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Over the last few months, I've presented at 3 conferences ( Tech Ed, IT Pro, ms internal - Tech Ready ) about building software as a service solutions with Microsoft Dynamics CRM. Now that all the conferences are over, I'm making more of this content available.
I've created a video repro of the solution demo. http://www.democrmonline.com/WordProposalIntro/
Also available from the home page. http://www.democrmonline.com
This is a nice example to demonstrate the value of software + software as service. The demo show CRM Online data being hosted in Word and inserted into a Word document. Dynamics CRM offers you other means without custom code to get data into Word, Office, Outlook, and Excel. The advantage of the proposal solution is that you get much more flexible control of content format and the interface is very user friendly.
I'll be posting more video's showing how to build the solution.
Cheers, Jon White
Hi Jon, thanks for sharing the demo. Merging some customer data fields from a CRM system into Word, however, is something that our customers have been able to do with contact management systems like ACT! since the '80s.
Much harder in Microsoft CRM seems to be presenting a quote in Word, with quote line items in a properly formatted table. Or how about a feature that merges invoice data into an email, again with invoice line items, emails the invoice to the customer (perhaps along with a nicely formatted PDF attachment) and stores the communication activity in CRM.
These are real world scenarios that our customers have requirements for, that are way beyond simple Word merge, and that take dozens of clicks and a long time to complete in CRM 4.0 today...
Neil
That is a very long explanation of a very simple concept.
Neil,
Don't overlook SQL Reporting Services. You can create a quote/proposal report that is formatted exactly like you describe.
Here is a link where you can download a SRS report that you can use for a starting point: http://blog.customereffective.com/blog/2007/09/sales-proposal.html
This makes it easy to export to PDF to email, and with SQL 2008, you can export it to Word format.
John,
Interesting post.
Thanks.
Rick
Jon,
Keep creating more great videos.
They are very helpful.