Refreshed Virtual PC image with Portal Accelerators

Microsoft released an updated version of the VPC image that comes with Dynamics CRM 4.0 preconfigured, available for download on CustomerSource or PartnerSource. There’s more on it than just CRM, check out the following list for all the goodies:

• CRM 4.0 with Update Rollup 11
• Windows Server 2003 R2 SP2
• SQL Server 2008 SP1 – SSRS, SSAS
• SQL Server 2005 Express Edition
• Office SharePoint Server 2007
• Office Communications Server 2007
• Office PerformancePoint Server 2007
• POP3 Server
• Visual Studio 2008
• IE8
• Office 2010 SP1
• Windows Mobile 6 SDK and Activesync

The image has been tweaked to include two virtual hard drives (VHD), allowing the swap file to be physically located on a USB drive, which is promised to improve performance by ~30%. How that figure has been determined is beyond me, but the environment works quite well on my Core i3 2.26GHz, 4GB, Win7 x64 setup. It would of course have been super nice to get your hands on a SharePoint 2010 environment, but the hassle of x64 environment virtualization with Hyper-V instead of Virtual PC would have not been worth all the trouble (although I’ve heard VirtualBox should be able to run also 64-bit images without Windows 2008 hosts). Let’s just settle for MOSS 2007 with Office 2010 client components.

What made this VPC image especially interesting to me was the latest versions of the Portal Accelerators. Now, I never really had hands-on experience with the first wave of Portal Accelerators released for CRM 4.0, but from what I’ve heard the results delivered didn’t quite live up to people’s expectations. This new breed of accelerators, on the other hand, is based on the technology found in the commercial products of Adxstudio, who have built a full blown content management system on top of Dynamics CRM. I simply had to test drive the Customer Portal and Partner Relationship Management Portal, after seeing them promoted in Convergence 2010 Atlanta.

When accessing the portal side of the content, the sites offer you the kind of WYSIWYG editing controls you would expect to find in a modern CMS. Hover over content and you get the editing menu for in place editing of text, images and links. Any changes you peform on the content here will be stored to a record on the Web Page entity. Going into the CRM world and accessing the Content Management tab gives you a list of all the components that the portal site is made of. Effectively it’s the CMS database but presented with Dynamics CRM entities, lists and forms. You’ll find even site settings such as CSS attribute definitions as records on a grid, just like a customer contact would appear on your basic installation of Dynamics CRM.

At first this might seem like a freaky way to build a website, but it really goes to show what the XRM concept can be like when taken to extremes. Just because Dynamics CRM as an off the shelf product is geared towards presenting sales managers a web page of accounts, opportunities, cases etc. doesn’t mean the platform couldn’t just as well deliver data on web page formating. Once you realise that all of the information on a website is being retrieved from the CRM database tables, it doesn’t take long for your imagination to start running wild when thinking about how the traditional customer related data could be pulled from the system and mashed up with web portal content. Typically any dynamic CRM attributes you need to present on a customer facing website means there’s lots of laborious integration planning and design sessions ahead before you get to see even the first rough demo. Building the CMS and CRM systems on top of the very same database flips things around and can certainly unlock ideas for designing portals that you might otherwise be hesitant to explore. Sure, plenty of development resources will still needed for implementing real solutions for production use, but the concept is quite impressive.

When considering building portals on top of CRM, it’s good to keep in mind the implications to license requirements. Presenting CRM data to external users and allowing them to interact with it will force you to buy an External Connector license from Microsoft for your on-premises environment. For a smaller organization that might otherwise find modifying the accelerator templates to their needs to be a sufficient solution, the cost of an EC license may well be prohibitive, which is really a shame considering the potential of the platform. However, CRM Online or partner hosted SPLA licensing models do not require External Connectors (see this post by Shan McArthur). So, not only is the cloud version of CRM much quicker to deploy than an on-premises IFD environment, the license pricing is becoming more and more favourable in the era of Social CRM, where the customer relationships data will increasingly be generated and collected somewhere out there in the clouds, beyond the corporate firewalls.

LightSwitch

If Dynamics CRM can be used as a generic platform for rapid development of custom Line Of Business (LOB) applications or dynamic content portals like seen with the accelerators, then how should the product really be positioned in the market? Or even inside Microsoft’s own product portfolio? Comparisons between Dynamics CRM and SharePoint as application platforms has been discussed in many great white papers, one of my favourites being “Relational Productivity Applications: Leveraging Microsoft Dynamics CRM and SharePoint for Enhanced Business Impact“. But could there be even more alternatives to consider?

The recent beta launch of Visual Studio LightSwitch made me think about this topic some more, since so may of the selling points mentioned in Microsoft marketing material for LightSwitch ring a bell from the XRM gospel we’ve seen pushed for Dynamics CRM lately. LightSwitch is a SliverLight app development tool that’s being branded as the “simplest way to build business applications for the desktop, web and cloud”. “Quickly build custom LOB applications that rival off-the-shelf solutions.” “Simplifies the development process because it lets you concentrate on the business logic and does a lot of the remaining work for you.” “Designed for non-programmers, you don’t have to write any code for navigation, toolbars/ribbons, or dirty checking.” Yep, that’s CR… no, I mean LightSwitch. Check our this blog post from the product team for an introduction to the feature set included.

The conclusions behind the value proposition of LightSwitch do sound valid. Most mid-size organizations would surely benefit from being empowered to build their own LoB apps to replace overgrown Excel sheets, also most of these apps could share the same form, grid, search etc. concepts offered in familiar MS style UI wrappings. However, the approach is coming from the opposite direction than with Dynamics CRM. Whereas CRM has been first sold primarily as an application for business people to manage their customer data and later on expanded towards being an actual application development platform, LightSwitch is a component of the Visual Studio IDE used by programmers that now tries to reach the business users by promising no-code application development tools. You can already read plenty of furious “who is this sh** for?” type of comments from the VS user community, when MS is offering seemingly “dumbed down” development tools that aim to offer SilverLight app creation for the masses.

