Creating RSS Feed Dashboard in Microsoft Dynamics CRM 2013: Part 1

Keeping you up-to-date with technologies, especially with your respective technology, is a very extensive requirement of our day-to-day life. We need to know what is happening, what is released and if we are not able to get the information directly then we need Someone/Something who/which can help us to get the latest updates. Here someone could be the person keeping him up-to-date and doing blogging to help others to keep them up-to-date :) and something could be the technology that we can be used to get updates from blogs, news, forums and so on. So what is that? The answer is RSS. RSS helps to easily stay informed by retrieving the latest content from sites.

In this article we will explain how to create a RSS feed dashboard in Microsoft Dynamics CRM 2013 using the free widgets available. Let's consider we want to get RSS feeds from:

• Microsoft Dynamics CRM Team Blog.
  
  
• HIMBAPInfo Twitter Feeds.
  
  
• Dynamics News.
  
  
• Microsoft Dynamics Forum

We will use the free widget from http://feed.mikle.com/ for demo purposes. The following are the high-level steps to create our RSS feed dashboard:

1. Get RSS Feed URL for respective website.
   
   
2. Create widget.
   
   
3. Get sample code.
   
   
4. Create web resource in Microsoft Dynamics CRM 2013.
   
   
5. Place web resource in Microsoft Dynamics CRM 2013 dashboard. 

So let's create our first web resource to get RSS feeds from the Microsoft Dynamics CRM team blog. The following is the procedure to get the widget code and place it in Microsoft Dynamics CRM 2013. 

• Browse http://feed.mikle.com
  
  
• Paste http://blogs.msdn.com/b/crm/rss.aspx under Feed URL.
  
  
• Do changes under General and copy the code.
  
  
  
  
• Browse the Microsoft Dynamics CRM 2013 Application.
  
  
• Navigate Settings | Customizations | Customize the System.
  
  
• Click New under Components | Web Resources.
  
  
• Use the following properties:
  
  
  • Name: MicrosoftDynamicsCRMTeamBlog.html
    
    
  • Display Name: MicrosoftDynamicsCRMTeamBlog.html
    
    
  • Type: Webpages(HTML).
    
    
• Click on Text Editor and past the code that we copied from the web site under the Source Tab.
  
  
• Save and Publish your changes.
  
  
• Click on Preview. We should be able to see Microsoft Dynamics CRM Team blog RSS feeds like the following:
  
  

Stay tuned for the next article. In the next article we will show how to get Twitter RSS feeds and use them in Microsoft Dynamics CRM 2013.

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