After amazing work by the team, we beat our due date by a week and releasing the latest version earlier than expected! We’ve added over 50 languages for the calendar itself, fixed (many) bugs, and added simple integration capabilities.

Keep reading below to see what we added.

Additional locales

This has been the most requested feature for the calendar - being able to view the calendar in the user’s language. We’ve managed to add over 50 languages, including various dialects. The language will always default to the CRM UI language, but as requested we also added the ability for the user to select the language manually. This is still a work in progress, and some of the languages still cause some issues (right to Left languages mostly…). We are now in the process of adding languages to all other parts of the application including the view configuration screen. We aim that our next version will have better support for right-to-left languages as well as having over 90% of the application included in the translation files. If anyone wants to help with the translation process, please feel free to drop us an email.

Viewing External Data

This feature wasn’t supposed to be in this release, and was actually still in our backlog pile as we went into our sprint. We received several questions around options to display and integrate data from other systems on the Dynamic Calendar interface. Our support team responded with get teh data into CRM, and then create a view for it. Our engineers didn’t like that response, mostly because there is a simpler way, that doesn’t involve the complexities of data syncing across systems. To add this feature, our engineers added support for the iCal file format, also known as ICS. A lot of applications that include calendar entries can provide an iCal file that includes the information. This is a standard file based on RFC2445 which allows easy integration between Dynamic Calendar and external systems/data. This feature gives you the ability to view all entries in a Google Calendar directly from CRM, or display the public holidays for your country, or include information from a different line of business application. The options really are almost endless as to how this can be leveraged.

Bugs, Bugs, Bugs

As with any software product, Dynamic Calendar has bugs as well. I want to thank everyone who sent us information about bugs and issues that were encountered - it has been incredibly useful for us to track and resolve the issues to provide a better product for all of our users. MSCRM Solutions, who are now looking after everything support related, have been doing a great job thus far in capturing requests, resolving them and providing critical information to our engineers. We aim to resolve as many bugs as possible with each release, and will continue to focus on providing a great user experience within the application and our other services.

The road ahead

We plan to release a new version once a quarter. The purpose is to continuously add new features, resolve bugs and grow to be the best Calendar add-on for Dynamics CRM. Our next version will include search capabilities, as well as refined embedded calendar capabilities. If you have any feature requests please let us know about them. We listen and try to provide a quick turnaround on all requests and really want to make sure our customers are getting the best experience.

The Guru