I’ve seen many people that are wondering where the print menu went in Windows 8 especially when trying to print a PDF file they’re viewing in the Reader app.
With Keyboard
If you have a keyboard attached to your Windows 8 machine, it is as simple as pressing Ctrl+P in the Reader app which will bring up the list of printers that you have installed and you’re two clicks away from printing your document.
Without Keyboard
If you don’t have a keyboard, don’t worry as you can do this easily with touch. Swipe from the right to bring up the charms.
Tap on Devices which should show you the list of printers you have installed.
Select the appropriate printer and choose other options (like page size, etc) and print away! BTW be responsible and print only if you must absolutely do so. Vast majority of things you can do on paper (such as reading, highlighting or adding an annotation) can be done directly within the Reader app in Windows 8.
Updated 29th August 2012: The sample has been modified to support both the Microsoft online services environment (Office 365 style) authentication and the Microsoft account (formerly Windows Live ID) authentication. Once again many thanks to Ryan Lo from Marketo for providing the updated sample.Recently I have had a number of developers asking me about using CRM Online web services from within non.NET applications such as PHP or Flash web apps. Given my heads down approach on .NET these days I ended up putting together a pretty basic sample in C# that shows how to access CRM Online web services using SOAP messages only. This code sample retrieves data from CRM Online using pure SOAP calls only and no additional assemblies to illustrate the underlying SOAP interactions. Couple of ISV partners were able to successfully use this sample and port it over to PHP & Adobe ActionScript, so this stuff apparently works!
The soap messages were based on Fiddler (http://www.fiddler2.com) traffic capture of sample code from the CRM 2011 SDK (http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/gg309408.aspx).
You can download the sample code here: http://code.msdn.microsoft.com/CRM-Online-2011-WebServices-14913a16
At a high-level below is what the code does:
BTW the new MSDN code gallery (beta) is pretty awesome with the ability to browse through the source code without downloading and extracting the zip file. Pretty nice, huh!
Updated: 23rd February 2011 - This webcast was recorded and can be viewed on-demand here: https://www.livemeeting.com/cc/mseventsbmo/view?id=1032473318&role=attend&pw=5149E819. You can view the slides used in this webcast using the PPT Web App at the bottom of this post. Also please note that the BCS connector shown in the webcast is not supported by the CRM support team.
On February 22nd , I’ll be presenting an MSDN webcast titled Integrating SharePoint 2010 and CRM 2011 Online. It is a 300-level webcast for programmers, developers & architects , so I’ll delve deeper into code and architecture. The topic of integrating SharePoint & CRM is something I’ve been presenting for more than an year but every time I deliver this, there is definitely new content available for me to present. This time is no exception as you’ll get a preview of the BCS connector we’re working on and also I’m excited to show a couple more interesting demos.
You can signup for the webcast here: https://msevents.microsoft.com/CUI/EventDetail.aspx?EventID=1032473318&Culture=en-US Date & Time: Tuesday, February 22nd, 2011 9:00 AM Pacific Time (US & Canada)
Below is the abstract for the webcast. Let me know (by leaving a comment below) if you’d like me to cover anything specific that might be of interest to you.
Microsoft SharePoint and Microsoft Dynamics CRM is a match made in heaven. With Microsoft Dynamics CRM 2011, Microsoft provides out-of-box document integration with Microsoft SharePoint 2010, but customers are increasingly looking for ways to integrate these two technologies further. In this developer-focused webcast, we look at how you can bring Microsoft Dynamics CRM data to SharePoint using web parts, Microsoft Business Connectivity Services (BCS), web services, and more. We also demonstrate the BCS adapter for Microsoft Dynamics CRM and an end-to-end online application connecting Microsoft SharePoint Online, Microsoft Dynamics CRM Online, Microsoft Silverlight, and Windows Azure. If you want to understand how to integrate SharePoint and Microsoft Dynamics CRM, then you don't want to miss this webcast.
You can view the slides used in this webcast using the PPT Web App below:
Below you'll find the source code for various demos I used during my OSP309 session at TechEd NA 2011.
These source code projects are provided as-is and are for temporary reference only without any support. They will be removed shortly and the final versions will be posted on MSDN Code Gallery. The link to the Code Gallery Projects will be available in this blog post as soon as they're published.
