I recently decided it might be useful to have an easy way to work with LinkedIn profiles from within Unified Service Desk (USD) ….. Here is how I achieved it.

The steps involved were;

1. Create a hosted control.
2. Create a field on contact.
3. Create a scriptlet in USD.
4. Create an action to navigate to the LinkedIn profile.
5. Add a button to the contact navigation toolbar.
6. Test my new feature.

Step One – Create a hosted control.

Create a hosted control. Isn’t that always the first step with a USD configuration!! Mine looked like the one below.

Nothing complicated here, my component type is “standard web application” and my display group is “MainPanel”.

Step Two – Create a field on the contact

Next I created a new text field (type url) called “LinkedIn Profile” and added it to my contact form. I’ll assume you know how to do that!

My contact form looks like this ….

Step Three – Create a scriptlet in USD.

I needed this step as I realised that I didn’t know the LinkedIn profile for all of my contacts, so I decided to display the profile when I had it and when I didn’t to search for a possible match. I therefore needed a small piece of code to construct an appropriate url.

If you haven’t created a scriptlet before try reviewing my earlier post on scriptlets.

My code looked like this ….

function linkedinUrl() {

var profile = "[[contact.new_linkedinprofile]+]";

var firstname = "[[contact.firstname]+]";

var lastname = "[[contact.lastname]+]";

var url;

if (profile == "" || profile == null) {

url = "https://www.linkedin.com/vsearch/f?type=all&keywords=" + firstname + "+" + lastname;

} else {

url = profile;

}

return url;

}

linkedinUrl();

And my USD scriptlet looked like this …..

Step Four – Create an action to navigate to the LinkedIn profile.

I could now create an action to navigate to the LinkedIn profile.

Notice that the hosted control is “LinkedIn” (the one I created in step one) and that the action is Navigate. The data portion is “url[[$scriptlet.LinkedInProfile]]”, LinkedInProfile being the name of the scriptlet I just created.

Step Five – Add a button to the contact navigation toolbar.

I’d already created a navigation toolbar on my contact entity, I’m going to assume you also already have a toolbar. But if you need help to understand how to do this review my earlier posts on toolbars.

My first step was to load this icon as a web resource under customizations in CRM settings. (I’ll assume you know how to do that.)

I then created a new button on my contact navigation toolbar and added the action I’d just created, resulting in a toolbar button that looked like this:

Step Six – The test!

My enhanced toolbar looked like this …..

With a LinkedIn profile entered on the contact I get the result below. (Note: On first view you might need to login to LinkedIn but only on the first contact you view.)

If my contact doesn’t have a LinkedIn profile populated I get the following result;

I hope you find this feature useful. Enjoy!