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Introduction
A few months ago Microsoft updated their set of four exams for Dynamics CRM to bring them in line with the CRM 2013 release. Having done the original four exams in their CRM 2011 “flavour”, I took and passed MB2-703: Customising and Configuring CRM 2013.
This post then covers how I prepared, what sorts of questions came up and what material I used.
The Exam
The exam is the usual 48 questions of multiple-choice format with a passing level of 70%. It concentrates on everything that can be customized and configured with CRM 2013 using the “out of the box” tools. The full curriculum list is at the following link, and this should be your golden standard for what to study and your check list of knowledge just before going in to sit the exam.
http://www.microsoft.com/learning/en-us/exam.aspx?id=mb2-703Preparation
The main resources I would recommend are: -
1) If you can get hold of the official course material for this exam from the Microsoft Online Courses (MOC) site then this is the best source of training. It includes eleven student PDFs for each of the main topics and also PowerPoint and lab exercises. Working through this is the best way of preparing as questions on the exam should limit themselves to what is covered on this course.
2) There is a new Customization guide within the CRM 2013 Implementation Guide and this is also a great resource for learning about customization options and restrictions.
3) Any notes and material related to the older CRM 2011 Customisation exam – MB2-866 – are useful as background material as the new exam will continue to test feature that have not changed between CRM2011 and CRM2013 such as Business Unit organization, Security, customizing Views etc.
4) If you’re still hungry for more after that then email me and I’m happy to pass on the notes I made (although they are rather rough) to show you exactly what I considered important.
5) Finally there is no substitute for playing with a trial CRM 2013 online version and the tablet/smartphone application (if you have a device) to test out some of the new features and work through the labs from the MOC material mentioned at point 1. Have a hunt around for useful blogs covering the new features if you want to go a bit deeper.
Points Covered
As a general pointer, the following sorts of questions came up a lot for me during the exam and are mentioned on the curriculum link: -
1) Make sure you know how business units are organized and what happens when you deactivate a business unit, what happens to users belonging to that Business Unit?
2) Know what inherited security roles are and how they behave when Business Units are reparented.
3) Know the different types of Views within CRM 2013 and particularly the new view type Associated View. Know what fields you can include within a view and the restrictions on sorting and specifying field as searchable.
4) Know how views can be used in sub-grids to provide data and how the sub-grids themselves can be set up for lists or charts.
5) Know how responsive design works with respect to tabs, columns and sections and how the same screen might get rendered on tablets and smartphones.
6) Know some of the restrictions for the tablet application – how many dashboards can you have, can the user change forms, how do long complex forms get rendered?
7) Know about the different types of relationships between entities within CRM 2013 and the differences between native and manual many-to-many links.
8) Know the restrictions on relationships, the difference between parental and referential and how these get configured within CRM.
9) Know what aspects of entities you can enable and disable and which ones can’t be disabled once they are turned on (Notes, Activities, Business Process Flows etc.)
10) I didn’t get any question on Access Teams but since they are a new feature it would be wise to study these.
11) Understand how Business Process Flows work, how they interact with security and how many flows you can have for an entity and how CRM reacts if you swap between flows.
12) Understand how Dashboards are used, what you can place on a dashboard and how they render on tablets.
13) Be comfortable with the use of managed and unmanaged solutions, what the difference is, how you create a managed solution and what you can use the version numbering for.
14) Understand how to create a private chart from a public one.
15) Understand how auditing works within CRM, how and where it is enabled and how the system behaves if you turn it off temporarily.
16) Understand the difference between global and local options sets and how these might behave when you have set up mappings between two entities that both use an option set.
17) Understand field level security and how it behaves across all platforms that CRM can be delivered on.
18) Know your way around Quick Create and Quick View forms, what they are used for, where they get accessed from within CRM and constraints about using them.
19) Know about the new Lync, Email, Ticker and URL formats for the Single Text field.
20) Understand the use of and restrictions surrounding Business Rules, where and when you would use them, what you can do with them.
Conclusion
In summary, for anyone that has already taken the CRM 2011 Customisation exam then I think the Royal road to success with MB2-703 is to have a relatively quick refresher on the customisations features you’re already probably very familiar with from CRM 2011 before concentrating on the new features that CRM 2013 introduces (Quick Create/View Forms, Business Process Flows, Business Rules, Tablet Application, Associated View etc.)
For anyone approaching this exam without the CRM 2011 background then the Microsoft course along with some dedicated time playing with the CRM is essential. There were lots of questions concerning how you achieve certain customisations within CRM and that sort of thing is much easier to remember if you have actually walked through doing it yourself, rather than simply reading about it in a more abstract manner.
Finally good luck and take heart, my experience was that the questions were clear and concise with little ambiguity so not too difficult if you’re prepared thoroughly.
Kev Notes
Here are the notes I made during my own preparation, I hope they are of use to you.
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