Entries for Girish Raja

Phone Company CRM & Azure Demo [Phone Company CRM & Azure Demo]

Girish Raja — Mon, 23 Nov 2009 06:42:00 GMT

Here is the full video of the “Phone Company” demo that shows the integration of Dynamics CRM “5”, AppFabric Service Bus and Windows Azure. This demo was shown as part of the PDC09 session on Developing xRM Solutions Using Windows Azure.

Enjoy!

Girish Raja

Thanks,

Girish Raja | Dynamics Technical Evangelist
http://blogs.msdn.com/girishr

in reply to Phone Company CRM & Azure Demo

CRM Accelerators: Analytics

Girish Raja — Fri, 12 Dec 2008 01:10:00 GMT

Reuben decided to take control of things on this channel9 video as we discuss about the Analytics accelerator. <Alert> we recorded this video really early in the development cycle for this accelerator. There are far more cool capabilities and reports in the final version of this accelerator than what we see in this video. </Alert>

The analytics accelerator provides a set of Performance Dashboards and Key Performance Indicators (KPIs) for analyzing the data residing within the CRM platform. It utilizes SQL Server Analysis Services (SSAS) for creating OLAP cubes. SSAS is also used here for creating predictive analysis with some fully functional samples. The analytics accelerator will work with SQL Server 2005 with some components enhanced to take advantage of SQL Server 2008.

Check out more Channel9 videos on CRM Accelerators here and please visit http://www.codeplex.com/crmaccelerators to download the accelerators.

Happy coding!

CRM Accelerators: eService (ASP.NET Portal)

Girish Raja — Fri, 12 Dec 2008 00:58:00 GMT

eService accelerator allows developers to easily create self-service customer portals built on top of ASP.NET. This accelerator utilizes an ASP.NET starter kit and several components of the ASP.NET framework including the membership provider for authentication. The out of the box functionality of eService includes the ability for customers to create cases, schedule and manage service appointments, search through KB articles, etc all from within the website.

Don’t be fooled by the name “eService”, as underneath the covers, there is an ASP.NET control suite for CRM. Each of the ASP.NET form you saw in this video is a customizable ASP.NET user control and all of its properties and settings are derived from the CRM metadata. You can hook up these controls to any entity within the CRM system and configure them fairly easily.

I’m sure this accelerator will jump start CRM development for a lot of ASP.NET developers and vice versa.

CRM Accelerators: Event Management

Girish Raja — Thu, 11 Dec 2008 05:55:00 GMT

The event management accelerator allows you to plan and manage events and logistics through Microsoft Dynamics CRM. This front end portal of this accelerator is actually built using an ASP.NET starter kit. Behind the scenes, CRM plug-ins and workflows drives the business logic like registration, waitlists, notifications etc.

The data model and business logic that Reuben has designed for this is very comprehensive and is a result of working with several event organizers. If you’re looking at building an event management solution, this accelerator will reduce a lot of brainstorming & revisions that you have to do otherwise.

Given the design of this, I’m beginning to wonder if this accelerator could very well become a Content Management System (CMS) for event planning. What do you think?

CRM Accelerators: Notifications (RSS)

Girish Raja — Thu, 11 Dec 2008 03:32:00 GMT

CRM notifications accelerator allows you to expose CRM business data by creating Really Simple Syndication (RSS) feeds.

Users can subscribe to any saved views within CRM as a feed. This allows you to have a channel where you pull information instead of being pushed to you from the server. These RSS feeds accessible via a variety of RSS readers including Outlook, Mobile phone, 3^rd Party Readers, etc. It is also worth noting that this capability can be used to easily create Vista Gadget for CRM by using the generic RSS gadget that Windows Vista ships with.

This is just a tip of iceberg on how RSS can be used with Microsoft Dynamics CRM. Since the accelerator ships with the source code as well, developers can further extend this or create new and interesting applications based on RSS & CRM.

CRM Accelerators: Enterprise Search

Girish Raja — Wed, 19 Nov 2008 20:33:00 GMT

In this video, we take a look at the Enterprise Search Accelerator for CRM and see how SharePoint and CRM can complement each other in creating business solutions.

