Home

Carta CRM Home

The Home is one manifest tool and two places to put it. The server decides which cards this organization may see, and the view fetches each card itself. Your job is to read the manifest, route a new user to the tutorial, pick where the Home goes, and render it.

Step 1 — Read the manifest

Call it for data first, not for the view:

crm_call_tool({ "name": "crm:get_crm_home", "arguments": {} })

Read it for data before you render anything. Step 2 can send the user elsewhere, and a Home that renders and is then retracted is worse than one that never rendered.

If the tool does not exist

The Home is behind a rollout flag. When it is off the server does not register get_crm_home at all, and the call fails with an unknown-tool error. That is a normal answer for an organization outside the rollout, not a failure.

What you do next depends on what the user asked for.

The second row is the important one. A phrase like "what's in my pipeline today" is a real question that the plugin already answers, so leaving the user with "the Home is off" would take away an answer they used to get.

Never assemble a substitute Home. Do not call search_deals, search_tasks, list_calendar_events and the rest to imitate the card set. Handing one question to the skill that owns it is fine, because that skill runs its own access checks. Building a Home-shaped panel yourself runs none of the card gating, so it can show an organization something it is not entitled to see.

Step 2 — Route a new or lapsed user to the tutorial

The manifest carries firstTimeUser. When it is true, the user is new to the CRM MCP or has not used it for a while.

Invoke the tutorial skill instead of rendering the Home. Say one line first, so the redirect does not read as a mistake:

Let me walk you through the plugin first. Your Home is waiting at the end.

The tutorial ends by rendering the Home, so nobody is denied it. Do not render the Home yourself as well.

When firstTimeUser is false or absent, continue to Step 3.

Step 3 — Pick where the Home goes

There are two, and they are not alternatives of equal standing:

• In this conversation. Step 4 renders it. This works everywhere the CRM MCP is reachable, so it is the floor and the default.
• As a published page. The carta-crm-home-build skill publishes it at a stable URL the user can bookmark and reopen cold.

The page is available only when both of these hold, so establish it before any rule below offers the page or invokes anything:

• The Artifact tool is present. Without it this surface cannot publish at all.
• The carta-crm-home-build skill is installed. It is internal today, so a published install does not carry it and no build verb can reach it.

Treat the page as unavailable whenever you cannot confirm both. Never name a page this surface cannot produce, and never invoke a skill you have not seen.

Decide in this order, and stop at the first that answers.

1. What the user asked for. A build or publish verb, such as "publish my crm home", "pin it", or "give me a link I can bookmark", names the page. When the page is available, invoke carta-crm-home-build and do not render here as well. When it is not, say in one line that a bookmarkable page is not available on this surface, then render in the conversation. A plain "show my crm home" names neither target, so carry on. A build verb is not a reason to invoke a skill that is absent.

2. What they already told you this session. If they have already chosen, honour it without asking again, as long as that target is still available. A recorded choice for a target this surface cannot serve falls through to the next rule rather than failing.

3. What this surface can do. If the page is unavailable, render in the conversation and say nothing about a page that cannot be built here. If it is available, both targets are open, so ask once, in one line:

Want this as a page you can bookmark, or just here in the chat?

Ask only when both are genuinely available. A question with one real answer is friction, not a choice.

Do not persist the answer. It holds for this session. Getting it wrong costs one sentence to redo, which is cheaper than a stored preference nobody remembers setting.

If you cannot tell whether the page is available, render in the conversation. The floor is never the wrong answer, and it never depends on the published page existing.

Step 4 — Render the Home

crm_view_tool({ "name": "crm:get_crm_home", "arguments": {} })

The view renders the shell and then fetches every available card itself, in parallel, each with its own timeout. Do not call the card tools yourself. They are get_crm_home_pipeline, get_crm_home_contacts, get_crm_home_deals, get_crm_home_counts, get_crm_home_notes and get_crm_home_meetings, and calling them here duplicates every fetch the view is already making.

Read the card set from the manifest rather than from this list. The server ranks the cards by the caller's own measured tool use, so both which cards appear and the order they appear in vary per user.

If crm_view_tool answers that the tool has no view, the MCP App bundle is off for this organization. Fall back to summarising the manifest you already hold from Step 1, and say the interactive Home needs the CRM UI enabled.

Close with the escape hatch

A third answer exists, and it looks like success: crm_view_tool returns the manifest, no error, and the host mounts nothing. You cannot tell that apart from a Home that rendered — you never see the view — so do not guess, and do not claim it rendered.

Say one line after the call, whenever the published page is available:

If nothing appeared above, say "publish my crm home" and I'll give you a page instead.

One sentence, offered every time, costs a reader nothing and turns a blank surface into the page. Leave it out where carta-crm-home-build is unavailable, per the Step 3 checks — never name a page this surface cannot produce.

What the cards mean

Two gates behave differently, so a card goes missing in two different ways. A module gate drops its card from the manifest entirely, because a tenant that does not buy the module should not see the tile. An interactions gate keeps the card and marks it unavailable with a reason, because an absent tile would be indistinguishable from a genuinely empty week.

A card the manifest marks unavailable carries a reason. Report the reason if the user asks why a card is absent. Do not offer to enable it: these are tenant permissions, not user settings.

After rendering

The Home has two exits. Point at whichever fits:

• a link on a card, which opens that record in the CRM web app;
• a prompt from the directory, which the user sends as their next message.

If the user picks a prompt, let the normal skill routing handle it. Do not try to answer from the Home's payload.

Notes

Never render tenant data unlabelled. The manifest names the organization, and the view stamps it on every card. When realOrganization is present the user is Carta staff viewing another tenant, and the view shows a banner. Do not remove or summarise away either signal.

The Home is read-only. It never writes. If the user asks to change a record from here, hand off to the matching add or update skill.