Some cool customizations and configs we are doing for clients. Some nice Productivity enhancements to the CRM UI and then a nice information consolidation.

These customizations below are helping clients to better use and leverage the power of the APIs of MS CRM with all the controls and then the intuitive Interface.

First of all (red arrow), we added Previous/Next buttons to the form. This is just a matter of modifying the isv.config file, restarting iis, adding the image files, and changing the web.config file to allow isv customizations to “All” client versions rather than “None”, which is default. These buttons will allow you to scroll through Accounts one at a time without opening/closing any forms. For example, if you pull up a list of Accounts, and you want to scroll through the list, open the first Account record and click the “Next” button, CRM will open the next Account record in the list and so forth. This works very well and is just a matter of adding javascript to the isv.config file. I particularly like this previous/next buttons because this comes up a lot when you are working in CRM all the time. They work out great just like on the records in the Outlook interface. These buttons are invaluable to a sales person.

Second (blue arrow), This is a custom SRS Report that is shown in an IFrame. This report is a summary of data that needs to be displayed for a particular Account record. The IFrame in CRM allows you to pass the GUID of the particular Account into the Report as a parameter and will generate the report with Account-specific information every time you open an Account. This is useful to clients with many integrations or sources of data to be brought together and analyzed in the context of one client or entity. This is going to be a summary for them, but the nice part is that we can pass parameters into reports and then show them on the form, as well as have them update every time the form is opened. Our next step is to use the CRM Style Guide and make this look seamless in CRM (change the background color and fonts, etc.)

Third (green arrow), we have all seen this before. Just another example of us using this method at a client site. Things to watch out for are making sure these are hidden on formtype create since there is no GUID yet, it will throw an error, so you need to only run the code if the form is NOT create or quick create.