Anne Stanton - Sams Teach Yourself Microsoft Dynamics CRM 2011 in 24 Hours

Anne Stanton

800 East 96th Street, Indianapolis, Indiana, 46240 USA

Sams Teach Yourself Microsoft Dynamics CRM 2011 in 24 Hours

Copyright 2012 by Pearson Education, Inc.

All rights reserved. No part of this book shall be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, without written permission from the publisher. No patent liability is assumed with respect to the use of the information contained herein. Although every precaution has been taken in the preparation of this book, the publisher and author assume no responsibility for errors or omissions. Nor is any liability assumed for damages resulting from the use of the information contained herein.

ISBN-13: 978-0-672-33537-2
ISBN-10: 0-672-33537-9

The Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication data is on file.

Printed in the United States of America

First Printing January 2012

Editor-in-Chief
Greg Wiegand

Executive Editor
Loretta Yates

Development Editor
Sharon Fields

Managing Editor
Kristy Hart

Project Editor
Betsy Harris

Copy Editor
Kitty Wilson

Indexer
Erika Millen

Proofreader
Kathy Ruiz

Technical Editor
John ODonnell

Publishing Coordinator
Cindy Teeters

Book Designer
Gary Adair

Senior Compositor
Gloria Schurick

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Anne Stanton started her career in the 1980s, as a programmer working with ancient languages such as Fortran 77, Basic, Turbo Pascal, and Cobol. She then built out her expertise as a master of software applications, consulting, marketing, sales, social media, and grassroots marketing and customer relations. Anne has spent 27 years working with technology and is still passionate about all that it can do to help businesses achieve efficiency and growth. Her most recent focus has been working with the Microsoft Dynamics xRM platform and Microsoft Dynamics CRM software. She was awarded the seventh Microsoft MVP for CRM and has a long-running blog (www.crmlady.com) and Twitter feed (crmlady) on the subject. She has worked with Microsoft Dynamics CRM as a customer, partner practice leader, consultant, and enterprise user since version 1.2, released in 2004.

This book is dedicated to the people who love and have loved me and to the children I was lucky enough to raise into adults, of whom I could not be more proud.

It is also dedicated to the community of passionate people who, for no other reason than to help, continue to participate in the online forums, post incredibly helpful knowledge on various blogs, keep Twitter updated in real time, and share their personal lives on Facebook and other social media platforms. This includes peers, friends, and family members who have been there in one form or another through some crazy times.

My deepest thanks to the following contributing writers, who, through their writing and dedication, have helped me to finalize and release this book despite a number of personal delays and distractions over the past year: Robert Peledie ().

And an extra thank you to the team of people at Pearson Education and the editors who told me like it was, helped bring the content to the next level, and were a great team to work with. They were extremely valuable to this book and to the Microsoft Dynamics CRM community as a whole.

As the reader of this book, you are our most important critic and commentator. We value your opinion and want to know what were doing right, what we could do better, what areas youd like to see us publish in, and any other words of wisdom youre willing to pass our way.

You can e-mail or write me directly to let me know what you did or didnt like about this bookas well as what we can do to make our books stronger.

Please note that I cannot help you with technical problems related to the topic of this book, and that due to the high volume of mail I receive, I might not be able to reply to every message.

When you write, please be sure to include this books title and author as well as your name and phone number or e-mail address. I will carefully review your comments and share them with the author and editors who worked on the book.

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Mail: Greg Wiegand
Editor-in-Chief
Sams Publishing
800 East 96th Street
Indianapolis, IN 46240 USA

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Microsoft Dynamics CRM is a customer relationship management application, a sales force automation application, a customer service application, a marketing tool, a platform and framework for software development, and an application that can be configured to meet a variety of relationship management needs. You might have seen the term xRM within the Microsoft Dynamics CRM world; this term represents all that is mentioned above that is not necessarily considered CRM. Needless to say, Microsoft Dynamics CRM is a product that has great depth and great versatility.

If you have picked up this book, you most likely have been thinking about learning more about Microsoft Dynamics CRM.

This book is aimed at users of Microsoft Dynamics CRM and Microsoft Dynamics CRM Online, Microsoft partners expanding into the Dynamics CRM space, and software developers and others interested in learning more about the product. This book gets you started, but it could not possibly describe everything youll ever need to know about Microsoft Dynamics CRM!

If you are already working with Microsoft Dynamics CRM, this book can help expand your depth of understanding about the product and organize your experiences with the product. If you have never worked with Microsoft Dynamics CRM, you can look to this book as a solid base that gets you started and helps you grow, learn, and expand in the right directions as you learn more about the software and its many areas of potential.