This is just a fancy way of saying you can navigate directly to almost any form or window in Dynamics CRM directly — without drilling down through the UI to get there. This trick can save you time, save screen real estate, and in extreme situations might even save your job (if you break your site map and have an unforgiving boss, for example).

The Basics; Navigating to the Service Calendar

Most Dynamics CRM users who use the web client open CRM by navigating to a URL like these:

• http://crm.imginc.com is an example of an “on-premise” CRM (in this case, installed and hosted by my company on our servers)
• https://img.crm.dynamics.com is an example of the Dynamics CRM Online version (hosted by Microsoft in the “Software as a Service” model)

In both cases, if you look at the URL after the page loads you’ll see something like these:

• https://crm.imginc.com/loader.aspx for the on-premise version
• https://img.crm.dynamics.com/loader.aspx for the online version

 The loader.aspx file you see is the default page that IIS loads for the organization you’re accessing; what it actually does is load up the familiar Dynamics CRM user interface with the site map on the left, the global toolbar and the CRM splash logo on top, and you see the familiar full-blown CRM web client:

I like this “normal” UI fine, but sometimes it’s convenient to navigate directly to a page. One example of this that I find especially useful is the Service Calendar.  Accessing the Service Calendar via the standard UI is done by clicking on the Service area on the site map, and then on the Service tab you’ll see there. The problem with this approach is that the default calendar view is so squished by the site map and the rest of the CRM UI that it’s hard to use it effectively. Here’s what it looks like if you navigate to it through the standard UI:

Service Calendar Exposed through UI

If you want more room to move in the Service Calendar, you can navigate directly to it by substituting  ”sm/home_apptbook.aspx” for “loader.aspx” in the URLs I showed above. So if I go directly to this URL, https://crm.imginc.com/sm/home_apptbook.aspx, I get the Service Calendar all by itself:

Service Calendar all by itself

If what I need to do is work in the Service Calendar, this is much better! For that matter, I can go one better by minimizing the “Calendar” panel on the right, and shrinking the list of names on the left:

Navigating Directly to an Account Record

This so-called “URL Addressable forms” trick works in lots of different places. Another example is with entity forms. If I navigate to an Account form through the UI, I see this:

But once you realize that every single record in CRM is uniquely identified by the so-called “GUID” you can see in the window title above, and that it’s always included in the URL, you can navigate directly to any record. The easiest way to get the URL is to enter “Ctrl-N” (open a new window) when you’re on a form like the one above, and you’ll see this:

Account form opened in its own window

 And in Case you Break your Site Map…

There’s another example of this when it might not only be convenient, but quite important, to navigate directly to a page: If you’ve ever tried to customize a Dynamics CRM site map you’ll like this trick! Customizing the site map can be very useful since it’s one of the main ways to customize the Dynamics CRM user interface, with links to external web sites, applications that integrate with CRM and lots of other things. The problem with customizing the site map is that if you make a mistake, your customized site map can break the CRM UI. And if you break the CRM UI you might not be able to get to the page where you can import the default site map or the most recent one that worked (if you saved it!). If this happens you’ll be very relieved if you remember this URL:

https://crm.imginc.com/tools/systemcustomization/importcustomizations/importcustomizations.aspx

Add everything after the “tools/…” to your normal CRM web URL and you’ll go right to the page where you can import your most recent working site map and fix the CRM UI you just broke!  

If you ever break your site map you'll be relieved to remember this!