At the 2010 CRMUG Summit at the end of October, I lead a session with Chris Condron from FM Global called “Best Practices for CRM Environments.”
During this session we covered best practices for CRM administrators to keep a CRM environment running smoothly (and by extension, keep users happy).
- Automation—The best system administration is automatic. By automating system administration processes, you guarantee consistently repeatable results. Some of the areas that should be automated include environmental refreshes, configuration deployments, and client installations and updates.
- Sandboxing development—Some frequent CRM deployment issues happen when there isn’t a clear distinction between dev and production. A best practice that can avoid these issues is by sandboxing dev in a separate environment from your UAT/Production environments.
- Source control—CRM is a very agile, customizable system; however, it is still important to apply standards of good source control practices to your configuration changes.
- Performance and sharing—Sharing is a very powerful tool for your CRM security strategy; however, if sharing is not properly implemented, it can cause performance degradation. The CRM database Primary Object Access table is used by crm to record privileges for each record shared with a user or a team. If this table gets too large, performance of system views and searching can be impacted. If you are sharing a large number of records, team sharing is recommended (instead of sharing with individual users), as it reduces the number of records in the POA table.
- Backup—Disasters happen. Having a good backup strategy is vital—knowing how often to back up, and what components to back up is the most critical component in disaster recovery.
Chris and I will be presenting an encore presentation of this session on 12/9/2010 at 1:30 PM ET. If you are not currently a member of the CRMUG, you can find out more at www.crmug.com.
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