This chapter focuses on using additional JavaScript libraries or frameworks to extend your CRM environment. While they are not officially supported they do work just fine. The reason they are not supported is because the onus is on the group maintaining these libraries to produce code that does not behave unexpectedly. These libraries are doing nothing more than manipulating standard HTML on a page, and thus they can be used with any other web application.

JQuery is one of the most common, popular, and used JavaScript libraries in web development. A large number of sites are implementing it in one form or another. The support is excellent, and there is a lot of documentation and examples online and in various books. This chapter will not teach you how to use jQuery, but rather it will focus on a few examples of the most basic and common elements from the library that interacts really well and easily with your CRM environment.

The other libraries presented in this chapter, while not as well known and commonly used, give you a few additional options to enhance the user experience within your CRM application. The focus is mostly on using CRM through the browser, and not all of these examples will work when using the Outlook client. Please test all your code in both models if you intend to release CRM as such.

A lot of the examples in this chapter focus mostly on the user experience. As such, the fact that they might not run at all when using the Outlook client should not affect the business functionality of your application.