Entries tagged with dynamics crm - Channel 9

CoreMotives combines the power of Dynamics xRM and Windows Azure Platform to offer new Marketing Automation solution

John O'Donnell — Mon, 23 Nov 2009 05:21:00 GMT

Larry Gregory talked to Rhett Thompson, Jeremie Desautels from CoreMotives at a recent Microsoft BizSpark Incubation Week in Atlanta hosted by Sanjay Jain. With a few days of design and development effort CoreMotives ported their Microsoft Dynamics xRM application to Windows Azure.

Enjoy the show!

John O'Donnell
Microsoft Dynamics ISV Architect Evangelist
Microsoft Corporation
http://blogs.msdn.com/jodonnell
http://blogs.msdn.com/usisvde
http://www.twitter.com/jodonnel

CWRMobility and the ZuneHD

John O'Donnell — Tue, 27 Oct 2009 16:32:00 GMT

Erik van Hoof from http://www.CWRMobility.com stopped by at the CRMUG Summit to show me his companies Dynamics CRM product called CWR Mobile CRM running on his new ZuneHD. Interesting to see how a ZuneHD can be used for business applications as well as consumer applications.

Enjoy the show!

John O'Donnell
Microsoft Dynamics ISV Architect Evangelist
Microsoft Corporation
http://blogs.msdn.com/jodonnell
http://blogs.msdn.com/usisvde
http://www.twitter.com/jodonnel

End of week overview of Dynamics Communities event

John O'Donnell — Tue, 27 Oct 2009 14:22:00 GMT

During the week of September 14th the Dynamic Communities team ran a successful event in Illinois focusing on Dynamics CRM, Dynamics GP, Dynamics AX and Dynamics NAV. I met with two of the organizers to get their feedback at the end of the week.

If you work with a Microsoft Dynamics product and are not part of a user group consider joining a group at http://www.dynamiccommunities.com/

The opportunity to network with your Microsoft Dynamics peers is one not to be missed.

Enjoy the show!

John O'Donnell
Microsoft Dynamics ISV Architect Evangelist
Microsoft Corporation
http://blogs.msdn.com/jodonnell
http://blogs.msdn.com/usisvde
http://www.twitter.com/jodonnel

FY09 Dynamics Platform Adoption Stories: Eloqua

Sanjay Jain — Mon, 22 Jun 2009 13:38:00 GMT

In this FY09 Dynamics Platform Adoption Stories series, I will continue to share success stories of my managed ISVs, highlighting their platform adoption experience, their Aha moments and advice to newer ISVs to be successful. Enjoy the next one…

During Convergence 2009, I got an opportunity to sit down with David Watkins and Aaron Rothschild from Eloqua, marketing automation leader and provider of best practices expertise for marketers worldwide. Eloqua provides Integration with Microsoft Dynamics CRM. You can see the solution demo and recent announcement of I.B.I.S. achieving Certified Partner Status.

Prior Stories:

· SmartCatalog

· Permuta Technologies

· Avalara

· LinkPoint360

· Bottomline Technologies

· Hoovers

· LeadTime Techonology

· Pervasive Software

· Celenia Software

· MaxQ

· Parature

Sanjay Jain
ISV Architect Evangelist
Microsoft Corporation
Blog: http://Blogs.msdn.com/SanjayJain
Twitter: http://twitter.com/SanjayJain369

FY09 Dynamics Platform Adoption Stories: SmartCatalog

Sanjay Jain — Sun, 21 Jun 2009 16:25:00 GMT

During Convergence 2009, I got an opportunity to sit down with Steve Brown from SmartCatalog (formerly known as Endeavor Commerce). SmartCatalog is a guided selling and sales configuration solution for Microsoft Dynamics CRM and helps manufacturing, telecommunications, healthcare, retail and service companies around the world increase revenue, profit and customer loyalty by empowering their sale channels with intelligence and guidance needed to process valid quotes and orders. To learn more see the demo and webinar.

