PinPoint, Accelerators & Ramp up Kit

Microsoft Dynamics CRM is a full participant in the beta for PinPoint, a unified online business marketplace for small and medium-sized business customers and partners. Pinpoint helps customers discover, discern and engage with Microsoft partners to fulfill their unique technology needs, while unlocking business opportunities for partners.

Accelerators for Microsoft Dynamics CRM are free ‘add-ons’ and allow Partners and Customers to extend CRM functionality. Accelerators will be available for Analytics Foundation, e-Service, Event Management, Enterprise Search, Business Productivity, Extended Sales Forecasting, CRM Notifications and Sales Methodology Support. The Estimated delivery is estimated to be during the second half of 2008.

The Microsoft Dynamics CRM 4.0 Developer Ramp Up Kit is based on lessons learned during eighteen months of instructor-led training by the DPE group as part of the DPE Metro Early Adopter initiative. The kit drills into development details and explains how .NET-based developers can interact with the Microsoft Dynamics CRM platform. It includes videos, presentations, hands-on labs, and a VPC environment for practicing. Familiarity with the .NET Framework, Microsoft Visual C#, Jscript, Microsoft SQL Server and general Web development is recommended. If you're interested and want to know more, I highly recommend reading the blog of Girish Raja.

Do the Wiggle!

No it's not a dance, it is a bike route through San Francisco. You might think why is that so special?! Well for the ones that have been here it's pretty easy to understand, for the ones that haven't been in San Francisco, we are really the hilliest city of the world. Driving a bike is challenging no matter what in the USA, but having hills adds another challenge on top of that.

As most know, my home country is The Netherlands and we're not only known for tulips, windmills and wooden shoes! We are also famous for our bikes, bike lanes etc. I believe recent research even showed that we have more bikes than inhabitants (1.75 bikes per person). On Bike to Work Day, May 15th 2008, I finally took my bike and biked to work. It was much faster than taking the bus, even with my favorite cup of coffee, a cappuccino, in my hand!

Biking to work was a breeze as it was mostly flat and downhill. At the end of the day I had to drive back and had chosen to just gamble it and see if I could find an easy way back. I failed miserably and I even had to get off my bike and walk up hill.

A couple of days later I bumped into one of my colleagues in the office, he’s a biker as well, and he laughed about my little adventure. He then said, you should do "The Wiggle"...I was like uhhh do the what? So I looked it up and found out that this is a bike route zig-zagging through the hilly streets without actually having to go uphill with your bike.

 
(Image by SF Wiki)

CWR Mobility on Channel9 I have plugged CWR a couple of times on my blog, but it's great to see that my fellow Bay Area blogger, Ben Riga,  has discovered CWR Mobility as well. He met them at WPC in Houston and he liked them and their solution so much that he interviewed CWR Mobility for Channel9. Make sure you watch it untill the end as they will show you how their solution integrated with Microsoft CRM Online!!

Join Social and CRM...

I'll start with the definition of Social media according to Wikipedia. Social Media is an umbrella term that defines the various activities that integrate technology, social interaction, and the construction of words, pictures, videos and audio. This interaction, and the manner in which information is presented, depends on the varied perspectives and "building" of shared meaning among communities, as people share their stories, and understandings.

You could describe CRM as a combination of philosophies, polices and strategies connecting different players within an organization so as to coordinate their efforts in creating an overall valuable series of experiences, products and services for the customer.

So in a sense CRM has an overlap, is similar or can be even called a form of Social Media. Now wouldn't it be nice to join some of the Social Media activities with a powerful application such as Microsoft Dynamics CRM? Social CRM?!

Phil pointed me to a great article on Social CRM written by Brent Leary and I think it's worth the read. Once your finished with this article I would encourage you to read this post on the CRM team blog written by Matt Witteman, who funny enough, used Jim, Phil and myself in his LinkedIn to Microsoft Dynamics CRM example.

What are your thoughts on Social CRM? Leave a comment.

Anti CRM example

If you're reading this blog on a regular basis you will remember one of my recent posts about my dentist being a example of great CRM. Today I was surfing the interwebz and bumped into this story about a guy that wants his coffee a certain way. Especially in America, the customer is always King and you can get pretty much anything the way you like it, no questions asked.

Read how Jeff Simmerson got dissed while and after ordering his favorite cup of coffee at Murky Coffee in Arlington. (Caution: Strong language)

SalesCentric updates

I love it when our partners are using new and exciting technologies to extend the power of Microsoft Dynamics CRM. SalesCentric is one of those "cool" vendors.

At WPC next week in Houston, they will unveil two new versions of Relationship Charts for Dynamics CRM. Visit stand 383 and see the next generation of CRM visualization utilizing Microsoft’s Silverlight technology and the new service, Relationship Charts for Dynamics CRM Online.

Silverlight provides the foundation to take CRM and Relationship Charts to the next generation of visual user experience. Animation, zoom and multiple ‘actor cards’ that fan out give the user the ability to quickly see on one screen information that would otherwise take multiple CRM views to get.

Relationship Charts will be available in two versions for CRM Online:

• Relationship Charts Online Professional offers Relationship Charts within three CRM areas: account, contact and opportunity
• Relationship Charts Online Professional Plus offers Relationship Charts within any CRM entity and displays any entity on a chart, including system users

CWR Mobile CRM for Dynamics CRM Online

CWR Mobility will officially release their CWR Mobile CRM Online for Dynamics CRM Online at the Microsoft World Wide Partner Conference in Houston. Currently CWR is successfully running a beta program for Mobile CRM Online with a group of partners and customers.

