Girish Raja's Dynamic(s) Thoughts : Community

A simple definition of Windows Azure

girishr — Sat, 25 Jul 2009 02:02:22 GMT

Here is an interesting video that’s informative as well. It’s Friday evening after all , so chill out and enjoy this really nice & simple video that Steve Marx created to explain “What is Windows Azure?” with simple terms and hand drawn sketches.

Now that was a great, wasn’t it. Check out Steve Marx’s blog post that goes into much detail on how he created this video.

Maybe it’s time for me to fire up my tablet pc again. I’ll soon tell you about an interesting way in which I use my tablet pc.

Check out the Dynamics CRM Twibe

girishr — Thu, 23 Jul 2009 06:36:58 GMT

I was really surprised when my twitter account http://twitter.com/girishr had a large number of new followers over the weekend. Now I know why.

After I caught up with my RSS feeds, I realized Menno did a great job of compiling the “influential” Microsoft Dynamics CRM people on twitter. You can see the list of people in the Dynamics CRM ~~tribe~~ twibe here

http://www.tekoppele.com/Blog/post/2009/07/17/20-Microsoft-Dynamics-CRM-Twitter-Users-You-Should-Follow.aspx

Menno,

Thanks for the honor. You’re now the official keeper of “List of twitter addicts in the CRM community”!

Time to get back to CRM evangelism, 140 characters at a time!

Videos from first CRM Incubation Week

girishr — Sat, 28 Mar 2009 02:57:29 GMT

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 – Interview with Kirill Tatarinov

girishr — Tue, 24 Mar 2009 22:04:04 GMT

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.

CRM Incubation Week – The Sequel

girishr — Mon, 23 Mar 2009 22:04:56 GMT

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 :-)

CRM Incubation Week – Roundup

girishr — Sun, 28 Dec 2008 14:22:41 GMT

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.”

CRM Platform Incubation Week

girishr — Tue, 18 Nov 2008 22:57:00 GMT

Wouldn’t it be great to build a functional business application in a week’s time. That is exactly what my colleague and good friend Sanjay Jain is aspiring for startups and students to do.

The 1st CRM Incubation Week is being held at Microsoft Technology Center, Reston, VA from Mon 12/15/2008 to Fri 12/19/2008. This event consists of ½ day of training, 3 ½ days of active prototype/development time, and a final day for packaging/finishing and reporting out to a panel of judges for various prizes.

This will give you chance to pitch your ideas in front of VC panelists and get valuable feedback.The event is free of charge and if you and your buddies wish to participate and create an application based on the CRM platform in a week’s time, please contact Sanjay Jain and let him know you’re interested.

Connecting Silverlight to Dynamics CRM

girishr — Wed, 03 Sep 2008 12:33:26 GMT

As I promised in the channel9 video on CRM & Silverlight, I'm posting the sample code with a slight (3 weeks!) delay. Sorry folks.

For information on Microsoft Silverlight and its development, please view the Get Started page.

There are a variety of ways you can connect a Silverlight client to CRM. In the below example we're using a proxy approach by having a WCF service sitting in between Silverlight control and CRM web services.

1. Download the code

2. Download the public VPC and the below differencing disk containing the deployed solution.

Note: This source code and VPC is provided "as is" and without any warranties or support from Microsoft.

Creating a Silverlight control for CRM

3. Download the video

If you have any questions or comments, please feel free to leave me a comment on this blog or contact me through the Email/Contact form.

Happy coding!

CRMUG Session: Building Complex Business Applications

girishr — Wed, 03 Sep 2008 06:00:22 GMT

This Thursday, I'm co-presenting a session with Reuben Krippner titled "Using the CRM Platform for Building Complex Business Applications". The session will be held as a CRM User Group workshop.

Date: Thursday 9/4/2008, from 12:30PM- 2:00PM EDT

Psst, I'll show some pieces of the demo from the "Dynamics Duo" videos and will be available for any questions you might have.

The event details and link to register are available here. Below is an excerpt from the description.

Are you leveraging the integration of Dynamics CRM with the Microsoft Stack? Microsoft Dynamics CRM is a robust platform that can be used to build different line of business applications besides the out of box functionality of sales, service and marketing. We’ll look at how one such business application could be built and how it can provide a seamless user experience by integrating with various technologies like WPF, Silverlight, SharePoint, and the Office Business Applications.

Please join us as we reveal the hidden power of a robust, integrated solution for your business!

A book on CRM Platform Development

girishr — Wed, 27 Aug 2008 08:38:12 GMT

I just got an autographed copy of the xRM Developer book that David Yack has published. I must say that this is a great resource for Developers and David has packed every ounce of his CRM knowledge into this book.

After you get the book, don't just read the book. If you glance through the pages you'll realize that this is a Developer book with plenty of code snippets. So get the jumpstart framework and code samples from the book website, sit in front of Visual Studio and work with the samples.

I'm sure David would have loved to embed video into many places within the book but unfortunately publishing technology hasn't caught up yet! For that lone reason, it is worth checking out the screencast videos that David is creating for out of the book experiences.

MVP tips within the book are equally valuable. Also remember to follow the blogs of the MVPs to get more tips and tricks.

I'm planning to read from cover to cover and I'd suggest the same for any developer aspiring to work on CRM. I only wish I had the time to do that right away :-)

Many thanks to Dave and Julie for bringing this book to the community.

