iPhone client for CRM (MS Dynamics)

The first phase of this project was to write a ‘read only’ iPhone client which is able to login to a Microsoft Dynamics CRM server and then fetch and display the data in a nice format.

The application needed to work with all three types of MS Dynamics deployment, namely CRM Live, IFD and OnPremise. Once logged-in, the client software fetches the relevant data and saves it into a local SQLLite DB on iPhone for faster viewing next time. Application then tries to load the data directly from the saved DB instead of fetching it again from the network if no change is detected. The data is displayed in nicely laid out tabs (Account, Leads, Sales etc), and tapping on any of the displayed records shows its details in the next screen.

Client also has option of adding/saving multiple accounts configuration, so that once configured, accessing any particular deployment is just a matter of a ‘tap’.

Technically, it was an interesting challenge to bring something so Microsoft-specific (Microsoft Dynamics supports only IE for web interface access!) to iPhone. Also, with all documentation available for Dynamics targeted at .NET implementation, it wasn’t much helpful either. Plus, absence of Web-service core on iPhone (not to mention missing XML handling classes from SDK) meant we had to implement our own soap/xml layer to handle all the network communication.

This client is currently meant for in-house enterprise distribution only, but future version could also be made available to App Store.