The Dynamics Duo talk about Dynamics CRM Customization

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Girish on my team has been working on a demo that demonstrates the capabilities of the Dynamics CRM platform.  We figured it would be a lot more interesting to get some of that on video in the form of a conversation (as opposed to a screencast) so I get to play the role of interviewer and Girish is the "talent" .  In this episode, we started off thinking we'd talk about Dynamics CRM and SharePoint integration but got so deep into the underlying capabilities of CRM that we ran out of time.  We'll show you the SharePoint stuff in the next episode.  I promise!

The demo that Girish has been working on uses the scenario of a fictitious graphics design firm (i.e. a professional services organization).  Clearly CRM works great for automating sales, service and marketing functions.  What we think about is the stuff under the covers that can be used by developers and ISVs to build new applications that may or may not be related to CRM.  That’s what we mean by the CRM platform.

This includes the basic metadata required to store the data related to a line-of-business application.  CRM uses the concept of entities and attributes to store data whether your online or offline (all stored in SQL Server).  It also makes the building of relationships among those pretty simple.  Once you've got your metadata defined then building forms for the UI (ASP.NET) and workflow (Workflow Foundation) for process are next. 

We’ll get into a lot more of the platform (and in particular the extensibility options) in the next few episodes.