We had a need here at Chorus IT to view network diagrams in Visio. This is especially useful for the technicians, and would be nice to do from within the Account record in CRM.
I’d been thinking about this for some time, and looked at various methods, some more in-depth than others. I kept coming back to an old saying about ‘not cracking a walnut with a sledgehammer’.
Yes it would be really useful, but is it the type of mini-project I want to spend hours on? So here follows the quick solution, that actually ended up being quite a nice one.
Visio Diagrams can be save as HTML, so once you have put your diagram together choose to save as Web Page.
This actually creates 2 files/folders:
HTML file
Files Folder
The files folder contains all the files that are needed by the HTML file.
We then created a folder within the ISV folder of CRM to store both the HTML files and the associated folders.
Next step was to call and display the HTML pages with the associated Accounts record in CRM.
We decided rather than just display the HTML within an iFarame on the account form (Which is already fairly cluttered) we would create a Visio entity.
The Entity needs a N:1 relationship with Accounts. We then created the following form:
Once you enter a description and a file name and save, the full form opens with the Visio diagram displayed within the page:
The nice thing about this approach is that the diagrams retain their formatting and functionality.
If you have any questions or comments, please feel free to contact me.
Rob
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