From the end of August until the end of October 2009 I fulfilled an assignment for Microsoft in Sweden. Microsoft was working on a large extension on top of Microsoft Dynamics CRM for Nestlé. For years now Nestlé is the largest CRM customer of Microsoft.
The system that Microsoft developed for Nestlé is called MDMS (Medical Delegate Management System). This system, which is based on CRM 4.0, is used world wide by Nestlé Nutrition. I was working at the head office of Microsoft Sweden in Akala, Stockholm. My work consisted of the improvement and preparing for deployment of a migration tool for the migration of data from the previous version of the MDMS system, based on CRM 3.0, to the new system.
To do this I had to take into account all the custom extensions and plug-ins, which form part of MDMS. Part of the work was improving the tool with functionality and to make it bug free. After that the tool had to be accepted via an extensive testing phase.
The period at Microsoft was very instructive. It was the first time for me to work abroad for a longer period of time. The working environment was very pleasant, as well as the city of Stockholm as the colleagues I worked with. I would immediately accept another such assignment.
CRM is the customer relationship management system of Microsoft. It is besides a complete product also a very flexible product. The functionalities can be extended with so called extensions and plug-ins.
In CRM everything is based on entities. An entity for example is a contact or an account. These entities have properties which can be changed or extended with new properties. Also new entities can be created. This is what is called in CRM extensions.
Plug-ins are small peaces of code which can be attached to CRM in the form of plug-ins. Plug-ins can be written in every language available through Visual Studio, like c# or Visual Basic. Plug-ins are mostly used to take action when an event takes place that is fired by CRM.
You could for example attach a plug-in to a 'pre save' event. Before a contact is then saved, the plug-in is fired. In this way you are able to change things under water before CRM saves the contact. With plug-ins it is possible to have CRM completely the way you want it.
At the moment of writing, the project was delivered successfully by Microsoft to Nestlé Nutrition.
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