Customization overview

 

Applies To: Dynamics CRM 2013

The way your organization works is unique. Some organizations have well defined business processes that they will seek to have applied using Microsoft Dynamics CRM. Others are not happy with their current business processes and are using CRM to apply new data and processes to their business. Whatever situation you find yourself in, you will find a lot of customization capabilities within CRM so that it can work for your organization.

In this topic

Combine customization capabilities

Additional capabilities not included in this guide

Combine customization capabilities

Each of the topics within this section will describe individual customization capabilities in considerable depth. But it is important to keep in mind that the solutions to meeting your business requirements will frequently use one of the capabilities together with one or more other capabilities.

Choose the right customization capability for the job

The law of instrument states “If all you have is a hammer, everything looks like a nail.” With all the different customization capabilities available in Microsoft Dynamics CRM it is easy to become very familiar with one of them and seek to use it to solve every problem. As you evaluate the business problems you want to solve, think about the end result you want to achieve and then work backwards to how you can get there.

Additional capabilities not included in this guide

In addition to the capabilities described in this guide, you should be familiar with additional capabilities not described in detail here. This section will introduce some of the capabilities and include links to other resources where you can find more information.

Document management

Document Management allows for integration between Microsoft Dynamics CRM and SharePoint. For information about how to enable and configure document management see Manage your documents or Managing Documents Stored in SharePoint from Microsoft Dynamics CRM. Developers should look at the Microsoft CRM SDK topic Integrate SharePoint with Microsoft Dynamics CRM . For information about installation requirements for Microsoft Dynamics CRM on-premises deployments, see SharePoint Document Management software requirements for Microsoft Dynamics CRM 2013.

Field security profiles

You can set an extra level of security for a custom field you have added to a form using field security profiles. To enable field level security you must set the Field Security property for the custom field and then specify the permissions you will allow for this field to any Field Security Profiles you have created. For information about creating Field Security profiles, see Create a Field Security Profileand Add teams or users to a field security profile.

Localization

If your organization has people who use a language other than the base language you chose when you installed Microsoft Dynamics CRM 2013 or subscribed to Microsoft Dynamics CRM Online, you can add more languages.

For CRM Online, you’ll find all the languages are already installed; you just need to enable them.

For Microsoft Dynamics CRM 2013, you can install additional language packs to add more languages. After you install the language pack you must enable the language to make it available for people to choose in their personal preferences. For information about installing and enabling language packs see Install language packs for Microsoft Dynamics CRM 2013.

Note

Enabling a language can take several minutes and during this time people may not be able to us Microsoft Dynamics CRM.

Enable additional languages

  1. On the nav bar, click or tap Microsoft Dynamics CRM > Settings.

  2. On the nav bar, click or tap Settings > Administration.

  3. Click or tap Languages.

  4. In the Language Settings dialog, choose any available languages and click Apply to enable them.

While you can enable additional languages, the localized text is only available for text that is included in CRM before it is customized. You can only customize CRM using the base language. Users of other languages will see the text in the base language unless you export translations and add localized text for any user interface items that you have added or changed. See Export Customized Entity and Field Text for Translation for more information.

Note

Because customization is supported only in the base language, as the System Customizer, you may be working in Microsoft Dynamics CRM with the base language set as your language preference. To verify that the translated text is appearing, you must change your language preference for the Microsoft Dynamics CRM user interface. To perform additional customization work, you must change back to the base language.

Security roles

A discussion of implementing security for your organization is beyond the scope of this guide. For more information see Control data access.

See Also

Customization Guide for Microsoft Dynamics CRM 2013
Getting started with customization
Create and edit metadata

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