Review of the List Web Part for Microsoft Dynamics CRM 4.0
Javista recently announced the release of the Sharepoint 2007 List Web Part for Microsoft Dynamics CRM 4.0. By coincidence one of Puzzlepart services customers needed some connections between MOSS and CRM 4.0 so I decided to take the new webpart for a test run. Read on for screenshots and a feature run-down.
For those of you who tried the last webpart for CRM 3.0, this is not really a big step forward. First of all it's kind of hard to get the impression of what's in the package without actually downloading and installing. The documentation in the installer package is a good read, and you should actually read the whole thing. If you don't want to pull down the msi in order to read this you can grab it here.
The functionality of the webpart is much like last time. You'll get a good impression of what can be done by checking out the configuration options in the toolpart:
After providing proper credentials you're allowed to select entity and view for display in the webpart. You can show all columns or just a single one. The "Look and Feel" option is not too exciting. The "Current Page" option (screenshot) removes the possibility to arrange columns (width etc) and it doesn't look all that much like current page, so it's just a lesser option than the "Microsoft Dynamics 4.0" (screenshot) Look and Feel.
The security is really easy if you are running CRM and Sharepoint on the same box, but since no one really does that in production you need to have your kerberos settings in shape. The documentation talks about this, but it's a bit weak. Check out Spence Harbars kerberos util and his upcoming whitepaper for details on this topic if you're not familiar with Kerberos. Spences util doesn't address CRM specifically at the moment but you can regard the relation from Sharepoint to CRM much in the same way as the Sharepoint to SQL Server relationship. Kerberos is really something you want to get right from the getgo.
UPDATE: The Microsoft CRM Team Blog just posted a more detailed article on Trust for delegation and kerberos with the webpart.
So what is the usefulness of this webpart?
The value here lies in the possibility to display a predefined set of information from CRM and allow users to access CRM directly through the new button or doubleclicking on the rows to open crm in a new window. This really doesn't differ much from a rather plain IFrame integration, and you can ask why you have to deploy a 1,3mb component to do something like that. The real upside here comes with webpart connections.
The webpart provides the data from its views through the IWebPartRow and IWebPartTable interfaces which can open up for some cool dashboards with filtered data from Sharepoint lists or your SQL Server Business intelligence stuff. The webpart will provide the data you see in the view through webpart connections.
In the past I implemented a webpart with much of this featureset where the toolpart acted in the same way. The feature I added back then allowed for presetting props to select a single entity, i.e. an account with the account name "Joes Burgers". This allowed for configuring a webpart to show "Contacts for account with [name] like [Joes Burgers]". This opens for a lot more usage scenarios and I'd hoped that MSFT had included such functionality in this release.
UPDATE2: The Microsoft CRM Team blog just published a guide on using this one webpart to build dashboards. Now all they need to do is add a feature to remove everything but the actual grids, and provide a detail item-level view.
If anyone sees other smart usage areas for this webpart feel free to post them here!