Last Months I’ve been quite busy working with Microsoft EMEA to prepare a very special training offering for ISVs to discover Microsoft Dynamics as Platform. It consist in two days deep technical training to discover the capacities that Microsoft Dynamics CRM brings for ISVs to build solutions and products on top of it.

During this two day we cover all the topics about customisation and extension of the Microsoft Dynamics CRM platform, and also, the solution packaging which is the most interesting part for ISVs. The part that I like the most from these two days training is that during the labs the attendees  build a whole Hospital Management solution using CRM as an application platform.

Ok, it’s not a huge and comprehensive solution, but for two days is quite cool. It includes custom entities to manage patients and medical records, some callout and workflows to streamline business processes like the assignation of a room to a patient, pieces of custom UI and some navigation customisation of course. However, the most interesting piece is that at the end of the labs we build a installer for the solution and make it ready to distribute. I mean, we packet all the customisations and extension in a msi (setup) file that you could even sell

So, if you are planning on building an ISV solution and you are interested on what the Microsoft Dynamics CRM platform can offer do not hesitate to participate on one of this events.

If you have interest on this trainings contact your local Microsoft CRM team or email dynamISV@microsoft.com . More information on Martin Houler’s blog

www.marcoamoedo.com

Recently, I was playing with this feature trying to find how it works and see if it could be possible to enable it for the Sales Order entity. My first idea as usual was to dig on the internals of the CRM’s JavaScript to see what dialogue or URL is this “Bulk Edit” option calling.

With my brand new Internet Explorer 8 Beta 2, I will dedicate a post to it in another moment but just let me say it is worth to give it a try, I started the new integrated Developer Toolbar. This toolbar basically lets you do the same things as the older plug-in IE Developer Toolbar available for IE 6 and 7, so you get sort of HTML inspector/debugger that let you dig onto the HTML, CSS and all the JavaScript code that is included on the web page that you are browsing. Looking into the on click event of the menu item for Bulk Edit on the contacts grid I found a very simple call to a function called doAction(…), and it did not take too longer to find the function definition on the JavaScript included files.

This function seems to be utilised in all the Microsoft Dynamics CRM grids to manage the typical options that you have in the grid buttons and menus. Basically, this function gets some parameters to indicate the grid that is calling the function, the entity type code and what operation to execute.

In this case, we want to get this function to fire a Bulk Edit dialogue for the Sales Order entity so the call to the function would be like this doAction(‘crmGrid’,’1088′,’bulkedit’).Where crmGrid is the name of the object that represents the Grid, we will go through this object another day as it quite useful to handy multi selection buttons on the grid, the second parameter is the entity type code for the Sales Order entity and the final parameter is the command that we want to execute.

Finally, if we edit the ISV.config file (by exporting it and re-importing it) and add a new button definition for the Sales using JavaScript to execute this function call we get the Bulk Edit functionality working!

Here is the chunk of code that we need to add on the ISV.config file under the <Entities> tag.

<Entity name="salesorder">

  <Grid>

    <MenuBar>

      <Buttons>

      <Button Icon="/_imgs/ico_18_debug.gif" JavaScript="doAction('crmGrid', '1088', 'bulkedit');" Client="Web">

        <Titles>

          <Title LCID="1033" Text="Bulk Edit" />

        </Titles>

        <ToolTips>

          <ToolTip LCID="1033" Text="Bulk Edit." />

        </ToolTips>

      </Button>

      </Buttons>

    </MenuBar>

  </Grid>

</Entity>

Hope you find this useful but remember that this is a NOT SUPPORTED customisation and you should carefully test it to avoid any problem.

I didn’t try to add this functionality to other CRM Entities that don’t support  bulk edit Out of the Box, I believe that the code should work for those entities with just change the Object Type code (second parameter). However, it might not work for all as I am sure that the CRM Team guys have a good reason to not include that functionality on all the entities.

Anyway, if you find any other entities for what this trick works please leave a comment to let me know. Below there is an image showing the Bulk Edit feature working with the Sales Order entity.

Regards,

Marco Amoedo – www.marcoamoedo.com

My first contact with this book was on June this year when David asked for help on reviewing the book to all the Dynamics CRM MVPs. The answer from the MVPs was amazing as David recognizes in his book, and in a less than an hour all the guys offered to help reviewing chapters of the book (I must talk one day about this fantastic group of professionals, I am really proud to have the opportunity of being part of it). I offered myself to review some chapters dedicated to Plug-ins since I had been working a lot with them and I was very interested on see how David presented this subject on his book.

The first impression couldn’t be better. Those chapters were really really comprehensive on how to work with Plug-ins and they deeply covered all the topics that anyone could expect from a development point of view. I had the pleasure of add my two cents with some minor advices and comments that finally got published on the book like the other Dynamics CRM MVPs did as well.

As soon as the Book was published, David and Julie gave us access to a electronic version of the book for free and a very especial price for the paperback version. I rushed to download some chapters that I was very interested to read, and my opinion of the book become even better. It didn’t took me more than half an hour to go to the book’s web site and order two copies for myself. Yes two, I wanted one to leave at the office and another one to have at home as I’m to lazy to carry such a big book in my rucksack. I forgot to mention that the book is more than 600 pages long!