Prior Stories:

· Permuta Technologies

· Avalara

· LinkPoint360

· Bottomline Technologies

· Hoovers

· LeadTime Techonology

· Pervasive Software

· Celenia Software

· MaxQ

· Parature

Sanjay Jain
ISV Architect Evangelist
Microsoft Corporation
Blog: http://Blogs.msdn.com/SanjayJain
Twitter: http://twitter.com/SanjayJain369

FY09 Dynamics Platform Adoption Stories: Permuta Technologies

Sanjay Jain — Sun, 21 Jun 2009 16:16:00 GMT

During Convergence 2009, I got an opportunity to sit down with Ryan Millett, President and CTO and Dave Milton, CTO from Permuta Technologies. Permuta has released DefenseReady, a suite of business applications for Department of Defense (DOD), built on Microsoft Dynamics CRM Platform. You may see the demo and whitepaper.

Prior Stories:

· Avalara

· LinkPoint360

· Bottomline Technologies

· Hoovers

· LeadTime Techonology

· Pervasive Software

· Celenia Software

· MaxQ

· Parature

Sanjay Jain
ISV Architect Evangelist
Microsoft Corporation
Blog: http://Blogs.msdn.com/SanjayJain
Twitter: http://twitter.com/SanjayJain369

FY09 Dynamics Platform Adoption Stories: LinkPoint360

Sanjay Jain — Sun, 21 Jun 2009 16:02:00 GMT

During Convergence 2009, I got an opportunity to sit down with Glenn Lehner from LinkPoint360, a leading provider of Lotus Notes and GroupWise integration with Microsoft Dynamics CRM. You can learn more on LinkPoint for Microsoft Dynamics CRM Features, and Screenshots.

Prior Stories:
* Bottomline Technologies
* Hoovers
* LeadTime Techonology
* Pervasive Software
* Celenia Software
* MaxQ
* Parature

Sanjay Jain
ISV Architect Evangelist
Microsoft Corporation
Blog: http://Blogs.msdn.com/SanjayJain
Twitter: http://twitter.com/SanjayJain369

FY09 Dynamics Platform Adoption Stories: Hoovers

Sanjay Jain — Sun, 21 Jun 2009 02:46:00 GMT

During Convergence 2009, I got an opportunity to sit down with Heidi Tucker and Malcolm Domecq from Hoovers (a D&B company that gives its customers a competitive edge with insight and actionable information about companies, industries and key decision makers). Recently Hoovers announced the availability of Access Hoover’s for Microsoft Dynamics CRM. You can learn more about the solution here, watch the demo and signup for TestDrive.

Prior Stories:
* LeadTime Techonology
* Pervasive Software
* Celenia Software
* MaxQ
* Parature

Sanjay Jain
ISV Architect Evangelist
Microsoft Corporation
Blog: http://Blogs.msdn.com/SanjayJain
Twitter: http://twitter.com/SanjayJain369

Dynamics Duo: Silverlight and Jazz Hands

Ben Riga — Fri, 19 Jun 2009 04:08:00 GMT

Ok; so maybe I got a little overexcited in the final installment to this 5-part series. <Jazz Hands!> This time around we spend time talking about how to use Silverlight to build experiences that will compel users to want to come back again and again while differentiating your application from those of your competitors.

In this episode we spend most of our time in the part of the demo related to the conference attendee portal. The portal is meant to be the place where returning attendees go to review information about the conference (maps, weather, schedule, travel ,etc). This would be similar to a SharePoint page but built with a consumer in mind so including animations, drag and drop and generally having more sizzle. <Jazz Hands!>

The information in the modules is coming directly from Dynamics CRM Online via web service calls. That information is data-bound to the Silverlight controls we used to allow users to display and manipulate that information. The ecosystem around Silverlight is exploding and as result there is a wide variety of controls that can be used to accelerate the design and development of solutions. In our case, much of the UI work on the attendee portal is based on a control built by a team led by Martin Grayson. Have a look at the various other controls available in the suite on the Blacklight showcase site. The full source code is available on CodePlex. Nice work on these, Martin! <Jazz Hands!> As we discussed in the last episode the separation of code and UI makes is easy for developers and designers to work together to build something cool really fast.