Many of our ISV partners might be familiar with the DPE Metro (formerly Ascend) early adopter training content that we used to ramp-up the partners on CRM 4.0 platform(code named "Titan"). We're now happy to announce that the materials are now updated and being released to the entire development community as Developer Ramp up Kit for Dynamics CRM 4.0. Any .NET based developer can use this kit to easily ramp up on the CRM platform and start building line of business applications well within a week's time.
The kit is available at the MSDN development center here http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/cc720132.aspx
The kit includes
No prior Knowledge of Microsoft CRM is required. Familiarity with the .NET Framework, Microsoft Visual C#, Jscript, Microsoft SQL Server and general web development is recommended.
The content has come a long way since its inception and has been refined and well tested in the field. Going back to 2006 with CTP2 build of Titan, revised completely for CTP3, the materials were delivered in-person to several of our ISV developers world-wide. Earlier this year, it was forked off and we created materials for the Software+Services scenarios focusing on CRM Online and Partner Hosted CRM.
We've listened to your feedback and the ramp up kit now unifies all of this into one single package that we hope will be a useful resource for our developer community. Many thanks to all those involved that helped in shaping up the content and releasing it. You know who you're!
Please let me know via comments or email if you have any questions or need any further information.
Windows Presentation Foundation (not Framework!) allows you to create rich interactive user experiences. If you've watched the channel9 video on using WPF with CRM, below code sample and screencast will help you to hit the ground running on WPF development for CRM.
Download the code
Creating a CRM WPF Offline Application
Download the video
Today I’m proud to announce the availability of beta version of Microsoft Dynamics CRM 2011 UR9 or Q2 2012 Service Update or “R8”. Call it what you want but it is here! The beta release only includes on-premises version of the next release of CRM. This release includes support for multiple browser types and many other great features that you can find in the Release Preview Guide.
This beta release is primarily targeted at developers and partners. We want you to make sure your solution and custom code works as you expect with the upcoming release. Please be sure to ready yourself, your peers and solutions for the release coming up in just a few short weeks.
Again we’d like to emphasize that the beta release is for test purposes only, and not for production usage. There is no migration path from the beta to the final release, so please plan accordingly and use appropriate test environments. There are elements of upcoming release that are not included in the beta, for example Mobility or CRMOnline specific features are not offered as part of the beta but will be available in the final release.
The bits are available on Microsoft Connect site. Please follow the steps below to get access.
Post all questions on the Connect discussion group linked above in step #4. If you are having trouble accessing the connect links above, please send an email to crmtapbeta@microsoft.com.
Updated 26th June 2012: The sample has been modified to use the Windows Live login URLs & URNs that is dynamically sent through the discovery service. Many thanks to Ryan Lo from Marketo for providing the updated sample. This new update makes this post obsolete!The recent code sample I published on Connecting to CRM Online 2011 Web Services using SOAP Requests Only was well received by many people however a few developers from Europe & Asia mentioned that they were getting (500) Internal Server Error when they were trying out the code. I then realized that CRM 2011 Web Service URLs had a different format in Europe & Asia which helped me to find the culprit.
I signed up for a CRMOnline European trial account and putting the SDK sample under Fiddler inspection revealed that it was a minor change within one of the XML fragments. That’s it, seriously!
<a:Address>urn:crm:dynamics.com</a:Address> to <a:Address>urn:crm4:dynamics.com</a:Address>
Obviously crm4 is used in our European datacenter and crm5 is used in our Asian datacenter so I had to modify the code to use the appropriate URN address.
// Create the URN address of the format urn:crm:dynamics.com. // Replace crm with crm4 for Europe & crm5 for Asia.string URNAddress = "urn:crm:dynamics.com";if (CRMUrl.IndexOf("crm4.dynamics.com") != -1) URNAddress = "urn:crm4:dynamics.com";if (CRMUrl.IndexOf("crm5.dynamics.com") != -1) URNAddress = "urn:crm5:dynamics.com";
You can download the updated code sample here: http://code.msdn.microsoft.com/CRM-Online-2011-WebServices-14913a16
All is well again!
In this video, David Yack walks through the process of setting up a all-in-one CRM 2011 Virtual Machine from the ground up. Of course CRMOnline is a great way to build your demos and prototypes however there are scenarios where you’ll need a virtual machine. This is especially true for pro developers who’d find a VM very useful for developing, debugging & testing their code.
