Thoughts about security roles and valves
During the system configuration, one can always want to customize the security roles for all the users, but IMO it is not a good approach. Why?
Dynamics CRM “5” change requests
I would like to introduce my personal list (neither short nor long, it will depend on my verbosity ) of changes I would to see in the future release of Microsoft CRM, codenamed “5” (MICROSOFT DO YOU HEAR ME?):
- Ability to export and save in a readable format (XML, CSV, Excel, whatever) the list of subjects: it’s a real ‘p-i-t-a’ to recreate the whole list every time you create a new environment!
- Ability to customize the relationship entity: one of my client has this kind of scenario (see below), where a contact can have multiple roles in multiple accounts with different emails or phone numbers, depending on the relationship with the account
- Ability to define attribute-security levels: clients are always asking for this security level! They always have one or more fields that can’t be read by “normal” users
- Ability to create a case from a task: why isn’t possible out-of-the-box (you can do it from phone calls & emails)? Imagine a scenario where you are working in a call-center: if you need to escalate a call, you *could* create a task to tell you colleagues what to do to resolve an incident, therefore the task should be converted to a case (yes, I know you could do it with a workflow rule
) - Ability to change the user’s business unit by just selecting it in the lookup and not by having to go in the menu!
- Ability to configure the SMTP server like in Microsoft Dynamics CRM 3!
- Ability to upload & include pictures in Knowledge Base articles
- TbC
My thoughts about CRM and Open Source
I do like CRM software, especially Microsoft Dynamics CRM.
Why do I like it?
- I’m a .NET guy (not geek!)
- I really enjoy working with Windows 7 (I also like Linux with KDE but it’s another story)
- I’ve know a bunch of things about Microsoft CRM since the first release (1.0) a few years back
- I’ve had some big projects around Microsoft CRM in the past 5 years
- Beyond some annoying limitations, you can verticalize it just by using the web interface (and go further with VS2008 and so on)