Girish promised to share the code for this on his blog here.

This episode is part of a 5-part series. In this series we’ve tried to explain how you can combine the Microsoft Web Platform with Dynamics CRM to quickly build and deploy self-service solutions. The full set of videos include:

Both Girish and I enjoyed recording this series. We hope you enjoyed them as well. If you have comments or suggestions for other topics, feel free to add comments below or email Girish or me (Ben) directly.

Sorry if I went a little over the top with all that Jazz Hands thing. <Jazz Hands!> :)

FY09 Dynamics Platform Adoption Stories: Pervasive Software

Sanjay Jain — Thu, 18 Jun 2009 21:32:00 GMT

During Convergence 2009, I got an opportunity to sit down with Dennis Hall from Pervasive Software (NASDAQ: PVSW), a global leader in embeddable data management and agile integration software. Earlier Pervasive announced their integration offering for QuickBooks accounting software and Microsoft Dynamics CRM Online. You can learn more about the DatatSync solution here, watch the demo here and sign 30-days free trial here.

Sanjay Jain
ISV Architect Evangelist
Microsoft Corporation
Blog: http://Blogs.msdn.com/SanjayJain
Twitter: http://twitter.com/SanjayJain369

Dynamics Duo: Composition with Third-Party Web Services

Ben Riga — Thu, 18 Jun 2009 04:41:00 GMT

In this episode we talk about a variety of topics including using Silverlight for UI, composing using 3rd party web services and storing complex information in Dynamics CRM.

We spend most of our time on the flight booking page. This page was built using Silverlight to demonstrate some of the simple experiences that can be designed. In this case the UI was built in Expression Blend. Designers and developers work together closely on projects. In fact, developers and designers work on the exact same project files but stay in their own environments; Developers stay in Visual Studio, Designers stay in Expression. We’ll talk a lot more time about Silverlight in the final episode of this series tomorrow.

In our example we use a third party web service run by ezGDS to present the conference attendee with a list of flight options. ezGDS takes care behind the scenes to retrieve that flight fare information from various global distribution systems including Amadeus, Worldspan, Sabre and others. The attendee sees none of that complexity since we’ve built all of that directly into our system. Even though the information coming back can be very complex, including ticket information and various inbound and outbound flight segments, Dynamics CRM easily handles storing this information in a custom entity.

Dynamics Duo: Wide World Importers Code

Ben Riga — Wed, 17 Jun 2009 04:00:00 GMT

In this episode we dive into some of the real code behind Wide World Importers Conference site. Girish walks us through the code-behind for the contact/profile and conference registration options pages.

There’s not really a lot of magic here. In fact, I would say it’s quite simple to understand. If you’ve used ASP.NET before it’s not much different when you’re writing for Windows Azure as we are here.

The only difference is that here we’re sending the data to Dynamics CRM using the SDK. That’s infinitely more useful for your customers as the information becomes actionable immediately. We should mention that, in this case, we’re using a 3rd party toolkit by Microsoft Gold Partner, ADXSTUDIO. Shan McArthur and his team at ADXSTUDIO helped us to put this site together and their toolkit naturally uses the CRM SDK. It abstracts the SDK it out a little more to make writing and reading the code even simpler.

We use the Live ID token that we’re getting from the Live ID service, as we discussed in the previous episode, to allow the user to retrieve and update their profile information. It’s the unique key, of sorts, to their record in the CRM data store.

Girish promised in this episode to publish the code so expect to see that soon on his blog. We’ll have to hold him to that. :)

Dynamics Duo: Everybody needs an Identity

Ben Riga — Tue, 16 Jun 2009 04:01:00 GMT

In yesterday’s episode we very briefly touched the identity and authentication part of the demo where, on the self-service site, the attendee registers using Windows Live ID. In this episode we go a lot deeper.

