Auditing Customization in Microsoft Dynamics CRM 2011

Question

I want to add Audit on the customizations done by Team on Server, on Entity Forms in my CRM solution.

I know there is a feature in CRM 2011 for Auditing Entity and Field changes in CRM 2011, but I want to ensure that if somebody changes the form without editing entity and fields ex: shifting controls from left to right, it should be logged somewhere, is there any solution to such requirement in CRM 2011.

I am a beginner to CRM 2011, so if my question doesn't make sense, please excuse.

Answer 1

I don't believe there is anything that audits customization changes (at least out of the box). Here is a list of the auditing capabilities that dynamics has out of the box Auditing.

If you need to do this, you can see if there is a 3rd party tool available in the market place, but you can do this yourself if you want to put the development work into it. I would register an plugin on the Publish and PublishAll messages and then store the changes in a custom entity called Customization Audit (or something to that degree). You can then display whatever granularity you wish to display in the audit.

Answer 2

There is not OOB functionality to log the customization changes.

Also if in theory it is possible to log some changes at a certain level (using a plugin triggered on the publish messages for example), the implementation will require a moderate amount of time with not so sure good results.

I suggest (this is my personal opinion) to teach the developers that will customize the system to track by themselves the changes they made (for example using a shared excel file)