Wednesday, December 26, 2012

XRM Speed Builder for Microsoft Dynamics CRM is Here!!

First off, before I say anything, I would like to thank Jason Lattimer for all of the hard work he did helping develop this application.  I would not have reached my goal of having it out this year without him.

If you haven't been following, this new tool is designed to take existing applications and speed up the process of moving them into Microsoft Dynamics CRM as XRM applications.

Check it out and Download it here: http://xrmspeedy.codeplex.com/

What It Currently Does:
- Creates custom entities from SQL Server database tables
- Creates attributes from fields from database table fields
- Puts CRM 2011 fields on

Next Steps:
- Add other datasources (MySQL, Oracle, Etc...)
- Make it create relationships between created entities based on relationships that exist on database tables

We are always open to hearing about new feature requests.

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Tuesday, December 18, 2012

Oh Yeah, Evidently I Am Recognized as a Microsoft Community Contributer

So I was on the forums the other day and I noticed on my profile that my profile shows that I am a Partner, MVP, and Microsoft Community Contributor.  I emailed the MCC program and they said that they could only email my award info the info they had on file which was for some reason some email address that hasn't been active for over 2 years.  So as of yet I haven't received any details from Microsoft, besides that at some point during the last year I evidently won this award.

Cheers!


Ramping Up!! Something is coming

I got a fun announcement in the next few days.   Can anyone guess in the comments what it is?!?!

Stay Tuned!!!!!!

Wednesday, December 5, 2012

Dynamics CRM Org Merge Part 2: The Sandbox

So, if you haven't been following, I am working on a project where they have both a CRM 4.0 organization and also a CRM 2011 Organization and they need me to merge them into a single organization.   This is a bit of a different scenario than the norm in the Dynamics world but I am hoping to gain some economies of scale by utilizing the upgrade features of CRM 2011 even though we are not doing an upgrade.

Basically here is what it looks like:


Here are the steps:
-  We will create a new organization in the CRM 4.0 environment.
-  We will move the customizations to the new org but not data.
-  We will attach the database to the CRM 5.0 environment and thus upgrade it.

This will do a few things for us:
- Will give us a clean environment to test upgraded customizations in before moving them to the real development environment to see what worksand what needs to be remediated.
- Can easily move things like jscript, web resources, plugins, workflows and entities that don't already exist in the current 2011 system as it makes sense as solutions.  Some things like workflows would otherwise need to be re-built entirely based on our scenario if we didn't have this upgraded space.

Thoughts?

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