Good old 3.0 - And looking at 2011

I have been working at a customer for the past 2 weeks integrating sharepoint and activating the marketing features of 3.0. Doing scripting, customizations and development of custom forms, reminds me of how important fundamental understanding of the application and the possabilities of customizations are to work efficient.

The knowledge build up on working for the past 3 years at 4.0, reading blog posts and books, has made lots of decissions more easy in relation to 3.0.

AND - now i have been doing some tests on 2011 (former known as crm 5.0). And the posibilities here are basically the same.... but with quite some nice features (objects) made available, that i was looking for in vain in 4.0.
So we are allmost there.
I have to point out, that the challange in getting the most out of Microsoft Dynamics CRM is to know what you can do and what you can't. That is a combination of the functional and technical skills of the team defining the final solution.
Sure step is aiming at having the correct project team on both the customer and the supplier side. But only few implementation projects are in a scale that permit a project organization to cover all the ressources.
And that will leave the mid- and small sized installations in the same condition as today....... Coping with lack of functionality caused be the limitations found at first glance. Due to lack of knowlodge from the project team members. On both customer and supplier side.
So awareness, product training, in depth customization and development training is a must.
Fortunately the people that have been working with CRM since 3.0 can bring forward the knowledge they gained in the past, and reuse -invent features and solutions in 2011.