August 2006 - Posts
Are you looking for a quick way to see all of the attributes/relationships for a given Entity? The CRM 3.0 SDK has a pretty cool web enabled tool that lists all entities in your CRM 3.0 deployment. You can also click on the Definition icon for a specific entity to get a listing of all attributes and relationships for that entity. The properties of each attribute is listed as well so you can quickly see the data type and length. This comes in very useful when you are migrating data as well as preparing documentation for the client.
The website for the Metadata explorer is:
http://<crm_website_name/sdk/list.aspx
Microsoft is continually creating utilities and snap-ins for CRM. The Report Scheduling Wizard is a great tool they developed that allows you to schedule reoccurring reports that will run on a daily, weekly or monthly basis. It also allows you to run snapshot report that the user can share with other CRM users. Once the tool is installed it's available to all users who have the Report Manager privilege in the Reports section of CRM. All the user has to do is select the report to run, pick start and end dates for the data capture and then how often they would like the report to run. It also gives the ability to share the report with other users.
If you are looking for a tool to schedule CRM reports, this tool is highly recommended.
The Report Scheduling Wizard can be found here:
http://www.microsoft.com/downloads/details.aspx?familyid=A101D4D9-6463-4A45-899B-3C3EE979C4D0&displaylang=en
If you're like me and you have a lot of folders in Outlook it can be a chore to access the CRM folders in the Outlook client. Sure I could click the CRM menu and access my accounts, contacts or cases from there but that takes too many clicks. I could also scroll down, expand the CRM folder list and access CRM that way. Once again, too many clicks.
What I do like is that I can add the CRM folders to my Outlook Favorites. All you need to do is right-click on the CRM folder you want to add and click "Add to Favorite Folders". You can also drag and drop the folder in the Favorite Folders section of Outlook if you want to do it that way.
Whatever route you choose both ways make it much easier to access frequently used CRM folders quickly and easily with just a click of your mouse.