URL-Addressable Forms and Internet Explorer Tab Sets

Combine these for an Efficient, CRM-Centric User Experience

Dynamics CRM has a trick referred to as “URL-addressable forms”, which is a fancy way of saying that certain forms can be navigated to directly and opened in their own Internet Explorer window, bypassing the underlying UI within which they are normally contained. This can be handy in lots of situations. Here are a couple:

• Suppose you want to add value to or extend a separate application with related information contained within CRM. For example, think of a SharePoint library containing proposals or other documents pertaining to accounts. A column in the SharePoint document library could contain a clickable link that would pop open the Dynamics CRM form for the account.
• Certain areas within Dynamics CRM are a little bit crowded when contained within the full UI. If you can navigate to one of these directly you can free up some screen real estate and create a more productive user experience.

The second one is the topic of this article, and it’s one I’ve written about before, in the context of the Dynamics CRM service calendar. It’s easy to see the advantages of direct navigation by comparing the following two screen-shots. The first one shows my company’s service calendar contained within the standard Dynamics CRM UI; the second shows it being accessed directly.

The two most important takeaways are the additional room you free up with the direct navigation approach, and the way you do it. You can navigate directly to your service calendar by taking the standard URL you use to navigate to your Dynamics CRM, dropping the “/loader.aspx” bit, and adding “/sm/home_apptbook.aspx”.

Don’t look for any intuition here, just do it. J

Why does this Matter and What’s it got to do with IE Tab Sets?

It matters because the more things that are exposed directly, the more you can take advantage of this direct navigation technique. (I’ll get to tab sets in a sec)

In Dynamics CRM Online, more things are exposed in this way than in the on-premise edition, especially after the November 2009 Service Update. Here are two of my favorites:

• Navigate directly to your sweet brand-new home page dashboard by substituting “/Home/Homepage/TTV_Home.aspx” for “/loader.aspx”
• Navigate directly to your Internet Marketing dashboard with the more cryptic “https://internetleadcapture.dynamics.com/Home/Dashboard.aspx?uflcid=en-US&DLExternalIdValue=http://<organization name>.crm.dynamics.com” (e.g., for me, it’s imginc in place of the <organization name>, and remember these last two are Online only features for now!)

Now you could navigate to all these pages separately, but it’s a lot more convenient if you bundle them all up in an Internet Explorer “Tab Set”, like the following screen-shot illustrates:

To summarize, there are two big advantages of this approach:

1. Navigating directly to one of these areas (service calendar, Internet Marketing dashboard, home page dashboard…) gives me more room. This is more useful than ever with the charts we can expose on the home page dashboard post November 2009 Service Update.
2. Bundling them together in a single IE tab set means I don’t have to remember URLs and I can open them all at once, every time I want to live my so-called Dynamics CRM life!

I put together a Captivate recording to show how to bundle several windows up into a single tab set. Let me know what you think!

Cheers,

Richard