Lazy Emulator for CRM Mobile Express

As promised in my last posting, I want to write about a small demo tool to demo CRM Mobile Express without a need for a real device / emulated device. CRM Mobile Express is a mobile client for Microsoft CRM that offers a lightweight, mobile browser client for viewing and editing data in Microsoft Dynamics CRM 3.0. Now you can manage important Sales, Service and Marketing information from your Windows Mobile, Smartphone and HTML 4.0 compatible devices! You can find more information about our mobile clients here http://blogs.msdn.com/crm/search.aspx?q=Mobile&p=1 or here CRM Mobile Express

So let’s talk about how to demo CRM Mobile Express. Imagine you are demoing Microsoft CRM and there are just a few minutes left and the audience would like to know more about our mobile solutions. Now there are three ways to demo our solutions:

• Having a real device in place and hand it out to your audience or instead of that you can show the display of the real device by using a tool called “ActiveSync Remote Display”, which is part of the Windows Mobile Developer Power Toys
• Second, instead of a real device you can use a device emulator for a smart phone or even a pocket pc. Just install it in your demo environment: Device Emulator 1.0. This is a standalone version of the Device Emulator that shipped with Visual Studio 2005. You can install this and use to run and showcase device applications.
• Third, instead of using a full blown device or emulator, for CRM Mobile Express you can just use a normal browser, because it is a normal html application. But instead of just using the browser, I created a small tool, which looks like a device inside the browser. So I named this tool Lazy Emulator. The trick is, to place a device picture behind the web site. A picture says more than words:

Download the demo files here: Lazy Emulator.

To install just copy the files inside the zip file to your "mobile application" folder on your webserver. To access it use the following URL: http://[CRMMobileServer]/Mobile Application/LazyEmulator.aspx

Hope that helps! Joris