Integrating Java business applications with the Customer Care Accelerator for Dynamics CRM

The Customer Care Accelerator (CCA) allows companies to integrate their business applications into one customer care application. While a previous addresses what kind of business applications could be implemented in CCA and the business value this could add to a company, this article will focus on the implementation of Java-based business applications in CCA with the Application Integration Framework (AIF) from an architectural point of view with some code snippets. Over the course of this article, a number of components will be considered. These are the global landscape, the approach, the architecture and the actual implementation. Finally, a brief summary of the implemented and integrated solution will be provided.

To integrate the Java application into CCA, we need three essential components. The main component is a working Dynamics CRM environment. This can either be an on-premise or a CRM Online environment. The second step is to download and install the Customer Care Accelerator for CRM 2011  from the Microsoft Dynamics Marketplace or the Unified Service Desk (which will be released in the near future) . The CCA package contains deployment guides, the UII install files, setup files for CCA and the agent desktop solution. If you need help installing these, there are many tutorials on how to set-up the CRM environment and also some good tutorials about setting up CCA with Dynamics CRM. The last component needed is the web-based Java application that needs to be integrated with the agent desktop. With Dynamics CRM, CCA and the Java applet in place it is time to look at how those are going to communicate.

A number of options are available to integrate a Java application into the Agent Desktop. The first and most logical implementation is to integrate the ...