Since we already know that CRM 2011 will continue to have a traditional web application UI, not SilverLight, one question that comes to my mind is: will the two paths ever meet? In this era of “app internet” many are claiming that RIA clients are the future of web (which, according to credible sources, is already dead) and that there’s really no need to waith for HTML5 to come and save us. The bigger the ecosystem of existing customers, applications and services around the familiar Dynamics CRM becomes, the harded it can get to plan the platform’s evolution from “just” a web app to a rich internet application.

Could we somehow get the best of both worlds? One approach would be to use LightSwitch to build entity data driven forms to reach non-CRM users in the organization (as suggested by @CplCarrot), but this again brings up the licensing issues discussed earlier. While Dynamics CRM offers a far more advanced set of pre-built plumbing than LightSwitch, everything comes with a cost. If you’re an ISV and your solution would require the customer to purchase licenses for both CRM and your own application at the same time, the equation may well make you reconsider if all that plumbing is necessary after all.

Salesforce.com or Microsoft Dynamics CRM, which horse to bet on?

I really enjoyed reading Behind The Cloud, in which Marc Benioff tells the story behind Salesforce.com. No matter what you think about their product in terms of CRM, you have to give credit to the company that has been such a major force (sic) behind launching the SaaS movement into the massive cloud hype that we see everywhere around us today. Challenging the traditional “Enterprise 1.0″ giants like SAP and Orcale (Marc’s previous employer) in the race for the next generation of business applications has earned Salesforce.com the status that is now making tech media around the world consider Microsoft as the underdog in the game of CRM. Just like SFDC in its early days gained big boost from ceaselessly attacking it’s nr. 1 enemy Siebel, I’m positive this head-to-head battle will only do good for Dynamics CRM in the long run.

Richard Knudson wrote a spot on article about the competitive setting between MSFT and SFDC. The announcement of Dynamics CRM 2011 has drawn a wealth of attention on the subject, now that Microsoft is finally promising a near-identical CRM feature set for both on-premises and cloud hosted deployment models. Looking at the signs out there, I’m inclined to believe in Richard’s prediction that “over the next couple years, the CRM market will be a two-horse race”.

The AppExchange marketplace is certainly something Microsoft will have a tough time replicating overnight, so I’m expecting the introduction of the Dynamics Marketplace to be just the first iteration of a long project in developing a solution that truly bridges the gap between the SMB customers and the vast but fragmented ISV ecosystem. And while Chatter may not be a revolutionary application when compared to the front line collaborative solutions out there (more like “lipstick on a pig“?), it’s still offering a solution that Microsoft doesn’t have a direct answer to in CRM 2011.

One big reasons why you shouldn’t underestimate Microsoft’s chances in the CRM horse race is because, well, this is exactly what Microsoft does. Looking at the company’s history, it never is the first player on the new market, or the most technically advanced application of the day, yet it tends to roll onwards like I giant freight train. Slow to get on the way, but almost unstoppable once the wheels are in motion. You could blame it on just an endless marketing budget, but that would be depreciating MSFT’s incredible business hunch and the track record it has for striking when and where the competition is at its weakest. At the end of the day, so many of Microsoft’s customers are also freight trains. That’s corporate IT and it doesn’t like changes that take place overnight, unlike what we as individuals in the corporate IT world might think about the pace of change.

Of course even Microsoft itself is now proclaiming that the end is near for traditional server deployments and that the clouds with silver lining are already upon us. Coming from the mouth of Steve Ballmer, you could think that such a message would totally play in the hands of Marc Benioff, but I wouldn’t be so sure. Call me a sucker for Microsoft’s marketing propaganda if you will, I still think the company is building it’s Azure offering and cloud momentum with exactly the right steps to challenge the early SaaS pioneers with a next level architecture that goes beyond the initial “hey, let’s outsource servers and save some $$$” thinking. Ok, that may be a gross exaggeration, but what I’m saying is that coming to the party late gives you more time to select the dress and finalize the make-up. And Microsoft is always late.

As long as most new cloud app users are coming from the MS Office world, Microsoft will likely continue to have an upper hand in the Outlook client development (read an example of SFDC’s Outlook 2010 woes). No matter how data driven the CRM applications become through the real time feeds of social network alerts and what have you, there will always be an office worker physically using the application. He or she will want to print documents from the data, pull it into Excel and synchronize it with the address book. Unless Microsoft loses the battle for the office market to Google Apps and Android, there’s bound to be a strong selling point there for Dynamics CRM for many years to come.

What does your CRM look like? Examples of industry verticals

When you spend most of your days working within a particular instance of CRM for a specific industry, it’s always refreshing to get a look at what someone else has built from the same ingredients. Lauren Carlson from Software Advice sent me a link to her review of 15 industry specific vertical solutions built on top of Dynamics CRM by Microsoft Partners. This is a great snapshot of what the market out there looks like in terms of packaged CRM/XRM offerings. I urge you to click through to some of the vendors’ sites and explore the ways how CRM is being sold to markets that are likely to be totally unfamiliar to you.

Although I’m sure these partners have invested a great deal of time and their industry expertise in packaging these solutions, the question that comes to my mind is “does this particular one size fit all”? Building a vertical solution must be an effective way to get your foot in the door and talk to the potential customers, but with the exceptional customizability of Dynamics CRM, how many customers will end up deploying only the contents of the standard package and not twist it to their specific needs and business practices? Probably not so many, which of course isn’t a bad thing by any means. It just means that out of any predefined selection of solutions, there will be an huge number of permutations that people will call “our CRM”.

Buzz on CRM add-ons

One of the applications we have lately spent time deploying and training in our organization is the CoreMotives Marketing Suite. While we initially were searching for merely a tool to replace our previous email marketing system integration that couldn’t scale to meet our growing CRM userbase’s requirements, what we ended up buying with CoreMotives goes far beyond just email blasts and click-rate tracking. The real selling point is in being able to start tracking website visitors already when they are still anonymous to your business, then later on convert them into identified leads with a page view history that the sales person can use for profiling the lead. To get an idea of what possibilities the CoreMotives tracking scripts open up, have a look at this piece of news regarding their latest enhancements to web form data capture to CRM.

