I took my first CRM 4.0 certification exam today, Customization and Configuration. Passed with an 86! Yea. I found it to be a good exam, though I have heard otherwise about the other 4.0 exams. CRM 4.0 Customization and Configuration includes configuring Business Units, Users, and Security Roles which were in the Installation and Configuration course in 3.0. Also, they have left off many of the meatier areas covered in the 3.0 Customization course to include Workflow, Client Side Scripting, and Reporting. These (well maybe not reporting) are briefly touched on in the final chapter of the course. Next I think I will attempt the Installation and Deployment test. Our Saturday morning study group as been working through this. I had thought I'd take the Applications exam but there has been some concern about it voiced in response to my post on the Team Blog. I may wait on that one a bit.
I recently authored a short article on the various courses available on MS CRM and the levels of certification one can achieve. It has been posted to the CRM Team blog at http://blogs.msdn.com/crm/archive/2008/07/23/are-you-certifiable.aspx. Please give it a read.
I have received a few e-mail messages from time to time that I cannot Track In CRM in CRM 4.0. When I do, I receive an error message stating the message is too big. This is interesting because even one word messages will produce this error, as long as it's from a specific sender. I've found that certain senders, only a few, but enough to be a problem, cause this problem. ANY message they send cannot be tracked in CRM.
Thanks to CRM MVP Michael Höhne who gave me the solution. It's simple. Just increase the size of the MessageID attribute on the Email entity. It defaults to 100. Michael suggested increasing it to 250. That worked for all the problem senders I had. However, other MVPs suggested perhaps an even larger was sometimes necessary.
Of additional interest is that in CRM 4.0 you can actually increase the size of an existing attribute. In CRM 3.0, although you could change the size of an attribute, increasing it did nothing. You could reduce it which would only reduce the size the form would allow you to enter. But it would not change the actual data size. This has been changed in CRM 4.0. A nice addition.