Can you feel the love tonight... I just saw Menno's post and he's feeling sore because few people (myself included) have given him credit for all the hard work he has put in to build the CRM 3.0 and CRM 4.0 CTP3 demo images that we all know and love. I just want to correct this injustice by saying...

The Analog Kid... I just had a question posted via the contact form on my blog from Chitrarasan Durai, who works at one of our partners. Unfortunately, I don't usually have the luxury of being able to spend time working on complex problems, so I thought I throw the question open to the readers of...

Keep Yourself Alive... I just heard that my good friends Iain McDonald (CRM Technical Lead) and Jibran Ali (CRM Support Specialist) from our Global Technical Support (GTSC) group will be attending the Convergence 2007 conference in Copenhagen next week. They are going to be manning the CRM technical...

La Villa Strangiato... You may remember Craig Steere's post on a real-world service scheduling opportunity we were working on last year - Craig Steere's Guest Spot: Microsoft CRM Real World Service Scheduling . Well, we actually sold a very large Microsoft CRM deal on the basis of this functionality...

Return Of The Son Of Shoogagoogagunga... OK, so it looks like the cat is out of the bag - the product formerly known as "Titan" is now officially called "Microsoft Dynamics CRM 4.0". In light of this monumental piece of news, we have organised a launch day for Microsoft CRM partners here at our UK...

Shine A Little Love... I get into regular discussion with partners and clients about what we doing with Microsoft CRM internally within Microsoft to manage our sales, marketing and customer service processes. I know at a high-level we embarked on an enterprise-wide, Siebel-replacement strategy over...

Cabo Wabo... After hitting the submit button on my previous post, I just read an e-mail from Ian Crow one of my Microsoft Consulting Services (MCS) colleagues pointing to the list of UK Standard Industrial Classification (SIC 03) Codes available from the Companies House website here . Once again...

Zoot Allures... I recently came across a web-site that provided a free database containing a list of virtually every town in the UK and Ireland, along with the associated county and country - that's a total of 48,421 towns across 127 counties in 5 countries (England, Scotland, Wales, Northern Ireland...

La Donna E Mobile... Last week I got into a discussion with one of our partners about one of their clients who were running Microsoft CRM on VMware ESX Server 3 in their development and test environments. They were experiencing some performance issues in one of their environments but not the other...

Return Of The Mack... Firstly let me appologise for my four month absence, I do have some good reasons including the arrival of a new baby in the Hutson household in May, the inevitable Microsoft end-of-year frantic sales push in June as well as the Microsoft conference season in July/August. Firstly...

Death On Two Legs... If you are looking for a complete list of bloggers for Microsoft CRM, then look no further than Ronald Lemmen 's post here . This posting is provided "AS IS" with no warranties, and confers no rights. Laughing Boy

Get It On... A couple of months ago the CRM product team started work on a new 84-page CRM booklet which fills the gap between the between the product datasheets (available for download here ) and books such as " Microsoft CRM for Dummies " and " Working with Microsoft Dynamics CRM 3.0 ". The good...

Back Street Symphony... As a rule I don't go in for badmouthing other software companies, especially those with whom we compete with in the CRM market, but I just came across Mike Schinkel's blog at http://www.thoughtsonsalesforce.com . Mike seems to be a smart guy with a lot of experience in the...

Know Your Enemy... I just finished watching Steve Ballmer's keynote speech from Convergence 2007, and saw Brad Wilson (Microsoft CRM General Manager) demo an early version of CRM Live. As you may already know CRM Live is a hosted version of the next release of Microsoft CRM (codename Titan), and will...

In Between Days... I was just working through my backlog of e-mail today, when I can across an announcement from Vlatko on the CRM product team. We have just released a beta version of a MOM management pack specifically for Microsoft CRM 3.0 and the product team is looking for partner and customer...

You're All I Have... Ever since the release of CRM 3.0 back in December 2005, the UK Microsoft Dynamics team has worked regularly with many of our CRM partners to help them become more effective at selling the value of Microsoft CRM. Invariably, the conversation always ends up with the same question...

Exodus... We recently announced that we are previewing the next major release of Microsoft Dynamics CRM (code-named “Titan”) with a broad range of Microsoft partners through our Community Technology Preview (CTP) Programme here . Well, I now have more details about the programme, as well as how to...

Jenny Was A Friend Of Mine... Good news always travels fast, and as many of my fellow CRM bloggers have reported the CRM 3.0 Outlook Client Refresh (affectionately known internally as V3C) has been released to the web, and you can download it here . The main focus of this release was to provide...

Pink Bubbles Go Ape... As you have probably read here on the CRM product team blog, a refresh of CRM 3.0 has been released to support installation on SBS 2003 R2. The main driver for this was to accomodate SQL Server 2005 Workgroup Edition, which replaced SQL Server 2000 Standard Edition from the...

Whole Lotta Love... There appears to be very little information about the capabilities of Microsoft CRM service scheduling, and as a result there may be some customer opportunities slipping by that we are actually very well positioned to solve. After spending the last 2 weeks getting to know some...

Knowing Me, Knowing You... I just finished watching a great webcast on Channel9 (the Microsoft community site for developers) covering Knowledge Network, a new add-on for the up-coming release of SharePoint Server 2007. Knowledge Network automates the discovery and sharing of knowledge and relationships...

I Bet You Look Good On The Dance Floor... Back in May, I wrote that our sustained engineering (SE) team would be testing the Outlook client with Windows Vista & Office 2007, fixing any issues that were identified and releasing a refresh of the Outlook client (you can find the posting here ). Although...

Surfing Down The Avalanche... By way of follow up to my December 2005 post Microsoft CRM 1.x Support Lifecycle , I thought it would be prudent to post a link to the information for CRM 3.0: Microsoft Dynamics CRM 3.0 Support Lifecycle If you want to find the support lifecycle for any Microsoft...

Junior's Gone Wild... Every so often a I get a question regarding CRM support for SQL Server named instances. With Microsoft SQL Server 2000 and 2005, you have the option of installing multiple copies, or instances of SQL Server on one computer. When setting up a new installation of SQL Server or...

The Long and Winding Road... I just can't believe it's been 2 months since I last posted an entry. My excuse, well first of all June was our financial year end, so it was all hands on deck trying to bring in those last few CRM deals. Next it was silly season with everyone taking their well-earned...