maybe something than just runs from time to time may have a bigger impact based on a million different variables… but I hope you get the idea).

The next question might be…. how to measure it?

Well, it turns out, from a plugin / codeactivity perspective, you could extract that information from the System Jobs entity rather easily.

Every time a plugin / workflow is executed, a new entry in that table is created, with the Created On, Completed On, fields etc, so you could actually measure how much time a single workflow / plugin execution took. If you have an On-Premise installation, then that is just a SQL query with some groupings, if On-Line, then a data extract plus some Excel manipulation magic should be enough too or… make use of the great Organisation Insights feature in AppSource:

Are you unit testing your code? If so, how did you start unit testing legacy code? Did you use a different approach? We would love to know more about your own experiences.

Please leave a comment below.

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CRM Events in Europe

In the previous post we were asked by some readers about any other CRM events in Europe like CRM Saturday. Also one blog’ reader has asked us about CRM events particularly in Poland.

Like so far we identified the following CRM events in Europe:

  • CRM Saturday – It is a free CRM Technical & Strategy Event organised by the Microsoft Dynamics Community in selected cities like London, Dublin, Zurich, Istanbul. The upcoming event will be in Dublin on 4th March 2017. In one of our post we described CRM Saturday 2017 at London.
  • CRM Meetup –  This event is a typical free CRM Meetup organised by local CRM community at Microsoft’ office at London.
  • Extreme CRM –  It is the premier event focused exclusively on helping the CRM community maximize the business benefits from their CRM solutions. It is global opportunity to share the knowledge and experience between CRM providers from different countries. The upcoming event will be in March 2017 at Lisbon.

As far I know there are not to many CRM events in Poland.  We know about:

  1. Dynamics Business Forum. It is the biggest event in Poland for the leaders on the Dynamics CRM and NAV market. Like you can notice speakers are mainly from two leading Dynamics companies: Netwise and IT.INTEGRO
  2. Dynamics NAV conference. It is an event rather for Dynamics NAV’ leaders than Dynamics CRM’ providers.

If you know anything about any other CRM’ events  in Europe we would love to hear about it.

Thank you very much!