Microsoft CRM 3.0 Experiences: Website Feed Generator on MS CRM

We have 6 company websites in the Chelford Group and we wanted an easy way of updating, news, case study, datasheet and newsletter information across all of the sites. In some cases the article would be repeated on more than one of the sites and also the article might apply only to a particular industry.

We thought about using blogger to create our feeds but decided to create a custom application in our common Microsoft CRM platform that was specific to our needs. We use MS CRM for all our Sales and Marketing so why not centralise our website news etc on here as well making it easier to maintain.

How does it work?

Website Feed Entity

I basically created a new entity on MS CRM called "Website Feeds" and added fields / attributes for your basic XML RSS 2.0 standard layout such as:

<title>

<link>

<description>

<image link>

<publish date>

<expiry date>

and custom fields such as

<industry> - the industry the feed is applicable to

<feed type> - news, case study, datasheet, newsletter

<company_id> x 6 - the company website the feed is to be displayed on (can be more than 1)

Feed Generator

On saving a new feed the feed generator (an ASP page in a IFRAME) retrieves all of the feed data from CRM and then creates an .xml file for each feed type for each company website in other words it creates:

SSI Website -