April 2009 – The Dynamics CRM 4 Accelerators

We had a great meeting last night (Thursday, April 30) at the Microsoft Downers Grove office. Microsoft’s Bob Piskule headlined the evening’s program on the Dynamics CRM 4.0 Accelerators. As has become the DCRMUG custom, most of the attendees were online, but the folks who came in person actually got treated to real food purchased by Jonathan Lee. Thanks Jonathan! 

I made some reasonably good quality recordings, which I’ve included links to below, along with my commentary & meeting notes. For those of you who simply want to watch the recordings, here you go:

• Bob Piskule’s slide presentation on the Dynamics CRM 4.0 Accelerators
• Bob’s demonstration
• Richard Knudson’s slide presentation on the Enterprise Search Accelerator
• Richard’s demonstration

Intro, Announcement of Data Integration Main Topic for May Meeting

Jonathan (www.riics.com ) led off with an announcement of next month’s meeting, to be held on May 27 (location TBD but certainly available online as always!). The featured topic of the May meeting will be data integration and migration. In the Dynamics CRM world, Scribe is one of the leading provider in that space, and Jonathan has lined up a couple of Scribe representatives to keynote the meeting for us. The meeting format will be a little different next month: after a shorter than usual main presentation we’ll have a panel discussion, featuring the Scribe folks plus some of our members with extensive Scribe and app integration experience sharing their expertise and war stories. We’ve already got a volunteer, but we still need a couple more to round out the panel – if you’d like to step up, please email Jonathan directly at jonathan.lee@riics.com

Main Presentation by Bob Piskule of Microsoft

Bob Piskule is a Partner Technical Specialist on the Dynamics team here in the Midwest District, and he gave us a great presentation on a popular topic: The Dynamics CRM 4.0 Accelerators. If you’re new to the Accelerators, they are essentially add-on modules that extend CRM 4’s out of the box functionality. They are developed by Microsoft, and available for free downloading from www.CodePlex.com/CRMaccelerators.

The CRM team is cranking them out fast and furious, so it was great to have Bob give us an overview of ALL of them, and put everything in context for us. I’m still not quite sure how he presented 40 slides plus a demo of all the Accelerators save Enterprise Search (I did that one) in 60 minutes…but he did!

Here’s Bob’s slide presentation on the Dynamics CRM 4.0 Accelerators.
Here’s his demonstration.
    
Here’s a summary of my “meeting notes” on Bob’s presentation:

• Both the Event Management and the e-Service Accelerators employ an ASP.NET application to add “portal” functionality. That is, they give you a web site where extranet users (customers, trading partners…) might go and view/update information that ends up in your Dynamics CRM. In my opinion, this portal functionality is critically important and has traditionally been way too difficult to implement in CRM. The fact that at least two of the Accelerators use a similar (the same?) framework to add this is encouraging, and I hope Microsoft continues to invest in this area!
• The Event Management Accelerator essentially customizes the Campaign entity and gives you a special campaign type of “Event”. One of the things you can do with this is distribute event invitations as Campaign Activities, and treat Campaign Responses as registrations. Martin Donnelly pointed this out, and noted the anomaly that these Campaign Responses could in turn be converted to Lead records. Interesting. Martin knows his entities!
• The Accelerators can seem a little mystifying if you’re new to them. Here are some of the ways they add their magic on top of your (on-premise only, for now!) Dynamics CRM:
  o   Some of them (see above) add portal functionality in the form of an entire ASP.NET web application you install on top of IIS. It works fine as is, but if you want to customize it you can, since you get all the source code.

o   Some of them use plug-ins you need to register, to customize the CRM UI.

o   Some of them use customizations (custom entities, workflows) that you need to import and publish.

o   Some of them use reports you need to import.

Because there are some moving parts, the setup can seem a little daunting, and Microsoft has started to include videos that walk through the setup. They’re somewhat odd, since there’s no audio. I kept thinking my speakers weren’t working at first, but after watching a couple I got used to it. If you’re going to install one of the Accelerators, I recommend watching the (soundless) installation videos at the same time as you’re doing the setup.

 Bob also mentioned that there is a brand-new VPC available for download that already has all the Accelerators installed…so if you just want to get some experience with them and don’t care about the setup part, I recommend you just download the new demo Virtual Machine and save yourself some install time.

Richard Knudson’s Demonstration of the Enterprise Search Accelerator

More than any of the other accelerators, ESA integrates Dynamics CRM with SharePoint, and since that’s an area of special interest to me, I was happy to take this one on. I had some Live Meeting challenges during my demo, so I re-recorded the PowerPoint part of my short session. If you want to skip the slides, here’s my demonstration of the Enterprise Search Accelerator.

Just for fun, I uploaded my re-recorded slide presentation to YouTube. (As usual, my son Jack was not impressed.) Here’s the embedded version of the link:

One of the things that I’m afraid didn’t come through clearly enough is this: if all you want to do is expose Dynamics CRM data to SharePoint users with the Business Data Web Parts (e.g., the “Business Data List” and “Business Data Related List” Web Parts), all you need to do is import the so-called Application Definition file and you’re good to go. In this sense, the ESA is simply a great example of what you can do with the Business Data Catalog (BDC) functionality that shipped with MOSS 2007.  Because of time limitations, I focused on this part of the ESA functionality more than I did on the explicit “Enterprise Search” aspect of it.

Anyway, if you have questions, please fire away: richardk@imginc.com