Add Rich Visual Experience to Dynamics CRM Mobile Clients

If you are like me you love the userfriendliness and performance of our mobile apps for tablet and phones.

Now this experience has become even better.

With Dynamics CRM 2016 comes a bunch of new visual controls you can use in CRM for phones and tablets to help mobile users enter CRM data faster, and to provide a richer visual experience.

This set of custom controls includes sliders, switches, star ratings, video embedding, and a calendar control that you can use to give users a view of their activities in a calendar format instead of a list.

To start using the new controls you work with the form designer to bind a control to a field

In this example I'll show how you can bind one of the new controls (an Arc Knob control) to the Probability field on the Opportunity form

Click Settings -> Customizations -> Customize the System


   Figure 1

Under the Entities section expand the Opportunity tree -> click Forms (1) -> click Opportunity (2) to open the Form Designer


   Figure 2

Click the Probability field to open the "Field Properties" dialog


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Click the Controls tab


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In the Controls tab click Add Controls (1) to see a list of the (new) controls you can bind to the selected field


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Notice there are several new controls. You can see al full list of controls here and/or you can click the entries in the dialog to learn more


   Figure 6

The "Arc Knob" is a half circle.


    Figure 7

The "Linear Gauge" is a slider like control


    Figure 8

Back in the "Controls" tab you see that I added an "Arc Knob" control already (1) and made it available to the Phone and Tablet app (2). In the lower part of the dialog you see that I defined the Min, Max and Increments for the control (to 0, 100, and 5 respectively)


    Figure 9


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Testing the new forms

To test the new (updated) form you open the Phone app and navigate to an Opportunity

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On the form you'll see the new Arc Knob control (1) and you can easily in a touch friendly manner update the value for Probabilty

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If you open the tablet app you'll enjoy the same experience


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I hope you will agree with me that the mobile experience on Dynamics CRM just got even better.

See also

  • CRM for Phones and Tablets User's Guide - link
  • Experience the new visual controls in CRM for phones and tablets - link