Biz Talk Integration with CRM : How to Videos by peter kelcey

Post by Peter Kelsey, MSDN

I recently participated with our MCS Canada team on a large BizTalk 2009 and CRM 4.0 integration project. I gained a ton of experience about CRM integration from that project and I thought I’d speak about it at our semi-annual TechReady internal conference. Not long before TechReady though, we release CRM 2011 and I realized that speaking about BizTalk 2009 and CRM 4.0 was about as relevant as speaking about Windows 98 and Trumpet Winsock implementations (I was reading a Slashdot article this week about the Trumpet Winsock creator… so that’s where the reference came from…). I hastily decided to refocus the presentation on CRM 2011 and BizTalk 2010. That meant that I had to quickly figure out exactly what the integration story was between these two products. After a bunch of trial and error and some helpful conversations with folks from the CRM 2011 team, I figure out the options. It turns out that you have TWO options for integrating BizTalk 2010 and CRM 2011.  Yes indeed, you have two different methods to choose from when integrating these two products! I ended up having a fairly relevant and well received presentation to deliver. From that internal session, I’ve repurposed my content into a publicly ready format and created a shorter walk through video that explains the two options that you have. Instead of trying to write a lengthy blog post about how to do that, I’ve just filmed a walkthrough of the process.  (I found that these video walkthroughs were highly successful when I did them for the BizTalk ESB, so I thought I’d do them again here for CRM) Also, I’ve included the source code project that I use in the video so that you can get a jumpstart on your process.

All in all, I found the process to be a very simple one once I figure out a few basic concepts. Hopefully, this blog post will help you figure out those concepts more quickly than I did. Once you’ve got a grip on those, then I believe you’ll find this integration process to be a very easy one.  As with most of these blog videos that I do, I created this after midnight when the house was quite  so if you find some issues or bloopers, let me know and I’ll correct them.

Below is an overview of the components, tools and services at play in to the process. In the video, I’ll walk you through this diagram in more depth before showing you the actual project I built.  In this diagram, you can see that there is data flowing from BizTalk out to the CRM 2011 cloud service as well as data flowing from CRM 2011 Online back through the firewall to BizTalk on-premise. In this first video, I focus on the BizTalk to CRM 2011 Online option. In a day or two, I’ll post a second video that shows the CRM 2011 Online event notification being sent back to an BizTalk on-premise installation. (it’s a cool one…)

This is quite a long video (>45 minutes) so I had to split it into a multipart zip file in order to get it to fit into my SkyDrive folder.

You can get:

1. Part one at http://cid-04bc12b1f7b2979a.office.live.com/self.aspx/BlogVideos/CRMBTS%5E_Video%5E_Multi.zip
2. Part two at http://cid-04bc12b1f7b2979a.office.live.com/self.aspx/BlogVideos/CRMBTS%5E_Video%5E_Multi.z01
3. The source project and test file here http://cid-04bc12b1f7b2979a.office.live.com/self.aspx/BlogVideos/BizTalkToCRMOnline.zip

You’ll need to download both parts of the zip file and then use WinZip to extract them.