Plugin to store attachments into Azure Blob storage?

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Posted on by Community Member Microsoft Employee

Hi,

Does anybody have experience in Azure Blog Storage instead of CRM/ SharePoint storage?
I came across this codeplex plugin which seems a little bit outdated.

crmazureattachments.codeplex.com

I guess adding this will do:
azure.microsoft.com/.../storage-dotnet-how-to-use-blobs

Are there people willing to update this project? It will help a lot of CRM customers.

==
We have a challenge to store large attachment of our support requests into CRM. It storage is costly and the lousy coupled email interface do not fit since it does not allow attachments larger than 30MB. The technical solution might be that the PHP form will upload the blobs into Azure itself. Then the PHP form will create the case in CRM with links to the attachments in Azure. Incoming emails with attachments (automatically smaller than 30MB otherwise they will be refused by the email service) must be placed in the blob storage as well. Attachments that Support Agents add must also be stored in Azure Blob storage. For instance if a customer emails a large file through a service like ‘wetransfer.com’ that file must also be added to the case. The plug-in must therefor have a bit of CRUD functionality.

Summarising:
- Implement a plugin so that (large) attachments are stored in Azure Blob Storage instead of in CRM or SharePoint;
- Implement a Rest Api for among others a PHP web form so that a case is created directly into CRM;
- Implement a MVC form for testing purposes before handing over the Rest api to the PHP development team.

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Community Member Microsoft Employee on at

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RE: Plugin to store attachments into Azure Blob storage?

As an update, the CRMBinaryStorageOptions project has moved to github:

https://github.com/DawidPotgieter/Dynamics-CRM-Binary-Storage-Options

Enjoy.
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Community Member Microsoft Employee on at

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RE: Plugin to store attachments into Azure Blob storage?

Hi,

Please refer this link which help you to store attachments into Azure Blob storage and reduce your database space on Microsoft Dynamics 365.

www.work365apps.com/attachment-manager
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Community Member Microsoft Employee on at

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RE: Plugin to store attachments into Azure Blob storage?

So, quite late, but in case anyone else is looking for something like this.

Here ya go for a plugin that stores attachments (activity) and annotations (note attachments) in Azure : https://dynamicscrmbinarystorageoptions.codeplex.com/

But looking at your specific requirement, you'll still have a problem. CRM seems to have a bug that causes anything over 5Mb to trash the plugin sandbox. If you're not too worried about the sandbox and run on-prem, you can get around this limitation, but you're still constrained to 32Mb max limit for any attachments.

What we've done for a similar instance to the above is to actually create a seperate website hosted on IIS somewhere. And then iframe it in so that it sort of looks like it's part of CRM, reading the metadata from CRM and the binary from Azure. If you create a "document" or some such entity to store the metadata in CRM and just store the binary in Azure, you gain basically most of what you require from CRM, without the binary size impeding you.

Hope this helps someone.
Aiden Kaskela 19,692 on at

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RE: Plugin to store attachments into Azure Blob storage?

Hi, I'm sorry, I don't have a timeframe of when I can get started (my first child was born this week and it's hard to find time for anything right now).
Community Member Microsoft Employee on at

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RE: Plugin to store attachments into Azure Blob storage?

Thank is very kind. What time frame do you think of? I would suggest first investigating if it is possible. Does it work with default CRM functionality (that is all attachments are stored there; also the support agents ones)..and the attachments can be retrieved as well? [I have limited CRM knowledge]

If you want and you share the source code we can collaborate on it.
Aiden Kaskela 19,692 on at

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RE: Plugin to store attachments into Azure Blob storage?

Sorry, I don't have experience with it, but I think this is a great idea and I'm going to look into writing it and distributing it free through The CRM Lab @ Cobalt.