Yesterday I took the new CRM 4 Customization and Configuration exam and passed! I just winged it and it turned out to be a fairly straight forward test. I can't go into too much detail around the test but the major areas it touched on were;
- Customizations through CRM's interface
- Deployment scenarios
- Relationships
- Multi Org
- Multi Lingual
- Multi Currency
It was a decent test with some fairly complicated scenarios and one of the questions had the same answer twice. I notified Prometric and filled out a form to hopefully get it corrected :).
I could not find any public links about the exams. The only ones I was able to find are on the partner website:
Exam MB2-633 – Microsoft Dynamics CRM 4.0 Installation and Deployment Certification Exam
https://mbs.microsoft.com/partnersource/communities/training/Certifications/exampreparation/CRM40_ENU_ID_PREP.htm
Exam MB2-632 – Microsoft Dynamics CRM 4.0 Applications Certification Exam
https://mbs.microsoft.com/partnersource/communities/training/Certifications/exampreparation/CRM40_ENU_APP_PREP.htm
Exam MB2-631 – Microsoft Dynamics CRM 4.0 Customization and Configuration Certification Exam
https://mbs.microsoft.com/partnersource/communities/training/Certifications/exampreparation/CRM40_ENU_CC_PREP.htm
Recently my company, Ascentium, posted a white paper titled Microsoft Dynamics CRM as a Business Application Platform that was written by my co-workers Aaron Elder and Jason Hunt. In the white paper is a section titled "The Skeptical Developer", which speaks to my experience with CRM and moving from a pure custom development background into the world of CRM and using CRM as the platform to build the same applications I have been custom developing and architecting for years. Yesterday I noticed that a fellower CRM blogger, Menno te Koppele, posted a write-up summarizing the white paper that I thought was very good. Below is a C&P of the write-up and the post is here.
“It Doesn’t Pay to Grow Your Own”
- When building a custom application, most organizations
“spend most of their time on the plumbing” (see below) and don’t have
enough time for business functionality.
- Ascentium has found
from their experience they SAVE “50% to 70% of the development time”
using Microsoft Dynamics CRM as the Platform
- Using Dynamics
CRM as a Platform allows Developers to “focus on solving the employees’
problems and solving them well [functionality], so that they choose to
use your application”
- “Custom business applications are often not extensible or scalable over the long term” due to time restraints around development
- When
technology changes you have to update and modify your Platform, using
Microsoft Dynamics CRM – Microsoft takes on that cost
- New versions of SQL Server, Exchange, Office, SharePoint
Benefits to the Business
- Centralization of data (Prevent Silos of information)
- Standardization of user experience – inherits Dynamics CRM web-like UI (user adoption, lower training costs)
- Simplification of development (Using Customization UI, Web Services, SDK, Service Oriented Arch [SOA], any .NET language)
- Integration with organizations existing systems (Web Services, common SQL Server tools)
What Dynamics CRM provides (The Plumbing)
- Security Model with Authentication tied to Active Directory
- Presentation Layer :: UI Framework (Tool build forms, tabs, add fields, IFrames without any coding)
- Data Model
- Structure of the Data (Tables, Fields, Etc.)
- Integrity of the data (Relationships, Dependencies on one another)
- Extensibility of the Data Model without SQL (Tool to add tables, fields, relationships without any SQL)
- Software Development Kit (SDK) – access to the entire SDK used by the developers of Dynamics CRM themselves
- Workflow Engine (Windows Workflow Foundation – build through simple UI)
- Built In connection with Outlook / Office
Don’t miss the “The Skeptical Developer” a great real world story.
If you haven't read the white paper, I highly recommend it. The Skeptical Developer is a great story (I'm biased because I helped write it :)) about my conversion. I now speak about CRM 4 to clients and ISVs all over the world with my most recent travels on behalf of Microsoft during Titan Ascend and Metro programs.
Microsoft has compiled together the performance and scalability whitepapers into 1 download. You can get it here
Below is a list of the white papers with a brief description.
Enterprise Performance and Scalability
This white paper provides an overview of the results and benefits of performance and scalability enhancements in Microsoft Dynamics CRM 4.0.
Performance and Scalability – User Scalability for the Enterprise
These benchmark results demonstrate that Microsoft Dynamics CRM can scale to meet the needs of an enterprise-level, mission-critical workload of 24,000 concurrent users while maintaining performance at sub-second response times. Test results were achieved without customizations to simulate an out-of-the-box Microsoft Dynamics CRM deployment. This white paper describes the goals, methodology and detailed results of this performance benchmark.
