Ben and I took some time to chat about this really neat demo that shows how you can combine the Microsoft Web Platform with Dynamics CRM to quickly build and deploy self-service solutions.  This is a 5-part “Dynamics Duo” video series and you can view the full set of videos below and also be sure read more about them on Ben’s blog .

I’m sure many of you will remember the “conference” demo that we showed in the Business Action Virtual Tour and also from the demo that Ben did in Convergence keynote last year.

Recently Ben and I had the opportunity to sit down in B20 and chat about the demo in much detailed fashion. We figured that we might as well turn on the camera so that you all can watch it as well and perhaps maybe learn a thing or two about CRM & Cloud platform from Microsoft!

Cross-posting from Ben’s blog. Enjoy!

Dynamics Duo Rides again

The CRM VPC available on download.microsoft.com has been a wonderful resource for not just demos but development as well. I’m sure many developers are using it for building their prototypes and in some cases active product development.

Note that the CRM VPC on MS downloads will expire tomorrow (June 11th 2009).

Make sure you download the new CRM 4.0 VPC from the PartnerSource link below:

Microsoft Dynamics CRM 4.0 Virtual PC Image (April 2009)

We are also working on modifying the CRM Developer Rampup Kit to be based on the new VPC. The new content will go live within a few weeks.

Phillip Haase has worked hard in building this VPC and has put together a nice article about this VPC on the CRM blog.

How do I know when my VPC expires?

Many have asked me how to find out the expiry of the variety of VPCs they have in hand. To find this out, simply type winver in command line or “Run” prompt within the VPC and it’ll tell you when the VPC expires.

Now try this on the new CRM VPC. As you can see the new CRM VPC also has an expiry date.

I know this can be frustrating for some of you but I wanted to explain why we keep doing this over and over again. We (as Microsoft employees) have legal obligations to release only time-limited or evaluation copies of software when we release them as a public VPC. That said, we definitely want to make things easier for you to begin your development or show a demo. Please let us know if you have any specific feedback or suggestions.

Tomorrow Shan McArthur, Ben Riga and I are presenting a webcast for XRM virtual user group. It is a basic 100-level session with some interesting demos on using CRM 4.0 and Windows Azure in the context of self service portals.

When: May 28, 2009 (Thu) 9:00 AM to 10:30 AM (PST)

Self-Service Sites: Proactive and Effective

More than ever applications built for the web connect customers (or partners, employees, or citizens) directly to systems running behind the firewall. Whether for informational or transactional solutions like customer portals or loyalty program sites, it is imperative that information gathered is acted upon as soon as possible while keeping costs way down. In this session we’ll explore how building on the XRM platform and taking advantage of Windows Azure, Live Services, and SQL Data Services provide a great platform for building proactive self-service web sites that effectively manage the end-user experience.

You can find more details about this event at http://www.xrmvirtual.com/events/self-service-sites. If you wish to attend this session, please sign up for free at XrmVirtual.com and also check out a number of upcoming presentations in the events section.

See you tomorrow in the webcast and come prepared with your questions!

Today, I had a simple question. Are the customizations schema (the exported .xml file) compatible across different update CRM 4.0 update rollups? Meaning, if I export a set of customizations (.xml) from a server that has UR2 (Update Rollup 2) installed, can I import that on a server having UR4? And how about the other way around?

Turns out that update rollup 2 and beyond are actually compatible with regards to customizations schema. Note that the only exception to this is UR1.

This KB article has lot more details about this: http://support.microsoft.com/kb/968176. Below is an excerpt from the KB article.

Notes about exporting and importing customizations

• The server from which you are exporting the customizations has no updates installed or has Update Rollup 1 for Microsoft Dynamics CRM 4.0 installed. However, the server to which you are importing the customizations has Update Rollup 4 for Microsoft Dynamics CRM 4.0 installed.
• The server from which you are exporting the customizations has Update Rollup 4 for Microsoft Dynamics CRM 4.0 installed. However, the server to which you are importing the customizations has no updates installed or has Update Rollup 1 for Microsoft Dynamics CRM 4.0 installed.