Since C9 now uses Smooth Streaming for the default player, it is recommended to watch this video in full screen on a broadband internet connection with good bandwidth. If you’re having trouble viewing this in the embedded player, please download & play the high quality WMV. For web purists (no offense), C9 now offers the video in a HTML5 player (video tag) if you choose so in your C9 user profile!
http://channel9.msdn.com/Blogs/girishr/Building-a-CRM-2011-Virtual-Machine
I shared the video with someone smart who also had the patience to write down the steps in a detailed fashion. I’ve posted the notes here as-is with minimal edits and I hope you will find it useful.
Step Outline
Detailed Steps
BTW, below are the links to software downloads referred in the video
Windows Server 2008 R2 http://www.microsoft.com/windowsserver2008/en/us/trial-software.aspx
SQL Server 2008 R2 http://www.microsoft.com/sqlserver/2008/en/us/try-it.aspx
Office 2010 Trial http://office.microsoft.com/en-us/try/
SharePoint 2010 Foundation http://www.microsoft.com/downloads/en/details.aspx?FamilyID=49c79a8a-4612-4e7d-a0b4-3bb429b46595&displaylang=en
CRM 2011 Download http://www.microsoft.com/en-us/download/details.aspx?id=27822
Visual Studio 2010 http://www.microsoft.com/visualstudio/en-us/download
P.S: I know this video was recorded several months ago while Beta build was around but it is still very relevant for everyone. I apologize for not posting this earlier.
My session titled “Integrating Microsoft SharePoint 2010 and Microsoft Dynamics CRM Online” from TechEd North America 2011 was recorded and can be viewed on-demand at the link posted below.
Source code of all my demos in this session is available here: Source Code from my TechEd OSP309 Session.
I also found out that John Anderson from Bamboo Solution has done a great job summarizing my session in his blog here: http://community.bamboosolutions.com/blogs/sharepoint-2010/archive/2011/05/17/teched-integrating-microsoft-sharepoint-2010-and-microsoft-dynamics-crm-online-with-girish-raja.aspx.
BTW channel9 has the recordings of all sessions from TechEd North America 2011 and you can watch/download them here: http://channel9.msdn.com/Events/TechEd/NorthAmerica/2011/. Even if you didn’t attend TechEd, you can watch all the sessions including the keynote, so don’t miss out on your favorite content.
http://channel9.msdn.com/Events/TechEd/NorthAmerica/2011/OSP309
Update (10/28 12.30AM): Make sure to use MSFTINET as SSID when connecting to wireless network. It is an open network (does not require key or password).
A few months ago, I “signed up” to be part of the PDC virtual planning team and my role was to take care of wireless (802.11) experience for the several thousand PDC attendees. Given the geeky nature of the audience, it was a challenge that had to be taken very seriously.
So what does it mean for you, the PDC attendees? You can get to the wireless network and browse the internet from most locations within the Los Angeles Convention Center. “Most locations” means that you may not be able to browse from within the restroom :) but you can at common locations like keynote room, internet cafes, lounges, breakout rooms where people congregate.
The keynote room was the biggest puzzle we had to solve. More than ever, many people use their laptops, smart phones and other internet enabled devices these days during conferences. Having several thousand people in one big room and every person using their array of devices, actually pushes the limit of physics to a greater extent.
In order for our attendees to have the best possible wireless experience at keynote, we realized a conventional wireless deployment may not work and we’re trying some innovative hardware and scaling it for “PDC level” experience. Infact, on the keynote this morning, we had more than doubled our usual capacity!!! I’ll blog more about it as the event progresses.
Also don’t forget to check out the mobile PDC experience at http://m.microsoftpdc.com/
Keep browsing!
Continuing the back to basics series, I thought I'd write a simple SharePoint webpart that pulls data from the CRM 4.0 VPC. If you've watched the Dynamics Duo talk on SharePoint, this should help you get to the next step and dig into some code.
After a little bit of challenge, I was able to get the sample code published in Code Gallery for download.
Download the Code
I also captured the process of creating a CRM-SharePoint custom webpart as a screencast and you can view it below.
Creating a custom SharePoint webpart for CRM
Download the Video
The example shows how you can build it from the group up. You can obviously use SharePoint project template and deployment packages to automate some of the steps.