Capturing more data is not an automatic road to success, so having the tracking capabilities of CoreMotives Web Intelligence at your disposal will definitely require also your online marketing process to be well thought out, with clear conversion targets in your mind. Nevertheless, the typical response from any marketing person that has been shown what you could do with the tools has been along the lines of “holy sh**, this is awesome!”, which leads me to believe that the investments needed on the process development side will probably also surface.

The CoreMotives solution is built on Windows Azure as one of the first Dynamics CRM applications on that infrastructure. You might want to glance through this Microsoft case study (where I also contributed a few words) that takes a look at what the new cloud service models mean for start-up ISV’s like CoreMotives that want to rapidly expand to international markets.

Another application that has caught my eye during the summer has been the M-Files for Microsoft Dynamics CRM. Developed by Motive Systems Oy, this document management system integration is a welcome addition to the relatively new market of Dynamics CRM add-ons developed and productized by Finnish companies.

Some more add-on products are also being actively promoted in Finland during this fall on the CRM Festival 2010, a joint roadshow from Anvia (the company behind the hosted service CRMpalvelu.fi) and a selection of partners like Snoobi and BookIT. Multiple sources have told me the registrations for these events have already been a great success, which gives an indication that the interest towards Dynamics CRM in our local market is steadily growing.

Performance tuning tips for IIS

Let’s face it, Dynamics CRM is not a particularly fast web application when used over a WAN connection with high latency due to physical distance from the client to the server. This is a common scenario for companies who need to operate on global markets with regional offices, some of which may struggle to find a reliable internet connection provider to begin with in their local market. Application response times are a critical factor in driving the adoption of systems like CRM, so paying attention to the service level of your application server and the underlying infrastructure is a must.

Did you know that you can reduce the number of HTTP requests from the CRM client to the application server to almost half by removing unnecessary authentication settings from static content? The solution we have adopted so far has been to disable NTLM authentication from images and scripts by manually going through the various folders on the CRM website. No need for that anymore! As discovered by Dave Berry, there is in fact a registry key setting that will make IIS remember the Kerberos authentication after the initial HTTP request. Read KB917557 for more details on how to set this up on your Dynamics CRM application server.

It’s coming! CRM 2011 beta

Ok, I’m sure most of you know by now that CRM 5 is CRM 2011 and the RTW of CRM Online is promised to take place before the end of the year, as announced in WPC 2010. The beta version is arriving already this month and that will surely cause an information explosion in the CRM blogosphere. Having had the privilege of using the CTP3 version of CRM 2011 Online as a part of the Microsoft Early Adopter Program our company is participating in, I can only say “it’s worth the wait”. Once the NDA is lifted, hopefully I will have the chance to share many more thoughts about the upcoming version and how we’re planning to utilize it. Stay tuned for updates.

So much for the branding. Underneath it all we will have the “CRM5″ engine evolving from CRM 4.0, with quite a few important improvements on how the application can be utilized as a platform for developing your own custom applications, a.k.a. the XRM mantra that Microsoft has been heavily promoting and showcasing between the product version releases. While this side of the coin will surely play an important part in gradually turning Dynamics CRM into part of the core enterprise infrastructure like SharePoint has become, the first thing most new users will see from the application will still be the Outlook client and traditional customer data management functionality. Which is why there have been some big investments from the Redmond boys on developing that side of the CRM product, as you can see from the picture below.

Instead of merely wrapping the web client page into an Outlook frame, the new rich client interface introduces whole new components that attempt to follow the faimilar Outlook UI experience. Tabs will help in keeping the number of pop-up windows under control while the preview pane we’ve learned to take for granted in processing our email inboxes is now also available in the scope of CRM entity forms. Since Dynamics CRM 2011 now comes with the ribbon interface like most other MS products, the CRM functionality now blends into the Outlook toolbar and gets presented in all its context sensitive glory. I myself have always preferred to use CRM through the web client, since the Outlook version has faded away some of the native CRM application navigation in order to remain Outlook-ish. With the new 2011 version, it looks like there will actually be better functionality (and hopefully usability as well) available through the rich Outlook client, which may make the web client look thin in comparison. Now, this of course raises the question that will any of these rich UI features be available if you stick to Office 2007 or do they require Outlook 2010? Remains to be seen.

Among the new features there is the ability to connect to more than one CRM organization through a single Outlook client. In my opinion this has always been one of the key shortcomings of the XRM offering from Dynamics CRM. Although multi-tenancy would allow you to easily create multiple different organizations on the same application server and leverage CRM as a framework for building non-CRM applications, the curse of a default organization for the Outlook users has meant that one major selling point of the core CRM product, i.e. familiar Outlook experience, has been somewhat paralyzed in the XRM scenarios. I’m not sure whether email tracking to multiple organizations is among the list of supported features, though, so some barriers may still remain on the road towards a ubiquitous “set regarding” button for all the activities encountered during the office hours of a knowledge worker.

Another common integration point after the Exchange/OCS messaging infrastructure is of course SharePoint for document management, which is also becoming a native part of Dynamics CRM 2011. The OOB functionality is unlikely to offer much glamour over the previous custom integrations of showing document libraries in an iFrame. The big deal would however be in synchronizing the user rights across the CRM and SharePoint realms, which is where I would put my money on MS to deliver a solution. What I would also like to see offered is a native integration to the FAST based search, thus providing a more Google like search experience for CRM users, but since SharePoint 2010 is highly unlikely be a system requirement for CRM 2011 implementation, this will surely remain a custom solution to be offered by the Dynamics CRM implementation partners.

The release of SQL Server 2008 R2 already introduced maps and geospatial visualizations into the Reporting Services (SSRS) feature set. With Dynamics CRM 2011 investing heavily on data visualization and built-in dashboards, perhaps we will finally get an easy way to map address attributes from CRM entities into a nice looking view like the one below. Or then maybe it will still require populating some additional coordinate data onto the records and paying for Bing API usage. Time will tell (or some fellow bloggers?).