Identity and authentication is hard. Simple, scalable and secure login capabilities require a great deal of experience to build and a great deal of effort to maintain and keep running. Windows Live ID provides you a proven solution for building identity-aware applications and is used today by over 460 million users.

In our case, since we’ve integrated Live ID into the system, we let Microsoft manage all the details related to identity and authentication. Live ID assigns each of our users a token that is specific to our site. That means Microsoft lets us know that the person coming to the site is the same person that registered. That token is unique to our site so that from the perspective of the user their privacy is protected (e.g. they cannot be tracked across multiple web sites). In fact, the token is the only thing the site will see. So even though the user may use an email address and password to login to Live ID the site never sees that unless the user explicitly provides that information (as in our example by typing it into a profile page).

The simplicity of this is just amazing. As a developer I just have to register my site with Windows Live ID and then redirect my users to the Live ID login page whenever I need them to be authenticated. Live ID handles the authentication and then redirects back to a page that I’ve registered. You can even brand the Windows Live ID login page that your users will see so that it will appear as if it is your own login page. Nice!

While Windows Live ID does a great job of helping me as a conference organizer to identify and authenticate my conference attendees, we also need to authenticate the Windows Azure site to the Dynamics CRM site so that they can exchange information. We’re obviously not going to have CRM licenses for all our self-service users (the thousands of conference attendees in this case) so we use a certificate on the Windows Azure site to ensure that only that site has access to the CRM data. Once the certificate is on my Azure site, we use a Live ID service account to handle the authentication between the two servers.

Dynamics Duo Rides again

Ben Riga — Mon, 15 Jun 2009 14:45:00 GMT

Girish and I dropped in to the new Channel 9 Studio (formerly Monaco) to record a few Channel 9 episodes around some demo code we’ve been working on for a few months.

In this series we’ll focus on self-service and specifically on building self-service sites that use Dynamics CRM on the back-end to enable customers, employees, citizens, etc. to get the information or perform the tasks they want without having to interact with a representative.

We’ve talked previously about using Dynamics CRM as a platform to build general purpose line-of-business applications. Typically these are for users that are behind the firewall. When we’re talking about self-service we mean the wide range of users that are out on the internet that need access to that same information in the CRM data store.

In this episode we walk through the demo in some detail. The Wide World Importers Conference site we use here is the main site for a fictitious conference. The self-service part of this is entirely hosted on Windows Azure. As we walk through the registration process the information is retrieved and stored directly in Dynamics CRM Online. Naturally, as we’ve said in the past, Dynamics CRM is great at managing both contact and transactional information. We also look at how, by using 3rd party web services, we can compose new capabilities into our system. In this case we show how to integrate an internet flight booking service into the attendee registration process and then store that complex flight booking information in the Dynamics CRM data store. Finally we show how to use Silverlight to build a compelling user experience for a self-service portal. This one is pretty slick.

Dynamics CRM was customized here for the requirements of a conference organizer. In our case we used Dynamics CRM Online but it could easily have been CRM in an on-premises deployment (or hosted by any of the hundreds of Microsoft hosting partners) as long as CRM is set up in an internet facing deployment mode (IFD).

The self-service site is running on Windows Azure so we walked through the Windows Azure Portal for the site to show how Azure helps us to deploy, configure and manage the site. The interesting part comes when we talk about how to scale up or down a site to handle large or small numbers of end-users (depending on the need of the application). Here Girish and I got into a discussion of running a site like this from the perspective of capital expenditures (capex) versus operating expenditures (opex). There are many scenarios like the conference one where the site will go through peak periods of high demand but then drop back down to very low demand. In those cases buying the equipment to handle the peaks means you have a lot of expensive equipment running idle during the low periods. Azure solves that problem by giving the power you need when you need it for as long as you need it. Unlimited scale for rent, I guess you could say.

