Maplytics in times of UR12

Native Bing Maps Integration coming in with UR12

UR12 is scheduled for a phased roll out starting next week. With one of the offerings being Bing Maps Integration. This integration is made available as a setting that when activated by the users would show a link to open Bing Maps and automatically plot the address entered on the specified record.

What is Maplytics and why should you want to use it?

Maplytics continues to work towards being a “more than simple” address plotting on the map.  It is a geographical analytics tool. Some of the features supported include

·     Support for all entities that have address fields. You would be able to see any address included on any entity on the Map

·     Map is essentially dependent on Geo-coding data. Maplytics comes bundled with Bing Maps subscription that allows for use of Bing Maps Spatial service that will let you batch Geo-code bulk data. This does away with the need to worry about getting the data Geo-coded.

·      Save geographical search as static Personal Views in CRM

·      Ability to print the route and routing directions using multiple way-points.

·      Maplytics builds upon the inherent Dashboard feature of Dynamics CRM to provide Maplytics Dashboards to provide analytics based on CRM data including Sales

·     Color-coding CRM data plotted on the Map for better analysis and geographic representation of the data

·     Usual mapping solution would include Road View or Aerial View. You can now get a Street View of the address using Maplytics

Who is Maplytics for

Maplytics is still a must-have for business driven by geography and geographic data.

For more information check out the product details here. 

Maplytics now available for CRM 2011

We are happy to announce the availability for Maplytics for CRM 2011. The new version now supports all 3 CRM deployment models On-Premise, Online as well as IFD.

Maplytics is geo-analysis tool that allows you to view your CRM data on a map as well as allow your Sales Rep on the field to plan their schedule with the aid of Maplytics.


This new release supports Street View. Street View allows you to get a road side view of the address


You can also select multiple addresses and have the tool plot the route through the addresses selected.


Ability to Print the map as well as the route directions so that it can be circulated within the team.


It can now be added as a Dashboard component in your Dashboard.

Click here for more details.

Maps Integration for Dynamics CRM 4

There has often been a need especially when you have Sales rep requiring to visit the clients on-site to be able to get the directions to the customer location. Google Maps, Live Maps, Mappoint are some of the services that you can use to incorporate this feature in CRM. While Mappoint is a paid service, the other two are free services and can be used to plot the customer address on the map.

One of the important pre-requisites while plotting a customer address would be to geo-code (get the latitude and longitude) the addresses. It is using these geo-coding that the addresses are plotted on Map. Since a customer’s address would not change often, it is a good idea to write a workflow that will geo-code the customer addresses each time a new customer is created or its address updated.

The following webservice from Google can be used for geo-coding addresses.
http://maps.google.com/maps/geo?q=address&Key=abcd&output=xml&sensor=false

Once the addresses are geo-coded, we can add a tab on CRM account/contact form and display the customer address in a map. The map will place a pushpin at the customer location.

This can further be extended to get the Route and Directions to the customer location from a base location.

Using Live Maps it can be done using the following code

locations = new Array(‘addr1’,’addr2’);

//Make an object of RouteOptions
var options = new VERouteOptions;

// Draw the route
options.DrawRoute = true;

// So the map doesn't change:
options.SetBestMapView = true;

// Call this function when map route is determined:
//options.RouteCallback = ShowTurns;

// Show as miles
options.DistanceUnit = VERouteDistanceUnit.Mile;

// Show the disambiguation dialog
options.ShowDisambiguation = true;

//Show the directions on the map
map.GetDirections(locations, options);";

This will show a map with the route marked starting from the start point to the end location.

Another use of integrating maps would be to search of location within a given distance range. So you are visiting a customer in “Redmond” and would want to find out the other customers that are in and around this location so that you could schedule an appointment with them. Or it could be used for schedule service requests for a sales rep. If a salesrep was already scheduled for a call in Redmond area and there was another ticket raised for that area it could be handed to the same sales rep for servicing.

This could be done by finding the distance between the base location and other customer addresses and plotting the customers that fall within the requested distance on the map. One pushpin will be placed on the map for each customer address that is being shown in the map.



There is so much you can do with Maps :) And it is pretty easy to as its shown above and requires a bit SDK skills and programming knowledge. The web is full of details as to how to use various maps functionality to achieve the same. We at Inogic were debating whether to come up with an add-on for Live Maps integration at all or just leave it for you people to figure out on your after giving you the above methodology.