WPC Wrap up

girishr — Mon, 21 Jul 2008 13:40:02 GMT

WPC was indeed Texas-sized this year with over 10,000 people in attendance and 4 days of packed action. Needless to say, I'm yet to fully recover from all that happened in Houston :-)

Software+Services and CRM both were heard all across the conference. Even though wall street doesn't very much agree on Microsoft's online investments, like Ina Fried, the attendees of WPC knew Microsoft's huge potential in this market. Of course Microsoft will continue to invest in its on-premise software and server applications as well.

On-demand software will be hot in markets like US and Europe. However partners from the Middle East and Asia seem to disagree. After talking to them, I realized that infrastructure improvements still needs to happen in many places around the world. At the same time, industries with enough wealth and resources don't want to cut corners by moving to on-demand software. No wonder making CRM 4.0 available both on-premise and on-demand resonates well with our customers.

By the way, don't worry if you missed the action at WPC. You can always watch the major keynotes and breakouts from WPC on demand at http://www.microsoft.com/digitalwpc/.

Pre-conference day at WPC 2008

girishr — Tue, 08 Jul 2008 19:14:37 GMT

Monday was the pre-conference day at Microsoft and we had a blast at the ISV track. Judging by previous experience at conferences, I was prepared by wearing sneakers and rolling laptop case to make that 5-mile walk across the conference center from session to session. This year the WPC organizers have that through this and made all of the ISV sessions in the same room and most of the other session I wanted to attend were pretty nearby. Nice!

Eric Weis, a program manager for the Metro program hosted a great session for ISVs titled "Making the Decision to Adopt the Latest Microsoft Technologies" to clear the myths and doubts on early adoption of Microsoft software. BTW, if you are not aware of the Metro program, it is Microsoft's structured program around early adoption of our technologies run by the Developer and Platform Evangelism (DPE) group. In this session, one of our very own CRM partners RDT was showcased. Mark Bates, CEO of RDT spoke clearly about the good, bad and ugly of early adoption.

The next session was by Eddie Amos, the GM talking about the Software+Services. The surprise of the day was the final session on how learnings from gaming software could be applied to enhance business applications. Entellium showed how you could build a WPF application that acts as a smart client and provide amazing User eXperience such that the users will love what they're doing. Working on the CRM demo where we did WPF and Silverlight samples for CRM Online, I was totally able to relate to that. If we could collaborate with our friends and intuitively play the games, why not our business applications!

Developer Ramp up Kit for Dynamics CRM 4.0

girishr — Mon, 07 Jul 2008 09:19:45 GMT

Many of our ISV partners might be familiar with the DPE Metro (formerly Ascend) early adopter training content that we used to ramp-up the partners on CRM 4.0 platform(code named "Titan"). We're now happy to announce that the materials are now updated and being released to the entire development community as Developer Ramp up Kit for Dynamics CRM 4.0. Any .NET based developer can use this kit to easily ramp up on the CRM platform and start building line of business applications well within a week's time.

The kit is available at the MSDN development center here http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/cc720132.aspx

The kit includes

Presentation slides and videos: Twelve modules covering the different extensible aspects of the platform.
Hands on Labs: To assist in hands-on learning of each module. Lab manuals along with completed source code are included. Note that we have three different packages, one for each deployment model namely on-premise, partner hosted and CRM Online.
VPC environment: For practicing the on-premise labs.

No prior Knowledge of Microsoft CRM is required. Familiarity with the .NET Framework, Microsoft Visual C#, Jscript, Microsoft SQL Server and general web development is recommended.

The content has come a long way since its inception and has been refined and well tested in the field. Going back to 2006 with CTP2 build of Titan, revised completely for CTP3, the materials were delivered in-person to several of our ISV developers world-wide. Earlier this year, it was forked off and we created materials for the Software+Services scenarios focusing on CRM Online and Partner Hosted CRM.

We've listened to your feedback and the ramp up kit now unifies all of this into one single package that we hope will be a useful resource for our developer community. Many thanks to all those involved that helped in shaping up the content and releasing it. You know who you're!

Please let me know via comments or email if you have any questions or need any further information.

New Way to Submit Product Suggestions

girishr — Mon, 21 Apr 2008 23:31:20 GMT

Do you ever feel that you want to make a direct impact on the next version of the Dynamics Product?

Being a Dynamics partner myself a few years ago, I’ve always wondered about an easy way to submit my thoughts directly to the product planning team.

For all those Dynamics Partners and Customers out there, here is how you can do it in less than 5 minutes from the comfort of your desk/couch.

First time users, become a member of the Microsoft Dynamics Product Suggestion program within Microsoft Connect by signing in with a free Windows Live ID.

Already a member? Click here and first search to see whether another community member has already entered a similar suggestion. If a similar suggestion already exists, simply use the voting mechanism in Microsoft Connect.

If you have established that no similar suggestion has been submitted, click the “Create New” button and type in your suggestion along with the other relevant product and company information and click Submit. It’s that simple.

Few things about this approach makes it my absolute favorite.

It is build on the MS Connect so I’m very confident in entering my data and I can see this right next to the other programs that I’m part of.
You can Rate/Validate an existing issue so that the product planning team takes a good look at it.
You can submit your suggestions either publicly or in private. This lets me post some of the intricate details of my problem which I can’t do in a public newsgroup.

So what are you waiting for?

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