A Cheap Way to Integrate Twitter and Microsoft Dynamics CRM

As you may know there is a Social Networking Accelerator for CRM which integrates Twitter and Microsoft Dynamics CRM 4.0:

http://crmaccelerators.codeplex.com/releases/view/29979

However, since Twitter changed their authentication method to OAuth a few months ago, the accelerator has been broken. This is a shame because it is quite a powerful little beast.

Wanting to bring tweets into Dynamics CRM, for various reasons, I've devised this workaround.

TwInbox

TwInbox is a great add-on to Outlook. When my Twitter rss feeds in Outlook died (because of the shift to OAuth) I needed to find an alternative way of getting my tweets into Outlook. While there are twitter clients out there, if it isn't in my pst file, I don't get a chance to read it. This is where TwInbox came in.

You can download TwInbox here:

http://www.techhit.com/TwInbox/twitter_plugin_outlook.html

Once installed, you can basically add as many Twitter accounts as you like to it and they will come into folders in a location you specify:

You can then use Outlook to manage them as you wish.

Leveraging Outlook

What would be ideal would be to use CRM Outlook tracking to bring the tweets into Dynamics CRM. Unfortunately the tweets are of a type ‘Post' and tracking won't work with Posts.