While we're posting the Channel9 videos, I thought it'd be good to get back to basics and show how we built some of the components in the demo. With CRM's entity/relationship system under the hood, it is very easy to create "xRM" applications that looks completely different. For example in the screenshot below, to the left is the out-of-box UI and on the right is how you can modify it with simple customizations.
We did a few things to the navigation here
Let us look at how a developer can go about to do these changes. There are couple of ways you can do that.
Changing Sitemap.xml
All of CRM's main navigation is stored in this single file. The way you edit is you goto Settings -> Customization -> Export Customizations and export "Site Map". The sitemap will download as a compressed file and you can modify the .xml within to change the navigation as you like. The tool I commonly use is either Visual Studio 2008 or one of the advanced notepad editors like Notepad++. Details on the SiteMap schema can be found here within the SDK. Most importantly, if you screw up the navigation, check out this section on how to recover from errors. You have got to bookmark this. Trust me, I've panicked number of times without realizing I could recover.
All of CRM's main navigation is stored in this single file. The way you edit is you goto Settings -> Customization -> Export Customizations and export "Site Map". The sitemap will download as a compressed file and you can modify the .xml within to change the navigation as you like. The tool I commonly use is either Visual Studio 2008 or one of the advanced notepad editors like Notepad++.
Details on the SiteMap schema can be found here within the SDK. Most importantly, if you screw up the navigation, check out this section on how to recover from errors. You have got to bookmark this. Trust me, I've panicked number of times without realizing I could recover.
However editing Plain Old XML (POX) is not a favorite thing to do. In the next part, let me show you a tool that simplifies this into a much easier process.
In this video, we take a look at the Enterprise Search Accelerator for CRM and see how SharePoint and CRM can complement each other in creating business solutions.
http://channel9.msdn.com/posts/girishr/CRM-Accelerators-Enterprise-Search/
The enterprise search accelerator allows Microsoft Office SharePoint Server (MOSS) customers to view and search for Microsoft Dynamics CRM data directly from their SharePoint portals.
Additionally, the technology, Business Data Catalog (BDC), and techniques used with this accelerator can be employed to surface data from other line of business applications to further enrich the SharePoint portal.
BDC makes it easy for people to connect to, find, and act on information stored in structured line-of-business systems (such as Microsoft Dynamics CRM) by using a declarative framework to securely integrate them into search results. With BDC you can configure actionable audience-specific portals, dashboards and mash-up interfaces for this data without writing any code.
Since July 19th 2012, all new sign-ups for Dynamics CRM Online have been switched over to the Microsoft online services environment which is the same subscription/billing platform used by Office 365 and many other services from Microsoft. Among many new things with this switch over, one significant technical change is that it allows CRM Online customers and partners to use the same identity platform as Office 365. This means that users of CRM Online & Office 365 will have the same set of username/password to access various services and it also helps administrators to manage their users in an effective way.
If you are a Dynamics CRM developer or partner developing with the CRM Online web services, you might want to update your code to support the new identity platform (now called as Windows Azure Active Directory - WAAD in short)
For .NET developers, this page on MSDN shows you all the details on updating your code: http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/hh670628. Also the downloadable SDK code samples have been updated to reflect the various authentication options. For those that are writing code in platforms other than .NET, you might want to checkout the updated SOAP-only web services sample posted here: http://blogs.msdn.com/b/girishr/archive/2011/02/04/connecting-to-crm-online-2011-web-services-using-soap-requests-only.aspx
For .NET developers, this page on MSDN shows you all the details on updating your code: http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/hh670628. Also the downloadable SDK code samples have been updated to reflect the various authentication options.
For those that are writing code in platforms other than .NET, you might want to checkout the updated SOAP-only web services sample posted here: http://blogs.msdn.com/b/girishr/archive/2011/02/04/connecting-to-crm-online-2011-web-services-using-soap-requests-only.aspx
You can sign-up for a trial account in the new platform at http://crm.dynamics.com and manage your subscription at the Microsoft Online Services Portal – https://portal.microsoftonline.com. Existing users of CRM Online using Microsoft account (formerly Windows Live ID) will eventually be migrated to the new environment and the timelines for this migration is still TBD.
I’m very excited to announce the availability of Dynamics CRM 2011 Developer Training Kit. It’s a great collection of materials that allows .NET developers to learn the development features of Dynamics CRM and helps them build applications using Microsoft Dynamics CRM 2011 and CRM Online.
