CRM 2011 – Free CRM 2011 User’s Guide

Finally Microsoft has made a CRM 2011 user guide.  I found it quite baffling they never had a user guide for people to download, it seems weird to expect people to buy a complex system like Microsoft Dynamics CRM 2011 and then not tell them how to use it fully.  

You can download the CRM 2011 user guide here

I appreciate there is a good resource centre which has lots of great articles but it doesn’t have an order to it, people can’t work through it and it would make it very difficult for people to print it out and some people like to do this.

I would say I wouldn’t recommend printing out the CRM 2011 guide because it is a whopper.   It’s 3.8 megs in size and 643 pages long.

What this is does enable me to do is give Users a guide and tell them to use the resource centre before users have purchased a book.

I would still recommend users to initially use the Resource Centre because it has some excellent examples and it shows the data in different formats.  The resource centre has links to videos and has some really good diagrams which make understanding process flows of CRM much easier than reading about them.  The user manual although useful doesn’t have any diagrams or screen shots which can make using it feel a bit of slog but it’s free so don’t think I am complaining.

An example is the article of following a quote from creation to conclusion, which you can read in full here but the diagram below explains it brilliantly.   To describe the process below would take many words and wouldn’t be as easy to understand, I can vouch for this because I have tried to explain the process to people and it’s pretty difficult and you will soon find yourself up at the white board drawing a diagram similar to the one below.