CRM

I've been looking into bridging our CRM 3.0 installation with the billing section of Quickbooks so we can do simple imports and exports of data between the two. So far, as far as I can tell, this might be more work than I initially suspected. Although not directly related to this, I did find a good write up on how the callout functions have evolved from 1.x to 3.x

I like doing little 'quickhack' widgets from time to time that do functions like this, but it looks like this will be more than just a quickhack.

A CRM-centric blog, and the callback info I talked about, can be found here: http://blogs.msdn.com/mikemill/archive/2004/12/09/279021.aspx

Think of Nancy Reagan and just say No.

I haven't pinpointed yet but there is a machine that acts as an Exchange frontend, providing RPC over HTTPS for the enterprise, and also functions as the frontend for CRM 3.0. For whatever reason, they do not get along. I would love to figure out why but for the sake of keeping things running, I'm going to move the Exchange frontend to another machine as soon as I can.

I'm not sure how common this setup is, but it could be I'm the only one trying to do this type of setup. I doubt it is a recommended setup but we currently don't have a choice at the moment.

I used to have a Dell Axim X50V but had to give it up when I changed jobs last year. If I had it, I'd probably be trying out this client since we're trying out CRM for internal use. There are a lot of things I like about CRM but there are also some things that don't quite make sense to me, but I'm sure they are done that way for a reason.

You can grab the client here:
http://www.microsoft.com/downloads/details.aspx?FamilyID=ea5a3566-7ec8-4afe-bbfa-91e7210c55c4&DisplayLang=en

I'm not certain that it is a supported configuration but it certainly made my laptop run a lot faster when I upgraded from MSDE to SQL 2005 Express. Simply install the CRM client, which in turn will install MSDE, then once you have sync'd with the CRM database, install SQL 2005 Express and tell it to upgrade your CRM database on your local machine.

I haven't done any real world time trials but the application responsiveness is a lot better after the upgrade. My laptop might be a bit of a strange one, with 2GB of RAM, but I think even RAM starved machines will run better with the new backend.

I don't know if it makes a difference, but I used the March CTP of SQL Express 2005 SP1.