Girish Raja's Dynamic(s) Thoughts : Channel9

Dynamics Duo: Wide World Importers Demo

girishr — Fri, 19 Jun 2009 22:25:26 GMT

Ben and I took some time to chat about this really neat demo that shows how you can combine the Microsoft Web Platform with Dynamics CRM to quickly build and deploy self-service solutions. This is a 5-part “Dynamics Duo” video series and you can view the full set of videos below and also be sure read more about them on Ben’s blog .

Dynamics Duo Rides Again

Dynamics Duo: Everybody needs an Identity

Dynamics Duo: Wide World Importers Code

Dynamics Duo: Composition with Third-Party Web Services

Dynamics Duo: Silverlight and Jazz Hands

As Ben put in his post, both of us enjoyed recording this series. We hope you enjoyed them as well. If you have comments or suggestions for other topics, feel free to add comments below or email me or (Ben) directly.

CRM Accelerators: Analytics

girishr — Fri, 12 Dec 2008 04:13:52 GMT

Reuben decided to take control of things on this channel9 video as we discuss about the Analytics accelerator. <Alert> We recorded this video really early in the development cycle for this accelerator. There are far more cool capabilities and reports in the final version of this accelerator than what we see in this video. </Alert>

CRM Accelerators: Analytics

The analytics accelerator provides a set of Performance Dashboards and Key Performance Indicators (KPIs) for analyzing the data residing within the CRM platform. It utilizes SQL Server Analysis Services (SSAS) for creating OLAP cubes. SSAS is also used here for creating predictive analysis with some fully functional samples. The analytics accelerator will work with SQL Server 2005 with some components enhanced to take advantage of SQL Server 2008.

Check out more Channel9 videos on CRM Accelerators here and please visit http://www.codeplex.com/crmaccelerators to download the accelerators.

Happy coding!

CRM Accelerators: eService (ASP.NET Portal)

girishr — Fri, 12 Dec 2008 04:03:15 GMT

Hands down, this is the accelerator that developers (at least I personally) would crave for.

CRM Accelerators: eService (ASP.NET Portal)

eService accelerator allows developers to easily create self-service customer portals built on top of ASP.NET. This accelerator utilizes an ASP.NET starter kit and several components of the ASP.NET framework including the membership provider for authentication. The out of the box functionality of eService includes the ability for customers to create cases, schedule and manage service appointments, search through KB articles, etc all from within the website.

Don’t be fooled by the name “eService”, as underneath the covers, there is an ASP.NET control suite for CRM. Each of the ASP.NET form you saw in this video is a customizable ASP.NET user control and all of its properties and settings are derived from the CRM metadata. You can hook up these controls to any entity within the CRM system and configure them fairly easily.

I’m sure this accelerator will jump start CRM development for a lot of ASP.NET developers and vice versa.

CRM Accelerators: Event Management

girishr — Thu, 11 Dec 2008 08:59:08 GMT

We continue our channel9 CRM accelerator video series with this post is on Event Management accelerator.

CRM Accelerators: Event Management

The event management accelerator allows you to plan and manage events and logistics through Microsoft Dynamics CRM. This front end portal of this accelerator is actually built using an ASP.NET starter kit. Behind the scenes, CRM plug-ins and workflows drives the business logic like registration, waitlists, notifications etc.

The data model and business logic that Reuben has designed for this is very comprehensive and is a result of working with several event organizers. If you’re looking at building an event management solution, this accelerator will reduce a lot of brainstorming & revisions that you have to do otherwise.

Given the design of this, I’m beginning to wonder if this accelerator could very well become a Content Management System (CMS) for event planning. What do you think?

CRM Accelerators: Notifications (RSS)

girishr — Thu, 11 Dec 2008 06:38:04 GMT

In this video, Reuben and I chat about the Notifications Accelerator.

CRM Accelerators: Notifications (RSS)

CRM notifications accelerator allows you to expose CRM business data by creating Really Simple Syndication (RSS) feeds.

Users can subscribe to any saved views within CRM as a feed. This allows you to have a channel where you pull information instead of being pushed to you from the server. These RSS feeds accessible via a variety of RSS readers including Outlook, Mobile phone, 3^rd Party Readers, etc. It is also worth noting that this capability can be used to easily create Vista Gadget for CRM by using the generic RSS gadget that Windows Vista ships with.

This is just a tip of iceberg on how RSS can be used with Microsoft Dynamics CRM. Since the accelerator ships with the source code as well, developers can further extend this or create new and interesting applications based on RSS & CRM.

CRM Accelerators: Enterprise Search

girishr — Thu, 20 Nov 2008 00:19:26 GMT

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.

CRM Accelerators: An Introduction with Reuben Krippner

girishr — Mon, 10 Nov 2008 18:32:25 GMT

Few weeks ago, I had the opportunity to interview Reuben Krippner from the CRM team. Reuben has been working very hard for the last several months to release CRM Accelerators. In this short video, Reuben gives us an overview of the Accelerators program and we chat about how Accelerators will evolve in the future.

CRM Accelerators: An Introduction with Reuben Krippner

Couple of the Accelerators were released last week and Microsoft Partners can download the bits and related information at the below links:

http://www.codeplex.com/crmaccelerators

https://mbs.microsoft.com/partnersource/newsevents/news/MD_CRM_Accelerators

Stay tuned for more videos on Accelerators as Reuben and I drill into the technical details of each accelerator.