July 13, 2013  

Yes, we drink our own KoolAid

Yes, we drink our own KoolAid

We just finished our first draft of our website (www.busiplanit.com), and we faced the dilemma of keeping it static or making it somewhat dynamic. So we decided to lead by example and connected our site with our own instance of Dynamics CRM Online.

Technically, it wasn’t as difficult as we thought it was going to be, and now we have a working example of how easy it is to use Dynamics CRM to keep track of your contacts and leads, even outside of the native Dynamics CRM interface. Granted, we didn’t build a full fledged portal with user authentication or Dynamics as a content management system (like the ADX Studio Portal), but still we are able to capture leads and manage the inquiries posted by our visitors, and by the way, we made it using the ‘Responsive UI’ design pattern so you can access it from any device.

Here are a few highlights of what you’ll need for a seamless integration of you portal with Dynamics CRM:

  • Find a host that offers at least .Net framework 4.0 and allows for full trust level.
  • Add the following tags in your web.config:
  1. <trust level=”Full” /> in system.web
  2. <add name=”Your Connection Name” connectionString=”Url=Your CRM Online Url”; Username=Your user name; Password=Your password;/>  in connectionStrings
  3. <section name=”microsoft.xrm.client” type=”Microsoft.Xrm.Client.Configuration.CrmSection, Microsoft.Xrm.Client” /> in configSections
  4. <add name=”Xrm” type=”Xrm.XrmServiceContext, busiplanit_1″ /> under contexts, microsoft.xrm.client
  • Even if you are using .Net 4.5, make sure you add microsoft.identitymodel.dll in your project (bin)
  • For you own protection, we recommend you add some anti-bot routine either a captcha component (lots of them in the market) or you may develop your own.
  • Finally, we developed a routine that loads static data from Dynamics CRM asynchronously, but that may deserve its own blog entry.

Well, we hope to hear from you and your questions, and are eager to apply these techniques to help you solve your information needs.

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