Microsoft's CRM forums... analyzed

I've been using a great full-text search application named dtSearch for several years but just recently discovered a feature that I'm finding more useful. The feature allows you to report on the count of words in an index. Combined with the ability to crawl entire websites, the two features can answer some interesting questions, such as the ones I came up with today: In Microsoft's CRM forums, what words are mentioned the most in the forum posts? In other words, what topics are people discussing the most in the CRM forums?

The answer to the question was easy to come by with dtSearch. First, I pointed the crawler at the three CRM forums and let it go until it downloaded all of the posts. I then exported a count of all of the words in the forums, removed the common "noise" words and came up with a pretty interesting list.

In the table below, I've listed the most occurring words in the CRM forums. I added some commentary to the first twenty words to give you an idea of what I've concluded from the word, but of course you can come to your own conclusions.

The Word	# Occurrences	Comments
entity	24938	An entity is what it all comes down to.
error	16293	Most of the use of "error" in forum posts relate to the generic "An error has occurred…". I'm guessing from this that a lot of forum posts originate from those who do not know how to turn on error-level tracing on the CRM Web server. Perhaps Microsoft could write full error details to a format that's easier to review, perhaps with a GUI they provide. Showing generic error messages and not providing customers with an easy way to get to the root of the problem leads to a lot of... forum Q&A's (and loss of productivity).
rights	15287	With the flexible role-level security features in Dynamics CRM, there are understandably lots of questions and problems relating to access rights.
workflow	14382	Plenty of questions about how to do something in workflow. A lot of the forum posts where "workflow" is mentioned also mentions "plugin", which tells me that people post questions about workflow and are told that they've hit a limitation and will need to write a plugin. Hopefully in 5.0 Microsoft will provide more workflow capabilities that don't require crossing over to code.
field	14083	Along with "entity", not surprising to see people needing to know how to update fields, make them read-only, etc.
custom	13192	It's not suprising to see this a top word considering that Dynamics CRM is highly customizable. This word is usually coupled with "entity", "attribute", or "field". But "custom application" is a popular subject as well.
account	13037	The top-mentioned entity type.
blogspot	10848	Looks like most people who mention their blog host their blog on blogspot.
contact	10518	The second most mentioned entity type.
donna	10033	This word occurs because Donna Edwards responds to a ton of questions. Thanks Donna!
problem	9944	Why else do people visit software-oriented online forums... because they have a problem... or an error. (It would be interesting to know the percentage of forum posts are answered to the originators satisfaction. I'm sure Microsoft has that stat.)
attribute	8962	The word shows up mostly in client-side SOAP XML that people paste into the forums.
davidjennaway	8393	David is a Dynamics CRM MVP who also answers a ton of questions. Thanks David!
outlook	8393	One of the significant benefits of Dynamics CRM is the ability to use CRM functionality seemlessly within Outlook. But the frequent occurrence of "outlook" in the forums means Microsoft needs to keep up the efforts to make the integration as reliable as possible.
update	8277	There are lots of ways to update data in CRM but there are lots of questions about how to do it.
check	8234	Most of the questions regarding the word "check" relate to the need to examine a field to then execute related functionality.
string	7950	The word "string" mostly appears in CRM Exceptions that people paste from their CRM trace files to the forum. By the way, the most common exceptions asked about on the forums are these (in order of word occurrence): SoapException, CrmException, InvalidPluginException, HttpUnhandledException, SqlException, WebException, TargetInvocationException, NullReferenceException.
find	7637	By far, the use of "find" in forum posts relate to "Advanced Find". It's a popular feature and people have lots of questions about its full capabilities.
view	7276
lookup	7193
sql	7190
query	7079
crmform	6896
client	6843
event	6767
function	6595
plugin	6369
guid	6138
imran	6116
customereffective	5967
sdk	5938
activity	5904
application	5855
xml	5806
button	5543
javascript	5531
please	5474
context	5341
crmservice	5334
import	5322
request	5280
opportunity	5228
execute	5064
select	5058
hassan	4983
contacts	4856
lead	4779
possible	4706
database	4626
null	4598
owner	4526
click	4480
default	4431
soap	4332
services	4275
link	4223
views	4201
think	4156
attributes	4091
relationship	4035
datavalue	3955
reports	3943
exception	3806
properties	3732
adi	3648
works	3648
msdn	3628
example	3605
option	3593
tried	3551
support	3476
hope	3422
address	3390
product	3384
andriy	3383
picklist	3352
isv	3338
cannot	3291
customer	3284
settings	3271
tostring	3263
config	3262
entityname	3241
tool	3231
security	3223
iframe	3211
leon	3199
related	3184
status	3170
filter	3161
xmlns	3158
delete	3120

And finally... my last name "Dutcher" appears 129 in the CRM forums. And I only found one swear word. The guy was having trouble with the flippin' Async service, but he didn't say flippin'.

-Tim