Dynamics Light Seeing the (Silver)Light effect in Dynamics CRM

CRM External View v1.2 on Codeplex!

I’ve been working on this project for the last few weeks and did a silent-twitter-only release couple weeks ago just to get some feedback from the users. CRM External View is basically an extension to Microsoft CRM (at the moment only supports CRM Online) which allows you to expose the view data externally.

Throughout my CRM career, I’ve heard a lot of request to expose data like TOP 10 best-selling products of the month from CRM to their external facing website. Traditionally, to do this, we have to write a custom code specific for this and therefore, making it really hard to customize the logic in the future.

Microsoft CRM has a really great functionality out-of-the-box called View which does half of this requirement. The CRM user can create new views, customize the columns displayed, or even configure the filtering and sorting criteria. Now, what if we take the greatness of CRM views and expose it publicly? Wouldn’t it be awesome? That’s exactly what this CRM External View does!

Some of the cool features from v1.2 release:

- Ability to create password-protected views

- Filtering capabilities. The matching is done on a case-insensitive “CONTAINS”

- Transparent paging functionality. No need to worry about using paging-cookie externally

and many more.

Checkout the release at http://crmexternalview.codeplex.com for more details. Please leave your feedback or feature requests through the Codeplex discussion or in this blog.

Here are the Quick Get Started video for this extension.

CRM External View: Overview from Dimaz Pramudya on Vimeo.