CRM 2011 online Performance and Read only forms

I attended a performance session at convergence today and finally MSFT has heard all those who have been complaining about the CRM online slow performance. I do not know is this would solve the issue or not but at least it is a step in the right direction. In a couple of weeks they will release Read Only (RO) forms. We saw the demo today and it does load fast. So administrator can enable the RO forms for users and then they will have the option to change the default form back to the one that is editable in personal preference section. However if there is any client side scripting then the RO form would not work. Although pretty lame yet I believe it is a step in the right direction. I had a discussion with their product team and they said they would work on in it in future release to analyze if they consider making it work with client side scripting but I am sure it wont be without tweaks from developers on client side. RO form does not have Ribbons so I think that is the most important piece for the performance gain. They have not changed anything on the server side as one would expect. It is just the client side form loading process that has changed. I shared with them that if users could have option to load form without ribbon or have buttons instead of ribbons that would serve the purpose better. Anyways I believe they are considering performance gains now and this is certainly very important.

They also shared a performance tool for CRM online that I must confess at least I did not know about. It can be accessed using following address

https://YOURORG/tools/diagnostics/diag.aspx. It is a nice to tool to check latency and Bandwidth. I have been using various methods to do this in the past not knowing that they have this very nice utility available. Will keep you posted with further updates.

Updated 03-28-2012

Just wanted to share that with Roll-up 7 Read only forms are now available.

http://support.microsoft.com/kb/2600643

MSDN link:

http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/hh913610.aspx