Active Directory password reset via CRM 2011

A couple of months ago, my colleague Robert Shurtleff (@rgsiii) came to me with an interesting idea about a CRM add on to change AD passwords. After a few emails back and forth thrashing out the design, it was time to make it actually work. In this post, I am going to provide some of the details of a solution to enable a user to change his or her AD password from within CRM.

Branding a CRM 2011 application

The Dynamics CRM 2011 application, along with the XRM framework, enables us to model a varied requirement set with a high degree of customization. But there are instances when CRM is used adjacent with another LOB application, either as sections inside of CRM 2011, or outside of it. In such a case, the user experience should be as streamlined as possible. Dynamics CRM approaches this issue by providing the style sheets that crm uses as part of the sdk (sdk\resources\styleguide), so that other applications can be brought in line with CRM. In situations where other LOB applications take precedent (or their UI cannot be modified), what are the options for the CRM customizer?

Extending CRM 2011 into the social sphere: Using Montage Page editor

The inspiration for this post is a whitepaper from Microsoft titled "The Connected Enterprise". It has a bunch of great ideas on how and why there exists a need to embrace social technologies to drive business needs. There is also a peek into the social tools that Microsoft is building or already built, and possible ways that might benefit your marketing and sales teams using simple storylines.

In this post, I am going to focus on one of those cool tools, and how users could possibly benefit by their integration with CRM 2011.