The CRM Engineering for Enterprise team has released two white papers that provide prescriptive guidance for the CRM Service Scheduling module. Together, these papers can be used to plan, design, deploy, and optimize a successful, high-performing service scheduling application using Microsoft CRM 3.0.
Please share these papers with the broader Microsoft CRM Community, and email any comments or suggestions to CRM Enterprise Content Feedback (entfeed@microsoft.com).
Service Scheduling: Optimizations and Considerations
This paper describes optimizations for configuring the Service Scheduling module in Microsoft CRM 3.0 based on a customer’s business processes. It also includes guidelines and best practices for designing a CRM service scheduling application.
The information in this paper was collected from various sources across the extended Microsoft CRM team, but the majority of the credit goes to Roger Gilchrist and Peter Simons from our MBS Consulting team in the UK. Their team spent a lot of time and effort collecting, evaluating, and documenting the information that formed the basis of this paper.
The optimizations and design guidelines included in the paper have resulted in significant performance improvements in both our labs and customer deployments. Although these optimizations were developed and tested with CRM 3.0, the majority of them still apply to CRM 4.0. We will update this paper for CRM 4.0 as necessary.
Service Scheduling: Performance and Scalability Study
The Business Systems Architecture (BSA) team is a North America group that provides prescriptive guidance to Partners and Customers regarding infrastructure and hardware for Microsoft Dynamics™ deployments. The BSA team offers various packaged services, including the benchmarking and performance evaluation of Microsoft CRM applications.
The CRM Product Team engaged the BSA team to assess the performance of a typical complex customer service scheduling solution – with multiple Sites, Resource Groups, Service Types and Services. The application was designed and tuned with the design principles and optimizations described in the optimization paper. The results demonstrated that a highly complex and high performing service scheduling solution can be developed on the CRM platform.
Please contact the BSA team (mbsprosv@microsoft.com) for more information regarding the CRM performance evaluation service.