August 21 Blog Review

This week is a short week for me at work. That means early blog review! Just a few items for this half-week, I will catch you up on the rest in the next edition.

CustomerEffective has a nice article about using CRM to Organize Baseball Little League Registration. They were able to begin accepting online registrations and payments to avoid data entry and busy work.

They also posted a summary of the Microsoft Training Blitz and the Enhancements to the User Experience coming in CRM 2013. Some interesting pieces are Microsoft’s five core design principles: Simple, Usable, Modern, Fast and Loved. Also, the new ribbon has color coded buttons. So Activities will always be red and such. I like this as it will draw the eye and train users (look for the red button). However, this feature may not be as helpful for the colorblind users.

Leon Tribe talked to us about Licensing for Dev, UAT and Prod Environments. For CRM Online this is very simple but can be expensive. With on-premise you can purchase a MSDN subscription for developers which include the Dev and Test licenses.

I am always a fan of finding ways to do things without needing to write code. So naturally I am very excited about the Business Rules functionality in CRM 2013. McGladrey posted a great blog: Business Rules in Microsoft Dynamics CRM 2013. These rules are added to the entity and can be used to do things such as make a field required, show an error message and make fields read-only. This allows a large amount of custom JavaScript to be removed and replaces with built-in functionality.

Thanks for tuning in. Look forward to more news on the next blog review.