Performance and Scalability – Database Scalability for the Enterprise
These benchmark results demonstrate that Microsoft Dynamics CRM can scale to data volumes of over 1 billion database records while maintaining performance at sub-second response times. Test results were achieved without customizations, and minimal optimization to simulate an out-of-the-box Microsoft Dynamics CRM deployment. This white paper describes the goals, methodology and detailed results of this performance benchmark.
Performance and Scalability – Bandwidth Utilization Improvements
Microsoft Dynamics CRM showed network utilization improvements of up to 94% in version 4.0. This white paper details the test results comparing version 3.0 to 4.0.
Over at the CRM Team Blog, they posted a very detailed list of upgrade steps from CRM 3 to CRM 4. The steps outline a lot of gotchas along the way. You can view the post here
1. Upgrade SQL databases to SQL 2005 SP2 (if not already done)
2. Upgrade SQL Reporting Services web sites to SQL 2005 SP2 (if not already done). Upgrade the reporting service database with SP2 script.
3. Verify the rights of the user running the upgrade
a. Must have admin rights on computer, admin rights in SQL Reporting Services and server admin on SQL Server
b. Must be able to create a security group within the OU where the 4 3.0 groups exist
c. Must be in the same domain as the servers where the upgrade is run
d. Must be a member of the system administrator role in CRM
4. Install Server Pre-requisites ahead of time
a. SQL Reporting Services Report Viewer (2.0.50727)
b. XML Core Services (6.0.3883)
c. .NET Framework 3.0 (3.0.4506.30)
d. SQL Native Client (9.0.2047)
e. Microsoft Application Error Reporting Tool
5. Install Email Router ahead of upgrade and start configuration (completed after upgrade)
a. If using forward mailbox, assure that you can access that mailbox via Outlook Web Access
b. Assure that WebDAV is enabled on the Exchange server where the mailbox is located
c. Configure outbound to use SMTP server
d. Once you finish configuring the router, turn the service off until the upgrade is completed
6. Review the following KB article (949256) for CRM 4.0 hotfix information, and download any server hotfix packages and add the installation to your upgrade steps
7. If using AutoUpdate for clients (requires admin rights on clients), create web directory for client patches and store the client patch .exes in that folder
8. Save off backup copy of all custom report .rdl files
9. Delete all CRM 3.0 out of the box reports not being used (you'll get another copy of the report in 4.0)
10. Export all your customizations for reference purposes (cannot be upgraded outside of the server upgrade process)
11. Review all custom entities to make sure the primary entity does not have NULL values. If it does, run a SQL script to update values to ‘’ or some value
12. Download the CRM 4.0 Diag Tool so it's ready to be used in the event of errors received on CRM 4.0
13. If using an Internet Facing Deployment, review KB article 948779 and download IFD Configuration Tool
14. Review the following KB articles prior to upgrade 946590, 947061, 947997
The following steps should be completed within the downtime needed for the upgrade.
1. If running SQL replication, disable SQL replication
2. Turn off IIS on the web servers
3. Back up [CompanyName]_MSCRM and [CompanyName]_METABASE databases
4. Delete the t_update_queueitem trigger on the QueueItemBase table (to be fixed in a forthcoming hotfix - 948172)
5. Launch the upgrade
a. Be sure to connect to the Internet to update installation files. If you don’t have Internet access on that machine, go to KB 948917 and following the links to download the installation files and bring them over to the server.
b. Install Visual C++ runtime
c. Enter your 4.0 server keys
d. Choose a base currency
e. Run the upgrade
6. Restart the web server
7. Complete the registration of the CRM 4.0 product
8. If you have additional web servers, upgrade CRM on those web servers
9. Complete the configuration of the Email Router by choosing the Deployment and testing the configuration
10. Apply all server hotfixes
11. If using AutoUpdate, run configurator tool to publish client hotfixes to clients
12. If Internet Facing Deployment, install the SQL Reporting Services Data Connector
13. If Internet Facing Deployment, run the IFD Configuration Tool
14. In SRS Report Manager, recreate any custom data sources under the 4.0 folder
15. Re-upload all CRM 4.0 reports that contained sub-reports and point the sub-reports to the appropriate parent report
16. Copy over any new customizations made on development 4.0 environments
17. Install the online and offline client (if used) for testing purposes
18. Test all functionality from Outlook and the web client