We celebrated DCRMUG’s first year with what I thought was an excellent meeting! It was different from our usual dedicated-topic sessions, since we covered a raft of different topics by way of reviewing all of the new features Microsoft included in the November Service Update for Dynamics CRM Online. As usual, along the way a number of interesting side-topics came up, questions were asked, so here’s a recap, with links to the recordings and other pages you might find interesting:

• I kicked off the meeting, and in the substantive part of my presentation covered two main topics: how to configure your (new) home page dashboard and how to use the Chart Designer: Introduction and Part 1.
• Jonathan Lee did a great job with a LOT of different topics. He covered the new & improved data import tool, the new tool in the Outlook client for importing contacts, Mobile Express, the built-in sampled data set, and a few others: Part 2 and Conclusion. (CORRECTION: In the recorded webcast, I mentioned that once you disable “Show Get Started Panes on all list” from Set Personal Options form that you can NOT re-enable them.  This is not accurate.  You can re-enable this option if you keep the option “Show Get Started Panes on all lists for all users” set to “Yes” from System Settings.  Sorry for the confusion. – Jonathan 12/30/09)

 I announced the availability of our first annual DCRMUG Annual Member Survey. It’s Friday as I write this, and we’ve already had a bunch of survey respondents! For those of you who have responded, thanks! And if you haven’t yet, there’s still time. On Monday morning, Kim Nogle & I will perform the ritual raffle drawing, and three lucky winners will get free attendance at their choice of one of my upcoming Dynamics CRM Essentials events.  If you like DCRMUG I think you’ll like these fast-paced one-day training sessions!

 Here are two links related to some of the other questions that came up:

•  The E-Mail Router now works with BPOS Exchange Server
• Dynamics CRM SDK article about programming Visualizations

Also, Ian Smith (I think it was Ian – apologize if not!) asked about data migration and integration tools. I mentioned that Scribe is probably the most popular provider of integration software, and nobody seemed to disagree with that characterization. For data migrations, one of my favorite ISV’s, CRM Innovation, has a new tool called Data2CRM that you should check out.

• Scribe: www.ScribeSoft.com
• CRM Innovation: www.CRMInnovation.com  

And in the “speaking of which” category: If you take the member survey, I’m sure it will give you a warm and fuzzy feeling to know that as soon as you click submit, your survey responses will create a brand-new record in a custom Dynamics CRM entity I created to capture survey responses!  Being able to survey customers, members, subscribers and so on is an important way to communicate, and I’m happy to recommend CRMInnovation’s excellent product, Web2CRM, which is what makes possible our DCRMUG member survey.

Finally, I want to close by thanking, on behalf of what passes for management of our little group, all of the members of the DCRMUG community for your participation in a great first year. I hope you enjoyed it as much as I did, and I’m looking forward to a great year #2.