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Since it is the start of December we’re now down to one month left to accomplish this year’s goals and set some goals for next year…for a lot of people those goals include getting some big projects done, and one of the reasons we fail to accomplish a lot of our big projects is because we aren’t in the right state to do deep work. Deep Work I only came across this NPR podcast (worth the 40 minutes to listen to) from July the other day and found it very interesting, in light of the need many of us have to find ways to be more effective. I see people complaining about their procrastination problem. (And no, you probably don’t have ADHD - not even “a little bit” - but if you think you legitimately might have ADHD then find a good psychiatrist and schedule an appointment.) Our world is becoming full of distractions and that is taking away from our ability to really focus and do deep work. ...

I saw this tweet from the Tom Peters (@tom_peters), the management guru, the other day and it really struck a cord with me. https://twitter.com/tom_peters/status/914155487595245569 I can’t say I always felt that way, there was a time I would have put “nice person” lower down on my criteria for hiring someone. My younger self would have said nice is nice but smarts are way smarter. I still believe smarts are important (as is drive, motivation, passion) but I have come to firmly believe nice matters a lot. ...

Almost every B2C (Business to Consumer) organization knows that high-quality customer service is critical in today’s market. But many B2B (Business to Business) and B2G (Business to Government) firms fail to pay enough attention to customer service, this is a critical mistake. The B2B/B2G customer is also a B2C customer and expects the same service from their business partners - technology partners, marketing firms, real estate, consultants, etc. - as they get at Nordstrom. ...

I’ve become a big fan of extension methods over the years to make my development work in Dynamics CRM, easier to implement and easier to read (i.e., easier to support.) Extension methods allow us to, exactly as the name implies, extended an existing class or interface with new methods - its a simpler version of implementing a derived class. Anyone familiar with developing .NET code for Dynamics CRM will be familiar with the IOrganizationService interface and its varied implementations. While in most cases I’m a fan of implementing my own version of IOrganizationService, often for code-base simplicity I’ll rely on some extension methods for my code. ...

The very smart folks over at PowerObjects recently posted a blog article on how to retrieve the membership of an Access Team using SQL. When working in CRM Online or when we need to use the query for a view we have to make our SQL statements work as FetchXML. Here is the FetchXML that will retrieve Access Team members. You can edit it for the desired entity and place filtering as appropriate. In this case, we are retrieving all the Opportunity records and User records for the Opportunity Sales Teams (CRM’s default OOTB example of Access Teams.)

This evening I was at a major national electronics retailer to purchase a new television. I recently moved into a new place and needed a television sized appropriately for the room (and, my old television being plasma, something that would run cooler to save money on air conditioning.) There was a very nice sales person - not too much pressure (and, being honest, didn’t know much about televisions) but there to help when I needed it. I had already done some research and really just needed to see a few models side-by-side to make a final decision. It probably didn’t take me more than thirty minutes to decide which television I wanted, at which point the sales person sprung into action. ...

Being able to use external DLLs in Dynamics CRM plugins is challenging but doable. Most people who have been doing development on the Dynamics CRM platform for any period of time know that it is not enough to simply reference the DLLs in Visual Studio - you must somehow make them available to run on the server - this can range from mildly annoying to impossible (if you using CRM Online.) ...

This is a product idea I have for Uber. I’m hopeful they will, one day, implement it. Intent Allow users to better understand and communicate pick-up locations at complex locations (stadiums, airports, conference centers, etc.) and special events (Super Bowl, Golf Tournament, etc.) Reason In many of these instances it is very difficult for a requestor to understand and communicate their location to the driver in a manner that is consistent with the vehicle pick-up regulations. ...

Occasionally, I need (or want – depending on your preference) a list of all the attributes (basic CRM metadata) in a Dynamics CRM organization. While there are several ways, including some great document generators, that will get such a list for you, SQL is always an option. If you are on-premises, or working in a developer VM, you can run this query against a CRM organization database to get the basic details. It can also be used as a starter for more complicated metadata query requirements. SELECT en.LogicalName , en.ObjectTypeCode , att.LogicalName , typ.Description , typ.XmlType FROM MetadataSchema.Entity en JOIN MetadataSchema.Attribute att on en.EntityId = att.EntityId JOIN MetadataSchema.AttributeTypes typ on att.AttributeTypeId = typ.AttributeTypeId ORDER BY en.LogicalName , att.LogicalName

Recently a question was asked about creating forms and specifying a default form in Dynamics CRM that was limited to specific group of users. The original question and answer are available on Stackoverflow. Stackoverflow is a great site for asking and getting answers to your Dynamics CRM questions. You already have a default form for the entity that is used by all users (All Users). You want to add an additional form to that entity that is only available to some of the users (Select Users). All Users are currently assigned a security role that gives them the necessary access to the system. ...