Going beyond what CRM offers out-of-the-box has always been what really makes the product so intriguing. There are countless ISV’s and individual developers out there who have built tools, enhancements or full-blown service integrations on Dynamics CRM.  Keeping track of the offering as a CRM end user or gaining visibility for your product as a service provider has not been so straightforward, due to the lack of a clear forum for these two parties to meet (here’s my personal link list on the topic). If both the user and the partner working on a CRM implementation project are small companies, exploring the world of ISV’s for solutions that would fit an identified need may just be too much of a hassle to be undertaken when there are more than enough customizations and plug-ins to worry about. This is where a simple solution could potentially unlock a big new market and that is what the newly announced Microsoft Dynamics Marketplace is going to attempt when it is launched in September 2010.

Initially the Microsoft Dynamics Marketplace looks to provide the existing catalogue of products from the Microsoft Dynamics Solution Finder. Also it will be built on the existing Microsoft Pinpoint platform. This combination in itself will not yet provide a huge leap forward in streamlining solution discovery and distribution, but at least it’s a start. Later on the Marketplace is promised to offer proper e-commerce functionality, thus allowing the exchange of money like a true marketplace ought to. In Dynamics CRM 2011 the Marketplace will be an integrated part of the application (probably á la Resource Center introduced in CRM 4.0), which will certainly help in bringing down the barriers to commercial transactions taking place in the ecosystem. The biggest dependency to Dynamics CRM 2011 in my opinion will be the upcoming solution management functionality, as this promises to deliver a controllable environment for the service providers to package their applications and not having to invest unfeasible amounts of support resources into ensuring whether the solutions will fit the unique CRM puzzle of each and every customer that wants to install it.

Building a marketplace is relatively easy, but getting it to work for the benefit of all interest groups (sellers, buyers and the platform provider) can be very tricky. Just because Apple has done such a phenomenal job on this front and built a whole new value adding layer around their core product experience with the help of 3rd party developers doesn’t mean that any app store would automatically be a success. Nokia, the previous leader in the smartphone field had launched their own Software Market around 10 years ago, failing to get much traction on the concept, and finding itself still struggling today, chasing Apple with a not so appealing concept called Ovi Store. Or have a look at the Windows Mobile / Windows Phone Marketplace and compare that to what Apple and Android have. Get the picture? The moral of the story is that you need so much more around the Marketplace concept than just a pretty site with some links to random products you have on sale. App stores only work when they are truly designed to serve the application ecosystem, not just to make money from the service or use the partners as a showcase for your own offering. Solve a real problem first, then watch the revenue streams accumulate later as a result of the value that you injected into the process first. Here’s hoping that Microsoft can build a serious contender for Salesforce.com AppExchange and the likes, as this will surely be one of the key success factors in the brave new world where rigid business applications are transforming into flexible services that the customers assemble into customized solution packages on-demand, pay-as-you-go.

So what’s up with the cloud then? Well, the jokes about running applications in your very own cloud hosted on the server hidden in the closet have just become a tad less funny, as Microsoft went and announced the Windows Azure Platform Appliance. Bundled with Windows Azure, SQL Azure and some other goodies, this will basically be a cloud-in-a-box type of a solution, which is trying to bridge the gap between on-premises and online. The underlying strategy behind the Azure appliance will surely be speculated from a plentitude of different angles, but my take on this is that it’s a one big step on the path towards Azure and the cloud becoming the default platform rather than the option. Companies who don’t want to or aren’t allowed to move their applications to CRM Online will be offered the possibility of replicating the Azure services inside their own (or hosted) server room. Once on Azure, the step towards handing it all over to Microsoft’s cloud will be not that far away anymore. By giving a clear message that Microsoft is focusing “all in” on the cloud, Steve Ballmer is also saying that the investments to their remaining traditional applications development will be steadily decreasing. You will continue to have the power of choice, but choosing to opt out from the cloud will just become more and more difficult to justify.

If the cloud computing movement is about the shift in technology, then the social web revolution is all about the people and their new forms of behaviour. Sure, it’s powered by some tech innovations from Web 2.0, but it would be a stretch to claim that the source code behind services like Facebook or Foursquare contains the magic ingredients that have caused the eruption of the social media volcano. To prove my point, just take a look at the following slide:

This “social customer stack” is taken from the Deriving Value from Social Networks session by Nikhil Hasija and Paul Greenberg. It was the best 60 minutes spent during Convergence 2010, hands down (even better than The Return at Tabernackle or The Geeks Band at Hard Rock Café). One particularly great thing about it was that there were absolutely no sceenshots of Microsoft applications, like in all other Convergence presentations. No attempts to push products like the Social Media Accelerator or anything else MS branded. Everything was built around the core message: what has changed since the invention of traditional CRM and why the customer is now in charge.

Social CRM is of course not a brand new concept. Having said that, it’s still far from an established or clearly defined concept. The following presentation contains much of the content that Paul was presenting at Convergence, so flicking through these should give you a good idea of the what, why, how of SCRM:

Be sure to also read Paul’s blog post titled “Microsoft Convergence 2010. Finally Getting Rid of the But….?” on ZDNet.

Returning to the social customer stack, it was quite delightful to see that Microsoft has been able to grasp the fact that the future of applications needed for any company to adopt a holistic practice of SCRM activities is not something they alone can engineer by themselves at Redmond. Maybe this can be partially attributed to the phenomena uncovered by the recent study by NetProspex, which found that Microsoft employees were the most social media-savvy in the world. If the company is able to transform this savviness into products and services that encourage coexistence and integration of applications from outside the Microsoft stack, then all those hours wasted by MS employees in reading each other’s Facebook status updates may actually deliver a nice ROI in the long run. Heck, maybe they’ll even survive beyond the looming death of the desktop operating system.

