Event Management Accelerator Foray

Authored by Ryan Swiderski - Senior Consultant - Wipfli's Microsoft Dynamics CRM Team

Originally posted 11/08 on Wipfli's Microsoft Dynamics CRM Team's internal blog

I've decided to take a dive into using the new Event Management Accelerator for 4.0. Microsoft describes this accelerator as:

"...giving organizations the ability to easily manage the planning, execution, tracking and reporting requirements for events."

• The venue and room
• The type of event
• How many people can register
• Can registrants be waitlisted
• Event session details
• Team members (users) and speakers (contacts)

Several workflows are also added to CRM. By default, they are set up to create campaign/event planning tasks, and manage registrant response/acknowledgement e-mails. These are good places to start with your own implementation, but likely a lot of tweaking is required.

I'd say the coolest feature of the accelerator, and the biggest value-add, is the integration between CRM and on-line event registration. The accelerator includes a sample portal that is all set up to let you view your CRM events and register for them. Personally, from the point of view of someone who is not a vb.net expert (but knows enough to be dangerous), it was very educational to look under the hood to see how this accelerator's plug-ins manages the implementation of the new controls, the creation of the aspx pages, and handling the registrations. Out-of-the-box this all works beautifully and you can start making it work for your own needs with little effort.

Having said that, there is some work to get it installed correctly. And to make sure that no ordinary Joe can do this, the accelerator development team left out a few key points and were off an a couple as well. Here's what I had to do to get the accelerator installed and the sample portal up and running...

1. Download the accelerator package. The download contains the installation files and two documents, the Installation Guide and the Solution Architect Guide. I recommend -- at a minimum -- scanning the installation instructions to get an idea of what parts of the application are being affected. Note that if you only want to get the sample portal set-up, skip to the last page and just follow the instructions under "Setting up a Sample Portal Site" (Note: If you aren't entirely sure what .ascx or resx files do, how to add a directive to an aspx page, or where your web.config file is located, I recommend just installing the sample portal, lest you have an entire day to waste).
2. Upload customizations (note: you'll have to move the XML from the default location before uploading since the file path extends over the CRM 100 character limit)
3. Publish all customizations (not the workflows... yet).
4. Edit each of the MSA-* workflows to change the "From" field of each of the steps that send e-mails. When installed, these Send E-mail steps are set to a non-existent user. Also, in the MSA-Event Management: Event Management Process workflow, I was unable to edit the properties of the "Target Audience Segmentation" step, which creates a marketing list -- received a "Record cannot be found" error. This is due to a reference to the GUID of a currency record that does not exist in my image. To fix this:

• Create a new currency in CRM
• Grab the GUID of that new currency record
• Open up SQL Studio and run the following query:

5. Edit the register.xml message to match the instructions: FYI - If you are using an image with the Litwareinc domain, you may have to specify the domain as simply "litware" for it to work.
6. Install the Crm.EventManagement.CustomizationInstall.exe utility. The instructions are a little off here... step three in the instructions say enter "Crm.EventManagement.CustomizationInstall.exe" at the command prompt; instead, enter "msa_eventmanagement.install.exe".
7. Configure Event Management to be visible in the settings area and set the values per the instructions
8. Deploy the reports
9. Finally, create a new website in IIS (or add the sample portal pages to an existing), set the ASP.NET version to 2.x, and that's it! You are good to go.

1. Pop open CRM and create a new Campaign. Set the type = "Event" and the status = "Launched"
2. Fill out all required information
3. On the Event Details tab, check the box "Publish Event Details on the Web"
4. Save it

 
Go to your website, and you should now see your event.

One final note, the accelerator does have logic built into it to determine when a new person registers if they are an existing contact in CRM. Out-of-the-box this is based on just e-mail address, but the source code includes other validation options that are relatively easy to turn on.

Bottom line with the Event Management Accelerator – it is simple to set-up a working demo, good web-registration capabilities, very modular (although it does affect some existing Campaign attributes, so it's highly recommended to do thorough testing), and even though it includes the source code so we can tear it apart, the basic functionality covers the major Event Management requirements.