How to set up a good CRM development team in office?

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Hi,
I am trying to set up a CRM dynamics development team in our office.

We have our CRM hosted on the cloud. It was done by a company which is Microsoft Partner.

All our Development, Test and Live versions of the CRM are on the cloud.

We are expecting some plug in development in the future (Javascript plug-in and C# plug-in).
Therefore we think it is good to have a copy of our CRM is installed on our developers' local machines as well.

Our developers have got Visual Studio 2015, SQL server 2012 on their machines. What else do they need to support our CRMs?

How do we take a back up of the CRM from the cloud and install on our machines?

Do the development team require any version controller like TFS or SVN?
What all technologies do we need to maintain a good CRM development team in our office?
Thanks,
Paul

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Community Member on at

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RE: How to set up a good CRM development team in office?

Hello

Were you able to find a solution for this? You can check out a company called Tenfold for this functionality. Tenfold offers integration for most CRM applications available. They also offer other features such as screen pop up, easy note taking, task creation advance analytics and much more. They support MS Dynamics integration. You'll can find more info on this link

www.tenfold.com/.../dynamics

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Alagunellaikumar 6,212 on at

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RE: How to set up a good CRM development team in office?

Hi

Regarding Tools

Since you are using CRM online VS 2012 should be needed because when you do custom report, you need to be install CRM report authorization extension(because with help of fetch xml only able to do custom reports) only support upto VS2012

A back up of the CRM from the cloud

IF it is CRM online there is no way, your only option is raise ticket to Microsoft. But you dont need backup because Microsoft they do internally and also they dev as well as test

or

If your CRM is host third party cloud then you have to check with your about Data backup.

How to do backup?

You have to back up only current organization database. that enought

Good CRM development team

A person one who has knowledge of .net ,C#,asp.net has able to work on plugin and also easy to understand core of CRM behind scene

Middle level knowledge in Javascript and SQL

To develop SSRS, i hope .net too must aware of this.

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tw0sh3ds 5,600 on at

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RE: How to set up a good CRM development team in office?

Hi,

If you have no idea what you are doing, it's usually a good idea to hire some Dynamics CRM Developer (at least as a few months contract) to help your DEVs learn CRM and how to properly handle the customizations and deployment. I have seen many system, where somebody just started doing CRM on their own (not through MS partner) and it always ended the same - at some point the system is damaged and they are looking for a partner to tidy things up for them. So just find some good Dynamics CRM DEV and he will help you out with establishing your external team, because you may think that you are now cutting costs, that will in fact result in bigger costs in the future, when you CRM will be broken.

Apart from what I just said, here is some hints about the environment you should work:

- You should have one DEV environment on-premise which all your DEVs can access (it should be on separate server, not on their machines...).

- you should use some kind of version control system and keep all customizations in this system (TFS, GIT, SVN, whatever)

- you should develop everything in this DEV environment, after testing you should move this to the cloud (in unmanaged solution) for testing and then for Live system

- You can take a backup from online by raising support ticket to MS. But it should be enough to export only customizations and import them on your DEV (you can also import some sample data for most important entities and dictionaries, so that DEVs can easier test things)

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sandeepstw 4,601 on at

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RE: How to set up a good CRM development team in office?

Hi RCP,

If you are going to develop using Online CRM-

1). For development you don't need to install CRM on local machine, you can connect Visual Studio using CRM connector and deploy your plugins and workflow direct to online CRM development.

2). Online CRM provides backup feature which you can use or schedule for backups and restore.

3). Regarding development and deploy on production, you can have multiple instance of CRM while development you can connect to development server and test your plugins and publish on production server.

4). Plugins and customization can also publish using export/import feature of CRM.

Regarding on promises-

1). It is hard to install crm on local machine every time if any error occur so it is good way to setup a VM machine and use it for development using just copy paste on developer machines.

2). Same way you can use for development, connect VM CRM using visual studio and and test development ON VM and then publish on production. And use CRM publishing wizard to setup CRM on newly VM machine.

3). You can save your solution in SVN and take update on every developer machine.

You can contact me if need more help.

Thanks,

Sandeep,

Skype: sandeep1584

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sandeepstw 4,601 on at

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RE: How to set up a good CRM development team in office?

Don't forget to verify if it helps.

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