Business Need
Microsoft Dynamics CRM is a Customer Relationship Management software package developed by Microsoft. The product focuses mainly on sales, marketing, and service (help desk) sectors, but Microsoft has been marketing Dynamics CRM as an XRM platform and has been encouraging partners to use its proprietary (.NET based) framework to customize it to meet many different demands. However, Microsoft Dynamics CRM doesn’t provide a unified search experience across all types of records. As a result, searching the CRM is difficult and time consuming. Based on client needs, Akvelon has developed Akvelon Global Search for Dynamics CRM 4.0.
Solution
Global Search CRM add-on encompasses all CRM entities and records. Search results are brought to the user in a single view allowing to click through to each found record as well as doing sub-search on each record type.
Akvelon Global Search offers the ability to:
- Search all records in all CRM entities at once from inside CRM workspace
- Search all records from CRM plug-in inside Microsoft Outlook
- View search results grouped by entity type in single results view
- Configure entities to search, attributes to search by and information to display
- Search CRM attachment contents
- CRM Custom entity search
- Perform sub-searches directly on the CRM result page
- SharePoint search option for Dynamics CRM – a custom module, which allows users to search across all SharePoint entities without leaving Dynamics CRM, open SharePoint entities directly from CRM.
- Complete integration with CRM 4.0 and CRM Outlook tool bar
- Web-like search and navigation over content
- Flexible configuration for all types of entities
- Searchable and presentable properties of all types of entities
- Selected attributes
- Result presentation
Benefits and Results
Akvelon Global Search is very popular among CRM users and Akvelon continues to work on new improvements based on customer feedback. Akvelon released Global Search version especially for Dynamics CRM Online which is hosted in a cloud. One of the latest improvements is a relevance search option which allows to sort the search data by relevance.
Akvelon Global Search is now available for all Dynamics CRM and SharePoint versions (On-premise and Online).
Technology Used
Used Languages: C#, ASP.NET 2.0, ASP.NET 4.0, JavaScript
Development Environments: MS Visual Studio, Windows Server, Microsoft SQL Server, Microsoft Dynamics CRM, SharePoint.
