Since the beginning of time CRM has had URL addressable forms.  This features makes it possible to consistently open an existing CRM entity form from script or from other programs simply by passing a series of mysterious URL parameters to the CRM...

There are a few places in the CRM UI where drag-drop are used.  One place where this occurs is when you resize the columns in a grid view.  Another obvious place for drag and drop is in the forms designer.  The system customizer can drag...

Microsoft Dynamics CRM Developer Portal is an excellent resource for anyone who is customizing CRM or building XRM solutions. I ran across this site a while back and frankly I had forgotten all about it.  It is worth posting again because it is such...

Microsoft CRM Guru Rich Carr has written a great article about how to Federate CRM between systems or tenants.  He is my first “guest blogger” and here is his article.   Federated or Multi-tenant Implementations – How to Sync 1 CRM system to...

XRM made the news this week thanks to Mary-Jo Foley’s article “ Microsoft takes off its xRM platform-as-a-service gloves ”.  My team wanted to put more context around XRM for our Public Sector customers.  Many customers are familiar with CRM...

On April 18th we released a new Dynamics CRM 4.0 VPC to our partners.  I love a lot about the new VPC including tons of data, dashboards, and pre-configured CRM Accelerators .  It took me several weeks to find the time to get to really work...

I noticed that last week we posted a new David Chappell whitepaper - “ Application Lifecycle Management ”.   I read all of David’s papers because I find that he has an incredible talent for clarifying and simplifying concepts in our industry...

Yesterday our team launched Public Sector on Demand .  It is an exciting new subscription-based SaaS offering with (initially) six applications ranging from public records tracking to case management and student information systems.  This is...

A new version of the CRM 4.0 SDK was released on 8/29/2008.  You can get this newest version here:  CRM 4.0.6 SDK . 

This afternoon I was playing around with the new Live Search macros. For a while I have wanted a simple way for a limited scope search against all MSCRM feeds. The Live Search team has a very cool macro capability that makes this easy. Please try out...

This arrived in my email box today: The Microsoft Dynamics CRM User Group (CRMUG) is now live at http://crmug.com . CRMUG is an association of companies sharing the common interest of optimizing their usage of Microsoft Dynamics CRM in their companies...

This is an interesting eWeek article discussing how Microsoft Dynamics Live CRM will include an on-demand marketplace for partners to showcase their company, applications, solutions, and customers. The article says that this is similar to Saleforce.com...

At WPC, Microsoft announced additional details about the upcoming CRM Live (aka Dynamics Live CRM). In case you missed it, a year ago at the 2006 WPC Steve Ballmer announced CRM Live. CRM Live is a hosted Dynamics CRM enabling organizations to purchase...

My role at Microsoft is the US Public Sector Dynamics Architect. This is a field-based technical position. I work on a sales team as the technical lead. Our team works with Federal, State, Local Government as well as K-12 and Higher-Education customers...

Wow. I am totally blown away by Biztalk Services . Simply put, it is an ESB in the cloud. This is still early CTP quality, but worth learning about. I think that this could represent the future of web services and application development. It has the potential...

This is a good whitepaper that addresses some of the challenges of interoperability within government. Interrop in this context includes delivering services to citizens and sharing services between government agencies.

On Monday I passed my last test for MCSD - 70-315 Developing and Implementing Web Applications with Microsoft Visual C# .NET and Microsoft Visual Studio .NET . These tests are almost as much about your test taking skills as they are about your knowledge...

I'm reading Fritz Onion's book - Essential ASP.NET . The book is terrific. It is probably the last ASP.NET book that I will ever buy. This book explains behind the scenes details that are not shown elsewhere. It is also well organized and well written...

I passed the 70-300 Exam - Solution Architecture. The exam is too easy. Without giving away details about the test, just trust me that it is little more than a reading comprehension test. All MCS Consultants are required to take these tests. I pulled...

WRT interoperability between data and systems, perhaps the government gets it, and we in the technology industry haven't figured it out yet? I read an interesting paper yesterday IAC Interoperability Strategy . The report was forwarded to me by one...

It has been several weeks since I have written anything in my BLOG. Since then I've had an interesting trip to NYC to visit the counter-terrorism center. During the 9-5 I've been mostly writing a marketing/vision document. All very mundane stuff. But...

The most fun that I had today was playing with the Microsoft Speech SDK v 5.1 for Windows - not to be confused with the Microsoft .NET Speech SDK Beta 2 . Of course I WAS confused for aa short while because I didn't realize at first that these are completely...

On Friday I finished my week long Developmentor Essential.NET class. I played with the WS-Security and WS-Attachements (DIME) capabilities in the WSE. Today we had VTC with Juval Lowy . Juval showed how to use object context and intercept calls to...

Here are a few useful .NET tools that I heard about this week: Lutz Roeder's Reflector Anakrino - IL to C# Decompiler Of course SysInternals has lots of great Windows tools. - Try out the debug viewer .

Today is day 4-of-5 of my Developmentor .NET Web Services Class. Dan Sullivan is teaching the class to a small group of Microsoft field developers. The course and instructor are simply awsome. I'm strangly sad that tomorrow is the last day. I've learned...