The enterprise search accelerator allows Microsoft Office SharePoint Server (MOSS) customers to view and search for Microsoft Dynamics CRM data directly from their SharePoint portals.

Additionally, the technology, Business Data Catalog (BDC), and techniques used with this accelerator can be employed to surface data from other line of business applications to further enrich the SharePoint portal.

BDC makes it easy for people to connect to, find, and act on information stored in structured line-of-business systems (such as Microsoft Dynamics CRM) by using a declarative framework to securely integrate them into search results. With BDC you can configure actionable audience-specific portals, dashboards and mash-up interfaces for this data without writing any code.

CRM Accelerators: An Introduction with Reuben Krippner

Girish Raja — Mon, 10 Nov 2008 15:22:00 GMT

Few weeks ago, I had the opportunity to interview Reuben Krippner from the CRM team. Reuben has been working very hard for the last several months to release CRM Accelerators. In this short video, Reuben gives us an overview of the Accelerators program and we chat about how Accelerators will evolve in the future.

Update: Microsoft Partners can download the accelerators bits and related information at the below links:

http://www.codeplex.com/crmaccelerators
https://mbs.microsoft.com/partnersource/newsevents/news/MD_CRM_Accelerators

Stay tuned for more videos on Accelerators as Reuben and I drill into the technical details of each accelerator.

Thanks,
-Girish Raja.
http://blogs.msdn.com/girishr

Creating a Silverlight control for CRM

Girish Raja — Wed, 03 Sep 2008 09:24:00 GMT

In this screencast, we'll see how to build a Silverlight 2 control that connects and displays data from Dynamics CRM.

There are a variety of ways you can connect a Silverlight client to CRM. In this screencast, we're using a proxy approach by having a WCF service sitting in between Silverlight control and CRM web services.

You can download the code for this screencast here. Check out http://blogs.msdn.com/girishr/ for more code samples and related screencasts.

Creating a CRM WPF Offline Application

Girish Raja — Tue, 19 Aug 2008 08:47:00 GMT

In this screencast, we'll see how to create a simple Windows Presentation Foundation (WPF) application that pulls data from Dynamics CRM. We'll then see how can we modify this application to work in offline mode.

Check out http://channel9.msdn.com/posts/benriga/The-Dynamics-Duo-talk-about-CRM-and-WPF/ for some cool WPF work we've created as a proof of concept.

You can download the code for this screencast here. Check out http://blogs.msdn.com/girishr/ for more code samples and related screencasts.

Creating a custom SharePoint webpart for CRM

Girish Raja — Tue, 19 Aug 2008 03:23:00 GMT

In this screencast, we write a simple SharePoint webpart that pulls data from the CRM 4.0 VPC.

Check out http://channel9.msdn.com/posts/benriga/The-Dynamics-Duo-talk-about-Dynamics-CRM-and-SharePoint/ to take a look at a cool dashboard you can build with custom connected webparts.

You can download the code for this screencast here. Check out http://blogs.msdn.com/girishr/ for more code samples and related screencasts.

Customizing CRM's Entity Model and User Experience

Girish Raja — Tue, 19 Aug 2008 03:14:00 GMT

Custom navigation along with custom entities allows you to start creating Line of Business (LOB) applications in a variety of vertical industries. This screencast shows how you can import the entity and sitemap customizations into the CRM platform to quickly convert a vanilla CRM instance to a customized business application.

Check out http://channel9.msdn.com/posts/benriga/The-Dynamics-Duo-talk-about-Dynamics-CRM-Customization/ for the conversation I had with Ben Riga on the topic of customizing the CRM Platform.

You can download the code for this screencast here. Check out http://blogs.msdn.com/girishr/ for more code samples and related screencasts.

Creating an OBA - Word Add-in for CRM

Girish Raja — Mon, 18 Aug 2008 23:41:00 GMT

In this screencast, we'll see how to create a simple OBA application (word add-in) that pulls data from Dynamics CRM 4.0.

Check out http://channel9.msdn.com/posts/benriga/The-Dynamics-Duo-talk-about-CRM-and-Office-Business-Applications-OBA/ for some of the possibilities with such applications.

Check out http://blogs.msdn.com/girishr/ for code samples and related screencasts.