Microsoft CRM 4.0 on a non-IE browser and IAG

At e92plus we use Microsoft CRM 4.0 as our CRM system. It is a good product that allows a lot of flexibility, granularity and customisation, but the downside out of the box is that it will only work with an IE browser.

Not a major issue you may think as all the computers at work are all Windows devices.

As you can see in the previous post, we were in the process of replacing our mobile telephones at work, and as part of the rollout, I wanted to offer IAG via the mobile phone. I know it works(albeit very slowly) on a Blackberry and (pretty well with 3G) on iPhones.

Now if we were issuing mobile devices with internet access to the staff, I not only want them able to access the IAG, I also want to give them the ability to access our CRM system.

My choices were to look at Windows Mobile devices, but there is either a comprise on cost or functionality, or find a way to get CRM available on other browsers.

A bit of Googling from Neil Langridge (Marketing Manager for e92plus) turned up the following links:

http://blogs.msdn.com/crm/archive/2009/07/09/product-release-mobile-express-for-microsoft-dynamics-crm-4-0.aspx
http://weblogs.asp.net/gayanperera/archive/2009/07/10/dynamics-crm-4-mobile-express-released.aspx
http://www.microsoft.com/downloads/details.aspx?FamilyID=F592EC6C-F412-4FD5-9A80-CD3BCBD26D8B&displaylang=en

After following the instructions on installing the 28Mb file, we then started testing.

I used Firefox, Safari, Opera and Chrome as my test browsers and they all worked perfectly. The view is slightly cut down, but we now have CRM on other browsers.

The next step was publishing this on IAG as a Generic Web Application (as I did for CRM on IE). Remember to use the server name, correct port number as well as the /m after the URL. I created an access policy to check the users browser, so that if they are using IE they have two icons (one for full blown CRM, and other for the "streamlined" version), and if they are using a non-IE browser they only see the "streamlined" version of CRM.

I have been playing with a number of mobile phones recently, and this works perfectly on Blackberrys, iPhones, Nokia and HTC Windows Mobile devices.