Add Visual Ribbon Editor to Your CRM Toolbox

Working with CRM ribbon customization could be a very challenging job due to its complexity and the vast options that the CRM platform offers.

Erik Pool has recently released a tool called Visual Ribbon Editor, which I believe you can now add to your toolbox to make yourself a proud and productive CRM developer. 

Enough though I am not practically working on CRM customizations on a day-to-day basis at this moment, I can tell the tool is sophisticated enough to help you conduct your ribbon customization work in a productive way.

Using the tool, you don't have to do all the wild guess about what you can do with your CRM ribbons. You can now instantly add, remove ribbon button and button groups, apply Display and Enabled rules based on your business requirements through its visual interface.

The following is a screen shot that I have copied from Erik's blog post.

Check out the tool, I believe this is the only CRM ribbon customization tool you will ever need.

Hope this helps.

White Paper - CRM Solution Deployment Released

Microsoft Dynamics CRM team has just released another white paper yesterday which covers some typical issues that you may encounter when developing, deploying CRM solutions, the whitepaper has also described some best practices that you can leverage when developing your solution components and promoting the changes across environments.

The following is a brief list of the contents of the whitepaper.

Preface
Introduction
Maintaining Test Environments
    Testing Microsoft Dynamics CRM 2011 On-Premises Deployments 
    Testing Microsoft Dynamics CRM Online Deployments
        Managing Configuration 
        Managing Data 
        Using Microsoft Dynamics CRM Online Trials
Managing Solution Component Dependencies
    Addressing Execution Identity Issues 
        Plug-ins
        Workflows
    Addressing Workflow Reference Issues 
    Automating the Creation of Users, Teams, and Business Units 
        Creating Business Units and Teams
        Creating Users
    Automating the Creation of Queues 
    Preparing Configuration Data
    Preparing Solution Reference Data 
Upgrading Solutions
Managing Solution Conflicts 
Deploying Solutions
Conclusion

The whitepaper can be downloaded from the Microsoft Download Center at the following link.

• http://go.microsoft.com/fwlink/?LinkId=232288

The whitepaper has a lot of valuable information about CRM 2011 solution framework, it's an important guideline document that you should check out.

It should be noted that CRM team has given the whitepaper an interesting name which is extremely long, but what has been discussed in the whitepaper is really about solution deployment.

Hope this help.