Last week I had the opportunity to present four webcasts as part of the Business Action Virtual Tour (BAVT) wherein we discussed about building line of business applications using the CRM (XRM) platform and how you can extend it to create compelling experiences (using WPF & Silverlight), reuse familiar skills (using Office Platform) and how to provide the power of choice to your customers (using Azure platform).

If you missed any of these events, don’t worry; we recorded all of them and have it available for you free of cost. Ben Riga was handling the Q&A during the session and has also posted a nice summary of the Q&A as part of his blog post. I’d encourage you to view the high fidelity version of the Live Meeting replay.

1- XRM, the Line of Business Application Framework

2- Compelling experiences (WPF & Silverlight)

3- Familiar Skills (Office, SharePoint & UC)

4- The power of choice (Azure Services Platform)

So set aside just four hours of your time, get the projector, crank up the volume and gather all your colleagues around . It’s show time!

The second CRM Incubation Week was another great success with 5 innovative XRM solutions built during the week.

During the week, I advised SmartRedPen from the Boston area that is working on a solution for second language teachers. Though it sounds like a simple solution, Jennifer and Bolivar from SmartRedPen explained to me the intricacies involved and how huge the market potential for their solution is.

What is most interesting to me about the XRM platform is the grassroots innovation it brings about. All that SmartRedPen did to begin with is pick up David Yack’s XRM book and download the CRM VPC to get started in building a business application on the XRM platform. They didn’t have to go through lots of training or complex processes to start building their application!

Luckily for them, we found several Microsoft platforms built on XRM, WPF and Silverlight that gave them a head start for their solution. Couple of interesting ones we discovered during the week include

Microsoft Semblio – A .NET based educational toolkit allowing you to create rich, immersive multimedia learning material.

SCE Starter Kit – Remember the amazing New York Times Reader built on WPF? Now what if you had the source code to that application platform? That’s exactly what SCE starter kit is. It includes the SDK to build great reading (& multimedia) experience in your application. A recommended download for all .NET & WPF developers. BTW, NYTimes Reader has a free edition, so that’s a recommended download for everyone!

Below are the companies that participated in the Incubation Week and built a functional solution in a week’s time.

So if you are a developer working in a startup or wish to join/create a new startup, I strongly encourage you to checkout XRM platform to quickly build and deploy your business application/solution. Also check out the Bizspark program that offers tons of software and resources for startup companies.

Sanjay Jain has detailed blog coverage of the entire event here: http://blogs.msdn.com/sanjayjain/archive/tags/Incubation+Week/default.aspx

Please feel free to leave a comment or use the email form to send us any questions you have or if you wish to participate in a future CRM Incubation Week.

The recent announcement that SharePoint Designer (SPD) will be offered for free makes me very excited. Being a SharePoint consultant not long ago, I can truly appreciate how the free SPD & WSS will revolutionize the content management space. When the announcement came out that this change was effective from April 1st, I had every reason to suspect the legitimacy of it but looks like it was all real!

SPD allows you to build a variety of things starting from designing simple websites (remember FrontPage!) to wonderful dashboards that revolutionize enterprise solutions.

While working on the “Dynamicss Duo” CRM 4.0 demo, we made heavy use of SPD and the results truly speak to the power this tool has.

In the above screenshot, one can see a heavily customized SharePoint page Iframed into CRM. Using SPD we built this Intranet style dashboard pages with connected webparts and also using a set of pre-built 3rd party webparts.

If you had seen the CRM demo that was shown at the Day1 Keynote of PDC2008, you can see the below attractive customer portal that doesn’t look anything like SharePoint but it actually runs on SharePoint Online and was built using SPD.

SPD allows customizing such SaaS SharePoint extranet sites even when you don’t have physical access to the server.  In the above screenshot, the gauge display is actually a Silverlight control running in SharePoint, and the webpart to the right is called a dataview webpart that connects to CRM web services. Dataview webparts are a very powerful feature of SharePoint as you can easily build data bound webparts and SPD allows you to build it without writing any code.

