SalesBoost: Microsoft Dynamics CRM and Salesperson Portal: Technical Report

This project is based around the installation, configuration and deployment of a Microsoft Dynamics CRM On Premise Environment, Microsoft’s Customer Relationship Management software that is widely used by business for Sales, Marketing and Service purposes. This project also addresses the issue of portability and usability of Microsoft Dynamics CRM as a sales/opportunity tracking system for Relationship Managers and other Sales based employees, by implementing a ‘Portal Application’. The Microsoft Dynamics CRM web client is resource-heavy and quite cluttered, meaning low-powered devices can lead to slow loading times and crashing due to the JavaScript loads and heavy HTML forms. Microsoft’s options for portability (Dynamics CRM for Mobile/Tablet) are also considerably poor ports of the system to a mobile platform. I plan to address this by creating an external portal, using a hosted ASP.Net application using web forms, hosted in Azure, that will also be ported for mobile devices using Xamarin. For the CRM environment, I will be deploying a Microsoft CRM 2015 On Premise environment. For the purposes of the project, the deployment’s authentication will be done through the user’s Active Directory credentials. In this instance, the user’s credentials/profiles are stored and managed on an external AD server, using CodeTwo as the Active Directory management software. The basis of the portal will be created around the ASP.Net web application, connected to a Microsoft Dynamics CRM 2015 organisation, which will be out of the box configuration. Authentication will be done through Form based authentication. Integration between the two systems will be done through a combination of the Microsoft CRM Developer Extensions, and the Microsoft Dynamics CRM API endpoint