14 DAY TRIAL // Microsoft is offering customers a toolset leveraged by the company’s own development teams in order to evaluate the performance of version 4.0 of its customer relation management solution. The Microsoft Dynamics CRM 4.0 Performance Toolkit is now available for download free of charge from the software giant’s CodePlex.
Not only is the Dynamics CRM 4.0 Performance Toolkit offered for free, but the release is also available under the Microsoft Public License (Ms-PL), which is an open source license.
The Redmond company explains that the creation of the Dynamics CRM 4.0 Performance Toolkit was catalyzed by the need to formalize performance testing of CRM 4.0.
“The toolkit contains various tools that allow you to extend Visual Studio testing capabilities to accommodate CRM specifically including: ImportCustomization Tool; DbPopulator Tool and CRM_Perf_Benchmark Tool,” revealed a member of the Microsoft CRM team.
Both Microsoft CRM customers and partners can leverage the toolkit in order to assess the performance of their CRM deployments.
According to the CRM team, work has been done to enhance the toolkit in order to tailor the solution on the capabilities introduced in CRM 4.0.
“The tool provides 133 out of the box tests that can be run against the core Dynamics CRM functionality, such as saving an Account, opening an Opportunity or sending an email,” the Microsoft CRM team member added.
“For custom screens or custom entities, we can create test cases in Visual Studio which can be tested with the toolkit."
“These test cases can test a “use case” or end user test scenario that is important to the functionality of the business."
“One caveat about using the Performance toolkit is that it requires a dummy Windows account for each user put into the test load.”
Microsoft informed that customers and partners will need Visual Studio Team System 2005 or 2008 in order to start taking advantage of the CRM performance toolkit.
In the solution’s description, the Redmond company enumerated some of the new enhancements delivered to toolkit:
“1. Multi Organization Performance Testing Support
2. Multi Server Deployment Performance Testing Support
3. Outlook Synchronization and Offline Performance Testing Support
4. Data Management Performance Testing Support
5. Workflow Performance Analysis Support
6. Email Matching Performance Testing Support
7. Ease of deployment of the Toolkit through an MSI package with enhanced configuration of the toolkit.” The Microsoft Dynamics CRM 4.0 Performance Toolkit is available for download here.