Pages

Monday, March 21, 2011

A Call-To-Arms For CRM Experts!

The CRM Community needs your help!  A new wiki has been established at TechNet Wiki for CRM.  While the principal pages have been setup, Neil Benson, George Doubinski, and I need your help in filling it in with content.  To that end, I’ve created a CRM Article Recommendations page with a list of topics I’d personally like to see deployed to the wiki.

Even if you’re not an author, or contributor, we’d be happy to find your article recommendations within that space.  Afraid to edit a wiki?  Don’t fret.  You can tweet your recommendations @crmwiki for good measure! 

Since activity within the wiki counts as community contribution, it may be a great way to not only secure the renewal of MVP status, but to obtain it for aspiring experts!  While many CRM MVPs are birthed from the flames of the CRM Forums, I’m excited at the prospect that some may yet come from the CRM Wiki.

I can’t enumerate how many times I’ve posted responses in the CRM Forum that refer to older threads.  If that practice could be replaced by references to a live and active wiki, I believe the whole community stands to benefit.  So, I openly encourage existing MVPs and CRM experts alike to join in welcoming and contributing to the new wiki.  And for those who become involved: thank you!

Thursday, March 17, 2011

CRM Wiki Moves to TechNet!

Several months ago, I was encouraged by George Doubinski to contribute to his blossoming CRM Wiki project, crmwiki.net.  At the time, the only thing I had to contribute was a list of CRM Development Resources which I had compiled into Microsoft’s public CRM forums.  The content was moved rapidly, and in the spirit of encouraging more utilization of the Wiki by the community, I removed my listings from the thread.

Now, George has taken the Wiki a step further by contacting the TechNet Wiki Advisory Board about making some space within their Wiki for CRM.  They seemed altogether pleased with the idea, and George then enlisted the help of myself and Neil Benson, to kick-start the Wiki space.  This seems to be a fantastic endeavor upon which the whole community can build knowledge surrounding CRM, and I wholeheartedly support it.

My first project within the new Dynamics CRM Wiki, will be to post the first revisions to the Dynamics CRM Survival Guide.  Hopefully, the community will be able to help me fill it in.  At the very least, however, it should serve as a fantastic starting point for people who are newcomers to Microsoft CRM!

Tuesday, March 8, 2011

Patrick Smacchia on Code Partitioning

While I’m still trying to find time to contribute to the CRM community with the often overwhelming personal time requirements, I found a lot of helpful information in an article by Patrick Smacchia, whom I know from the NDepend project.  He has written a very thorough and enlightening article on the principles and practices of segmenting code through the use of solutions, projects, and assemblies in Visual Studio.  I intend to use this information to make myself a more efficient developer in my CRM projects.  Thank you, Patrick!