Here’s a fun way to integrate some Social into your salesperson’s life. Say I have a new account assigned to me. What do I do? I research it. To research the business data, I will probably go to some of the business data sites that are out there. To see what’s happening on the Social sphere, it would be nice to see all the combinations of news about this account in one place, in a fun and interactive way. Microsoft Fuse Labs has Project Montage that allows you to just that.
Here’s a quick set of screenshots showing the final results of this blogpost.
1. Open your account form. Say it’s called U2. Click on ‘Research this company’
2. See the social information about U2 with a choice of layouts. Pick a layout (I like newspaper#2).
3. Save your favorite layout.
4. Spend time you want reading the news, twitter feeds about this account and looking at other’s curated news about the topic by searching for it on Montage.
To do this, here’re the components and changes:
– Create two web resources with the montage images – 16 px and 32 px.
All these are, is scaled PNG files of this:
http://montage.cloudapp.net/Content/Images/logtagleft.png.
– jScript web resource that will be used by the ribbon button
Script code
function openMontageCompanyUrl() {
var attributeValue =
Xrm.Page.data.entity.attributes.get(‘name’).getValue();
var url = ‘http://montage.cloudapp.net/edit/?topic=’ +
attributeValue;
window.open(url, ‘_blank’);
}
– Updates to the account form Ribbon (see this article for the step-by-step on adding a ribbon button). For the purpose of a demo, the button is added to the ‘process’ group on the form. But one can add it to any other group or create a new group.
Ribbon XML for this button:
<RibbonDiffXml>
<CustomActions>
<CustomAction Id=”MontageButton.CustomAction”
Location=”Mscrm.Form.account.MainTab.Workflow.Controls._children” Sequence=”30″>
<CommandUIDefinition>
<Button Command=”MontageCommand” Id=”MontageButton”
Image16by16=”$webresource:new_Montage_Image”
Image32by32=”$webresource:new_Montage_Image_32.png”
LabelText=”Research this company” TemplateAlias=”o1″ />
</CommandUIDefinition>
</CustomAction>
</CustomActions>
<Templates>
<RibbonTemplates
Id=”Mscrm.Templates”></RibbonTemplates>
</Templates>
<CommandDefinitions>
<CommandDefinition Id=”MontageCommand”>
<EnableRules>
<EnableRule Id=”Montage.NotNewEnableRule” />
</EnableRules>
<DisplayRules />
<Actions>
<JavaScriptFunction
Library=”$webresource:new_Montage.ResearchCompany”
FunctionName=”openMontageCompanyUrl”></JavaScriptFunction>
</Actions>
</CommandDefinition>
</CommandDefinitions>
<RuleDefinitions>
<TabDisplayRules />
<DisplayRules />
<EnableRules>
<EnableRule Id=”Montage.NotNewEnableRule”>
<FormStateRule State=”Create” InvertResult=”true”/>
</EnableRule>
</EnableRules>
</RuleDefinitions>
<LocLabels />
</RibbonDiffXml>
In Summary – I added a button that reads some data from the form, and launches the Montage to explore.