Great blog which can be found
here
Here’s quick overview of the different services:
- Organization SOAP Service: This is the primary web service accessing the data and metadata (data about data) for a CRM organization. It provides methods to perform any operation in Dynamics CRM.
- Discovery SOAP Service: A CRM implementation can have multiple “tenants” or organizations. To determine/retrieve an organization and the web service endpoint to access the Organization service, the discovery service can be used.
- Organization ODATA Service: This is a web services that utilizes a REST endpoint and is limited to only CRUD (create, retrieve, update and delete) operations. This is typically the bulk of the operations performed, but an example of an action the REST endpoint cannot do is to assign records in CRM.
Traditionally within plug-ins, you’ll use the organization service because you can easily retrieve the service as it’s being passed into the plug-in execution context. However within web resources such as JScript and Silverlight applications, what should you use and when? The Dynamics CRM SDK lists the following:
- CRUD Operations: REST
- Associate and Disassociate records: REST
- Assign Records: SOAP
- Retrieve Metadata: SOAP
- Execute Messages: SOAP
Another good link
Service | Platform | Protocol | Description | Tasks |
Discovery | WCF | SOAP 1.2 | information about the organizations availables | RetrieveUser, RetrieveOrganization |
| Endpoint:<Discovery Server URL>/XRMServices/2011/Discovery.svc | |
Organization | WCF | SOAP 1.2 | access to the business data and metadata | CRUD, Associate, Dissociate, Metadata, Execute |
| Endpoint: <organization URL>/XRMServices/2011/Organization.svc | |
Organization Data | WCF | REST
Open data (JSON/Atom) | access to the business data (only for web ressources/no authentication) | CRUD,Associate,Dissociate |
| Endpoint: <organization URL>/XRMServices/2011/OrganizationData.svc |
Web Ressource | WCF | SOAP 1.2 | access to the business data and metadata (only for web ressources/no authentication) | CRUD Associate, Dissociate, Metadata, Execute |
| Endpoint: <organization URL>/XRMServices/2011/Organization.svc/web |
Deployment | WCF | SOAP 1.2 | access to the deployment properties | RUD, Execute |
| Endpoint: <servername>/xrmdeployment/2011/deployment.svc |
For CRM Online End Points:
CRM 2011 Discovery and Web Service URL’s to use, based on the Developer Resources Page in CRM.
Here is the information that you need:
The following URLs should be used to access the discovery service (use the appropriate URL for your location):
The following URLs should be used to access the Organization service(SOAP endpoint):
https://{Organization Name}.api.crm.dynamics.com/XrmServices/2011/Organization.svc (North America)https://{Organization Name}.api.crm4.dynamics.com/XrmServices/2011/Organization.svc (EMEA)https://{Organization Name}.api.crm5.dynamics.com/XrmServices/2011/Organization.svc (APAC)
Where {Organization Name} refers to the Organization that you specify in the URL when accessing the Web application. For example, for Contoso.crm.dynamics.com, the {Organization Name} is Contoso.
The following URLs should be used to access the Organization Data service(OData REST endpoint)
https://{Organization Name}.api.crm.dynamics.com/XrmServices/2011/OrganizationData.svc (North America)https://{Organization Name}.api.crm4.dynamics.com/XrmServices/2011/OrganizationData.svc (EMEA)https://{Organization Name}.api.crm5.dynamics.com/XrmServices/2011/OrganizationData.svc (APAC)
For CRM On-premises customers:http://{server}/XRMServices/2011/Discovery.svc for the Discovery service endpointhttp://{server}/{OrgName}/XRMServices/2011/Organization.svc for the Organization Service endpoint (SOAP)http://{server}/{OrgName}/XRMServices/2011/OrganizationData.svc for the Organization Data Service endpoint (REST)http://{server}/XRMDeployment/2011/Deployment.svc for the Deployment Service endpoint