A request we see often from customers is the ability to integrate Liferay with a CRM system. At the same time, we all know that Liferay is strong when it comes to integrations with external systems, offering several different approaches and tools to achieve our needs. But sometimes, knowing is not enough and we do need to show it! 

On this quick blog post, we have a simple proof of concept, for a Liferay and Microsoft Dynamics integration. 

This POC goal is to showcase how we can integrate Liferay DXP with Microsoft Dynamics CRM, not only to pull information from MS Dynamics to be displayed on Liferay side but also to push information from Liferay to MS Dynamics. The challenge we proposed to ourselves was to be able to:     

• List MS Dynamics CRM accounts on a Liferay widget;    
• Create a new MS Dynamics account from Liferay. 

The integration approach was to leverage the MS Dynamics Web API, which implements the OData (Open Data Protocol) v4. OData is an OASIS standard for building and consuming RESTful APIs over rich data sources. 

On the Liferay DXP side, we have 3 simple OSGi modules: 

• Configuration module, which allows us to configure the connection details to the target MS Dynamics account; 
• Rest client module, responsible for calling the MS Web API endpoints; 
• Front-end widget, to display the data and possible actions to our end users.  

You can find a short video of this POC in action here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZZTKHMwlJlw

And the POC repo here: https://github.com/fafonso/liferay-ms-dynamics-poc

I hope you find this POC useful!