What is Microsoft Dynamics CRM?
Customer relationship management is a critical part of virtually every business. Dynamics CRM 2011 offers a solution for the three traditional areas of CRM: sales, marketing, and customer service.
For customers interested in managing a sales team, Dynamics CRM 2011 has a strong set of features. This includes organizing teams into territories, defining price lists, managing opportunities, maintaining organization structures, tracking sales pipelines, enabling mobile access, and much more.
If you are using Dynamics CRM 2011 for marketing efforts, then you have the ability to import data from multiple sources, plan campaigns and set up target lists, create mass communications, track responses to campaigns, share leads with the sales team, and analyze the success of a marketing program.
Dynamics CRM 2011 also serves as a powerful hub for customer service scenarios. Features include rich account management, case routing and management, a built-in knowledge base, scheduling of call center resources, scripted Q&A workflows called Dialogs, contract management, and more.
Besides these three areas, Microsoft pitches Dynamics CRM as a general purpose application platform called xRM, where the “X” stands for any sort of relationship management. Dynamics CRM has a robust underlying framework for screen design, security roles, data auditing, entity definition, workflow, and mobility, among others. Instead of building these foundational aspects into every application, we can build our data-driven applications within Dynamics CRM.
Microsoft has made a big move into the cloud with this release of Dynamics CRM 2011. For the first time in company history, a product was released online (Dynamics CRM Online) prior to on-premises software. The hosted version of the application runs an identical codebase to the on-premises version meaning that code built to support a local instance will work just fine in the cloud. In addition to the big play in CRM hosting, Microsoft has also baked Windows Azure integration into Dynamics CRM 2011. Specifically, we now have the ability to configure a call-out to an Azure AppFabric Service Bus endpoint. To do this, the downstream service must implement a specific WCF interface and within CRM, the Azure AppFabric plugin is configured to call that downstream service through the Azure AppFabric Service Bus relay service. For BizTalk Server to accommodate this pattern, we would want to build a proxy service that implements the required Dynamics CRM 2011 interface and forwards requests into a BizTalk Server endpoint. This article will not demonstrate this scenario, however, as the focus will be on integrating with an onpremises instance only.
Why Integrate Dynamics CRM and BizTalk Server?
There are numerous reasons to tie these two technologies together. Recall that BizTalk Server is an enterprise integration bus that connects disparate applications. There can be a natural inclination to hoard data within a particular application, but if we embrace real-time message exchange, we can actually have a more agile enterprise.
Consider a scenario when a customer’s full “contact history” resides in multiple systems. The Dynamics CRM 2011 contact center may only serve a specific audience, and other systems within the company hold additional details about the company’s customers. One design choice could be to bulk load that information into Dynamics CRM 2011 on a scheduled interval. However, it may be more effective to call out to a BizTalk Server service that aggregates data across systems and returns a composite view of a customer’s history with a company.
In a similar manner, think about how information is shared between systems. A public website for a company may include a registration page where visitors sign up for more information and deeper access to content. That registration event is relevant to multiple systems within the company. We could send that initial registration message to BizTalk Server and then broadcast that message to the multiple systems that want to know about that customer. A marketing application may want to respond with a personalized email welcoming that person to the website. The sales team may decide to follow up with that person if they expressed interest in purchasing products. Our Dynamics CRM 2011 customer service center could choose to automatically add the registration event so that it is ready whenever that customer calls in. In this case, BizTalk Server acts as a central router of data and invokes the exposed Dynamics CRM services to create customers and transactions.
Communicating from BizTalk Server to Dynamics CRM
The way that you send requests from BizTalk Server to Dynamics CRM 2011 has changed significantly in this release. In the previous versions of Dynamics CRM, a BizTalk “send” adapter was available for communicating with the platform. Dynamics CRM 2011 no longer ships with an adapter and developers are encouraged to use the WCF endpoints exposed by the product.
Dynamics CRM has both a WCF REST and SOAP endpoint. The REST endpoint can only be used within the CRM application itself. For instance, you can build what is called a web resource that is embedded in a Dynamics CRM page. This resource could be a Microsoft Silverlight or HTML page that looks up data from three different Dynamics CRM entities and aggregates them on the page. This web resource can communicate with the Dynamics CRM REST API, which is friendly to JavaScript clients. Unfortunately, you cannot use the REST endpoint from outside of the Dynamics CRM environment, but because BizTalk cannot communicate with REST services, this has little impact on the BizTalk integration story.
The Dynamics CRM SOAP API, unlike its ASMX web service predecessor, is static and operates with a generic Entity data structure. Instead of having a dynamic WSDL that exposes typed definitions for all of the standard and custom entities in the system, the Dynamics CRM 2011 SOAP API has a set of operations (for example, Create, Retrieve) that function with a single object type. The Entity object has a property identifying which concrete object it represents (for example, Account or Contract), and a name/value pair collection that represents the columns and values in the object it represents. For instance, an Entity may have a LogicalName set to “Account” and columns for “telephone1”, “emailaddress”, and “websiteurl.”
In essence, this means that we have two choices when interacting with Dynamics CRM 2011 from BizTalk Server. Our first option is to directly consume and invoke the untyped SOAP API. Doing this involves creating maps from a canonical schema to the type-less Entity schema. In the case of doing a Retrieve operation, we may also have to map the type-less Entity message back to a structured message for more processing. Below, we will walk through an example of this.
The second option involves creating a typed proxy service for BizTalk Server to invoke. Dynamics CRM has a feature-rich Solution Development Kit (SDK) that allows us to create typed objects and send them to the Dynamics CRM SOAP endpoint. This proxy service will then expose a typed interface to BizTalk that operates as desired with a strongly typed schema. An upcoming exercise demonstrates this scenario.
Which choice is best? For simple solutions, it may be fine to interact directly with the Dynamics CRM 2011 SOAP API. If you are updating a couple fields on an entity, or retrieving a pair of data values, the messiness of the untyped schema is worth the straightforward solution. However, if you are making large scale changes to entities, or getting back an entire entity and publishing to the BizTalk bus for more subscribers to receive, then working strictly with a typed proxy service is the best route. However, we will look at both scenarios below, and you can make that choice for yourself.
Integrating Directly with the Dynamics CRM 2011 SOAP API
In the following series of steps, we will look at how to consume the native Dynamics CRM SOAP interface in BizTalk Server. We will first look at how to query Dynamics CRM to return an Entity. After that, we will see the steps for creating a new Entity in Dynamics CRM.
Querying Dynamics CRM from BizTalk Server
In this scenario, BizTalk Server will request details about a specific Dynamics CRM “contact” record and send the result of that inquiry to another system.
