Dynamics CRM

So, I have been tackling a new MS beast these last few months. Her name is Dynamics CRM. In a lot of was CRM is very similar to MOSS. Sadly it's in their failings that they are most alike. The SDK is the worst. At least in CRM it's not full of placeholder content. However the content that is there is absolutely useless.

So, over the course of the last couple of weeks I have become the CRM master, as I had to become the Sharepoint master before. It all started with my desire to handle all of the data migration and integration myself, rather than let the consultants we hired for the implementation handle it. At the rate they were charging us and knowing that they required us to buy a third party tool, I felt (and rightly so of course) that I could do a better job. Most of the work was pretty easy. I created several SSIS packages to handle various tasks (full loads, incremental loads etc) from our data sources (Outlook contacts, ERP data from an Informix database etc...). The real problem came with the little gotchas. Things like assigning an owner of an account to a system user, or setting the parent company of an imported contact and sharing contacts with other system users.

These were not unsolvable problems (obviously since the code is complete) but they could have been made much easier with a properly written SDK. I'll try and put the code I came up with out on the interwebs for all to see soon.

Cheers!