Archive for December, 2008

Integrating SharePoint and Dynamics CRM

Dynamics CRM and SharePoint: Better Together
Dynamics CRM and SharePoint have plenty of similarities and just as many differences. While there is some overlap in the kinds of business applications each one is good for, there usually is a right answer to a question like “As an application platform for application X, would I be better off using SharePoint or Dynamics CRM?”.  
But for organizations who have both products, it’s not an either-or decision. In this situation there are lots of ways to integrate the two products, and you can take a “best tool for the job” approach.  
 
There are lots of different ways you can integrate the two platforms, and first off, it’s not like I think business people go around thinking to themselves…hmmm, how can I integrate SharePoint and CRM today? While we’d like to think that integrations always happen as part of a well thought out strategy, that might not always be the case.
 
In my experience, Dynamics CRM deployments tend to be well planned and somewhat “by the book”, whereas SharePoint ones often are more ad-hoc and can take on a life of their own. This is partly due to the nature of the data typically managed in each: CRM is essentially a platform for relational database applications with lots of rows and columns of highly formatted data. SharePoint stores all kinds of diverse content in lists and libraries, and there’s no built-in mechanism in SharePoint to create dbms-style relationships between those lists and libraries.
 
So here’s a common scenario where you might want to integrate the two: most organizations that have both products will probably have data in SharePoint that have to do with — or describe — data in CRM. You might have many documents in SharePoint that have to do with an Account record in CRM. You might have images stored in SharePoint image libraries that are about employee or product records in CRM. There are lots of examples like this, where the SharePoint data are really meta-data, since they’re data that describe the formatted data in CRM. These are good examples of what I think of as the right-tool-for-the-job. CRM’s doing what it’s good at and so is SharePoint.
 
If you understand how to use the IFRAME control on Dynamics CRM forms you can weave the SharePoint meta-data into the fabric of your structured applications in CRM. It takes just a little bit of code, but it’s fairly straightforward.
Here’s a video I made on the topic: Integrating SharePoint and Dynamics CRM  — let me know what you think!

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December 20, 2008 · Filed under Integration and SharePoint

Search SharePoint for Stuff for a Dynamics CRM Record

Question
I’ve heard you can search SharePoint from external applications. I want to search it from a Dynamics CRM account form, so I can see all of the documents stored in our MOSS site related to an Account record in CRM. Is this possible?
Answer
Excellent question. (Meaning, I think it’s interesting AND I can answer it.) Here’s what I did — you can of course modify this to meet your specific requirements. Probably most important is the url I’m searching in the example, which is our firm’s intranet site. If you’re searching a SharePoint site that you navigate to by typing ‘http://foo.acme.com‘, sub that in for the ‘http://wss.imginc.com‘ references you see below and this will work fine.   1. Add a tab to the Account form. I called mine ‘MOSS Search’. Add a section to it, and onto that section add an IFRAME. I called mine ‘moss_search’, so the full name of the IFRAME is IFRAME_moss_search.2. Add the following code to the onLoad event of the Account form:

// JScript source code
var CRM_FORM_TYPE_CREATE = 1;
var CRM_FORM_TYPE_UPDATE = 2;

var sLiveSearchURL = ”;

if(IsOnline())
{
 switch (crmForm.FormType)
 {
  case CRM_FORM_TYPE_CREATE:
  
   // Point to the IMG wss Intranet site when creating an account
   imgSearchURL = ‘http://wss.imginc.com‘;  
   break;

  case CRM_FORM_TYPE_UPDATE:
    
   // Use MOSS search with this account’s name when updating account
   imgSearchURL = ‘http://wss.imginc.com/search/pages/Results.aspx?k=’;
   
   // Encode the account name and add it to the search string
   imgSearchURL += encodeURIComponent(crmForm.all.name.DataValue);
   
   break;
 }
}

// Set the IFRAME’s URL
crmForm.all.IFRAME_moss_search.src = imgSearchURL;

 

One more point about the code snippet above: the imgSearchURL variable will need to be replaced by whatever the url is for your SharePoint search results page. Just do a search with no parameters to see what it is and sub that in.

This is a nice illustration of how you can integrate Dynamics CRM and SharePoint, but it also applies to other scenarios when you want to do what I call contextual searching from within Dynamics CRM. Let me know what you think!

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December 1, 2008 · Filed under Integration and SharePoint

Summary of CRM 4.0 Certification Resources

Question:

Can you provide a summary of what you think are the most helpful resources specifically for preparing for the 3 core Dynamics CRM 4.0 exams?

Answer:

My pleasure! I recently authored a series of one-hour exam prep sessions for Microsoft; they were delivered in December by a colleague of mine and are (mostly!) available on the MS Partner Learning Center. Here are the links for two of them:

Prep Session for Customization and Configuration Exam
Prep Session for Installation and Deployment Exam

Two things about these: they are only available to MS US Partners, so when you click the link you need to provide your partner-affililated Windows Live ID to get to them. Also, for some reason the Applications session isn’t exposed — at least I couldn’t find it. If anybody finds it, please let me know where it is! These ‘Prep Sessions’ are your best overall source for ALL of the resources available for preparing — they won’t teach you Dynamics CRM themselves, but they’ll show you where to go to learn and prepare for the tests. So I guess you can think of them as a meta-learning resource.

Here are a couple of my other favorite exam-prep specific resources:

Microsoft Learning has ‘assessments’ available for Dynamics CRM 4.0, and they map to each of the 3 core exams. These assessments are like practice tests, and while they aren’t QA’ed very well, they’re definitely better than nothing, and I recommend you take advantage of them. Here are the links for each:

MS Learning Assessment for CRM 4.0 Applications
MS Learning Assessment for CRM 4.0 Customization
MS Learning Assessment for CRM 4.0 Installation

Finally, I’ve recorded what I refer to as ‘Assessment Walkthroughs’ for each of those. These are recorded sessions where I take each of those assessments, providing commentary and demonstration of key points. Here are the links to these:

Assessment Walkthrough for Applications
Assessment Walkthrough for Customization
Assessment Walkthrough for Installation

Hope this is helpful!

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December 1, 2008 · Filed under Training and Certification