The Benefits of Open Source Projects in the World of Microsoft Dynamics CRM

In recent years I have become involved with the world of open source projects in the Microsoft Dynamics CRM community. I have searched, found, followed, discussed, improved, and developed tools for CRM. I see many benefits and possibilities, as well as a few risks with open source initiatives for Dynamics CRM.

In this article I will explore some of the pros and cons around living in the world of branches, commits, releases, pull requests, forks, builds, contributors, issues and wikis.

Background

I guess we have all at one point or another found ourselves looking for some third party download on CodePlex, GitHub, SourceForge and similar sites. But probably most of you have stayed far away from those "Source Code" buttons on these web pages, just like I did for so long.

It was not until I started developing software for the general public myself that I actually took a deeper look into the possibilities of online, shared, open source code.

I wanted the possibility to get help with new features, and I was not developing anything that was going to be either secret or subject to copyright. So why not give it a try?

Common ground

For those of us who are doing business based on Microsoft Dynamics CRM, we have a common platform with tons of built in functionality on one hand, but on the other hand we have very customer-specific requirements. This results in an environment where Microsoft provides us whatever we might need to customize the systems from ...