Microsoft CRM and Drupal

I am Stamati Crook from www.redware.com and very experienced with Microsoft CRM but fairly new to Drupal. I have been working with Microsoft CRM for a few years now and have an integration product that integrates Microsoft CRM (all versions including 2011 online) with the leading small business accounting package here in the UK (Sage 50). I have done a lot of work for different customers normally around the area of billing and sales orders and invoicing and so forth. I have also published a handbook online and at amazon at: http://www.redware.com/handbooks/mscrmhandbook.html

I have been interested in Drupal for a while now and built a couple of sites using modules only (no code) and am now moving into Drupal development. One angle I am exploring is to help businesses that are heavily invested in Microsoft infrastructure to use Drupal as their customer facing website. It was great therefore to see Microsoft at DrupalCon. Some initial areas that are interesting to me are:
1. Displaying existing SQL Server out over the internet to logged on users via drupal
2. A customer facing website built in drupal to display, for example, orders and helpdesk status using data from Microsoft CRM.
3. Display exchange addresses and calendar via drupal
4. Intranet users authenticating (using windows authentication) onto Drupal and controlling security according to active directory roles for example

Many CRM installations feel the need for a branded customer portal using CRM data and indeed there are ‘accelerators’ from the CRM team that provide this. Drupal lends itself however to building up all the content needed for a good customer service website and seems a good match. There are many things to explore and it might be a good idea to explore them together – even better if there is a potential customer there who might fund or at least test any development in the real world.

There are several technical approaches to pursue and issues to resolve but I suppose we need to start with what we think a CRM user would want from a Drupal integration ?

A quick investigation shows some areas for discussion around the technical architecture:
1. CRM 2011 has JSON support from JavaScript but only for Javascript on a CRM form and not an external site (it may however be possible to hack this somehow?).
2. There is a CRM 4.0 drupal module for MSCRM which should be looked at.
3. CRM 2011 (online) requires Windows Live authentication and there is a PHP library for this and on premise requires normal windows authentication has been problematic previously from php sites.
4. The web services in CRM are complex and are best wrapped up to make them sensible. This is better for CRm 2011 but still an issue.
5. An alternative that avoids all these issues is to build a (commercial?) .NET website that receives instructions and logs on to the CRM 2011 return json or other suitable data.

These are thoughts to get some ideas flowing...

Best... Stamati