Once again, I’d love to tell you who this project was for, and show you some screen shots, but the client would prefer that both they, and their website, remain out of the public eye.

What I can tell you is that the client was a major field sales agency, who promote the products of a number of global blue-chip brands to resellers and systems integrators.

One of the things that they do on a fairly regular basis is offer heavily discounted hardware to their contacts, which they have to hold onto for a set period of time, the idea being that they’ll get familiar with the product, and hopefully recommend it and order full-price units.

These promotions can be surprisingly hard to manage and keep track of, often requiring multiple levels of approval within the agency and the client. However, CRM systems are ideally an ideal solution to this kind of problem, and when we came into the picture, the client was in the process of setting up a Microsoft Dynamics solution hosted on Windows Azure to deal with the first of a series of promotions for a blue-chip IT hardware client.

Although the client had experience of building and hosting simple websites, they didn’t have experience with in-depth ASP.NET development, which is where we came in, although they had identified Microsoft’s Portal Development Toolkit as a likely solution.

Our first job was first to build a demo website based on the Portal Development Toolkit samples, and demonstrate that it could read and write data from their development system, without causing any problems. To our immense satisfaction (and the client’s), we were able to get this working within a few hours, though it was definitely a steep learning curve!

Armed with our proof-of-concept, the second task was to build the website for the first promotion. This was essentially a two-stage process (with some supporting pages), requiring visitors to validate themselves, then submit their request. The users were validated against records held in the CRM, then details of their request were logged, which enabled creating a number of records in the CRM, as well as sending an email for logging/auditing purposes.

Finally, once the solution was fully tested, we migrated it onto the client’s live production system, where it’s run flawlessly since. The deadline was extremely short, given the potential complexity of the task, dependencies on the client to do additional work at their end, but we got the solution running on-time, and it seems to be running very well so far. The client, and their client seem to be delighted, and the next promotion is currently being planned.