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I think we will have to eventually develop a portal that will expose some of our CRM 2011 data to external users (ie: Case related to them and follow up on activities our staff did on them) and also some Dynamics AX 2009 data (perhaps their invoices and such) and maybe other platforms as well.

The most important requirement of the portal will be, as far as I know at the moment:

  • The looks of the portal need to be configurable for each users (such as foreground/background color, perhaps their company logo, the views showing the data either the one from CRM or AX)

I am not exactly sure which technologies to use. I know it'll be C#/.NET but are there any tools available to would simplify the development of such a portal ?

For the CRM data, I was thinking of using a View that we could configure on our side (within CRM) should the user want to see an extra column eventually.

For the AX data, perhaps a webservice will need to be developed.

Is there any specific benefits to use MVC, Razor, etc. We also have Sharepoint 2010 to our disposal, I don't know enough about it to know if it's a candidate for such a purpose. I have to admit SP is not my cup of tea in terms of what I am most at ease with.

Any other ideas ? I know this is an open ended question, but if you need more information to help advise me, post away.

Francis Ducharme
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I recommend taking a look at ADX Studio (http://www.adxstudio.com/). It is portal technology specifically built for integration with Dynamics CRM. I don't know if they have AX integration, but it is all built on .NET so at least you'd have a headstart on the CRM side.

If you want to roll your own, your idea about using views is a good one and one that I have used in the past. In fact we have even written code that renders a CRM form as a public web form so it is very easy for us to change. You'll get very comfortable with the Metadata service if you take this approach.

Hope that helps!

Josh Painter
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