What is the Microsoft Dynamics CRM integration?

The Microsoft Dynamics CRM integration allows looking for contact information in Microsoft Dynamics CRM and launching of outbound calls from the Microsoft Dynamics web interface.
The integration allows showing of contact information in the screen pop-up, opening the contact record, creating a new contact and saving the call information in the contact’s history.

System requirements

The Microsoft Dynamics CRM integration  requires the following:

• 3CX Assistant version 9.13537 or higher installed on the computer
• Microsoft Dynamics CRM version 4.0
• 3CX Assistant should be installed with CRM option selected in setup
• Port 5535 to be free

1. Download the Microsoft Dynamics plug-in from here.
2. Run the setup.
3. After setup is complete, enable the Microsoft Dynamics CRM plug-in by going to the File / CRM settings menu in the 3CX Assistant. Check the “Enable Microsoft Dynamics Plug-in” option.
4. If you also want to automatically register call information in the contact’s activity history, check the “Store Call Information in Microsoft Dynamics” option.

Figure 1 – Microsoft Dynamics CRM plug-in configuration (Login Information)

5. Fill login information with your Microsoft Dynamics user account information. There are 3 authentication methods available:

• OnPremise: select this option when your Microsoft Dynamics CRM is configured to use integrated Active Directory authentication.
• IFD: select this option when your Microsoft Dynamics CRM is configured as an Internet‐Facing deployment.
• WindowsLive: select this option if you have a Microsoft Dynamics CRM Online subscription.

Depending on the selected authentication method, you can configure your account with different settings. For example, when you select OnPremise authentication, you may choose to use current user credentials, or specify credentials for another user. And when using Windows Live authentication, you just need to specify your user name and password.

Figure 2 – Microsoft Dynamics CRM plug-in configuration (Contact Lookup)

You can change the maximum digit length to compare in the Contact Lookup section. When an inbound call arrives to your extension, the caller ID may have different formats depending on your PSTN or VoIP Provider. It could have international format (including the country code), national format (including the region or city code), or local format (including only the local number).

Also, you may have created your contacts in Microsoft Dynamics with prefixes that are not present in the caller ID example mobile phone prefixes. In order to match incoming caller ID’s with your contact entries, you need to specify this parameter. The system will compare the last N digits of the caller ID with the last N digits of your contact’s phone, where N is the specified maximum digit length to compare. Usually this parameter should be the length of your local number. With a higher number you get more accuracy, but there might be a possibility that the Caller ID is not matched. With a lower number you get less accuracy (with possible false positives), minimizing the possibility of a no match.

Finally, you can choose to look for contact information in the Contacts, Leads and / or Accounts tables, and select the lookup order in these tables.

Launching calls from Microsoft Dynamics CRM

You can add customizations to your Microsoft Dynamics CRM to launch calls directly from the web interface.

1. Login to Microsoft Dynamics CRM, and go to the “Settings” page
2. In the “Administration” section, select “System Settings”.

Figure 1- System Settings dialog

3. Click on the “Customization” tab and add “Web Application” to the “Custom menus and toolbars” section. Click the “OK” button to accept the changes and close the System Settings dialog.
4. Under the “Settings” page select the “Customization” section, and click on the “Import Customizations” link.
5. Browse for the file “Microsoft Dynamics Customizations.xml” file located in the installation directory, for example, “C:\Program Files\3CX Assistant\CRM\Microsoft Dynamics Customizations.xml”, and press the “Upload” button.
5. Select the “ISV Config” line, and then click on “Import Selected Customizations”. Press “OK” to confirm.
NOTE: if you previously added customizations for another application, this procedure will override your customizations. In order to avoid losing your current customizations, export them first, and then merge them with the ones provided by 3CX in the “Microsoft Dynamics Customizations.xml” file.
You should see a message “Customizations have been imported successfully”. Press the “OK” button to finish.

6. Once you have imported the customizations provided by this plug-in, you will see a menu when you open a contact, lead or account, as shown in the following screenshot.

Figure 2 – Menu in the contact dialog

When you click “Call via 3CX” -> “Mobile Phone”, the call to the contact’s mobile phone will be launched using the 3CX Assistant application, which must be running. If the application is not running, you will receive a message with the error description.

Troubleshooting Microsoft Dynamics CRM integration

Windows Live authentication

When using Windows Live authentication, your Windows Live account must not be logged in to any other service. For example, you can’t use the same account to login to Windows Live Messenger and Microsoft Dynamics CRM Online simultaneously.

Changing the outbound call receiver port

In order to allow automatic dialling of outbound calls from the Microsoft Dynamics web interface, you need to add some customizations. Those customizations contain hyperlinks to the outbound call receiver included in this plug-in. The outbound call receiver listens by default in port 5535.

If another application in your computer is using that port number, you will see an error message when the Microsoft Dynamics Plug-in starts, indicating that the port is in use by another application. We recommend that you reconfigure the conflicting application to use another port number otherwise, you will need to change the configuration of 3CX Dynamics on all your workstations.

In order to change the port number, do the following:

1. Open the “Microsoft Dynamics Customizations.xml” file located in the installation directory, for example “C:\Program Files\3CX Assistant\CRM\Microsoft Dynamics Customizations.xml”, and change the port number 5535 with the new port number you want to use.
2. Import the xml file again, as described in the “Launching calls from Microsoft Dynamics CRM” section. This will override previous settings.
3. Open the configuration file located in “%AppData%\3CX Assistant CRM Integration\3CX Assistant CRM Integration.ini” and change the parameter “OutboundCallsPort” in section “Microsoft Dynamics Plug-in”. Ensure that the new port number is not being used on your workstations.