Download the training kit here: Dynamics CRM 2011 Developer Training Kit.
The training kit includes various resources such as
Presentations - Presentation decks in PowerPoint (.pptx) format that you can use to learn the concepts. Videos - Video recordings of the presentation along with demos delivered by expert trainers. Hands-on Labs - Hands-on labs with detailed instructions and source code that will walk you through the various development features.
No prior Dynamics CRM experience is required to go through this training kit. Familiarity with the .NET Framework, Microsoft Visual C#, Microsoft JScript, Microsoft SQL Server and general Web development is recommended.
What topics does this kit cover?
What’s Next?
We look forward to seeing your apps on the Dynamics Marketplace.
Recently an analyst asked us what is new in SharePoint & Dynamics CRM with the December 2012 service update. I wrote the below note as a quick summary of what’s revolutionary and evolutionary with SharePoint (specifically SP 2013) & Dynamics CRM.
1. Self-Service BI with PowerView
Excel 2013 introduces the ability to create PowerView charts for advanced data analysis by combining a variety of data sources. With the new December 2012 Service Update, data from Dynamics CRM Online can be included as one of the data sources for PowerView. SharePoint 2013 and SharePoint Online’s new release provides the ability for customers to render PowerView charts (including bubble animations) from Excel workbooks through Excel Web App. This allows professionals to analyze their CRM Online data in a self-service manner with just a browser (no need for everyone to be running Excel 2013). For example, in the below figure you can see that the customer service data from CRM combined with call metrics from IVR systems to produce a report rendered right within the browser.
2. Self-service Portals with BCS
Business Connectivity Services (BCS) in SharePoint 2013 has been enhanced to natively consume OData endpoint making it easy for customers to integrate Dynamics CRM data within SharePoint. For example, customers can now easily build an internal SharePoint portal for casual CRM users. This is very useful in many enterprise scenarios such as help desk ticketing, vendor portal and many more. SharePoint 2013 also introduces the new notion of SharePoint ‘Apps’ that can bundle such customizations and provide developers with the ability to sell them through the Office marketplace. You can find a simple step-by-step walkthrough on Connecting SharePoint Online and CRM Online using BCS here.
3. Document library integration enhancements
With the December 2012 service update, the document library integration with SharePoint has now been enhanced to support SharePoint 2013 along with rendering on multiple browsers including Chrome, Safari, Firefox and IE. SharePoint 2013 also has improved eDiscovery for legal compliance and built-in Content Management Interoperability Services (CMIS) compatibility for interoperability with other applications (like Adobe Bridge and Photoshop) making it easier for customers to manage their CRM digital assets with SharePoint.
4. Identity alignment
Office 365 and CRMOnline have shared the same identity platform for some time now. The same identity platform now has been extended to developers for their custom apps as well through Windows Azure Active Directory. This simplifies the user provisioning and administration of joint solutions spanning Dynamics CRM, Office 365 and other applications within an organization.
5. Social enhancements
Last but not least is the social enhancements in December 2012 service update powered by Yammer which becomes the social layer for Dynamics CRM. We are also heavily investing in unified identity, integrated document management and feed aggregation among SharePoint, Yammer and Dynamics CRM for the future.
The list is just a sampling of what I have been able to do discover so far and I’m sure there are a lot more cool integration scenarios that we’ll discover together as a community. Things like FAST search, SharePoint for Internet Sites connecting to CRM and many more scenarios were possible earlier with SharePoint 2010 and they are enhanced in many ways within SharePoint 2013.
If you’d like to see some of these scenarios in action, please check out one of my presentations at the upcoming Convergence conference:
Title
Developer's Guide to Integrating Microsoft Dynamics CRM & Microsoft SharePoint 2013
Session Code
CSCRM09
Description
Many organizations use both Microsoft Dynamics CRM and Microsoft SharePoint and are increasingly looking for ways to integrate these two technologies. With the new wave of SharePoint 2013 and Office 2013 suites, it is now even easier and compelling to integrate them with Microsoft Dynamics CRM for collaborative cloud solutions. Come learn some of the developer patterns and practices you can use when building apps using technologies such as Microsoft Dynamics CRM, SharePoint 2013, Office 365, and more.
