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CCA/UII Launches… The evolution of Customer Care Framework (CCF)

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Microsoft Customer Care Framework is now User Interface Integration for Microsoft Dynamics CRM, or UII for short. UII is the evolved core engine of CCF, covering the Application Integration Framework, HAT and CTI.  The CCF Configuration management server has been replaced with Dynamics CRM 4.0, which makes installing and configuring the UII environment much simpler :)

UII is supported and tested on Premise based CRM deployments and IFD based deployments, it does not yet support CRM online.

If you have a CRM 4.0 server, you can DL the UII bits from Microsoft.com here

The Customer Care Accelerator for Microsoft Dynamics CRM 4.0 or CCA for short, has also just been released to Codeplex as the newest Dynamics CRM accelerator.  CCA is a reference application built on top of the UII system and is provided as working source code for you to work with or help learn how to use UII.

You can find the bits for CCA on Codeplex here

 

What's new and different?

UII is very similar to the CCF 2009 sp1 QFE release, so much so that if you have developed applications on CCF 2009 sp1 QFE you should be able to update some namespaces, alter a few method and parameter names and recompile for UII.

The major differences in UII are centered around how UII works with CRM,  so make sure you take the time to read though the dev guides and admin guides for UII as the way in which administration is done is very different now,  in a lot of ways much simpler.

Other major areas of note:

  • The concept of AIF Services have been added to support Common AIF level services such as Auditing and SSO
  • All agents must have a valid login to Dynamics CRM 4.0, this can be a limited license if all you need to use is UII bits.
  • A connection to the CRM SDK Service and Metadata Services are provided at the AIF Level
  • Examples are provided in CCA for doing customer look up in CRM from the desktop vs having a separate customer lookup service.
  • Microsoft ESSO no longer ships with UII, however we now provide 2 different examples of SSO providers in the Quick starts;
    • An updated ESSO adapter ( you can get MS-ESSO from BizTalk or SharePoint )
    • A simple SSO adapter that is XML based to allow for development of SSO aware components with out the need for a full SSO system in dev.

Head on over there and give it a spin,