Jukka Niiranen

Tag: crm2011

  • Greetings from Microsoft Convergence 2010 EMEA

    Continuing with the format introduced in 2009, this year’s Microsoft Convergence for the EMEA region was split into three locations: London, Prague and The Hague. Out of all the options, Prague fit our schedules the best, so that became our destination of choice to hear the latest news and buzz around Microsoft Dynamics products.

    With the fairly recent release of Dynamics CRM 2011 public beta, there was certainly a lot for Microsoft to present on the CRM front. Having been working with the product since CTP3 already, I wasn’t expecting too many surprises for myself in the CRM 2011 session contents. It’s still interesting to observe what is being said about the new release and how the customers and partners react to it. There is such a wealth of new, important features included in CRM 2011 (see my walkthrough slides for starters) that you can’t really construct the one right pitch for the product. You could say that there’s something for everyone.

    We saw the first glimpse of CRM 2011 during Kirill’s keynote, when Reuben Krippner showed a bit of Process Dialogs in the Dynamic Business demonstration. From there on, Reuben was a busy man, since he was giving demos in the next four consecutive CRM sessions on the agenda. Great job pulling it off, Reuben! Let’s hope Liverpool picks up their pace in the Premier League, so we can see some more of them in future CRM demos 😉

    Barry Givens held the last CRM session of the day, focusing on data visualization in CRM 2011. Not like we hadn’t seen the charts a few times already during the day, but hey, I always enjoy hearing Barry talk about his favorite topic i.e. analytics in CRM. While the out-of-the-box charts in CRM 2011 certainly do deliver value, you should really look at the broader picture of what the visualization features introduced in the new version truly mean in terms of customization and application design. The charts are actually one alternative method of navigation, due to their tight integration with grids and the drill-down capability. They can be embedded not only on grids but also forms (through sub-grids), bringing visualizations to every part of the CRM UI. Oh, and don’t forget to check out my post about editing the .NET Chart Controls for CRM 2011. Dashboards, on the other hand, are not just an item in the main menu but rather a new form type. By allowing flexible arrangement of embedded components like grids, charts and web resources, the dashboard forms might actually one day become the next generation UI for navigating in Dynamics CRM. You know, something for the future ahead of us when every modern web app must be built in RIA fashion, with Silverlight controls and what have you.

    (more…)

  • Turn the flat Dynamics CRM 2011 charts into 3D

    “We’ve got charts and dashboards!” Yes, ok, so that’s the common initial reaction to one of the most visible new features of Microsoft Dynamics CRM 2011. After playing around with the OOB charts in CRM 2011 Beta and building a few of your own personal charts with the simplified editor that’s available right in the end-user UI, the next reaction is likely to be “I wish I could do more with these charts“.

    The good news is: you absolutely can! The bad news? It requires a bit of XML editing. Now don’t go running away all scared, because it doesn’t take a .NET developer to perform some basic tweaks into the CRM 2011 charts. Heck, even I was able to figure it out after an hour of surfing around the documentation and blog posts on Microsoft Chart Controls for .NET 4.

    In this quick example I will take the a custom chart I built in the solution customization UI for CRM 2011 and inject some more parameters into it to enhance the presentation. The first thing we’ll need to do is select the chart you want to modify in CRM and click Export Chart to grab the XML definition for the chart.

    Open the XML file in the editor of your choice and have a look at the structure. Inside the <presentationdescription> tag you’ll find details about the <Chart> in question. What we’ll want to do in this example is insert more attributes inside the <ChartArea> tags. From MSDN Library we can find the following piece of information:

    The Chart control supports 3D charts. To use 3D charts, set the respective chart area’s Area3DStyle.Enable3D property to True.

    So, we know we’ll want to have the <Area3DStyle> tag in there with some parameters. In my chart we can apply the following addition into the chart definition XML:

    <ChartAreas>
    <ChartArea BorderColor=”White” BorderDashStyle=”Solid”>
    <AxisY IsLabelAutoFit=”False” TitleForeColor=”59, 59, 59″ TitleFont=”{0}, 10.5px” LineColor=”165, 172, 181″ IsReversed=”False”>
    <MajorGrid LineColor=”239, 242, 246″ />
    <LabelStyle Font=”{0}, 10.5px” ForeColor=”59, 59, 59″ />
    </AxisY>
    <AxisX IsLabelAutoFit=”False” TitleForeColor=”59, 59, 59″ TitleFont=”{0}, 10.5px” LineColor=”165, 172, 181″ IsReversed=”False”>
    <MajorGrid Enabled=”False” />
    <MajorTickMark Enabled=”False” />
    <LabelStyle Font=”{0}, 10.5px” ForeColor=”59, 59, 59″ />
    </AxisX>
    <Area3DStyle Enable3D=”True” LightStyle=”Realistic” WallWidth=”5″ IsRightAngleAxes=”true” />
    </ChartArea>

    Once we save the XML file and import it into a new CRM chart, the results will be the following:

    There you go, that’s all there’s to it. Or more specifically, that’s just the beginning of what the visualizations in Dynamics CRM 2011 are capable of. Have a look at the MSDN Library for Visual Studio 2010 on articles about using Chart Controls or browse the Chart Controls for .NET Framework forum for questions and answers on how to work with the charts available in CRM 2011. Downloading the Sample Environment for Microsoft Chart Controls might also be a good place to start.