The Dynamics CRM consultant tool belt

To be truly productive as a Dynamics CRM consultant you need a good toolkit to automate tedious or labor-intensive tasks. While you can solve anything by writing code – it just gets a lot easier when you can leverage the tools built by the CRM community. Listed below are the tools which I have used in the last 12 months – leave a comment if you think I have missed an essential utility in your tool belt.

• Ribbon workbench for Dynamics CRM  - the standard for editing the Dynamics CRM Ribbon since CRM2011, it can now also be installed as a plugin for XRMToolbox
• XrmToolBox – the Swiss army knife for CRM consultants, it is a windows application on which 30+ plugins can be added to automate a number of tasks – listed below are some of the XrmToolBox plugins I have recently used
  • Metadata Document Generator: a tool to generate Excel and Word documents with entities and attributes information - also take a look at  Spring Cleaning for your Dynamics CRM system about how you can use it to clean up your CRM system
  • Script Finder: lists all client events defined in an organization
  • Solution History for CRM 2013/2015/2016: allows you to view a historical list of solutions that have been imported, as well as display how many times a solution has been imported, version number that was updated and error/warning messages that were encountered during solution import
  • FetchXML Builder: Build and test FetchXML with all capabilities supported by the CRM platform, etc …
• CRM Diagnostics Toolkit
• Trace reader for Dynamics CRM (Codeplex)  
• Level Up for Dynamics CRM (Chrome extension) 
• Random test data generator 
• Dynamics CRM/365 Developer Extensions - is a very worthy replacement of the SDK Developer Toolkit. It contains a lot of templates and will accelerate your development of plugins and workflows
• CRM Rest Builder – a tool to generate Javascript code using the 2011 & Web API REST endpoints
• XRM CI Framework - provides you with the tools automate the build and deployment of your CRM solutions. Use the framework to implement a fully automated DevOps pipeline, which will allow you to deploy more frequently with greater consistency and quality.
• Fake XRM Easy – unit test library for Dynamics CRM/365 plugins and workflows
• ConfigDataMover – Tool used for synchronizing data in different CRM environments (from @lucas_is)
• Dynamics 365 workflow tools – this solution contains 30+ workflow activities which will help you to be more productive when designing Dynamics 365 process (from @demian_rasko )

Also check out these other tool lists – Your essential toolkit for Dynamics CRM (from @jukkan)