What does it all mean for Dynamics CRM? Well, your guess is as good as mine, but I believe the business applications world will be moving towards the app store model that we’ve seen grow quite popular in the consumer mobile arena. In order to get there, it’s going to require a little bit of work from Microsoft to make this transformation possible, but I see them taking the steps into right direction. With the Solution Management features to be introduced in CRM 5.0 (edit: now branded as Dynamics CRM 2011), the possibilities for creating real application packages that a CRM using organization could easily consume will be at a whole new level. With its Azure platform, Microsoft has a natural expansion tank in place to facilitate the growth of its CRM customers’ solutions to become a network of applications.

Even though it is somewhat disappointing that there doesn’t appear to be any Chatter type of functionality built into the upcoming version of CRM (guess you’ll need to use SharePoint 2010 for that) to foster the social enterprise approach for transparency on CRM customer data, perhaps this isn’t the most important thing Microsoft to focus on. Social CRM will not be a module you can plug into your existing application, it’s about being able to support whatever new methods of communication and collaboration emerge “out there” between companies and their customers. Get the right pieces in there and the ecosystem may just invite you to be a part of the conversation.

As a final note from Convergence 2010 Atlanta, I want to touch one subject of far less importance than the cloud or the “SocialX” future, but something which relates to them quite closely. If there’s one thing that has changed in conference audience behaviour during the past couple of years, it has to be the explosion of mobile applications for social networks. Yeah, I’m talking about Twitter et al. The backchannel of tweets during the sessions is nowadays something you can expect to take place in any larger tech oriented event. Some people are even writing books about it and building applications targeted to amplify and leverage this phenomena.

I guess Convergence is nowhere near SXSWi in terms of mobile geek penetration rates (just watch this video), but it would have been awfully convenient if Microsoft had provided complimentary WiFi for all attendees, to facilitate the emergence of a proper backchannel. Perhaps the U.S. crowd didn’t have any problems utilizing their data plans, but for an overseas attendee the ridiculous WiFi rates charged by the Georgia World Congress Center for 24h access were a showstopper. Luckily there were plenty of CommNet terminals around, which weren’t locked to browsing only the Convergence site. Tweets thru SMS during the session and a quick review of updates with #CONV10 hashtag during the breaks managed to keep my social network addiction at bay.

Girish Raja showed a cool demo in his Azure themed session about using The Archivist to collect a database of tweets for analyzing trends and other kinds of data mining activities. Perhaps by Convergence 2011 we will hear how Microsoft has managed to make use of the backchannel analytics. I’ll see you in that session then!

First of all, getting to Convergence 2010 in Atlanta this year was not easy, as I’m sure many fellow Europeans noticed. No, the problem was not in acquiring tickets or hotel accomodation, it was in the physical act of getting to Atlanta through the volcanic ash cloud that paralyzed the airspace in most of Europe the week before Convergence was set to start. I was in Kuala Lumpur at the time of the eruption and had to re-route myself directly from Malaysia to United States, without visiting my home base in Helsinki. The one week trip in South-East Asia turned out to be a three week trip around the world, which was a bit of a rough ride, but I’m glad to have made it to all the meetings I had planned, attended Convergence for the whole duration of the event and returning safely back home (with a huge pile of laundry in my luggage).

The event took place in Georgia World Congress Center in downtown Atlanta. Even though there were over 8.500 attendees to this years Convergence, which is a huge event on my scale, it still felt like GWCC was half empty, which should give you an idea of the sheer size of the building complex (check out some fun facts here). This meant a lot of walking between the sessions, but a small exercise never hurts. Feeding all the thousands of people cannot be an easy task, but the organizers pulled it off quite nicely with the help of the gigantic buffet hall and of course a countless number of coffee and snack stands everywhere. All in all, great surroundings for the event, which is probably why it was announced that also Convergence 2011 will be held in Atlanta.

The opening keynote this year didn’t deliver anything spectacular. GP 2010 was announced, as was the upcoming global availability of CRM Online, but all of this was very much business-as-usual. Kirill delivered basically the same Dynamic Business message as he did in Convergence 2008 Copenhagen, with the added flavour of cloud computing. There was a nice R&D Labs demo of a product concept utilizing a touch screen overlay for a “65 screen from NextWindow and a business application that allowed touch-based adjustment of sales forecasts derived from fictional social network data analytics. While I’m somewhat sceptic about companies reaching that level of sophistication in mining the social buzz level around their product lines anytime soon, the in-store utilization of touch screen UI’s presenting unified product catalog data in both web stores as well as retail outlets may not be such a distant concept anymore. Expanding the usage of ERP data to the new retail use cases with direct customer interaction will surely require a whole new mindset in application design, something which is might be considered the ERP equivalent of the Social CRM movement (more on that later).

Click the image to access video clips from Convergence 2010 keynote

“We’re all in”, that is the primary message from Microsoft these days. The “in” is of course the Cloud, which MS is considering to be at least as big a shift for IT business as the invention of the graphical UI or the browser based Internet. I think many people in the audience were still cautious when estimating the impact of cloud computing for their own field of information management and application development, which is an understandable approach at this early stage, when the hype surrounding the cloud is still at such a peak level. Nevertheless, everyone needs to keep their eyes open and observe what is going on in the world around them. For example, I guess almost all of the CRM related sessions at Convergence 2010 were using specifically CRM Online for the demos (except for a few local virtual machines that were probably needed in some cases). The big shift is that the Online offering has taken the center stage in Microsoft’s CRM product message, with the on-premises version slowly but surely becoming an option that is still available. Will we eventually see MS CRM going 100% hosted á la Salesforce.com?

A good example of the benefits of running your Dynamics CRM in the cloud instead of your own server behind the firewall are the recently announced portal accelerators for CRM Online. The package that initially includes Event, eService and Partner Management accelerators is presumably going to offer a full Portal Development Toolkit (see the MS Partner Network presentation for May 2010 release). What you effectively get is a CMS system for building websites with dynamic content straight out of your Dynamics CRM Online database, with out-of-the-box content hosting and CRM integration running on Azure. There have already been products like this offered by ISV’s like Adxstudio before (who, I believe, are also behind the portal accelerator development), but providing it as an extension to CRM Online can lower the barrier to such a level that I’m sure many customers cannot resist the temptation to try it out. Considering that there is no External Connector license model for CRM Online (like there is for on-premises installations), the total cost of having the basic web + CRM functionality could potentially be highly attractive for many SMB’s.

