Intuit QuickBooks integration link with Dynamics CRM 4.0 released

QuickBooks is one of the most popular accounting packages for the SME segment. There has always been a need to integrate CRM with accounting system to avoid duplicity as well as to improve productivity and efficiency by providing the sales people using CRM a view of the financial details of the customer so as to enable them to handle the sales/marketing process better.

To satisfy these needs, Inogic lab have come up with a link which has been deployed at a number of customer sites and we have now packaged it and would like to announce the release of version 3.0 of the integration having the following features:

Customer Synchronization: Accounts of Dynamics CRM and Customers of QuickBooks are completely synchronized. You can save an Account in Dynamics CRM and promote it to QuickBooks. Vice versa, you can synchronize customers from QuickBooks applications to view and edit it in Dynamics CRM. Any edit and update on the Dynamics CRM side reflects in QuickBooks in the real time.

Invoices and Orders Viewing in Dynamics CRM: Complete view of a particular customers Invoice and Orders history from QuickBooks in Dynamics CRM within the Account form.

Promote Orders from Dynamics CRM: This feature is extremely useful for Sales people to make Orders against opportunities in CRM and then promote it to Quick Books for further processing.

Quick Customer Account Information: Various financial important data like Credit Limit, Aging, and Terms etc from the Quick Books is available against the Dynamics CRM customer for viewing by Sales People.

Versions supported:
QuickBooks: Enterprise 8.0 US/UK Edition

Microsoft Dynamics CRM: 4.0 On-premise (IFD not supported), Partner Hosted and CRM Live.

The challenge for integration between QB and Dynamics was the inherent difference in the SDK and databases and having a detailed knowledge of the accounting system as well as CRM system. It is not easy to code and develop an integration which takes care of deduplication, checks out the security rights and also takes into account that accounting compliance are maintained. You also need to have a knowledge of QB SDK as well as be confident about the financial aspects of the system as Order Entry process needs to be duplicated in the integration. If you require more information with regards to QB and would like to pick our brains in terms of integration with any other accounting package which you are attempting, please be free to email us and we will be more than willing to discuss our experience with the same.

Integrating DOTNETNUKE with Self Service Portal for Dynamics CRM

DotNetNuke:

This is a widely used Open source framework available to develop websites without requiring much technical knowledge. Its framework provides for developing custom modules that can integrate seamlessly with the main DNN website. DNN also takes care of security by providing website owners to provide access to different sets of users to different functionalities on the portal.

Self Service Portal:

Any self service portal (in our case Inogic has a product for Self Service portal/Customer Portal) to allow CRM users to allow their customers to register tickets through the Portal and monitor its progress online. These customers use the portal to register incidents that are directly created in CRM and any updates by the company on their case is reflected to them through the portal.


Linking the two:

We need to create a DNN module for our Self Service Portal that can be installed within DNN. DNN uses the concept of User Controls. We needed to convert each of the web forms that we had to user controls.

Once they were converted to User controls you can add these Controls to DNN and associate it with your module. Once the controls have been uploaded, user can use these controls to add on their pages as and where they wish. can include these in your DNN module. These controls can then be used by end users to add on the pages they wish.

The Self Service Portal had its inbuilt security that was integrated with CRM by adding custom attributes to store the login id and password of the customers. This was taken care of in DNN module by using the DNN security. So only users that are registered on the DNN site had access to the Portal. We could well do away with this security check from CRM as DNN already has a robust security architecture.

Advantages of linking:

A customer centric website can be designed using DNN by the users easily while also utilizing the entire features of CRM's customer service portal.

Automatically resize the IFRAME to adjust to the Form size

If you need to show an external page within CRM, you need to provide the URL to the IFRAME in CRM. You will notice that it would not display scrollbars to scroll through the entire web page being displayed in the IFRAME. So it is advised that we create a custom page and add an IFRAME within a "DIV" tag. This helps in bringing up the Scroll bars to allow users to navigate through the entire page.

But there is still a glitch. If you happen to resize the form on which the IFRAME has been added, you will find that the IFRAME does not automatically resize itself according to the form.

Here is the script that we used to achieve this.

Here we try to resize the two IFRAMES ('IFRAME_ActivityShow' and 'IFRAME_ReportShow') that were added on the CRM form.

Add the below function in the custom page on which the IFRAME has been originally placed


function calcHeightWidth()

{

var main_height = null;

var main_width = null;

var height = null;

var width = null;



// for all except Explorer

if (self.innerHeight) {

main_height = self.innerHeight;

main_width = self.innerWidth;

// Explorer 6 Strict Mode

} else if (document.documentElement

&& document.documentElement.clientHeight) {

main_width = document.documentElement.clientWidth;

main_height = document.documentElement.clientHeight;

// other Explorers

} else if (document.body) {

main_height = document.body.clientHeight;

main_width = document.body.clientWidth;

}



height = main_height * (3/4) + 'px';

width = main_width * (1/2) + 'px';



//change the height of the iframe

document.getElementById('IFRAME_ActivityShow').style.height=height;

document.getElementById('IFRAME_ActivityShow').style.width=width;

document.getElementById('IFRAME_ReportShow').style.height=height;

document.getElementById('IFRAME_ReportShow').style.width=width;

}


We need to attach this function to the IFRAME in the page load event of the custom page.

if (!Page.IsPostBack)
{
IFRAME_ActivityShow.Attributes.Add("onload","javascript:calcHeightWidth()");

}

Hope this helps others too!

Microsoft Office Accounting Integration Link with Microsoft Dynamics CRM released which supports Dynamics CRM version 4.0 On-Premise/CRM Live

Microsoft Office Accounting is one of the most popular accounting packages from Microsoft for small and medium industry. Dynamics CRM is one of the most popular CRM systems being deployed by Microsoft consultants. Linking the two applications has been a crying need for resellers, prospects and end users of Dynamics CRM system.

To bridge the gap for the users, we have come up with a link which has the following features:

Customer Synchronization: Accounts of Dynamics CRM and Customers of Office Accounting are completely synchronized. You can save an Account in Dynamics CRM and promote it to Office Accounting. Vice versa, you can synchronize customers from Office Accounting applications to view and edit it in Dynamics CRM. Any edit and update on the Dynamics CRM side reflects in Office Accounting in the real time.

Invoices and Orders Viewing in Dynamics CRM: Complete view of a particular customers Invoice and Orders history in Dynamics CRM within its tabs.

Promote Orders from Dynamics CRM: This feature is extremely useful for Sales people to make Orders against opportunities in CRM and then promote it to Office Accounting for further processing.

Quick Customer Account Information: Various financial important data like Credit Limit, Aging, and Terms etc from the Office Accounting is available against the Dynamics CRM customer for viewing of Sales People.

Versions supported:
Microsoft Office Accounting: US Edition – 2008/2009/2010/2011, UK Edition - 2008/2009/2010
Microsoft Dynamics CRM: 4.0 On-premise and CRM Live.

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