PREVIEW – Here is an overview of the new ‘helpers’ customizers have at their disposal while customizing Microsoft CRM 2011:

Solutions

• Upon installing Microsoft CRM, a new default solution is created that reflects the ‘default’ state of the system; this default state contains all the entities and components that are installed with the system
• A solution can be seen as a ‘vertical solution’ created with Microsoft CRM; for example: you may need to create a new solution for customer Y, based on an existing solution created for customer X
• A solution groups a series of customization
• Solutions can be imported/exported
• New solutions are empty, you just need to add the entities & components you want to deploy!
• Solutions are versioned using a ‘version’ field, meaning you can have multiple versions of your customizations resulting in ease of deployment and testing
• A solution is based on a publisher, which means that each publisher can now be identified by a contact form and can have its own customization prefix
• The publishers can sell their solutions through the new “Marketplace”, which is available through Microsoft CRM

Attributes = Fields

• This may not seem quite interesting but it looks like someone at Microsoft thought that it would be more understandable for everyone to rename ‘Attributes’ to ‘Fields’ for the entities customization, not sure why…
• A new field is available: lookup, which lets you decide to which entity you want to relate (account, contact, etc.); this field is similar to the attribute created when using a N-1 relationship in Microsoft CRM 4.0

Entities

• New entities can now be defined as being a new type of activities; for example: visits, meeting minutes, etc.
• New entities can now be sent to queues
• New entities can be set to send emails (not sure of that one, I still have to test it)
• New entities can be audited based on the new auditing feature (more on that later)
• New entities can be set to use the new ‘Document Management’ feature which is tightly coupled with SharePoint 2010 (more on that later as well)

This is a first overview of the new functionalities (or helpers) that are available for system customizers, I’ll try to go more into details of these new cool stuffs!