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The CRM 2011 background job schedule can be changed with this tool from CodePlex.

http://crmjobeditor.codeplex.com/

The MSDN blog gives a good overview

http://blogs.msdn.com/b/crminthefield/archive/2012/04/26/avoid-performance-issues-by-re-scheduling-crm-2011-maintenance-jobs.aspx

Changes in CRM record data is a common part of business process, and clients often use the “ModifiedOn” field in views as an indication of new information in a recordset. However, adding text in an entity “notes” field does not update the “ModifiedOn” date. A client using this pattern were looking for a simple configuration-only solution using Workflows. The following example describes how to implement the solution for the Opportunity entity.

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Channel 9 feature Dynamics CRM 2011 integrated with the Dealmaker sales management tool. This CRM online solution demonstrates many of the data and event integration points available in CRM 2011.

In this video Wendy Reed from The TAS Group showcases Dealmaker in Microsoft Dynamics CRM 2011 Online.  Dealmaker helps sales people to sell smarter and manage better by embedding intelligent deal coaching, social networking, configurable sales process, and proven sales methodology.

Out of the box, the CRM 2011 Customer Portal is integrated with LiveID authentication.  While this is a great example of an integrated authentication provider, it may not be the ideal solution for your business and it’s certainly a tricky configuration to get working in your debug environment.  All is not lost. It’s a very simple process to convert the out-of-the-box Customer Portal to use Forms Authentication and the SqlMembershipProvider.

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Prompted by a question on a previous post, I’ve posted some additional examples on the CRM 2011 REST interface. In particular, this post covers the ability to query relationships and complex types.  All the examples below and more are explained in the CRM 2011 SDK.
From an <entity>Set query, there are a number of <link …>  elements that describe the URL’s to access information from the current entity relationships. For example:

To list a specific Account, request

xrmservices/2011/organizationdata.svc/AccountSet(guid’b9436b0d-b832-e011-9e40-00155da9cd4f’)

If you then search in the response content for “contact_customer_accounts”, you will find an entry like

<link rel=”http://schemas.microsoft.com/ado/2007/08/dataservices/related/contact_customer_accounts” type=”application/atom+xml;type=feed” title=”contact_customer_accounts” href=”AccountSet(guid’b9436b0d-b832-e011-9e40-00155da9cd4f’)/contact_customer_accounts” />

The href … Continue Reading

The CRM 2011 API contains a new class xRM.SDK.Relationship. Relationship manages the parent-child reference between entities and allows you to express “RelatedEntites” in a parental or referential relationship and create the whole stack in a single Create() call.  Thats the theory but it doesn’t appear to work as expected. Continue Reading

For anyone interested in Dynamics CRM 2011 and its Windows Azure integration capabilities, the CRM Team Blog has listed a series of videos from the xRM Cloud Acceleration Lab.

A recent report from Gartner says that worldwide enterprise social software revenue is on track to total $664.4 Million in 2010. This is a 14% increase on 2009 with a forecast growth for 2011 of 15.7% giving an expected revenue of around $769 million.

The use of social software to drive business is well knowm however take up is supprisingly slow. A Forbes article on “The Future of Selling: Its Social” states that although many U.S companies claim to have a social media strategy, only 9% of U.S salespeople have training in using social media for sales.

The … Continue Reading

Dynamics 2011 has a neat little feature that allows you to generate an Advanced Find, then download the FetchXML representation of your query.
Go to Advanced Find, create your query and select “Download FetchXML”. Hey presto! just cut and paste it into your code.

Show the FetchXML version of your Advanced Find query