One of the great benefits of our base Cobalt Engagement Dynamics product being built on Microsoft Dynamics CRM is the ability to add solutions from other vendors to CRM to add functionality to the product.

On a call today to discuss accounting functionality with one of our association customers I was asked about the ability to “export Geolocation Codes from Cobalt Engagement Dynamics to plot meeting registrations on Bing Maps”. I wasn’t able to answer the question off the top of my head, though I had previously seen a demo of heat maps in CRM 2013 based on sales data. I assumed it would be pretty simple to setup a view of meeting registrations and view a chart of locations for the contacts who registered for a meeting. So, I did a little research when I got back to my office and 30 minutes later I was able to do them one better than exporting / importing information to Bing. Instead with the help of this little addon I was able to create a saved view of contacts registered for a meeting in CRM and plot the addresses of the meeting registrants in a map on the chart view.
Cobalt-bing-map

The setup is simple.

  1. Download the solution zip file from here
  2. Import the solution to your CRM 2011 or 2013 Organization
  3. Publish All Customizations <- Important!
  4. Open the newly imported solution and fill in the settings.
    Note: If you don’t want to see the bar across the map that says you haven’t configured the solution correctly you’ll need to get a Bing Map Key. You can do so by going here.
    Map-Config
  5. Click Save and wait for the popup message that says the save was successful.
  6. Publish All Customizations again <- Important!
  7. Now go and select an existing contact view or create a new saved view.
  8. Open the Chart View on the right hand side and select the Contact Locations chart.

This sort of plug and play ability in CRM to extend the software not only just beyond the out of the box CRM functionality but even the custom Cobalt xRM functionality means that customers have an entire community of developers, customizers and experts at their fingertips with just a little bit of searching online.

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