Room
391-392
Day
Thursday, March 21
Time
4:00 PM - 5:00 PM
Add to Calendar
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One of the benefits of the new CRM Online identity platform is the ability to federate user identities so that end users can use their Active Directory (AD) credentials to logon to CRM Online without having to use a separate set of username and password. This is also referred to as single sign-on (SSO) wherein a user signs in once and can access many applications including CRM Online, Office 365, local on-premises applications and more.
I often get asked how can one setup a demo/test environment to showcase this functionality with CRM Online so I spent a little bit of time putting together the list of steps required to have a CRM Online demo environment with federated identity. In the end, it is a "no drama" demo as all you are doing is just signing in but there are plenty of things happening behind the scenes to enable this magic!
The list of steps might seem long because I cover everything from setting up active directory from the ground up to adding users in AD. End-to-end, it'll take about 2 to 3 hours to setup. . I pretty much followed the video walkthrough by Planky to put together my demo environment however there are few steps missing in planky's videos that I've included here. Please note that these instructions are strictly for demo environments and not recommended for production environments. In typical production environments, much of this would be done in advance and you'd need backup/redundant servers for failover, etc. In short, you're better off following the official documentation for production environment setup
The post assumes that you have already created a new CRM Online trial and have a fair bit of knowledge on Windows Server and Active Directory setup. If you don't have that background, you can easily search the terms I mention on your favorite search engine and you can find plenty of articles to help.
CRM Online Identity Federation Demo Setup Steps
Note: Do the above setup only if you haven't added yourdomain.com as the forest domain in AD. For example if you added crmpmg.local during dcpromo, this UPN addition is necessary, otherwise not required.
DirSync
Note: In Hyper-V, you might want to create an additional network switch (Internal or Private) to bridge the VMs together to able to domain join. This network setup is similar to the 2010 IW VM.
Note: Office 365 supports synchronization of up to 50,000 objects (users, groups, etc). To synchronize more than 50,000 objects, contact Office 365 Support.
I’m returning back to Dynamics CRM world after a small hiatus! I joined our Dynamics CRM group as a Technical Product Manager last month. Even though I’ll be working with most people I already knew and same set of technologies, every job change at Microsoft is challenging. That’s not bad though, since the constant change and new challenges are essential parts of being at Microsoft and is actually quite fun.
For those that aren’t very familiar with me, I was a Technical Evangelist in the DPE group for the past 4 years evangelizing Dynamics CRM, SharePoint, and the Microsoft platform to our developers and ISV partners. In that role, I had the opportunity to create vast amount of technical content, demos, present at various conferences world-wide and most importantly blog about all of those great things.
Though my new role is slightly different from my previous one, I’ll continue to evangelize Dynamics CRM and other great Microsoft technologies, so stay tuned for more blog posts!
This blog post is a simple step-by-step walkthrough on connecting SharePoint Online (SPO) to CRM Online using the Business Connectivity Services (BCS). This can be useful in a number of situations including self service portals, executive dashboards, etc. The end goal for this post is to have CRM account information displayed within SharePoint as illustrated below (nothing fancy) but you can easily extend this sample to include additional scenarios such as pulling additional entities/tables, create/update CRM data, charts/dashboard, mashups with ERP and much more.
Note: SharePoint Online in this example uses SharePoint 2013 and CRM Online is the December 2012 release. Steps are subject to change for future releases. This walkthrough uses the App model for SharePoint instead of the classical BCS settings managed in the admin center.
Below is a quick diagram showing the architecture of the solution we’re going to walkthrough. As you can see from the diagram below, we do have a shim sitting between CRMOnline & SPO. The reason for us to have a shim/proxy web service is because, external authentication is not enabled on CRM Online’s REST endpoint today. CRMOnline’s REST endpoint today is only available for use by JScript and web resources within the CRM application however you can expect that limitation to change in the future.
Enough with the talk, let’s get to the code.
Now that we have the proxy OData service up and running, it is time to create the SharePoint App.
Now that you have the base connectivity between CRMOnline and SPO through BCS, the possibilities are endless. You can bring data from other CRM entities, apply security trimming, have users update CRM data directly from SharePoint, use highcharts.com for pretty charts and dashboards, mashup CRM data with other OData data sources and much more depending upon your needs. If you end up building interesting SharePoint-CRM apps, please do tell us through comments below.
The Dynamics Demo team has just released four virtual machines and corresponding demo script for CRM 4.0 to demo to the following industries.