Since the Office 2010 wave of products was released very recently, there was of course some promotion of SharePoint 2010 and how it can be “better together” with CRM. On a practical level there wasn’t too much to show about the synergies, as the demos were along the lines of showing SharePoint search results in an account form iFrame. Useful, but hardly revolutionary. Many vendors are promoting their automatic document library integration products, but if you want my opinion, I’d say you should wait to see what CRM 5.0 (edit: make that Dynamics CRM 2011) will offer on that front before committing to ISV add-ons. All in all, the best demos related to Office 2010 were actually the PowerPivot examples of building dynamic data cubes directly on the client PC instead of relying on SQL Server Analysis Services. Very cool stuff, wish I could convince our corporate IM department to upgrade my Excel so I’d be able to try some of that “personal BI” magic…

That’s it for the first part of the article. Check out Part 2, where I’ll be discussing how the word “social” is changing the world around CRM and Microsoft.

I was lucky to recently get access to a CRM Online development environment, provide to us by CoreMotives as a part of our evaluation use of their Marketing Suite. Here are some of my initial impressions on the differences and similarities between Dynamics CRM Online and the good ol’ on-premises Dynamics CRM.

Outlook client setup

Since my work laptop’s Outlook is connected to a production CRM instance, I decided to try the CRM Online with my home PC. The installation file download took a while, but soon we were on our way.

I decided to skip the SQL Server installation to speed things up and settle for the online-only version. After all the patches had been applied, I was greeted with a login window for the Outlook client.

From here onwards everything seemed to work just like in the familiar on-premises CRM world. Perhaps even a bit too closely, as the first prompt that greeted me when accessing CRM Online was a notice about scheduled maintenance downtime later on the same day.

Oh well, I guess the cloud needs some regualr reboots, just like any Windows machine.

CRM Online user inteface

Like with the Outlook client installation, most things look very familiar inside the CRM Online UI. The home page does however present some new features to us.

CRM Online contains a feature called Get Started Panes, which provide contextual information at the top of the main CRM window entity screens. By default these contain categorized instructions on common tasks a user might want to perform when working with e.g. accounts or opportunities.

What’s really nice about this feature is that it provides an additional customization point where you can inject your own help menus into the Get Started pane. See the SDK for more information on how you can use the GetStartedPanePath and other variables to customize the panes through Sitemap XML. Looking forward to having something similar in the on-premises CRM, at least by the time CRM 5.0 is released, since I can think of many cases where providing company-specific process instructions right inside the CRM UI would be very practical.

Another visible new feature is of course the dashboard style charts that are presented at the CRM Online home screen. Although not too fancy in their appearance or feature set, it’s nevertheless a nice addition to the product, making basic data visualizations something that can grab the attention of the CRM end-user more easily, maybe even driving him or her to have a closer look at the actual reports menu. The charts have a few settings available for the user to customize to his liking, including record type, selected view and the type of chart.

For those users who need to rely on CRM Online as their only system for reporting on customer data, things are still not so great, as using SQL Server Reporting Services for building custom reports is not an option. Well, there are of course ways to arrange it, as outlined in this post on the Dynamics CRM Team blog recently, but exporting offline data snapshots might not sound appealing to all users.

Internet Lead Capture

One additional marketing feature not available outside CRM Online is the Internet Lead Capture menu.

Basically what Microsoft does is they offer to host landing pages or online forms that feed data to your CRM Online database. While this sounds like a nice idea, I’m not too sure how many companies would in practice be willing to utilize a hosted contact form page that exists outside their website (you can find some live pages by searching for “dynamicssite.com”). For a quick’n'dirty landing page for some specific campaign this might be an option worth considering. The editor makes creating integrated forms a fairly easy task, so playing around with the option is a fun little exercise.

I won’t go further into details, as the lead capture form has been covered with many screenshots in this blog post by MS. One thing to note is that the Internet Leads are stored into a separate entity from the regular Leads, thus allowing you to filter out spam messages before assigning the data to your sales reps. Importing data from external lists collected from other sources into the Internet Lead entity is supported through a wizard.

Mobile Express

Ok, this is not a feature limited to only CRM Online, but since I hadn’t previously had the chance to use a CRM server that could be accessed directly through the web, I wanted to test how the Mobile Express client has evolved since the days of 3.0.

What’s the verdict? Well, let’s just say that it’s “a nice try” and better than nothing, but there’s still a long and winding road for Microsoft to travel, if they intend to reach a mobile user experience that would somehow be at least close to what is delivered through the web and Outlook clients. The whole process was full of pitfalls that shouldn’t really exist: from trying to desperately log into the service with a Windows Mobile phone (HTC Touch Pro2, with Opera as the default browser), fighting with the useless default customization configurations, to the point of eventually realizing how the relational data model of CRM is only partially supported in Mobile Express. There could be some specific use cases where the mobile client would serve its purpose, but as a CRM system admin I might hesitate on promoting these to the CRM users who don’t understand the limitations.

Conclusions

The overall impression from Dynamics CRM Online is definitely a positive one. It’s not a lite version of CRM, it’s the real thing, with only a few differences and some limitations that you need to be aware of. Combining the ease of deployment with the integration possibilities gives a very interesting value proposition for the product.

During my test usage, the response times from the CRM Online server were surprisingly decent, compared to using one of our own on-premises CRM server in US through a web client from Finland. With a proper roll-out to international markets and the enhanced solution management functionality promised in CRM 5.0, I’m sure the service can become a very viable option for companies of all size.

Both Kim and Patrick stated that the pull from the customers’ side on Microsoft offering an online version of Dynamics CRM has been tremendous. Given that CRM has been designed as a pure web application since day one, it’s no wonder that especially smaller companies today would be questioning what exactly they need their own server for, since so much of the competition is using a purely hosted strategy in delivering their flavor of customer relationship management apps.

