My boss has recently tasked me with developing an estimating form in Dynamics CRM Online for use by his sales team. The idea is that his sales team can enter the parameters into a dialog and have Dynamics spit out a rough estimate for the cost of the project. Sales team members need to be able to do this while on site at a customer's location.
I have no idea about anything with Dynamics. I could easily do this in Excel VBA and make it look nice. I could develop my own app in C# or Java. But the ideal is to integrate this into Dynamics CRM with existing opportunities and associated tools. I've looked at Dynamics on my boss' monitor and I've poked some of the existing dialogs on our old on-premises Dynamics server with a long stick.
Is this kind of application even possible with Dynamics Online? We'd need to take user input, query the product database for pricing info from that input, and do some fancy arithmetic to spit out a number and ideally save the data in some way associated with an opportunity. This is a flooring company, and I envision an estimating tool where you can dynamically add a room to a list in a dialog, specify the size of the room in two text entry boxes (length x width), and select a type of flooring and substrate from a combination of radial buttons and drop down boxes, and finally have a price displayed for that room with a cumulative price displayed for each additional room added to the list.
Somebody please tell me if this is possible and where I can go for some resources on developing for Dynamics CRM to teach me how to do it. Help!
:edit: Essentially the current manual estimating process is rather laborious and takes a couple of days turnaround. Sales reps run through a checklist and submit a form to the office with information about the size of the job, substrate, and the products to be installed and then a human operator manually calculates an estimate with that information. An automated system should allow sales reps to input some basic information and get a rough estimate in minutes while on site with the customer making the sale.
At its most basic, the application must be able to accept user input for the substrate under the flooring, the new flooring type, and square footage for each type of flooring. With that information, it needs to query price information from a database and then calculate an estimate for the project. It needs to be available online via mobile devices (tablets or possibly phones) for sales reps who are on location with a customer.
Beyond that, if we can have it save the estimate into an existing opportunity or create a new opportunity within Dynamics CRM, that would be great.
