Road to Smart Flows (Part 1) : Document Generation with XperiDo

This is one of two connected posts to introduce document generation features with Xpertdoc Smart Flows, explaining the important steps and issues faced during XperiDo to Smart Flows migration.

This post provides a basic idea about XperiDo as this is the start for Smart Flows. Also, most of the concepts are still same and most parts of the architecture is similar in the Smart Flows.

What is XperiDo

XperiDo is a document generation solution available as an online service and as an on-premise solution. It’s a fully compatible document generation platform for Dynamics CRM giving various of functions to generate different types of documents using Dynamics CRM data. XperiDo supports building complex document generation activities, accessing dynamics CRM schema in a user friendly environment.

The solution helps improving the productivity of the business activities in Dynamics CRM and providing users an effortless document generation experience. Also, having a consistent set of activities from the template designing to generate of the documents, allowing developers a less learning time.

XperiDo Architecture

XperiDo is a server based solution can be hosted in an own server environment, private cloud and can be used as an online service. Also, XperiDo supports both on-premise and online versions of Dynamics CRM. XperiDo for Dynamics CRM is a server based application with three main components.

Server component

The server component does all the hard work and that’s the most important among the 3 components. The server holds all XperiDo projects, connectors, data sets, templates, assets, custom scripts etc… Users can be managed by the XperiDo Administrator console and projects can be managed by the XperiDo Manaement Console in the server. Also, the server consists of a Integrated Development Studio to customize parts of XperiDo.

Dynamics CRM component

Components for Dynamics CRM are mainly coming through the importable XperiDo solutions. There are two main CRM solutions, contain core components and custom workflows in each. These two solution components bridges CRM and XperiDo server. Also, XperiDo user roles are a vital part in CRM side.

Local component

The last component is the Microsoft Word add-in to design XperiDo document templates. This adding communicates to the XperiDo server and get the related project data to design the template. Designers can check-in to the server and check-out templates from the server.

Supported Dynamics CRM versions

• Dynamics CRM 2011
• Dynamics CRM 2013
• Dynamics CRM 2015
• Dynamics CRM 2016
• Dynamics 365

XperiDo Projects

Project setup

XperiDo maintains one project per one Dynamics CRM instance. Multiple projects can reside in one server or in multiple servers, but each project has components for only one Dynamics CRM instance.

Project components

Each project has a set of components for document generation.

• Assets: images that you can use in your templates.
• Base: system scripts, that are the same for every project. Customizations usually happen in here.
• DataSets: data sets.
• Samples: samples, with references to data sets.
• Services: every time a data set is created, a service is created as well. These services are used by XperiDo to retrieve information from CRM.
• Templates: templates.

Promotion paths

Promotion paths should exist for moving components across the projects. Usually the components are set against an one environment and move it across the other environments. E.g. Design the templates in against Dev CRM environment and pass it to Test environment for testing.

References

XperiDo knowledgebase