Shan McArthur's Blog

Microsoft has changed the naming conventions again for Microsoft Dynamics CRM updates.  This article will describe the new naming strategies.

Microsoft has published a new page that contains all of the installation guides, download links, and update rollups and service packs for all versions of CRM.

Microsoft Dynamics Marketing (MDM) tailors the user experience based on the role that you have selected in the "Welcome Dialog".  It may not be obvious, but if you find yourself frustrated by MDM in that you cannot seem to do something that you should be able to do despite you configuring your security roles to do so, please try switching your role in the welcome dialog.  This article will show how to do this.

Microsoft is deprecating the availability to host public websites in SharePoint online starting January 2015.  See http://support2.microsoft.com/kb/3027254 for more information.  This article will cover our roadmap for SharePoint Online support.

Microsoft Dynamics Marketing has the capability of exposing the data through an oData feed.  This article will show you how you can use this feed with Microsoft Excel.

My previous article showed the new way of activating the internal use rights for CRM Online.  This article shows you how to add Microsoft Dynamics Marketing to your partner internal use rights as well.

If you have a silver or gold competency in the Microsoft Partner Network (MPN), you get a certain number of seats of both Office 365 and CRM Online.  In the past, these were delivered through the Microsoft Cloud Partner program, but the process has changed this year. This article will show you how to activate your subscription using the new model.

If you are using Hyper-V virtual machines for your development environment you will find that when you clone the virtual machines that they start up in Safe Mode and CRM no longer works.  This article will give you the information to resolve the problem.

Our Adxstudio Portals product has been maturing quickly over the past year.  A theme of Portals 6 was to make everything point-and-click so that you did not have to engage a developer to do most basic things with our portals.  We also added new functionality to surface CRM data and forms on your portals with our Entity List and Entity Forms features.  We also carved up all of our solution files into individual solution files for every feature.  We have been having record sales this year which gives us some feedback on our feature investments.  We will continue to invest in these priorities and will bring even more to the table with Adxstudio Portals 7.  This article will give you a sneak peek into our current planning processes and let you know what you can expect as we continue to invest in the next version.

Do you have managed solutions in your CRM environment that you need to go back to unmanaged and you want to learn about the process?  This article will demonstrate the various situations that lead up to this and show you how to accomplish the goal.