David McDonald's Dynamics Blog : Dynamics CRM

Search CRM Blogs with Microsoft Live Search

blogx — Tue, 18 Sep 2007 01:11:46 GMT

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 my Dynamics CRM Blog Search page - if you are a Dynamics CRM geek like me then I think that you will want to bookmark this and use it frequently.

It uses a new macro feature of Live Search to scope your search down to only MSCRM blogs. It is especially cool that you can add this search to your browser search box.

And if you don't like mine, you can create your own! If you create your own MSCRM macro, please comment on this post to share it with me and the rest of the community.

Dynamics Live CRM AppExchange

blogx — Fri, 13 Jul 2007 15:51:00 GMT

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's AppExchange.

The concept of an on-demand environment for customers to shop for solutions is fantastic. In my experience many customers do not want just simple vanilla CRM. They have specific customization needs - either vertical requirements (ex. real estate, 311 case management, etc.) and horizontal requirements (marketing analytics, event management, etc.). This marketplace will enable a customer to shop and buy functionality a la carte.

If it catches on it may spawn a new developer industry. For a good example see this article in Redmond Developer also published today. The first Facebook developer conference was held recently with over 750 developers in attendance! Facebook is taking off in large part because of the many creative applications that it's partners have developed for it's site.

Dynamics in Government

blogx — Thu, 28 Jun 2007 04:58:49 GMT

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. We focus specifically on Microsoft's Dynamics products.

I am a 13 year Microsoft veteran with a developer background. Two years ago I switched into this role. For me the attraction is that Dynamics as a huge new market opportunity for Microsoft. We have invested billions in these products. In many ways I enjoy being the underdog. Microsoft is the underdog against some of the more established tier one ERP vendors like SAP and Oracle. Siebel and Salesforce.com are also established competitors in the CRM space. Being the underdog reminds me of my experiences in the early and mid 90s as a softie. I can remember when SQL Server, Windows Server, MS Mail and other products were not ready for the enterprise. But the company continued to invest and work at it and now nobody disputes that Microsoft is an enterprise company. The Dynamics products are maturing rapidly and are already enterprise ready. The product teams listen closely to those of us in the field because everyone understands that we need to rapidly evolve these products to meet customer needs.

July 1 is the beginning of our new fiscal year. One of my New Years resolutions is to blog more. I plan to write about our solutions and success with Dynamics CRM as a development platform. Check back here over the coming weeks and months. I will share my thoughts and experiences with Dynamics CRM.