You can download the VMs on PartnerSource at this link:
https://mbs.microsoft.com/partnersource/deployment/methodology/vpc/msd_crm4industryvpc.htm?printpage=false
Or if you are a customer, you can download them at CustomerSource here:
https://mbs.microsoft.com/customersource/downloads/servicepacks/msd_crm4industryvpc.htm?printpage=false&stext=crm%20vpc
Please note that these four images are configuration examples of CRM in the Finance, Professional Services, Manufacturing and Municipality industries. These are not Accelerators, partner or ISV products. The new VPC images provide baseline demo capabilities and the scripts address very specific scenarios.
Updated: 1st August 2010 - This webcast was recorded and you can view it on-demand here: https://www.livemeeting.com/cc/mseventsbmo/view?id=1032453068&role=attend&pw=FC9433C0 Updated: 14th February 2011 - For the latest information on this topic, checkout this webcast on Integrating SharePoint 2010 with CRM 2011 Online
On July 1st (Thursday), I’ll be presenting an MSDN webcast titled Integrating Microsoft Dynamics CRM with SharePoint 2010 and Office 2010. This is a topic that I’m very passionate about, so please feel free to participate and ask plenty of questions! It is a level 300 webcast for a programmer/developer audience, so I’ll go deeper into some of the development areas.
Date: Thursday, July 01, 2010 11:00 AM Pacific Time (US & Canada)
You can signup for the webcast at this URL: https://msevents.microsoft.com/CUI/EventDetail.aspx?EventID=1032453068&Culture=en-US
Line-of-business (LOB) applications can have a far-reaching impact when they are tailored specifically for the needs of an information worker. A LOB app like Microsoft Dynamics CRM is the most effective and powerful when it is integrated with Microsoft SharePoint 2010 and Microsoft Office 2010—these products complement Microsoft Dynamics functionality. Attend this webcast to learn some of the developer patterns and practices you can use when building applications with Microsoft Dynamics CRM, Office 2010 and SharePoint 2010. We also review the new Microsoft Dynamics CRM software development kit (SDK) update from May 2010 to show how it simplifies Microsoft Dynamics CRM development, and we walk you through some simple yet powerful demonstrations.
See you on Thursday!
Here is the full video of the “Phone Company” demo that shows the integration of Dynamics CRM “5”, AppFabric Service Bus and Windows Azure.
View & comment on Channel9
Note: Updated video (audio issue fixed) posted as a Channel9 screencast. To download this video, right click and download here. For better viewing experience, view this video in full screen.
If you have tried editing CRM Navigation as described in part1, you'll be more than relieved to know that there is a tool that'll act as a GUI editor for the navigation.
It is called Demo Tools and it is available for download here:
Microsoft Dynamics CRM Demonstration Tools (for Microsoft Dynamics CRM 4.0)
As the name states, it is a great set of tools for CRM mainly targeted for delivering a demo. But hey, nothing stops us from using it is for development! I'll have to plug-in the standard disclaimer that it is not supported through Microsoft Technical Support.
The tool has a bunch of features besides Sitemap editing like string replacement, dependant picklists, etc.
The major takeaway here is that it makes editing Sitemap a breeze. You can open existing Sitemap XML files and visually edit them. Once you've made the changes, you can save it back to the XML file.
The tool also takes it one step further so that you can directly open the Sitemap from CRM, make all your changes and publish back to CRM without downloading any intermediate (.xml,...) files. See those buttons "Open from CRM" and "Publish to CRM" in the above screenshot, that's what they do.
It seems like a lot of developers are hesitant to install 64-bit OS like Vista or Windows Sever 2008 on their dev. machine. I don’t want to go into driver compatibility issues but want to discuss what it means to write code and build applications for MSCRM on a 64-bit dev. machine. As Ben mentions, I’ve been working on a demo that uses an array of products on top of CRM. I personally took the challenge to build and deploy them all on my 64 bit machine and some on the public CRM 4.0 VPC (which is 32-bit BTW). Overall, I had a wonderful experience and I’m glad that I made the leap to 64-bit for my dev. machine.
For those of you who aren’t familiar with 64 bit architecture, let me just say that the popular AMD x64 architecture can run both 32-bit and 64-bit applications. What a relief! Windows basically runs this using a mechanism called Wow64 (Windows on Windows).
In my next few posts, I’ll walk you through my experiment with 64-bit development.