Girish Raja's Dynamic(s) Thoughts : SharePoint

Business Action Virtual Tour On Demand

girishr — Wed, 06 May 2009 23:32:32 GMT

Last week I had the opportunity to present four webcasts as part of the Business Action Virtual Tour (BAVT) wherein we discussed about building line of business applications using the CRM (XRM) platform and how you can extend it to create compelling experiences (using WPF & Silverlight), reuse familiar skills (using Office Platform) and how to provide the power of choice to your customers (using Azure platform).

If you missed any of these events, don’t worry; we recorded all of them and have it available for you free of cost. Ben Riga was handling the Q&A during the session and has also posted a nice summary of the Q&A as part of his blog post. I’d encourage you to view the high fidelity version of the Live Meeting replay.

1- XRM, the Line of Business Application Framework

2- Compelling experiences (WPF & Silverlight)

3- Familiar Skills (Office, SharePoint & UC)

4- The power of choice (Azure Services Platform)

So set aside just four hours of your time, get the projector, crank up the volume and gather all your colleagues around . It’s show time!

What does free SPD mean to you?

girishr — Mon, 13 Apr 2009 05:47:40 GMT

The recent announcement that SharePoint Designer (SPD) will be offered for free makes me very excited. Being a SharePoint consultant not long ago, I can truly appreciate how the free SPD & WSS will revolutionize the content management space. When the announcement came out that this change was effective from April 1st, I had every reason to suspect the legitimacy of it but looks like it was all real!

SPD allows you to build a variety of things starting from designing simple websites (remember FrontPage!) to wonderful dashboards that revolutionize enterprise solutions.

While working on the “Dynamicss Duo” CRM 4.0 demo, we made heavy use of SPD and the results truly speak to the power this tool has.

In the above screenshot, one can see a heavily customized SharePoint page Iframed into CRM. Using SPD we built this Intranet style dashboard pages with connected webparts and also using a set of pre-built 3rd party webparts.

If you had seen the CRM demo that was shown at the Day1 Keynote of PDC2008, you can see the below attractive customer portal that doesn’t look anything like SharePoint but it actually runs on SharePoint Online and was built using SPD.

SPD allows customizing such SaaS SharePoint extranet sites even when you don’t have physical access to the server. In the above screenshot, the gauge display is actually a Silverlight control running in SharePoint, and the webpart to the right is called a dataview webpart that connects to CRM web services. Dataview webparts are a very powerful feature of SharePoint as you can easily build data bound webparts and SPD allows you to build it without writing any code.

This is just a tip of the iceberg and developers are free to deliver a variety of custom portal solutions, extranets, intranets, internet-facing sites, collaboration solutions, social networking sites, and internal applications on top of the extensive capabilities of SharePoint. Integrating these with Dynamics CRM makes it even more compelling and presents a good business opportunity for providing value-added solutions to your customers.

Action Packed Business Applications Coming to US

girishr — Sat, 04 Apr 2009 04:06:35 GMT

In a series of world-wide events called Business Action World Tour, we’re showcasing how Independent Software Vendors (ISVs) can build serious line of business applications without a lot of effort. To add to that, if you could create a rich & compelling UI (with WPF & Silverlight), make it familiar to your users (with Office system), and give a choice of on-site or cloud deployment to the customer (with Azure Services), wouldn’t that be a wonderful opportunity for more business.

If you think so, all you need to do is spend half a day at one of our free “discover” events. The next upcoming one in the US is on May 4th at Chicago and we have another one coming up in Silicon Valley on May 6th.

For more information about the event and links to register, check out John O'Donnell blog article below.

http://blogs.msdn.com/jodonnell/archive/2009/04/01/discover-a-new-way-to-build-line-of-business-applications-at-chicago-may-4th-and-mountain-view-ca-may-6th.aspx

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.

Creating a custom SharePoint webpart for CRM

girishr — Fri, 15 Aug 2008 09:20:21 GMT

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.

Performance for CRM - Why not Cache?

girishr — Wed, 12 Mar 2008 02:06:55 GMT

I just attended an interactive discussion at Convergence on Archiving and best practices. Though the topic was mainly on archiving, several people talked about performance especially related to the SQL database. Also many of them compared CRM with SharePoint (MOSS 2007) and sought out differences.

Though SharePoint usually has a monstrous database storing all of the documents, the performance of the product is usually great because of one great feature in SharePoint(since MOSS 2007) . Whenever a request comes in from the user, the SharePoint front-end server requests the document from database and then caches it. For repeated requests, the front-end server serves the data from the cache instead of going to the database again. This largely reduces the round trip back to SQL and decreases the page load time for the user at the same time reducing the load on the back-end SQL server.

Now thinking about CRM, many users often want to read account and contact information and I thought it'd be cool if CRM could cache the data and serve it from the front-end server. Of course as data gets updated, the cache must be refreshed and the process will get busier on a transactional system. But still, with the right pattern, the performance improvements will be much larger.

Incidentally I ran into Shan McArthur of ADXStudio yesterday and he was telling me about the CRM Developer toolkit that they're building. He says this toolkit addresses this very problem in that it'll cache the data using .NET caching and does Cache Invalidation when the data gets updated. There is a lot more in the toolkit and I can't wait to check it out.

At the end, I must say I'd love to attend every one of those interactive discussions if only we had enough room for all the people. But as I mentioned earlier, maybe it is good that they limit the number of attendees.