We’ll dive into each of the various pieces of the demo over the next few days so come back and have a look. Be sure to leave us your feedback below.

Local Government and Microsoft Dynamics CRM with Mitchell Humphrey

John O'Donnell — Fri, 05 Jun 2009 19:04:00 GMT

Mitchell Humphrey is an ISV who now uses Dynamics CRM as a development platform to build their solutions for local government. In this video they talk to us about the work they do and showcase their solutions.

For more information go to FastTrackGov

John O'Donnell Microsoft Dynamics ISV Architect Evangelist
Microsoft Corporation
http://blogs.msdn.com/jodonnell
http://blogs.msdn.com/usisvde
http://www.twitter.com/jodonnel

A look at Cloud Computing, Azure and Dynamics CRM

John O'Donnell — Fri, 05 Jun 2009 00:50:00 GMT

In this video Jon White, a CRM Technology Specialist with Microsoft Dynamics CRM talks to us about Cloud Computing, Azure, Dynamics CRM and what it really means for anyone working with Microsoft Dynamics products

John O'Donnell Microsoft Dynamics ISV Architect Evangelist
Microsoft Corporation
http://blogs.msdn.com/jodonnell
http://blogs.msdn.com/usisvde
http://www.twitter.com/jodonnel

Interview and demonstration with ExactShip and Dynamics CRM

John O'Donnell — Mon, 04 May 2009 04:41:00 GMT

ExactShip gives you the ability to ship products directly from solutions like Dynamics CRM, Dynamics GP and Dynamics AX. As the guys from ExactShip say, everyone ships!

See more product demonstrations at http://www.exactship.com/msdynamics

Product Demonstration starts at time index - 9:29

Enjoy the show!

John O'Donnell Microsoft Dynamics ISV Architect Evangelist
Microsoft Corporation
http://blogs.msdn.com/jodonnell
http://blogs.msdn.com/usisvde
http://www.twitter.com/jodonnel

Transcensus Interview and Demonstration - Deliver easy training with SHO Guide

John O'Donnell — Tue, 28 Apr 2009 13:56:00 GMT

Just before Convergence 2009 wrapped up I caught up with Dan Higbee and Dan Peay from www.transcensus.com and talked with them about their solution for delivering application help. In this video we show it running with Microsoft Dynamics CRM Online but it can also be used with Microsoft Office applications, Dynamics or any application developed using Microsoft .NET.

Product Demonstration starts at time index - 5:45

Enjoy the show!

John O'Donnell Microsoft Dynamics ISV Architect Evangelist
Microsoft Corporation
http://blogs.msdn.com/jodonnell
http://blogs.msdn.com/usisvde
http://www.twitter.com/jodonnel

Dynamics CRM eService Accelerator

Catherine Eibner — Fri, 20 Mar 2009 04:17:00 GMT

This week, Nina Vines & I caught up to record this webcast on the eService Accelerator. During this webcast we walk through how to set up & configure the Accelerator as well as take you through some of the great features it includes.

Dynamics CRM Event Management Accelerator

Catherine Eibner — Tue, 10 Mar 2009 23:05:00 GMT

This week the lovely Nina Vines who is the CRM Technical Specialist from our Australian Dynamics team joined me to record the first in our series of webcasts on the new Dynamics CRM accelerators. We decided to do these after receiving so many requests for copies of the unrecorded LiveMeeting session we did on the first 3 accelerators a few weeks ago.

Overview and demonstration of Cast Iron Systems Application Integration and Migration Solution

John O'Donnell — Sun, 08 Mar 2009 17:15:00 GMT

While in Mountain View, CA I had the pleasure of visiting Cast Iron Systems and talking about their hardware and cloud based solution for data migration and integration. Chandar also did a great demonstration of the solution with Dynamics CRM and Dynamics GP.

Overview starts at time index - 4:01
Demonstration starts at time index - 14:23

More information about the solution can be found here -http://www.castiron.com/integration-solutions/ms-dynamics/index.html

Enjoy the show!

