Friday 27 March 2015

Theming with CRM 2015

How long you have wanted to have the branding in your CRM applications for your clients? With CRM 2015 you will now be able to use branding and change the colours for navigation. You can also give the colour to your entity which is quite cool.

There will be a new option in solutions area called Themes.

This allows you to select the existing sample CRM Default Theme which user should be able to copy and create a new one.



You can preview the theme to make sure you are happy with the final outcome and if you are, you can then publish the theme just like any other solution.

All themes are not solution aware. However users can export and import themes to different organisations just like solutions.

There are few things that is still not possible:
1) Changing the font
2) Changing the background colour
3) Changing the OOTB icons

Hope to see many colourful CRM implementations now.

Thursday 19 March 2015

CRM Administrator's New Assistant!!!!

When running Dynamics CRM on-premise, it is critical to monitor the server health constantly. So far we relied on looking at various places to monitor our server health and try to figure out what is going on. But for Dynamics CRM 2015, Microsoft has released a new management console which allows administrators to monitor all relevant components of CRM from one place and identify root cause of any failures very quickly.

Here is the list of services available (source for further information)

Feature Summary
  • Monitors the availability and heath of the following components
    • Microsoft Dynamics CRM Server 2015
    • Microsoft Dynamics CRM 2015 E-mail Router
    • Microsoft Dynamics CRM 2015 Reporting Extensions
  • Monitors the availability and health of the following component services:
    • Microsoft Dynamics CRM Asynchronous Processing Service
    • Microsoft Dynamics CRM Asynchronous Processing Service (maintenance)
    • Microsoft Dynamics CRM Sandbox Processing Service
    • Microsoft Dynamics CRM E-mail Router Service
    • Microsoft Dynamics CRM Unzip Service
    • World Wide Web Publishing Service
    • Indexing Service
  • Monitors the availability and health of the following application components and functionality:
    • Operability of ISV plug-ins
    • Web application requests processing, SOAP exceptions, and unexpected failures
  • Monitors the performance metrics of the following components:
    • Web application requests processing
    • Database query processing
  • Monitors the system for configuration-related failures.

The download link for this tool from Microsoft website.

https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/download/details.aspx?id=46371

Enjoy the Microsoft System Centre Management Pack and hassle free monitoring of your CRM servers administrators!!!!!