best ribon editor tool for crm 2011?

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Hello - What is your favority ribbon editor tool for CRM 2011? The SDK describes editing the ribbon by directly editing the customization.xml file directly. However, there are a few ribbon editors on codeplex:

Ribbon Workbench for Dynamics CRM 2011
Ribbon Editor for Microsoft Dynamics CRM 2011
MS CRM 2011: Pragma Toolkit: Ribbon, Site Map Editor
CRM 2011 Visual Ribbon Editor

Which of these tools have you used and what's you preferred approach for making ribbon updates?

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Community Member on at

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I'm looking at the Customizations.xml and some of the patterns are starting to become clear to me.

Have you found that after some experience with different methods of ribbon updates that editing Customizations.xml directly becomes the easiest approach for ribbon updates?

For example, most experienced web developers prefer to manually code html as opposed to using a GUI editor?

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@guido - thanks for that balanced perspective!

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ScottDurow 21 on at

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Hi,

I'll start off by saying that I'm the author of the Ribbon Workbench and so I'm a little biased, but thought I should add something here.

I wrote the Ribbon Workbench in the first place because the other tools just didn't give me all the features I needed to customise the ribbon. As a result of those limitations I found that developers (myself included) were making very error prone manual edits to the RibbonXml and this tended to waste a lot of time when trying to track down the problem. I wanted to plug this gap and create a tool where you never need touch the RibbonXml and where I also could build in techniques & tricks that I'd found to work when editing the ribbon.

Here are some of those features that the Ribbon Workbench supports:

Support for Flyout Anchor/Split buttons & sub-menus

Support for dynamic population of menus

Edit/customise standard out of the box buttons and commands as well as adding new ones.

Moving standard buttons around and changing their commands

Adding new Groups/Tabs

Sharing the same commands between multiple buttons

Searching for image/javascript webresource to prevent typos.

Customising the Jewel menu

Validation of common mistakes when adding ribbon customisations.

Drag & Drop UI

I had also found that the other editors used to leave RibbonXml artefacts in my customisations even after I'd removed buttons.

You can learn more about the Ribbon Workbench here - http://ribbonworkbench.uservoice.com/knowledgebase

There will be a new version for Orion once it's released that will support the new flat UI interface - http://www.develop1.net/public/post/App-Bar-Workbench-for-Dynamics-CRM-2013.aspx

Finally - another tool that is a fantastic resource for working with the ribbon is the CRM2011 Iconator by Tanguy that allows you to quickly add icons to your solutions.

Hope this helps,

Scott

P.S. This is also posted at - http://social.msdn.microsoft.com/Forums/en-US/e3304f64-5c96-4cf7-b4ee-e2a72e2ce3c5/best-ribon-editor-tool-for-crm-2011

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rrizwann 675 on at

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I use MS CRM 2011: Pragma Toolkit: Ribbon, Site Map Editor,and i think this is user friendly

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Hi Scott - I tried to import RibbonWorkbench_1_0_1_8_managed.zip but CRM returned an error dialog:

"An error has occured. {1}{0}"

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Hi Rriswann - Pragma Toolkit has one of the best UI's I've seen for ribbon edit however, only 1 out of 10 buttons are available for edit through the tool, at least for phone call entity. I posted my question with details here:

pragmatoolkit.codeplex.com/.../448196

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ScottDurow 21 on at

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Hi Andrew,

Please open a support ticket at ribbonworkbench.uservoice.com and I'd be happy to help you resolve this issue.

Scott

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The following ribbon editor tools only appear to display ribbon buttons that have a reference in an existing customizations.xml as opposed to displaying a reference to all of the buttons available in the ribbon:

* Ribbon Editor for Microsoft Dynamics CRM 2011

* MS CRM 2011: Pragma Toolkit Ribbon Editor

Am I understanding this correctly? I'm really looking for a tool that provides visual access to all of the buttons in the ribbon because this would give me the easiest access to all of the ribbon buttons that I may need to edit.

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