Although it may seem like Microsoft has been somewhat conservative in their efforts to roll out their CRM Online offering, this may rather be an indicator of how serious they actually are about ensuring that their cloud experience lives up to the hype. The following quote from Brad Wilson highlights the strategic importance of CRM Online to Microsoft:

“In three years, 100% of our CRM business will start with an Online experience.”

To me that prediction makes perfect sense. Gone are the days when you could sell business software armed with a website full of marketing bullets and some on-site sales presentations with selected screen shots of how the application looks like, “if you buy” or “if you commit to a PoC”. Today the rules of the game are quite simple: give me a demo account and a URL to log in. What, your application requires me to install something? Hmm, well maybe I’ll try it sometime later then.

If you can present your application through a browser, getting your foot through the door can be so much easier. This seems to be precisely what Microsoft is planning to use CRM for. Patric’s presentation included a cycle that presented the typical order in which they expect the customers to adopt cloud based services. Microsoft considers Dynamics CRM to be the most likely entry point for companies to try hosted replacements for their existing business applications. Once the customer data is in the cloud, presence (OCS) and document collaboration (SharePoint) are quick to follow into the palette. After that, having your own Exchange will start to feel outdated etc. etc.

Will this gateway theory work in reality and bring new business to Microsoft? If anything, it does at least sound like a plan where the phases are in the correct order. There would appear to be fairly little functional benefits in moving existing monolithic services like Exchange into the cloud, but going there with a customizable and extensible platform such as Dynamics CRM offers a whole lot more opportunities. As long as CRM Online manages to build an attractive ecosystem around the core product and pull in services that demonstrate the benefits of building integration in the cloud, as opposed to behind the firewalls, it has a great chance for stealing the momentum in business application development.

Will Microsoft make more money out of SaaS than it’s traditional licensing model? That may not be the right question to ask. In order to keep on makin’ money like they have, MS must first find a way to fight the new competition, just like it fought off Lotus & WordPerfect back in the days when the battle was on the C-drive. If Dynamics CRM gains more mind share as a result of this brand new warfare, so be it.

Patric ended his presentation with the following bullets on the key considerations companies should focus on when planning their investment in the cloud:

1. Know where and how cloud services fit into your company’s IT architecture. (strategic or tactical)
2. Prepare your company for the changes associated with cloud services. Prevent anarchy, just because you can sign up to anything doesn’t mean you should sign up to everything. Remember: integration still is key.
3. Attend to your identity management system. User access, security, and integration.
4. Choose the right apps. Most companies will move into the cloud gradually, so it’s a matter of deciding where to get started.
5. Select the right cloud service provider.

While many of the points may sound somewhat obvious, they are all too easy to forget at the high peak of the hype cycle that cloud computing has been riding on. Yes, the cloud will change almost everything, except the mistakes that we will repeat all over again.

On the technical side, CRM 5 will be running natively on .NET Framework 4.0, which means it will be riding on the wave of the latest .NET version released, unlike CRM 3.0 or 4.0. In the presentations there were talks about WCF (Windows Communication Foundation), .NET RIA Services, system types and all kinds of developer lingo that goes way above my head. There’s a great summary article here by Marco Amoedo.

Now, let’s move on to the CRM application itself.

Basic UI

We’ve all seen the upcoming ribbon UI in CRM5 already, so that wasn’t big news. Looking at the start page ribbon content, there’s a button called “Add connection”, which hopefully is about the creation of ad-hoc relationships between any entities, but none of that was shown in the session. Another interesting thing was the “Get started with accounts” instructions pane. That might be just a feature of CRM Online, which was used for the demo, but I sure would welcome a better way to provide customized instruction links to users right within the CRM UI.

More of the same here under the Service menu. The out-of-the-box views don’t seem to have evolved, but it would be interesting to see what’s behind that Views tab on the top. The order of the Quick Find box and the views dropdown menu was somehow messed in this early version of CRM5.

On the entity form, things look kind of familiar, even though form tabs have now been converted into sections and we only have one looooong form instead. I still have mixed feelings about this approach, but perhaps removing one navigation area requiring end user focus and consolidating that into the left hand side menu turns out to be a good compromise, now that we have a busy ribbon on top of every form. As promised earlier, there’s now a native way to present related entity grids on the form without any iFrame magic, but I still didn’t see an option for configuring or filtering the related entity view. I hope there are customization points for it.

Data visualization

Dashboards will finally be a native feature of all CRM editions, so there’s a dedicated menu for them, in addition to the reports list. The Silverlight controls in the charts allow dynamic filtering and other nice user interaction with the data, but we didn’t get to see how you actually modify or build a dashboard. The message seemed to be that these are more intended for getting the CRM users started on looking at their data, but any complex analysis should be done elsewhere. They could therefore be just another way to present the charting feature that appears on all of the entity ribbons in CRM5.

The charting tab displays a set of buttons that we didn’t see in action in the PDC sessions. Only couple of views with the Bing Maps integration were flicked through, so I assume the charts are still very much work in progress.

There was one cool demo with service requests and Bing Maps, which allowed you to merge the open cases from within a certain geographical area into one case record. Since case merging in general is a useful feature that we’ve previously had to do with custom code, I hope there would be some out-of-the-box tools in CRM5 for this (not asking for whole the map integration, you can keep that for the demos, thanks).

Customization and settings

Moving to the sysadmin side of the UI, the customizations menu now presents us with some interesting options:

• Find Customizations. Probably some link to an MS marketplace, aimed at bringing the ISV solution ecosystem closer to the CRM users. Didn’t see this one.
• Customize the System. The traditional customize menu, with a new UI (see below for more)
• Publishers. Didn’t quite catch the full concept behind this one, probably used for subscribing to cloud based services from within your on-premises CRM5.
• Solutions. The big new concept in CRM5.
• Download Web Service Description Files. Why the WSDL download is a separate menu option, remains to be seen.

