Customization Strategies CRM Field Guide Chapter 20

It is week 20 in the review of the CRM Field Guide chapters from the book – The CRM Field Guide – How to CRM Like an MVP with Microsoft Dynamics CRM. This week it is the 11 page Customization Strategies and Solution Management chapter.

There are 3 ways that the CRM system can be customized.

• Simple Customizations
  • Add New Entities
  • Add new fields to standard or custom entities
  • Modify the data entry forms
  • Create custom reports
  • Add custom views
  • Create charts and dashboards
• Enhanced Customizations
  • Adding Jscript to the data entry form
  • Include related web pages using the Site Map and iFrames
  • Modifying the ribbon bar to add functionality
• Advanced Customizations
  • Customize the user interface via Silverlight, HTML or Jscript
  • Custom workflow activities
  • Custom business logic extensions – called plugins

The author takes us through Customization 101 – the gathering of requirements and then covers Customization 102 – developing a detailed plan which is the creation of the functional requirements.

Then there is an introductory explanation of creating a development environment so that you can set up the system correctly for development and test without creating issues in your production environment.