My company uses MS dynamics CRM 4.0 and I can only access the client side of it (using the URL in IE to open the CRM system).
I can see that the system could do with some enhancements and plug-ins.I want to work on them because when I suggested these enhancements I was told that the system will be upgraded, after maybe 2 years. So no one is working on making it better even though the extension could really help the users.
Details: Currently, users enter details for each sale into the system. This takes a lot of time because the server and centralised database is in another continent. What I want to do is to have the users enter their data into an excel sheet and a system scheduler will upload the data overnight.
My question is can I develop, plug-ins or extensions etc, on the CRM with VS Express Edition? I have no access to the CRM Server or database since I'm using only the browser to use the system to enter data, just the client side CRM window.
Edit This is not lack of research. I have not found an answer to this anywhere. I appreciate your expertise and experience.
If you are talking about .NET, server-side plugins, you'll need the following things as described on the "Creating a Simple Plug-in" page of the 4.0 SDK:
To complete this walkthrough, you will need the following:
- Visual Studio 2005 or Visual Studio 2008.
- A pre-built version of the Plug-in Registration tool.
- A Microsoft Dynamics CRM SDK installation.
- Network access to a Microsoft Dynamics CRM 4.0 server.
- A Microsoft Dynamics CRM system account with either the System Administrator or System Customizer security role, which is also a member of the Deployment Administrators group in Deployment Manager.
The line about network access to the server I'm not so sure about. If you register the plugin to the database as you typically would, I don't think you'd need network access; if you deploy to disk, that's when I think you need it.
If by "extensions" you mean things like adding scripts to forms, the only thing you'd need is the System Customizer or System Administrator roles.
Update based on your addition to question: If you want to schedule a daily import, you should be able to do that with the limited, web-only access you have (assuming you have enough privileges to kick off imports [which, if you can do it through the UI, you can do it programmatically]). Your program could run and kick off import jobs (see "Configuring Data Import" page of SDK). I know for sure you could kick off imports of csv's, not sure about programmatically importing excel files, but you could programmatically transform the excel files to csv and then kick off the jobs.