Working with PHP and Microsoft Dynamics CRM Online 2011 - Helpful Resources

Its been a few weeks now that I've been working on PHP code to create entities with Microsoft Dynamics CRM 2011. It's actually my first time to encounter Microsoft Dynamics CRM 2011, or any Customer Relations Management system for that matter, so there was a bit of a steeper learning curve and longer research time to create simple tasks from a PHP code into the CRM.

I've also learned that the Microsoft Dynamics CRM 2011 is actually the cloud version of Microsoft Dynamics CRM 4.0 which can be hosted on a Windows Server on-premise or online. The two have basically the same except that for CRM 2011, you need to purchase the subscription per user on an official Microsoft-hosted platform (http://www.dynamics.com), whereas in CRM 4.0, you can deploy it on a Windows server in your local office network (on-premise) or host it on a Windows server in the Internet (online).


Basically, the main goal was to create entries from PHP into Microsoft Dynamics CRM (I will shorten it as MSCRM for the purpose of this post). The way I did it was to use the SOAP interface of MSCRM to request and retrieve data from. I tried looking for a PHP API or even a PHP class for MSCRM but there were none that could do the work for us. But there are a handful of resources where I grabbed the code snippets from and integrated them to work with our PHP system.

I cannot detail the full method of how I did it since it took a chunk of my work load to put things together, but here are some of the helpful resources where I got most of the ideas from and can also give you a starting point in your PHP - MSCRM journey:

• Working with Microsoft Dynamics CRM 4.0 SOAP Interface with PHP and NuSoap
• Microsoft Dynamics CRM Online 2011 Connector for PHP - I used this code to connect to the MSCRM interface with PHP
• Connecting to CRM Online 2011 Web Services using SOAP Requests Only
• Microsoft Dynamics CRM 2011 Fetch XML based Custom Reports - this is helpful when you are already coding the XML queries to fetch data from your PHP script
• How To: Use Create Requests in .NET and Jscript in Microsoft Dynamics CRM 2011 - in here I got a lot of concepts from the XML request part in Jscript and ported it to a PHP SOAP request.

Hopefully these links will also be your goldmine to get PHP and Microsoft Dynamics CRM Online 2011 work together to your requirements.