Customisation
There are numerous new customisation features in Dynamics CRM 2011:
Solution Record – customisers can package customisations into Solutions, which can be exported, imported, deleted or published (using Publishers – new concept in CRM 2011)
Solution Marketplace – direct access from within CRM 2011 to this online service for finding, evaluating and downloading industry specific developed applications offered by Microsoft Dynamics ISV partners.
Role based Customised Forms - the interface or information presented for a specific form (e.g. Account Entity) can appear different from user to user, depending on role within the organisation and security privileges
Greater Control and Visibility for customizers with regard to sections, fields and form properties, attribute properties (custom attributes can be created and properties altered directly from the customisation form)
View Level Customisations –customisers can edit filter criteria (system and public view), add up to 2 default sorting columns, find columns are controlled on the quick find view only, activate and deactivate public views
Chart Customisations – customisers can create publicly available charts for users to use in personal dashboards and view; these charts can also be imported and exported (as with any CRM customisation)
Custom Activities – in addition to the previous default activities (Tasks, Phone Calls, SMS messages, Email Messages, Letters, Faxes, Campaign Responses, Service Activities) a custom activity can now be created (e.g. Time Entry, Survey or Instant Message) |
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Drag and Drop Functionality – ability to drag and move fields onto the form and between sections and tabs
Public Dashboards - not only can users create their own personal dashboards, but customisers can also create publically available dashboards – providing a graphical view of CRM data displayed in a list, a chart, or via a web resource or an IFrameWeb Resources – CRM functionality can be extended by adding custom web content (for example, HTML, Images, Silverlight, JavaScript) to CRM forms.
Connections – these replace relationship roles in CRM 2011 and can be created ad-hoc for most CRM entities
Dialogs – unlike workflows (which are background automated/asynchronous processes) dialogs are interactive or synchronous processes in Dynamics CRM and require user inputs to start and run until completed; each dialog contains sets of wizard-like pages, with each page consisting of questions (prompts) and answers (responses). |
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