Restore the ‘Missing Link’ to your Dynamics CRM system

So you implemented Microsoft CRM; Good! Then you spent endless hours curating the data; Great! Now you want to share and put the data to use our in the real world.. Hmm, now what?

Published in

POWER-UP Microsoft Dynamics CRM

4 min readOct 9, 2013

The next logical step when the implementation of CRM is in place, is to start utilizing all the data, and the most obvious place to start is your website.

10-second “Executive” overview

Before reading further, let me answer three common questions for articles like this:

Q1 — How much does it cost?

A: Nothing. This solution is free.

Q2 — How much time does it take to implement?

A: 15-30 minutes for a reasonably skilled person

Q3 — What is the catch and limitations?

A: Nothing. Your imagination.

The problem with your CRM data

Have you ever been told: “No system is an Island“?

Let us start with the bad news. Most systems — including your CRM system — IS in fact an island… At least until someone builts a bridge to access it.

Unfortunately, for most non-IT people (which is ‘most people’), this fact comes as quite a big surprise. It also means, that there is no built-in features in your Dynamics CRM system that allows you to easily share and utilize the data within.

The good news

If you are using a Microsoft-based website (ASP.NET), your website already has some quite handy built-in out-of-the-box features, called ‘Providers’. The goal for these providers, is to handle advanced functionality automatically, without you having to do anything:

The Membership Provider
With this provider you can management Memberships on your website. A membership is a known/identified user on the site. The provider can manage all aspects of handling users on your websites: Registration, login, logout, etc.
The Role Provider
As the name indicates, this provider works in conjunction with the membership provider, and provides roles to each of your website users. In other words, you can segment/close your site, so only certain users can access certain areas. For example: You can create a “Customers” or “Partners” area on your website. Only Membership users with the “Partner” role, will then be able to access the “Partners” area — very nice, and keep in mind, you do not have to do anything to enforce these rules. The providers does this for you.
The Profile Provider
This provider, enables ‘Profiling’ to both known and anonymous users on your site. Since a website user is just a name and email, you can use the profile provider to attach other relevant information to the user.

Restoring the missing link to your CRM System

Since the only ‘bridges’ offered are paid packages, or special purpose add-ins, I decided to create a package of free custom providers, so you can link any Microsoft-based website with your CRM system, utilizing the providers mentioned above to your own liking.

Usage scenarios

First of all, you can lock down parts of your website. You can for example create special “Customer” or “Partner” areas. Only people who have a “Web Membership” with the specified roles will be able to access those pages.
You can collect profile information from website users. This is a big subject which deserves an article for itself (coming up asap… promise!)
You can automate the management of web memberships with standard CRM Workflows. For example: Create a Membership with the role “Customer”, when a prospect changes status to customer in the system, etc.
You can create Landing Pages and “Edit profile” pages for marketing campaigns.
You can create ‘self-service’ pages that exposes data from your CRM system, like: Service cases, Orders, Invoices, etc.

The only limit is your imagination really.

Installing and getting started

You can either download and install the ‘Ready-to-go’ package, or download and modify the entire source code to your hearts content.

Everything you need is released as Open Source on CodePlex. The project on CodePlex also contains a sample MVC based website with the providers in place, so you can test it quickly with your own CRM database.