Customization - Do you have a naming convention for your customization back up? (CRM 4 only)

Keeping track of CRM customization changes is just as difficult as back-end database changes. We have a rule Is a Back-end structural change going to be a hassle? which provide you an example how you should keep track of back-end changes. You can apply this rule to CRM changes and use a naming convention on each customization backup file to identify and keep track of your changes.

Your customization file name should be:

[IncrementalNumber]_[Entity]_[Date].zip, for example: 001_account_29042009.zip

The file's name can tell you which entity you made changes and which date the changes were made. The incremental number will provides us step by step instruction on how to produce the current CRM system from a vanilla Microsoft Dynamics CRM.

CRM2011 has significant improvements in this area with Solutions. In CRM 2011 we use versioned solutions along with source control.