Didjital Vibrations… To paraphrase the late, great Douglas Adams from his book Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy “ MarketingPilot ,” it says, “is big. Really big. You just won’t believe how vastly, hugely, mindbogglingly big it is. I mean, you may think it’s...

634-5789… Although I wasn’t able to be there in-person, all the sessions from this year’s Convergence conference in New Orleans were streamed live, enabling me to participate virtually. If you want to participate, you can access all the session recordings by signing up here . I...

Festival De Ritmo… A couple of months ago I saw a Windows 8 “CRM for Sales” concept demo produced by Reuben Krippner from the CRM product marketing team. Although it was just a standalone UI demo, it provided a good insight into where the CRM product engineering team were going...

Do You Hear The People Sing… Last week we announced a partnership with Moxie Software to provide deep integration between their multi-channel solutions and Microsoft Dynamics CRM. Available immediately both on-premises or in the cloud, the following Moxie products are now integrated with Microsoft...

A Little Fall Of Rain.. This issue cropped up a couple of times in the last month, so I figured it was worth a quick post to help out anyone else who might come across it. No matter what we tried, we couldn’t get CRM charts to display on any PC at a particular customer, but they would display...

Good Vibrations… Following on from my previous post Building A CRM Demo For Financial Services (Part 1) , I thought I’d spend a bit of time looking at a specific piece of functionality related to customer on-boarding. Whether it be for retail banking, wholesale banking or wealth management...

Bring Him Home… For more than 6 years I have been selling Microsoft Dynamics CRM to a wide spectrum of customers in the financial services industry, and a significant part of my pre-sales role involves building and delivering demonstrations of our software to a variety of audiences, from senior...

I Dreamed A Dream… The other day, one of my colleagues rebuilt their demo laptop with our corporate build of Windows 8 consumer preview. Taking advantage of the Hyper-V support now built into the latest version of our desktop operating system, he decided to create a brand new “All-In...

How Deep Is Your Love… Regular readers of my blog have probably noticed a distinct lack of activity over the last 6 months. The reason is very simple. The whole Microsoft UK Dynamics sales team (myself included) have been incredibly busy selling CRM into the Enterprise & Corporate market...

Boom, Shake The Room… It has been all go here in the UK CRM Enterprise Sales team, so I haven’t had any time to post regularly. Today, one of my Banking solutions partners called me for some help with one of their deals. They have an important client demo to deliver later this week, and...

Get Down On It… Although I have posted several CRM code-samples on my blog, I don’t think of myself as a particularly expressive or creative developer. Sure, I can code a plug-in in VB (and more recently C#), or knock out the occasional JScript library, but I struggle to use design patterns...

22 Acacia Avenue… For a recent client demo, I needed to build a dashboard that would identify key accounts/contacts that hadn’t been contacted recently. Although all the activity data needed is in the CRM database, it’s not easy to consume within a dashboard. For example, suppose...

Secret Messages… Following on from my previous post ( Using Plug-Ins To Modify Views ), I developed a set of plug-ins to manage security at an account level in order to satisfy the requirements for one of my corporate banking clients. The scenario was quite straightforward, in that a Client...

Let’s Get It Started… I just spotted this on the Citrix web site http://www.citrix.com/ready/partners/microsoft/products/microsoft-dynamics-crm-2011 . This posting is provided "AS IS" with no warranties, and confers no rights. Laughing Boy Chestnuts Pre-School Chain Gang

Rolling In The Deep… You may have heard that we recently released the latest version of the Customer Care Accelerator for Microsoft Dynamics CRM 2011 (CCA R2) on the Microsoft Dynamics Marketplace . CCA delivers contact centre functionality by combining, displaying, and manipulating data from...

Left Outside Alone… Following on from my previous post Outlook 2003 Client Features , I was asked about the CRM 4.0 Client for Outlook and how this works with CRM 2011 Server. As you may know, Microsoft Dynamics CRM 4.0 for Outlook with Update Rollup 7 (or later) is compatible with Microsoft...

Two Steps Behind… I’m not sure how I missed this first time around, but we have a special offer for CRM Online running at the moment. Not only do we have an introductory price of £22.75 per user, per month (available until June 31st 2011), but we also have a cashback offer for customers...

Tiger Feet… A couple of weeks ago, one of my CRM 2011 prospects asked for details about which features are/aren’t available when using older versions of desktop software. Like many large enterprises their standard desktop is based on Windows XP & Office 2003, and although they are...

I Wish… I realise it has been a while since I last posted, but I have been mega-busy working with some of the top UK financial services organisations and selling Microsoft Dynamics CRM 2011 into various divisions such as business banking, corporate banking, wealth management and investment...

Celebration… The wait is finally over. Microsoft Dynamics CRM Online is available today in 40 markets and 41 languages, for the introductory price of £22.75 per user, per month. You can sign up for your FREE 30-DAY TRIAL at http://crm.dynamics.com. Also, we are hosting a global...

Diggin’ On James Brown… Last month I posted a sample solution which demonstrated how to use some of the capabilities of CRM 2011 (such as JScript libraries, global option sets and the new client-side object model) to develop re-usable, dependent option sets (pick-lists). In that example...

Walk The Dinosaur… I just spotted that the on-premises RC (Release Candidate) has just been posted on the Microsoft Downloads web site. I shall be upgrading my Beta demo system as soon as I can. Microsoft Dynamics CRM 2011 Server Release Candidate 05.00.9688.34 http://www.microsoft.com/downloads...

Bu2b… With the introduction of Option Sets in CRM 2011 (formerly known as picklists), it is now possible to create common drop-down lists across multiple entities and forms. On a recent project I had a specific requirement to build a solution that used two related option sets. If I selected...

The Whisper… I just received a press release from Digiterre , one of our UK CRM partners, announcing they had won the best CRM provider in Buy-Side Technology magazine’s prestigious awards for leading technology providers in the investment management sector. Built on Microsoft Dynamics...

Screaming In Digital… For those of you lucky enough to have access to the Microsoft Partner Network portal, you can now access 10 new technical training courses, totalling more than 15 hours of recorded video. This training is recommended for anyone who plans to implement, use, maintain, consult...