“Affordable Adaptability” in practice: CRM-Office integration via web services

You may have already read Satya’s vision on “Affordable Adaptability” (Satya’s blog). There are many aspects to that vision and one that I want to write about is on building business solutions that can easily be integrated with other applications, in order to provide a seamless user experience. It is unlikely that your business uses a single application to fulfill *all* of your business needs. So businesses usually end up deploying multiple applications and technologies to build a stack that satisfies their requirements. However, in order to get the maximum value out of their investment, these applications should work very well together as if they are a single application. From user perspective, a good user experience does not require the to switch application context and go back and forth between different application screens to accomplish their daily tasks.

Lets take CRM and Office applications. A typical sales person uses both of these applications on a daily basis. They may want to work on a customer Invoice using a preferred Office application (e.g. Word) but the invoice and customer data is stored in their CRM system. So it is vitally important for a product like Microsoft Dynamics CRM to work seamlessly with Microsoft Office products in order to bring improved user productivity. That is exactly why out-of-the box you will get a powerful and rich integration between Microsoft Dynamics CRM and Microsoft Office Outlook and you can easily export live and updateable CRM data into Microsoft Office Excell with only a few simple clicks.

But what if you want more than that? What if you want to build a more complex customized integration between these applications that enables a whole set of new business scenarios which can significantly improve your business productivity. Imagine the high ROI that you will get when you use both of these applications in a very closely integrated fashion at a low develpment cost.

One answer is integrated innovation through web services! Microsoft Dynamics CRM 3.0 comes with a set of all new standard-based web services and a very rich object model(Check out our SDK docs). As soon as you add a reference to our web services in your development environment you will get access to a rich object model that allows you unlock the power of your CRM data and business logic. You can easily read and update CRM data and invoke business logic and workflow rules using the web service calls directly from your application. On the other side, Microsoft Visual Studio Tools for Office 2005 (VSTO) provides a set of new .NET based APIs that allows access to the Microsoft Office object model and set of newly designed controls (inluding a new Task pane!). Reference both of these object models in the Visual Studio 2005 development environment and you will have all you need to build powerful CRM-Office applications in a single Integrated Development Environment and at much lower cost that you could have ever done. 

Why am I so excited about this? becuase this is a great example to show how the power of web services, richness of Microsoft CRM object model and power of Visual Studio development tools can enable even the most junior developers (myself being one, no doubt) to easily build powerful bridges between these applications to really help customers adopt business solutions to their buisness needs and not the otherway around, at a much lower cost. 

In the next couple of blogs I provide some insights on how you can work with all of these technologies to build powerful applications that allow you to integrate Microsoft Dynamics CRM and Microsoft Office applications to provide seamless user experience across both apps. Watch this space and in the meantime get yours self ramped up on our SDK, VSTO and VS 2005……….