Well, let me try to give you a more formal opinion about the book and who should read it. This book is definitely the most comprehensive work till the date about development on the Microsoft Dynamics CRM platform, it deeply covers all the topics related with it ranging from Scripting for the UI with JavaScript to Advice on packaging and deployment of ISV solutions and including of course all the other topics related with Plug-ins, Workflows, and even CRM Online. You can take a look to “The CRM Book” TOC here to find a complete list of chapters.

The book is mainly designed for developers, technical consultants, and solution architects working with Microsoft Dynamics CRM but it goes further than the pure development book and it always keeps the idea on how to take the advantage of Microsoft Dynamics CRM as a Development Platform. So, you can expect to get very valuable advices covering interest topics like setting up environments for development teams, debugging and testing, performance and packaging you solutions for easy deployment.

That is not all, the book comes with a lot of very useful code libraries and examples ready to use on your solutions that can help you to speed up your solution development. There are libraries to help on plug-in development and debugging, an amazing library to accelerate the development with JavaScript and the CRM Web Services and lots of useful stuff.

So, If you have .Net development knowledge and some exposure to Dynamics CRM Development definitely this book is a must in your desk… and not, I am not getting any money for saying all of this, this post is really my humble opinion about the book.

Regards,
Marco Amoedo

AlfaPeople is there presenting his brand new two platforms CRM Alive and Dynamics CRM 4.0 Hosting Platform. I can’t tell much more at this moment as we have to wait until the “premier” during the conference. In short, what we called CRM Alive is intended to be a new platform for ISVs to distribute and sell his products, and the Hosting Platform as you can imagine is about empowering partners to provide Microsoft Dynamics CRM 4.0 Hosted in a very easy way. So stay tuned and I will update you, and if you are there try to make it to these two sessions:

Expanding Your Microsoft Dynamics CRM Business through Software + Services (DYN007)

Microsoft Dynamics CRM on-demand services create possibilities for entirely new business models and opportunities. Attend this session to explore how you can develop a reliable annuity stream by reselling, configuring, customizing, and supporting Microsoft Dynamics CRM.

Developing and going to market with your ISV solution (DYN010)

Attend this session to more deeply understand the market opportunity and how to design, develop and go-to-market with industry and vertical solutions based on Microsoft Dynamics CRM.

Regards

At least we got it to work in our testing lab, but we’re running aginst real CRM Live deployments hosted by Microsoft.

Adding a CRM Live Organization to your ImportManager 2008 Server is as easy as adding any other Microsoft CRM Server:

1. Open the “Add New Microsoft Dynamics CRM Server” wizard and choose “Microsoft Dynamics CRM 4.0 Live”
   
2. Type in your Windows LiveID and click “Next”
   
3. Choose the Organization among all your CRM Live Organizations which you wish to connect to
   
4. Choose licensing method
   
5. Close the wizard
   

That’s it – five easy steps and you are up and running with CRM Live Organizations on ImportManager 2008.

You can use all the features of ImportManager 2008 including but not limited to Create/Update/Delete objects, Advanced Matching, Data Transformations and so on.

Stay tuned for the next release of ImportManager 2008 – it’s just arounf the corner…

Since the people started to put their hands on the brand new Microsoft Dynamics CRM 4.0, the most commented feature is not all the cool stuff about the UI, the new plug-in model, the multi tenancy, multi currency, multi language, the workflow engine… The first thing that everybody says when puts his hands on ‘Titan’ for the first time is: “WOW! It’s super fast!” And that’s true; it’s amazing the improvement of the performance from the version 3.0.

I guess that one of the big reasons for this improvement is that the CRM Team has been concentrated on produce an “internet ready” CRM with the “Power of choice”. In other words, one CRM system that let the customer change his mind from hosted to on-premise without problems (since it shares the same code base), and with a performance that enables work with your CRM through the internet like in your own network. I’m not going to say anything bad about CRM 3.0. That product was one of the most brilliant things that Microsoft put in the market in the latest years, but to be honest its performance was “not so good” in some scenarios.

Anyway, I’m writing this because today I have been playing with our brand new platform to provide Microsoft Dynamics CRM 4.0 Hosted for our Customers and Partners (thanks Peter for letting me play and my impressions can’t be better. It’s incredible how fast and smoothly it works, in part for all the things I commented above and in part for the good job that Peter made to setup everything in our datacenter. Here you have some pictures of the Outlook Client working with our hosted CRM.

The CRM client in outlook asking for the credentials.

The Outlook Client syncing for going offline.

It took only about 40 second to sync before goinf offline even it was the first time (that’s amazing). I wanted to add a picture of the process of going online again, but it was so fast that I wasn’t be able to print the screen )

I’m really excited about the possibilities of the CRM 4.0 in general, and in especial with the possibilities of the Hosted Edition. And to be honest, the setup process for the client computer is even easier than in the on premise version… Next, next and finish

If you fancy a try, or you want to know more let us know. At AlfaPeople, we are more than happy to show you this ‘cool’ CRM. And of course, stay tuned for more news about our experiences with Dynamics CRM Hosted and about our Hosting Framework to let the Dynamics Partners speed up hosted deployments.

 We have a booth located @664