Getting Started With CCA For CRM 2011

Rolling In The Deep…

You may have heard that we recently released the latest version of the Customer Care Accelerator for Microsoft Dynamics CRM 2011 (CCA R2) on the Microsoft Dynamics Marketplace. CCA delivers contact centre functionality by combining, displaying, and manipulating data from disparate line of business applications in a single user interface. CCA provides a number of capabilities, including:

• Integrated agent desktop
• Scripting to eliminate duplicate data entry
• Computer Telephony Integration (CTI)
• Agent activity reporting

At it’s core CCA is a framework that allow developers to build their own agent desktop, and provides features such as multi-session management, UI integration with different kinds of applications (including Web, Windows Forms, Java and Terminal Services apps), task automation and so on. This development framework is known as the User Interface Integration (UII) for Microsoft Dynamics CRM 2011.

In addition to UII, we also ship a sample agent desktop application with some ready-to-use CRM 2011 integration components, to show what can be achieved with the development framework.

Installing UII on an agent’s PC is very straightforward, and we provide a simple installer (32-bit or 64-bit depending on your version of Windows) that guides you through this process. There are a couple of pre-requisites, and UII requires both the .NET Framework 4.0 and Windows Identity Foundation (WIF) to be installed first. Unfortunately, since WIF does not run on Windows XP, neither can the CCA agent desktop.

Earlier this week, I was lucky enough to spend a couple of days with Lee Zuckett (solutions architect on the CCA team), and he was able to get me up and running with the new product. He pointed out that a specific .dll was not able to be included with the UII installer because some of the code had been written by a 3rd party and was posted on the Microsoft Open Source site https://www.codeplex.com.

The UII deployment guide includes a section entitled “Integrating the WPF CAB Libraries with the Composite UI Application Block”, which explains how to download the source code from codeplex, modify it slightly for use with UII, and compile it yourself. The end result is that you end up with a file called Microsoft.Practices.CompositeUI.Windows.dll, which you have to deploy in the UII folder on each agent machine.

Although not too time consuming it is still a bit of a pain, so I decided to simplify my life and post a copy of the compiled file here so I can always get hold of it no matter where I happen to be. Please note, this is for my own personal use, and is not intended to be used by the wider CRM community :-)

This posting is provided "AS IS" with no warranties, and confers no rights.

Laughing Boy Chestnuts Pre-School Chain Gang

Microsoft.Practices.CompositeUI.Windows.dll.zip

Comments

• Anonymous
  June 28, 2011
  Hello Simon, Thank you for the great intro writeup.  I am hoping you can clarify one piece of information you mentioned in the above post, "Unfortunately, since WIF does not run on Windows XP, neither can the CCA agent desktop." One of our engineers recently installed the CCAR2 Agent Desktop on XP & it worked fine for him.  While he did have to install .NET 4.0, it did NOT require WIF!  Trying to ensure that we are NOT overlooking anything on our side. Appreciate your feedback.  Thank you. Samir

• Anonymous
  July 07, 2011
  Hi Samir, I'm afraid I'm not sure of the XP/WIF answer. I'll ping some of my colleagues to see if they have more details. Regards, Simon

• Anonymous
  November 01, 2011
  Hi Simon, hope all is well! I have a question about how CCA r2 framework works if you want to integrate data from Microsoft Axapta 4.0 (ERP) and/or web services. We have a client who is interested (at first) in using CCA r2 with their CRM-system (Dynamics CRM 2011). But even to integrate some of their most used processes from Axapta and web services into the CCA r2 framework. Thanks in advance!

• Anonymous
  February 17, 2012
  Thanks for .Dll