Discussion: Linking External Data in a “Virtual Entity” arrangement to the CRM Platform

We all know what a wonderful platform Dynamics CRM is for building business solutions. Indeed CRM is the best rapid application development tool I’ve ever used.

However, there is one area that has constantly frustrated me, and that is the inability to link the CRM Database to other business systems to form a collaborative solution.

When your solution requires the building of entities within CRM, you know you can benefit from all the CRM bells and whistle and rich functionality available.

However, when you cannot create entities within CRM because of issues with data duplication between systems, or not wanting to rebuild parts of a foreign system within CRM, but you still want to work closely with it, the choices are not as flexible.

Of course Web Resources exist to allow additional foreign data to be pulled in and displayed on forms, but these tend to have an undesirable latency issue, and of course it cannot be used in searches or charts, which is one of the most flexible features of CRM that make the product a dream to use.

A feature I would like to see in CRM would be the ability to design “virtual entities” based upon foreign datasets brought in via SQL Views. This would allow attributes and datatypes to be described to CRM and thus useable within the forms, charts and searches as a relationship. Granted things like workflow and data entry would be off the table, but the ability to link other systems together without the need of recreating the processes or duplicate the data would be an amazing feature to have.

What chance in seeing something like this in the future, or is there something out there that allows foreign data to be used within CRM without being stored in CRM.

Comments and suggestions welcomed.