RichardBarclay

Changes in CRM record data is a common part of business process, and clients often use the “ModifiedOn” field in views as an indication of new information in a recordset. However, adding text in an entity “notes” field does not update the “ModifiedOn” date. A client using this pattern were looking for a simple configuration-only solution using Workflows. The following example describes how to implement the solution for the Opportunity entity.

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Channel 9 feature Dynamics CRM 2011 integrated with the Dealmaker sales management tool. This CRM online solution demonstrates many of the data and event integration points available in CRM 2011.

In this video Wendy Reed from The TAS Group showcases Dealmaker in Microsoft Dynamics CRM 2011 Online.  Dealmaker helps sales people to sell smarter and manage better by embedding intelligent deal coaching, social networking, configurable sales process, and proven sales methodology.

Out of the box, the CRM 2011 Customer Portal is integrated with LiveID authentication.  While this is a great example of an integrated authentication provider, it may not be the ideal solution for your business and it’s certainly a tricky configuration to get working in your debug environment.  All is not lost. It’s a very simple process to convert the out-of-the-box Customer Portal to use Forms Authentication and the SqlMembershipProvider.

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Here’s a nifty little CRM2011 javascript function to add records of type targettype, with the uniqueindentifier, recordid, to a queue identified by queueid.

var addtoqueue_xmlHttpRequest = null;
function AddToQueue(targettype, recordid, queueid) {

var header = context.getAuthenticationHeader();
var target = “TargetQueued” + targettype; //http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/bb959372.aspx
var routetype = “Queue”;

var xml = “” +
“<?xml version=\”1.0\” encoding=\”utf-8\”?>” +
“<soap:Envelope xmlns:soap=\”http://schemas.xmlsoap.org/soap/envelope/\” xmlns:xsi=\”http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema-instance\” xmlns:xsd=\”http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema\”>” +
header +
“  <soap:Body>” +
“    <Execute xmlns=\”http://schemas.microsoft.com/crm/2007/WebServices\”>” +
“      <Request xsi:type=\”RouteRequest\”>” +
“        <Target xsi:type=\”" + target + “\”>” +
“          <EntityId>” + recordid + “</EntityId>” +
“        </Target>” +
“        <SourceQueueId>00000000-0000-0000-0000-000000000000</SourceQueueId>” +
“        <RouteType>” + routetype + “</RouteType>” +
“        <EndpointId>” + queueid + “</EndpointId>” +
“      </Request>” +
“    </Execute>” +
“  </soap:Body>” +
“</soap:Envelope>” +
“”;

addtoqueue_xmlHttpRequest = new ActiveXObject(“Msxml2.XMLHTTP”);
addtoqueue_xmlHttpRequest.Open(“POST”, “/mscrmservices/2007/CrmService.asmx”, … Continue Reading

Amazon’s Cloud Drive gives you 5GB of free disk cloud storage space with unlimited access from any machine.  A seamless integration with Amazons MP3 Store allows you to store all your song purchases directly in the cloud and listen to them with the Amazon Cloud Player.

The new service has raised a few eyebrows with industry experts, claiming that incomplete license negotiations may make the service illegal.

Licensing aside, with storage plans extending up to 1000GB and integration with web and Android, the service is a … Continue Reading

Have you every wondered how your Social Media interactions would look in a scrap book?  Take a look at Memolane and watch your digital life scroll right before your very eyes.

Integrating with Twitter and Facebook, Flickr, Foursquare, YouTube and Picasa (and many many more) your personal Memolane is displayed as a date indexed view of everything you’ve said and done, photographed, commented, visited and shared.

The San Fransisco based team started life as an idea pitched at Startup Weekend Copenhagen in April 2010 and their story can be seen, as a Memolane of course, right here.

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The ability to calls external web resources (sites and services) from within a CRM 2011 online plugin (running in the sandbox) is a major piece of integration kit.  The fact that the ability to do it in practice has been up in the air during the CRM 2011beta phase has been a bit of a worry.

The  code snippet below (from a CRM Online plugin) allows me to succesfully connect to a remote web service requiring Basic/API Realm credentials.

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Drupal is one of my favourite CMS and its great to see it running on Windows Azure. Check out the video on C9.

Prompted by a question on a previous post, I’ve posted some additional examples on the CRM 2011 REST interface. In particular, this post covers the ability to query relationships and complex types.  All the examples below and more are explained in the CRM 2011 SDK.
From an <entity>Set query, there are a number of <link …>  elements that describe the URL’s to access information from the current entity relationships. For example:

To list a specific Account, request

xrmservices/2011/organizationdata.svc/AccountSet(guid’b9436b0d-b832-e011-9e40-00155da9cd4f’)

If you then search in the response content for “contact_customer_accounts”, you will find an entry like

<link rel=”http://schemas.microsoft.com/ado/2007/08/dataservices/related/contact_customer_accounts” type=”application/atom+xml;type=feed” title=”contact_customer_accounts” href=”AccountSet(guid’b9436b0d-b832-e011-9e40-00155da9cd4f’)/contact_customer_accounts” />

The href … Continue Reading

The CRM 2011 API contains a new class xRM.SDK.Relationship. Relationship manages the parent-child reference between entities and allows you to express “RelatedEntites” in a parental or referential relationship and create the whole stack in a single Create() call.  Thats the theory but it doesn’t appear to work as expected. Continue Reading