MS Prodcut Triangle: CRM - NAV - WSS3 (MOSS07)

FOAvbOKI

Hi Everybody,
i'm currently checking our options regarding the variety of products Microsoft offers <> licenses we have. I Have: WSS3(running)MOSS007 license, SQL2005, Navision4 native, CRM3 license. Now my question: we dont have a navision crm granule, can i somehow use the crm3 solution preferrable together with eiterh wss3 or moss07(higher priority) to access navision customer / vendor data and make full use of the crm3 functionality?
any help / pointer suggestions appreciated in advantege!thx tom

p.willemse6

Yes, you can. You can use the NAV connector from Celenia Software to integrate NAV and CRM, and from there add MS CRM to Moss 2007. As CRM is webbased, this is a nice option. You should set up the system (we did also) to generate a webpage per company (contact), and add the MS CRM contact card as a webpart...

Only thing to take a look at is how to show documents...

Marije_Brummel

Has anyone succesfully implemented the CRM connector from Celinia?

I know that Tecrura dropped support and I am just curious about what happened after that...

p.willemse6

nope. At this moment we are only implementing CRM in PSA organizations, where only integration of NAW is required for contacts... very simple SQL integration was enough, and much cheaper...

FOAvbOKI

Hi, thax for ur firection.

now the next q: wont it work without a 3rd party connector? i think thats kinda stupid...
does anyone know how to setup links / connections , as welll via odbc in CRM?
that would be great!

thx tom

p.willemse6

That's what we did: don't ask me the details, but we integrated CRM and NAV directly in SQL.

FOAvbOKI

can u be a little bit more specifi about the implementation? i assume u are running nav on the sq-server instead native?
im not familiar with the crm suite, therefore i need a little bit more inout as normal ;-)
so, do u have to make a mnual mapping instead or how does the sokution look like?

thx in advance tom

p.willemse6

Tom, I basically can't tell you as I am not a technician. It is from NAV SQL to CRM SQL, that's all I know. Sorry.

DenSter

When I worked on a connector from NAV to CRM, it worked with something called 'post-callouts', which are basically events when records are created/modified it sends out a copy of the record into this post callout. You can then develop a component (in those days it was a COM+ component, and now it's probably implemented as a web service or something) that catches those post callouts.

We developed a component that caught the post callouts, and forwarded the XML to a MSMQ. We then had a NAS monitoring the MSMQ, just like Commerce Gateway, to import the data into NAV. It worked similar when sending data from NAV to CRM.

The Celenia connector I heard is quite good, you should give it a try and have them show it to you before you try to develop this yourself.

Ian_Piddington10199

I have the Celenia connector running for a demo I am doing. We have had a few issues with it. There are a few processes that aren't clearly documented but generally it’s working ok. There’s a few things in it I know I am going to have to work around, but as it’s only a demo right now I haven't gotten a dev license to the NAV side so I can't go looking at how easy it will be to add the extra stuff I want.

Apparently there’s a new version due out soon that have easier to use customisation and workflow tools in it.

I have also done the integration directly through SQL in the past.

As Daniel said it’s all about figuring out which call-out to put some code in so that it triggers correctly. There are a number of 'gotchas' in it. Most notably that if you do an update to a CRM record the easy way to grab the record only actually returns the changed fields, so if you have an attribute that is used to ID the related record in NAV you will have to make you code go and get that before passing it over.

Ian