CRM 2011 and SharePoint 2010 Integration - Part 4 (Enhancements)

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Welcome Sharepoint Folks,

Now that previously here we saw that SharePoint can search CRM entities, I want to add a little enhancement to it. Here is the concept, Your end user does a Entity search in SharePoint and sees several record from CRM system, now that user wants to jump to the CRM entity and work on it. So we are saving few hundreds of clicks for the user ( actually just a few, but “hundreds” sounds cool than “tens” :) ).

We achieve this by doing two steps

1. Creating a Custom Actions in BCS ECT and set that action as default.

here is the sequence of events for end user

1. End user does a search and sharepoint returns a CRM result

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2. End user clicks on the interesting result, and now wishes to open that crm entity directly, So he clicks on Open in CRM link

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And the entity opens in CRM Form

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So here is what we are going to do to achieve this.

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Open the CRM ECT in Central admin

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Click on Add button

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Fill the info according to the below image

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Now here the tricky part is to get the URL correct

Below is how to get that URL

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We need to construct a URL that accepts a parameter and somehow opens the specific account CRM dialog in a new window.

according to documentation at MSDN - https://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/gg328483.aspx

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So general form of the URL is

https:// <CRMURL> /main.aspx?etn=account&pagetype=entityrecord&id=%7B <ACCOUNTID OF THE ACCOUNT> %7D

Here CRM URL is simple to get

ACCOUNT ID is dynamic (depending on the result), BCS will give us the accountid all we need is, enclose that in {0} and select what parameter  BCS should replace it with and our CRM link is ready.

here is the finished url i used in the box

https://crm/fabrikam/main.aspx?etn=account&pagetype=entityrecord&id=%7B {0} %7D

And thats how you get the URL

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Ok Once you got the URL, select from the Parameter Property accountid, mark it as Default action, Click OK.

(You may be required to update the profile page).

See you soon !