Tip #108: CRM 2011 External Connector License – Its not a paper weight

CRM 2011 to 2013 License Mappings

Did your firm acquire an External Connector License for your CRM 2011 OnPremise instance? Back in the days before CRM 2013 if you created a portal that customers, partners, vendors could use to connect to the CRM system via the custom API then you needed to buy the EC license. Alternatively, if you happened to […]

Tip #97: CRM Administrators Don’t Take this Shortcut

CRM System Admin

Okay, I understand, we are all busy and have more to do than time to do it. As CRM Administrators we can often spend most of our day reacting to requests with little time to actually plan our response. Here is the typical scenario – The marketing manager calls you and lets you know that […]

Tip #92: Cascading Relationships – The Forgotten Customization

Dynamics CRM Entity Cascading Relationship

If you have implemented your CRM organization and not done a sanity check of the built-in cascading relationships for the COLAC (contact, opportunity, lead, account, case) entities vs. your corporate business practices then you have missed an important step in the architecture process. When you have a one-to-many relationship there are effects to the related […]

Tip #80: Auditing for all Critical Records

CRM Auditing

Maybe you don’t want to turn auditing on because you think you don’t need it or are concerned about the additional storage space it will consume. But enabling auditing is a CRM Administrator’s best friend when it comes to understanding the consequences of the assigned security roles. So at the minimum be sure to enable […]

Tip #79: Limit use of System Admin and System Customizer Assignments

CRM System Admin Role

At the risk of significant human induced catastrophe, don’t assign the System Administrator or System Customizer security roles to anyone that hasn’t received in-depth training in customizing, configuring and managing the CRM system. No matter how expedient it might be to assign the role to a marketing team member that needs to go into the […]

Tip #77: Security Role Terminology

Before you can create the security architecture or manage your security, you need to know the terms: Privileges are the verbs in CRM: Create, Read, Write, Delete, Append, Append To, Share, Assign. Access levels, from most to least generous: organization, parent-child business unit, business unit, user, none. Entities are the units to which a security […]