RSS and CRM - a little history

Wow, just over a week since MS-CRM hit the big time and showed up on stage during a PDC keynote. That’s pretty cool. So, how did it get there? Well, the product is really cool and might have made it up there on its own merit. But then again, this is a PDC, not TechEd (and some of us are still laughing about ANY business application on stage).

It got up there because we had a lot of spirited discussion in the weeks and months leading up to PDC and the Business Summit about what would change in the world if we could democratize data. That is, could we do something that would unlock a company’s business data in a controlled way that could also make the entire supply chain work better.

What initially came out of those discussions was that CRM had a pile of cool technologies available that at least enable us to start exposing the data. Everything is exposed using web services (and yes, the V3 web services address all of the V1.x problems), it’s secure, and we’ve got a reasonably decent query definition and execution environment (CRMQuery and <fetch>).

We needed to take the next step which was to think through scenarios where access to subscription data was useful and to think about what a subscription was (in terms of business data). What we decided to do was leverage the query definition and execution services to generate a list of “interesting data”. Since queries themselves are secured objects in CRM we were able to ride on that security model to only allow access to specific queries (both access and the ability to execute a query is constrained).

Once we had that the next step was to look at what we could do to expose the underlying query results. Sure, we could have just given the caller the XML. Or we could have generated HTML. Or, just slightly better, we could have provided the XML with an XSL stylesheet. All those ideas were good, but they weren’t good enough. Instead, we converted the query results into a reasonably standard, well-supported, and well-understood protocol – RSS.

We took stock RSS, added in support for list extensions, and sprinkled in a few other goodies (watch for these in upcoming entries and in the final release) to generate a deployment-specific, partner-specific feed. Each feed honors the deployment’s configuration metadata (custom entities, entity and attribute names, display values) and the calling user’s privileges and rights.

Sorry, but I don’t really have a witty wrap-up for this. There’s a lot more to the feed generator than I’m letting on about. You’ll have to wait to see the other cool stuff we’re doing with it.

Comments

• Anonymous
  March 24, 2006
  We've finally released the RSS connector for MS-CRM. This has been a long release mired in a few documentation,...