Customizing Main Navigation of CRM 4.0 - Part2

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If you have tried editing CRM Navigation as described in part1, you'll be more than relieved to know that there is a tool that'll act as a GUI editor for the navigation.

It is called Demo Tools and it is available for download here:

Microsoft Dynamics CRM Demonstration Tools (for Microsoft Dynamics CRM 4.0)

As the name states, it is a great set of tools for CRM mainly targeted for delivering a demo. But hey, nothing stops us from using it is for development! I'll have to plug-in the standard disclaimer that it is not supported through Microsoft Technical Support.

The tool has a bunch of features besides Sitemap editing like string replacement, dependant picklists, etc.

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The major takeaway here is that it makes editing Sitemap a breeze. You can open existing Sitemap XML files and visually edit them. Once you've made the changes, you can save it back to the XML file.

The tool also takes it one step further so that you can directly open the Sitemap from CRM, make all your changes and publish back to CRM without downloading any intermediate (.xml,...) files. See those buttons "Open from CRM" and "Publish to CRM" in the above screenshot, that's what they do.