Besides this, CWR Mobility announced its participation in the Microsoft Mobility Partner Advisory Council (MPAC). This, again, shows that CWR Mobility is a leading mobile solution provider as MPAC is an invitation-only partner program developed by Microsoft and it's definitely not easy to get in.

Recently they have been working on a Microsoft Windows Mobile Vertical Application Guide. This guide highlights application and device partners in the retail, manufacturing and financial industries. The guide will be available on http://www.windowsmobile.com within a few weeks. Besides this they've also recorded a promotional video on how CWR Mobility leverages the Power of Dynamics CRM and Windows Mobile to build one of the best Mobile CRM products.

(Don't you love the Dutch Accent)

Freaky CRM Link Love for June 2008

Just in time, at least according to my timezone. Here is the much anticipated link love for June 2008.

• Microsoft Dynamics CRM for Outlook Balloons
• Differences between workflow and plug-ins
• Workflow vs plug-ins by Mitch
• Workflow vs plug-ins by Humberto
• Creating a Dashboard using MOSS, Excel webservices and more
• Reports in iFrames for CRM 4.0
  
• Microsoft Dynamics CRM Wiki
• How instant-on is an instant-on CRM Solution
• Easy API Export of All Customizations
• File Attachments to Notes - CRM 4.0
• Data Migration with CRM Online
• Picky Lists
  

Guest Post: Three Top Tips for CRM 4.0 Plugin Development

Recently Catherine Eibner, my guest blogger for today, spent time working on some CRM 4.0 plugins, and made a few notes that she thought would be useful to share, as they seem to be common issues for working with the new CRM plugin infrastructure.

Tip #1 Sign your assembly!
This is a step that's importance isn't made blatantly clear in the SDK documentation, but is absolutely key to the successful implementation of your plugin (and also makes a huge difference to debugging successfully as well). If you follow the "create a simple plugin" walkthrough in the SDK, it is listed as step 3 here: http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-au/library/bb955365.aspx.

The steps it describes are basically as follows:

1. Right-click your project in Solution Explorer and click Properties.
2. Create a new strong key file by clicking the Signing tab, select the Sign the assembly check box and select </NEW…>in the drop down list.
3. Type a name for your key and decide if you need to password your assembly enter the password here or if not, clear the Protect my key file with a password check box.
4. Click OK.
5. Save your changes by clicking the Save All button.

The screenshot below shows the Signing Tab & the Create Strong Name Pop up:

Alternatively you can use the sn.exe command line tool. Once you have signed your assembly, you will see a *.snk file listed in your solution explorer.

Tip #2 Register any Interops in the GAC
In my most recent project, I was working with some COM API's to integrate into the clients Line of Business Accounting System. Visual Studio is smart enough to build a COM Interop around any (registered) dll you wish to import, which is very handy - until you try to deploy your plugin to the CRM Server & it has no knowledge of the Interop you are referring to in your code.

You need to make sure that your interop dll is registered in the Global Assembly Cache (GAC) of the CRM Server. The first step you need to keep in mind is that to register your dll into the GAC, your assembly must be signed - so if you followed Tip #1 above you'll be fine! Once your assembly is signed, you can add it to the GAC in two ways, if your a fan of command line utilities, you can use the gacutil.exe command: gacutil /i MyComInterop.dll

I however tend to prefer the GUI tools provided, such as the .NET Framework 2.0 Configuration tool. To use this:

1. Select Microsoft .NET Framework 2.0 Configuration (CRM 4.0 uses .Net 2.0 by default) from the administrative tools menu
2. Select Manage the Assembly Cache
3. Click Add an Assembly to the Assembly Cache (The second option)
   
4. Locate your dll using the dialog window that appears and Click Open.

Tip #3 Use the Plugin Registration tool (in the SDK)
The registration of plugins in CRM 4.0 is made so much easier than it used to be in CRM 3.0 - mainly due to the Plugin Registration Tool that ships with the SDK & can be found in the SDK\tools\pluginregistration directory. Some good instructions on how to set it up & use it are listed here, so I wont waste time in repeating them.

What it doesn't mention is what you need to do if you update your Dll's. Initially I wasn’t sure if I had to delete & re-register them, or how to get CRM to recognize that I had updated my dll. If you spent any time at all writing callouts for CRM 3.0 or earlier versions, your first instinct is to stop services, copy over dll's and then restart the services. However you do not need to do this anymore (thank goodness)!

Using the Plugin Registration tool, you can simply:

1. Copy over your dll's in the server\bin\assembly\ directory
2. Select the Update option for the selected plugin:
   
3. Browse to the new dll file by clicking on the elipse on the update assembly window, and selecting your dll from the dialog window
4. Select Load assembly
   
5. Once the assembly has loaded, select Update Selected Plugins
6. You will receive a confirmation popup once the system is finished that confirms what has actually been changed
7. Click OK.

All this occurs without having to restart services - so is seamless to end users and a lot less painful than it was with callouts in CRM 3.0! I really love this change for developing plugins in Microsoft Dynamics CRM 4.0.

So thats it...
So there you have it, my three top tips for CRM 4.0 plugin development. These are the 3 things that I find when working with plugins are not highly documented, but can either save you a lot of time if you know about them - or give you a lot of grief if you forget them! I hope they help you.

Catherine Eibner
http://blog.cybner.com.au

CRM Plugin Registration Tool 2.1

You've probably heard or perhaps even used previous versions of the CRM Plugin Registration tool. It makes your life way easier to deploy and register plugins for Microsoft Dynamics CRM 4.0

Today version 2.1 of the CRM Plugin Registration Tool is released and some of the added features are:

• Support  for HTTPs
• Allow registration of Image for Surbordinate entity in Merge
• Tool allows to change the CrmService Url returned by DiscoveryService before connecting to it