Microsoft CRM Mobile Express Rocks!

Based on various client requests, I've spent the last number of hours installing, configuring and playing around with the Microsoft CRM Mobile Express client which you can download from the Micrososft community website called gotdotnet. Unfortunately this site is going away in the next couple of months (however, I'm pretty sure that the majority of their code will still be supported by the general community).

Anyway, the Mobile Express client rocks! Installing and configuring the code on your CRM server allows CRM users to access Microsoft CRM from almost any internet-capable phone or handheld device - and yes, that means Blackberries, Smartphones, Treos, etc...

What's more is that the Mobile Express client includes an administrative interface which allows system administrators to determine the specific data fields to display on each entity available within the client. I'm sure that this capability serves to increase application performance and/or allows organizations to display custom fields or specific data sets that are relevant to their needs.

Contained in this post are a couple of screen shots I took of the administrative interface. Because I installed Mobile Express on my VPC image, I can't offer a picture of the client interface, but I think you can still get a pretty good idea from these shots.

One other thing, because the install requires a fair amount of modification to the web.config file and the CRM sitemap, I recommend using Visual Studio or some other XML editor to make the neccesary updates.