Activity Feeds are a great new social feature in CRM 2011 that was made available with the November 2011 update.  Many organizations using CRM 2011 have begun to gain tremendous benefit by enabling Activity Feeds and training their users on how to take advantage of them.  Not as many, however, have started to use the Activity Feeds app for their Windows Phones yet.  This app has some great features, but it also takes a few tricks to get it working with CRM 2011.  This post will focus on the specifics of using Activity Feeds on a Windows Phone – and fixing a known bug with CRM 2011 Online and Activity Feeds on your Windows Phone.

So imagine you’ve created this awesome Silverlight application. The app works great and everyone’s happy. In this particular case the client was using an automated build tool called Anthill which is how they deploy their CRM solutions. The later versions of the CRM SDK have a deploy function where you can have your code in TFS and deploy your plugins and web resources straight from your project after pointing the Visual Studio CRM Explorer add-in to a specified server and organization. This all sounds great until I get a call saying that my wonderful Silverlight application isn’t working.

Distraught and aggravated I start contemplating would could have possible gone wrong. What could I have possibly done wrong? As it turns out when I go to the deployment server the Silverlight control decided to not show up in a matter of speaking. Just to give some background this is a Silverlight control hosted in an HTML web resource displayed in the form content iFrame from a navigation link. The page shows up just fine, but my control isn’t loading. Weird…

This is the second in a 3 part posting about accessing CRM within Outlook versus from the web.  In the first post in this series, I outlined some of the reasons why businesses should consider training their users in CRM for Outlook.  Given this powerful functionality, why would any business person prefer to use the web version of CRM (also called the “Web Client”)?  Well, as it turns out, there are some excellent reasons for doing just that.  Many of our clients (and many of our internal users of CRM) prefer to use the Web Client for various reasons.  In this article, we will explore the top reasons for choosing the Web Client over Microsoft Dynamics CRM 2011 for Outlook.

Do you have old email, templates in CRM that you don’t use anymore?  You want to get rid of them because they’re cluttering up the views of users.  But you don’t want to get rid of them because you might want to use them again some day (or, like me, you’re just a packrat).  Unlike other record types, these don’t include the ability to deactivate the individual template records.  So what’s a CRM power user to do?