This is just a tip of the iceberg and developers are free to deliver a variety of custom portal solutions, extranets, intranets, internet-facing sites, collaboration solutions, social networking sites, and internal applications on top of the extensive capabilities of SharePoint. Integrating these with Dynamics CRM makes it even more compelling and presents a good business opportunity for providing value-added solutions to your customers.

Seems like WPC08 was just a few weeks ago but WPC09 is already upon us. This year WPC is at New Orleans from July 13th through 16th.

Every year, top Microsoft partners are recognized and honored with “WPC Awards”. There are several categories of awards includes the coveted awards

• ISV/Software Solutions Partner of the Year
• ISV/Software Solutions Innovation Partner of the Year
• Microsoft Dynamics CRM Partner of the Year

Partners can nominate their solution/company for these awards and do so immediately as the nomination ends April 9, 2009 at 11:59pm Pacific Time.

If you don’t know what WPC is, it is a partner event that provides a fantastic opportunity to connect with Microsoft folks and other ISVs or Partners just like you.

I also noticed that registration for WPC 09 is now open and you can register here: https://partner.microsoft.com/global/trainingevents/wwpartnerconference 

These days unborn babies and even plants start to socialize early enough through social networking sites! So check out the below links to “socialize” during WPC this year :-)

http://twitter.com/wpc09

http://www.facebook.com/pages/WPC09-July-13-16-2009-New-Orleans/50554356818

In a series of world-wide events called Business Action World Tour, we’re showcasing how Independent Software Vendors (ISVs) can build serious line of business applications without a lot of effort. To add to that, if you could create a rich & compelling UI (with WPF & Silverlight), make it familiar to your users (with Office system), and give a choice of on-site or cloud deployment to the customer (with Azure Services), wouldn’t that be a wonderful opportunity for more business.

If you think so, all you need to do is spend half a day at one of our free “discover” events. The next upcoming one in the US is on May 4th at Chicago and we have another one coming up in Silicon Valley on May 6th.

For more information about the event and links to register, check out John O'Donnell blog article below.

http://blogs.msdn.com/jodonnell/archive/2009/04/01/discover-a-new-way-to-build-line-of-business-applications-at-chicago-may-4th-and-mountain-view-ca-may-6th.aspx

Recently Nikhil Hasija pointed me to the videos that were recorded during the 1st CRM Incubation Week. 

DubMeNow: A very cool contact management mobile solution that integrates with Dynamics CRM. I was their advisor during the week and very impressed with them. A very professional startup company.

Highland Martin: A customizable portal solution sitting on top of CRM with some cool Silverlight work. 

Channel Blade: An online solution for the Marine (Boating) industry.

Prime Time Software Solutions: Sales methodology solution targeted towards the media industry. They have  vast industry experience and I was surprised by their fantastic progress with limited technology background.

Support4U: A social collaboration solution that tightly integrates with CRM and produces excellent analytics around documents. A good example showing how Silverlight can light up the UI.

The next CRM Incubation week (Part2) is coming up shortly and I’m betting it’ll be even more fun and productive for the participating companies.

Partner Channel magazine recently interviewed Kirill Tatarinov, the Corporate Vice President of Microsoft Business Solutions. For those who don’t know Kirill, he is the in charge of the entire ERP and CRM business for Microsoft.

If you’ve been to Convergence in New Orleans a couple of weeks ago, chances are that you might have read this interview in hard copy.

If not, check out the online version below to get a good idea of what this Convergence was all about and most importantly about Microsoft’s commitment to Partners. Also don’t forget to checkout the nice caricature of Kirill!

http://thepartnerchannel.com/wp-content/uploads/pgs_41-60_tpc_spring_09_online.pdf The interview is on Page 52.