If we first look at the traditional Customize The System menu, there’s a very welcome change of presenting all the entities and their related components in a tree hierarchy, instead of the popup hell that used to be found under the customization menu. Looks like an immediate productivity booster to me, but just make sure we can expand that tree frame to see the full entity names, please.

When editing an entity attribute, we see a few new things. First, there’s an option to enable the auditing feature. Apparently you first specify it on an entity level, then select which attributes to audit, so looks like it might offer some useful data for the end users (who changed the account name etc.). The second thing is the introduction of the Options Set concept. This will effectively be a way to define global picklists, which share the list of values across entities.

Solutions

The concept of solution management was introduced in the session “Managing the Solution Lifecycle for xRM Applications”, so I recommend you watch the 45 minute video here if you’re interested in the topic. In short, the ability to package the customizations, plugins, workflows and other items related to a custom solution into a single zip file and then just import that into your CRM instance should first of all lower the barrier for installing new pieces into your CRM puzzle. More importantly, the system will try to manage the coexistence of multiple solutions from multiple vendors in the customer’s customized CRM environment, which is by no means a minor little task. How well the system handles the clashes in real life remains to be seen, but at least there will now be common procedures and tools that you can rightfully expect the vendors to use.

As a result of the solution management concept, the actual “final” customizations of a CRM instance will now be a calculated Default Solution. When you click “Export”, this is produced in real time  from all the various custom and default components found from the system. Makes sense to me, but how the order and priority of conflicting customizations is managed when individual solution versions are upgraded is something that’s going to take a while to get my head around at.

Building a solution is done right from the customization UI, where you select which components belong to your solution. In this example screenshot, after adding the account entity into the solution, the system is notifying that there are a number of other required components that are missing from the solution. CRM5 looks to introduce a more complete layer of dependency management into sytem customizations. In a relationship management system where everything can be related to almost anything, this kind of a control point does sound sensible, so let’s hope that the result will be something useful for the day-to-day application mangement tasks.

Cloud Architecture

While there isn’t a “screenshot” you can take of the cloud, I thought I’d include this one slide from the “Developing xRM Solutions using Windows Azure” session (view the recording here), just to wrap things up.

Microsoft’s vision of how the Azure cloud can serve the CRM/xRM market is not limited to just subscribing to 3rd party applications from the cloud and integrating them with your on-premise CRM server. They also showed a concept where the Azure layer would act as a kind of load balancing unit between the customer facing services and the back-end CRM. The Azure Web Role would collect all the incoming transactions, hand them over to the Worker Role, which then delivers them to CRM at a rate which the server can tolerate. The whole AppFabric Service Bus (whatever the name will end up to be) is also marketed as a convenient way to talk to applications behind the corporate firewall.

All of this fits nicely with Microsoft’s idea of Software plus Service, which really has to be a viable concept for businesses, if CRM5 is to be able to compete head to head with the full SaaS CRM vendors. Most of the actual new business features for MS CRM will increasingly come from ISV’s delivering their solutions through the cloud, not in the CRM software version upgrades themselves, so Microsoft needs to make sure that CRM5 acts as a pathway to these new services, not as an obstacle.

(Edit: The new version has now been branded Microsoft Dynamics CRM 2011, as announced at the WPC 2010 on July 12th. See my blog post on the new 2011 version).

Top 7 reasons why to avoid (much) customization

• Regressions can be tricky to hunt down and fix
• Go-live schedule can be delayed if the customizations are not properly though out in advance
• Official support does not cover custom code, how do you then identify if problems in your system are covered or not?
• Upgrade to the next version will become more difficult and expensive
• Know-how only exists within your organization, so proper documentation becomes a critical factor for risk management
• Vendor lock-in is almost inevitable, which in practice means rewriting the code if the co-operation with your vendor is no longer working
• Help for the users needs to be developed and maintained in-house, since user guides and courseware can’t possibly cover your custom processes

The relative ease of developing custom solutions on top of applications like Microsoft Dynamics CRM can easily lead you to dangerous path. Just because you can quickly implement it, does not mean that it will be cheap in the long run. Unless you are able to identify these hidden costs of customization in advance, you may find yourself singing up for something that will ultimately cost you more than the potential benefit to be derived from the custom solution.

So, just because you can, does not mean you should.

“This attribute map is invalid. The selected attributes should be of the same type. The length of the target attribute should be equal to or greater than the length of the source attribute and the formats should match. The target attribute should not be used in another mapping.”

This can happen when the source customization has some default attributes mapped in a different way than what they are by default. As pointed out by Will Willson in this blog post, CRM only adds new mappings between entity attributes during the import. It will not delete any existing mappings, so you may end with the source entity having two mappings pointing to the same field in the target attribute.

If you have a hunch on what entity and which attribute might be causing the problem, the quick solution is to go and remove the existing mapping prior to importing the new customizations. If you’ve got no idea on where the conflict is, you can try enabling CRM Platform Trace, reproducing the error, then opening the resulting trace file that begins with “w3wp-MSCRMServices” and searching for the tag “FAILURE”.

(This issue is described in the confidential Microsoft KB article 921977, available through Customer Source.)

During the development project of this integration, frequent updates were made to this callout dll file and I received new versions to be deployed from the developers almost on a daily basis. After one particular update, we were surprised to notice that the callout was still writing an error messge into the custom entity, which was not supposed to be there. In fact, the whole message string no longer existed in the dll file. Where did his ghost messages appear from?

It turned out that merely stopping and starting IIS does not guarantee that the previous version of a callout would not remain in the cache. If there are any workflows associated with the entities that the callout references, these can keep the old version of the dll loaded up in memory, thus creating the “haunting” effect described.

As a lesson learned, whenever I need to update a callout dll file, I now go through the following steps:

• Stop the CRM Workflow Service (net stop mscrmworkflowservice)
• Stop IIS (iisreset /stop)
• Replace the callout dll
• Start IIS (iisreset /start)
• Start the CRM Workflow Service (net start mscrmworkflowservice)