John O'Donnell Microsoft Dynamics ISV Architect Evangelist
Microsoft Corporation
http://blogs.msdn.com/jodonnell
http://blogs.msdn.com/usisvde
http://www.twitter.com/jodonnel

CRM “5” – Secure Code on the Server

Ben Riga — Wed, 17 Dec 2008 02:53:00 GMT

In this video I chat with Andy Bybee (Principal Program Manager Lead), Allen Hafezipour (Senior Program Manager) and Nirav Shah (Senior Dev Lead). These are some of the folks on the Dynamics CRM team thinking hard about code on the server.

Back in October I spent some time chatting with the Dynamics CRM team about some of the new features coming in CRM “5”. I published a couple of videos back then (here and here) but never got around to publishing this final one (sorry about that guys!).

In this one we chat about how to write custom code in Dynamics CRM and have that run securely in the various deployment models available including on-premises, partner-hosted and even in CRM Online.

The current version of CRM allows code on the server (for plug-ins or workflows) and that code runs in full trust. That’s the primary reason why server code is not allowed on Dynamics CRM Online where you’re sharing the server with many other tenants.

There are a number of different areas where you might need to write custom code on the server; for instance, custom workflows, custom web apps, plug-ins. It’s not hard to allow that sort of thing. Where it gets tricky is allowing developers to do that in ways that don’t compromise security and performance.

The team talks about what they needed to think about to solve these types of problems (profiling, tracing, and managing security of numerous managed assemblies). They looked at physical (sandboxing) and logical (code access security) isolation levels. They divided the security problem into multiple layers:

1st layer is .NET code access security
then using Windows security: putting code within its own machine and isolating access to databases or machine services
and finally for multi-tenant environment preventing one tenant’s code from touching the data or code from another tenant

Nirav and Andy provide a great whiteboard architecture walk through showing how the security is implemented and how the message pipeline flows.

Allen walks us through some sample code to show how this works in an early build (of course this stuff could change) including how to insert tracing in your server code allowing you to see what happened when exceptions are thrown. There’s a new plugin registration tool that helps with registration and deploying of code on the server.

The message to the developer writing line-of-business applications on the Dynamics CRM platform is clear. While today’s server code model supports only full-trust the new code security now unlocks the ability to run the exact same code in all of the various deployment mechanisms.

By coupling that with the coming solution management features, building and deploying secure applications will get much easier. There’ll be no need for writing MSIs and constantly keeping them updated. There’ll be no need to think about which type of server deployment a customer will use. As a developer you get to focus on your application. The platform does the work related to security and performance management.

I think the power of choice just got more power. :)

Learning to build on Azure: One ISV's Experience

Ben Riga — Tue, 16 Dec 2008 03:22:00 GMT

While at PDC back in October, Ryan Dunn and I had a chance to sit down with Shan McArthur from gold ISV partner ADXSTUDIO to discuss what he'd learned from his experiences with the Azure Services Platform.

Shan is a serial early adopter and Ryan and I (and a few other Technical Evangelists) have been working with him and his team for some time to help them along the way.

In this video Shan discusses some of the things he's done that helped him get there faster. Amazingly the team was able to get the ADXStudio Content Management System (CMS) ported to Windows Azure in a lightning fast 3 weeks.

He ported ADXSTUDIO CMS and their CRM Developer Toolkit so that they are now able to run in either on-premises, partner-hosted or Windows Azure. He also took advantage of Microsoft SQL Data Services (which is Ryan's favorite technology :) ) to store the content for the CMS.

Shan had a lot so say about what he learned when build his cloud-capable and scalable app. His app originally had a dependency on numerous Microsoft technologies including IIS, ASP.NET, SQL Server, Active Directory.

Windows Azure

He’s now betting of both worlds. He knows many of his customers will continue to use traditional deployment methods but for many more Windows Azure will be a great fit.