Every blockbuster in this world has to have a Sequel coming up. The mega hit CRM Incubation week is no different either :-) That’s right, 2nd CRM Incubation Week is coming up soon and will be starring your favorite CRM stars.

The 2^nd CRM Incubation Week will be held at Microsoft Technology Center, Boston, MA from Mon 4/20/2009 to Fri 4/24/2009. There’ll be half a day of CRM training, three and half days of active prototype/development time, and a final day for polishing your solution and presenting to a panel of judges for various prizes.

If you’re part of a startup company and would like to participate in this, please submit your nominations to Sanjay Jain. You can find more details about submitting your nominations here: http://blogs.msdn.com/sanjayjain/archive/2009/02/25/startups-announcing-2nd-microsoft-dynamics-crm-incubation-week.aspx. If you’re nominated, all you have to do is just show up with your brightest minds.

The show is on us and we’ll even get you the popcorn and soda for free :-)

It is not usual to see pouring rain in Virginia and heavy snow fall in Seattle at the same time. The CRM incubation week happened during this same time and like the weather, the event was definitely extraordinary.

As I blogged earlier, the CRM Incubation Week was conducted on a very simple idea. The idea of startups using Microsoft Dynamics CRM as a Rapid Application Development Platform for building business applications.

Five startups were chosen from over 50 applicants. There were given a short training on the CRM platform and from there on, the teams worked feverishly for the next four days and nights putting their solution together. The focus was not just the technology but we had lunch presentations on business aspects like how startups can pitch their ideas and how they can validate their business model, etc. This is very critical for startups as it is not just good enough to have a great idea but you need to be able to convince others and gain the backing to make your ideas successful.

Each startup team was assigned an advisor and I was honored to be advising DubMeNow who had an  innovate mobile based solution for business cards.

The advisors were not all from Microsoft. Jim Steger from Sonoma Partners and Dan Blake from CourseMax sacrificed their revenue generating hours and volunteered to be advisors to help the community. Their presence clearly thrilled the startups. We gave 3 CRM development books to every team and Jim co-authored 2 of the 3 books. When you have a question while reading a book, walking next door and clarifying it directly with the author is not something you get everyday and when you can do that at 1AM in the morning, that is when startups realized that Incubation week is special. Dan Blake was in the same situation as every other team couple of years ago when he started CourseMax. Dan’s insights and experience as a startup was sought by every team.

You can see me twittering different activities of the week here http://tinyurl.com/9q7g8u but with the amount of white boarding and development we were doing, you can imagine why we hardly had time to even go out for dinner. Nevertheless, with Xbox 360 console and the nice food arranged by MTC, we had plenty of fun.

Day 5 was  the climax with all teams presenting their solution to a panel of Venture Capitalists (VCs), Angel Investors and CRM experts such as Paul Greenberg who also happens to the CRM blogger for ZDNET.

I can keep going for another 3 pages of content but I’d rather point you to Sanjay’s excellent blog coverage of the event. On closing, I’d like to quote Paul Greenberg on his thoughts about the CRM Incubation Week.

“I have to hand it to Microsoft here. This kind of program not only encourages and supports emerging businesses - small and new or even established and moving in other directions - but also showcases their platform in a good way. As a far better development tool than I thought it was.”

Reuben decided to take control of things on this channel9 video as we discuss about the Analytics accelerator. <Alert> We recorded this video really early in the development cycle for this accelerator. There are far more cool capabilities and reports in the final version of this accelerator than what we see in this video. </Alert>

CRM Accelerators: Analytics

The analytics accelerator provides a set of Performance Dashboards and Key Performance Indicators (KPIs) for analyzing the data residing within the CRM platform. It utilizes SQL Server Analysis Services (SSAS) for creating OLAP cubes. SSAS is also used here for creating predictive analysis with some fully functional samples. The analytics accelerator will work with SQL Server 2005 with some components enhanced to take advantage of SQL Server 2008.

Check out more Channel9 videos on CRM Accelerators here and please visit http://www.codeplex.com/crmaccelerators to download the accelerators.

Happy coding!