Monday, September 19, 2016

ADXstudio vs SharePoint for Dynamics CRM

Microsoft buys ADXstudio. I believe this is a known fact to all.

How does it compare to SharePoint. Why use ADXstudio over SharePoint and why not? I'll try and answer these questions here.

Grant McLarnon wrote a great post on why use ADX portals over SharePoint providing you six reasons. It's a great place to give you a head start. What I'm going to focus on is not the technical bit but from a business stand point.

ADXstudio is a great portal solution which provides OOB customer portal, partner portal, community portal, content management and profile management features. All these features are licensed under a single license. You only need to license per CRM organization and not user based. On the other hand, SharePoint is user based licensing and all these features mentioned above have to be manually developed which is time consuming and increases cost.

ADXstudio however, doesn't offer rich document management features like version control, metadata definition of documents, document collaboration and sharing between team members, views and filtering options. With a powerful search engine on SharePoint, looking for documents is much easier even if you don't remember the location of the document within SharePoint. Now it's even better with Office web apps, one can open and edit documents online without having a desktop client for word, powerpoint or excel.

While ADXstudio provides you with certain portal features to meet specific business requirements, SharePoint on the other hand is a clean slate where your imagination is the limit.

In this blog I'm not trying to promote ADX portals or SharePoint, but only helping you make informed decisions. You would really need to vet the options before implementing one over the other.


Thursday, September 8, 2016

Where is my CRM online data?

Short answer, in a Microsoft datacenter located somewhere on planet earth.

Long answer, here's how you can know for sure:

  • While signing up for CRM Online, you are signing up for a public cloud where your data is hosted in one of Microsoft's datacenters.
  • The datacenter is determined by the region you're in. Here is a table that Microsoft has released for your reference. Courtesy Microsoft.
where is my CRM online data
  • This gives you an idea where your data will be hosted however, once you have provisioned your CRM online environment, your URL will clarify the region for you. See the below table for details. Courtesy Peak Engagement
determine CRM online region
  • Now where is your CRM online data, really? Login to CRM online and navigate to https://.crm<4>.dynamics.com/home/home_debug.aspx
  • Look for server name. The first 2 letters determine your data location.
Now I know, where my data is residing.


Sunday, September 4, 2016

What's next in Dynamics CRM?

Want to know what's new in Dynamics CRM or what's in preview or in development? Microsoft makes this easy with the CRM Roadmap website.

Now keep yourself up-to-date!

Thursday, September 1, 2016

Monthly bulletin on Dynamics CRM - August 2016

Here are a few things I thought are worth sharing this month:

Now you can backup and restore your CRM Online instances (for both production and sandbox). Microsoft has provided us the ability to perform backups on demand:  Backup and restore your CRM Online instance

FantasySalesTeam update 1.4.6 is now available. Microsoft has improved the process for Metric Feed. FantasySalesTeam update

Collect feedback and rate records in CRM Online and Dynamics CRM 2016. Collect feedback using the Feedback entity

New data type for CRM fields called Customer added in CRM Online. Now you can include the Customer data type in system and custom entities.

customer data type in Dynamics CRM Online