Some of his comments:

Hosting in Azure is different. You can’t always do the things you expect from ASP.NET since you're now in a sandbox
The first thing to learn is code access security code since Windows Azure doesn't run apps in full trust
A great way to learn code access security is to move into medium trust immediately (even while on IIS) to see the exceptions right away
Get devs to Vista and IIS7 and use the integrated pipeline
He talks about how to build applications that will run in either IIS or Windows Azure.
Shan’s team were able to get all of this cool stuff ported and working in just a few weeks.
Shan shows us a project built on the ADXSTUDIO CMS running on Windows Azure and in the Windows Azure dev fabric.

SQL Data Services

Shan’s team went with SQL Data Services (SDS) for data storage. He notes that Windows Azure also has some storage capabilities. Shan discusses why he made the choice he did to use SDS:

much richer query capability
easier to use for composition of multiple web sites
soon will have the additional security access control
will take on more and more relational capabilities

Since SDS is not full-fledged SQL Server there is a certain amount of re-architecting that Shan needed to do to ensure that his app was portable. He made some design decisions very early on in development that made this easier:

used a provider model to separate the data from the logic in the application
moved away from deep dependency on SQL Server (e.g. stored procs)
used guids/ unique ids (as opposed to using auto-numbered ints) for unique keys

Shan goes quite deep into the code showing how he takes full advantage of the provider model.

He also spends some time talking about how he tackles identity. Again because he uses the membership provider model he can switch identity based on the need of the application (Active Directory, Live Id, Forms Auth, etc).

Dynamics CRM

Shan’s team does a lot of work with Dynamics CRM as well. Shan’s team put together a very cool conference self-service registration demo application that uses Azure on the front end with the site content stored in SDS and the dynamic content coming directly via web services from Dynamics CRM. So, in the same way that Dynamics CRM can be used to build line-of-business apps that run on-premises, partner-hosted or in Microsoft data-centers with CRM Online, they can build customer facing self-service web sites that run in any of the 3 hosting models (on-prem, partner-hosted, Windows Azure). For Shan’s code it’s just a change in a web.config file.

I even managed to get Ryan on film paying off Shan for all the kind words he has for the evangelists that have helped him out. Gosh, I hope Legal doesn't see this. :) Seriously though, Shan has certainly done a great job of taking advantage of all the resources we provide to ISVs building on our platform. Thanks for the kind words and great product, Shan.

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.

Entries tagged with dynamics crm - Channel 9

CoreMotives combines the power of Dynamics xRM and Windows Azure Platform to offer new Marketing Automation solution

CWRMobility and the ZuneHD

End of week overview of Dynamics Communities event

FY09 Dynamics Platform Adoption Stories: Eloqua

FY09 Dynamics Platform Adoption Stories: SmartCatalog

FY09 Dynamics Platform Adoption Stories: Permuta Technologies

FY09 Dynamics Platform Adoption Stories: LinkPoint360

FY09 Dynamics Platform Adoption Stories: Hoovers

Dynamics Duo: Silverlight and Jazz Hands

FY09 Dynamics Platform Adoption Stories: Pervasive Software

Dynamics Duo: Composition with Third-Party Web Services

Dynamics Duo: Wide World Importers Code

Dynamics Duo: Everybody needs an Identity

Dynamics Duo Rides again

Local Government and Microsoft Dynamics CRM with Mitchell Humphrey

A look at Cloud Computing, Azure and Dynamics CRM

Interview and demonstration with ExactShip and Dynamics CRM

Transcensus Interview and Demonstration - Deliver easy training with SHO Guide

Dynamics CRM eService Accelerator

Dynamics CRM Event Management Accelerator

Overview and demonstration of Cast Iron Systems Application Integration and Migration Solution

CRM “5” – Secure Code on the Server

Learning to build on Azure: One ISV's Experience

Windows Azure

SQL Data Services

Dynamics CRM

Links:

CRM Accelerators: Analytics

CRM Accelerators: eService (ASP.NET Portal)