Live from PDC: Extending and Customizing Microsoft CRM Solutions

Microsoft CRM Program Manager Arash Ghanaie-Sichanie

Microsoft CRM Program Manager Arash Ghanaie-Sichanie presented the "Extending and Customizing Microsoft CRM Solutions" PDC session today. Just the like the Microsoft Partner Conference in July, the room was packed (but not quite standing room only!). Arash explained in detail how to create a proposal in Microsoft Word that pulls data from and publishes data to Microsoft CRM. He created this by using the Visual Studio Tools for Office to create a custom task pane in Microsoft Word that connects to Microsoft CRM 3.0 web services. Arash said the code he demoed today will eventually be published on MSDN after CRM 3.0 releases.

Most people familiar with Microsoft CRM know that the quote output in version 1.2 was a little lacking, so being able to implement this type of Word-CRM integration will be very beneficial to many different customers.

During the Q&A session, one of the audience members asked a good question about working with Outlook offline. He wanted to know if the pre and post-callout functionality of CRM 3.0 works when a user is offline. Arash answered the question by pointing out the following:

• CRM 3.0 has additional hooks exposed to indicate when a user if offline, and you could create additional code to handle this situtation

• When an offline user goes back online, all of their offline changes will then run through the appropriate callouts loaded on the server.

PDC posts the PowerPoints from each session for attendees to download, but they haven't posted Arash's file yet. Once they release it, we'll publish it for you to download too.