Three Pillars Of Getting Started With Microsoft Dynamics CRM

Very common question that we face in Microsoft Dynamics CRM community forums, “How to get started with Dynamics CRM?” Personally I feel that Microsoft Dynamics CRM is always a very hot topics for .NET developers and it totally make sense because after putting little more efforts you can add a new skill to your resume and can increase your career growth. If you are a .NET developer, you don’t need to learn new language, you can use your existing .NET skills to develop solution for CRM. We have trained many .NET or non .NET developers, you can reach us for our individual and corporate Dynamics CRM training programs. In this article I am going to provide you the basic steps to get started with Microsoft Dynamics CRM.



Setup your Dev Environment

First thing first, the basic requirement is to first get your CRM dev environment. So how can you get your environment?? The following are some of the options that you can use to get your CRM environment:

1. Setup 30 days online trial

2. Setup your VM using on premise trial

The easiest option to get latest CRM environment is setup online 30 days trial using this link , you will always get latest CRM environment with latest fixes and new releases. You can setup your own physical server or virtual server machine. You can download setup files from here. You can also setup your VM on Windows Azure, this is a nice post with complete steps. To setup your on premise environment first download Microsoft Dynamics CRM Implementation guide, which will help you to setup your environment. If you need any help in setting up your dev environment, contact us, we will help you to setup your environment and get started.

Get Functional Overview

It is very important to get function knowledge of any application before jumping into development directly, so I always suggest developers to first go through functional overview of CRM application. You first need to know what are the different modules and their process flow. To get functional overview the best and quick option is CRM customer center, it has many eBooks that can help you to quickly get overview of CRM application and its module. Apart from this you can also watch video on YouTube or can view this course on Microsoft Virtual Academy to get basic understanding of CRM. We also provide Microsoft Dynamics CRM functional training so if you are interested in one to one or cooperate training program contact us.

Get CRM Software Development Kit

Now for the development, downloading software development kit should be the first step for any application developer, so after getting functional overview you should download CRM SDK from here. CRM software development kit contains many tools which will help you on CRM development and it has .chm which contains documentations and sample code. You will also get sample code for both server and client side development.

You can Contact us for more advanced and customized individual and corporate training. We have different training programs that we designed for different types of CRM users like developers, business users, functional and technical consultant.