Girish Raja's Dynamic(s) Thoughts : Microsoft Dynamics

XRMUG Presentation on Using CRM 4.0 & Windows Azure

girishr — Wed, 27 May 2009 20:48:17 GMT

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!

Business Action Virtual Tour On Demand

girishr — Wed, 06 May 2009 23:32:32 GMT

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!

CRM Incubation Week Part2 - Roundup

girishr — Wed, 06 May 2009 02:55:21 GMT

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.

Startup	Solution
FourthLink	Project Management and Resource Scheduling for Professional Services Organizations
Smart Red Pen	OnDemand educational portal for learning 2^nd Language (Spanish)
Skyline Vertical Solutions	Project Management and Cost Control for AEC Market
myStaffingCRM	HR Staffing, Recruiting and Leasing
Hippamatic	Automate Mobile Radiology including Order Entry, Dispatch, Billing and Reporting for Health Care Providers

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.

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.

Calling ISVs – Get Credit for your Indirect Customers

girishr — Mon, 19 May 2008 09:16:25 GMT

Of course it would be unfair if you don’t take credit for the work you do.

For ISVs (in the US only), improvements have been made to the indirect customer registration process in VOICE. For more information on this announcement and instructions on how to register your indirect customers, check out this article.

Indirect Customer registration process changing for US, Canada and LATAM ISVs beginning May 18th, 2008

Obviously there are quite a few benefits in keeping your list of customers up-to-date. If you’ve been to Convergence this year, you might have noticed several people wearing batches indicating that they’re members of the “President’s Club”. Wonder what it takes for you to wear one, check out the below excerpt from the article.

ISVs can achieve FY07 President’s Club by adding 53 total new customers in FY08 (combined total of direct and indirect customer adds).

BTW, I should remind myself of the first statement in this blog post!

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?

Technorati Tags: CRM,Feedback,Community

Performance for CRM - Why not Cache?

girishr — Wed, 12 Mar 2008 02:06:55 GMT

I just attended an interactive discussion at Convergence on Archiving and best practices. Though the topic was mainly on archiving, several people talked about performance especially related to the SQL database. Also many of them compared CRM with SharePoint (MOSS 2007) and sought out differences.

Though SharePoint usually has a monstrous database storing all of the documents, the performance of the product is usually great because of one great feature in SharePoint(since MOSS 2007) . Whenever a request comes in from the user, the SharePoint front-end server requests the document from database and then caches it. For repeated requests, the front-end server serves the data from the cache instead of going to the database again. This largely reduces the round trip back to SQL and decreases the page load time for the user at the same time reducing the load on the back-end SQL server.

Now thinking about CRM, many users often want to read account and contact information and I thought it'd be cool if CRM could cache the data and serve it from the front-end server. Of course as data gets updated, the cache must be refreshed and the process will get busier on a transactional system. But still, with the right pattern, the performance improvements will be much larger.

Incidentally I ran into Shan McArthur of ADXStudio yesterday and he was telling me about the CRM Developer toolkit that they're building. He says this toolkit addresses this very problem in that it'll cache the data using .NET caching and does Cache Invalidation when the data gets updated. There is a lot more in the toolkit and I can't wait to check it out.

At the end, I must say I'd love to attend every one of those interactive discussions if only we had enough room for all the people. But as I mentioned earlier, maybe it is good that they limit the number of attendees.

Convergence 2008 - The Place to be for Microsoft Dynamics

girishr — Wed, 12 Mar 2008 01:32:00 GMT

This is my first time attending the Convergence conference for Microsoft Dynamics and I must say I'm more than thrilled to be here. Plus the Orlando weather is a lot more welcoming than the rainy & cold Seattle area.

Getting back to the conference, if you are working with Microsoft Dynamics whether you're a Partner, Customer or a Microsoft employee, Convergence is THE place to be. There are over 10,000 people attending this conference (some say it is over 20,000 people!) and lots of ideas and thoughts flow around here that shouldn't be missed.

As Klaus Anderson pointed out in the executive discussion yesterday, convergence is about Learning and Networking.

Learning

There are plenty of concurrent sessions that teach you different aspects of the various dynamics products. If you want to learn more about a Dynamics product, do attend those. Also the hands-on-labs are great if you'd like to check out a product and play with it real time.

One of my favorite part is the "Interactive Discussions". I attended one that was hosted by Anne Stanton, the CRM Lady and the discussion was very thoughtful. It was on Archiving and Best Practices for MSCRM, a topic not many MSCRM practitioners address. People also talked about Performance and compared it to MOSS 2007 a lot during that session. Being a devotee of MOSS, it prompted me to think about some knowledge that MSCRM can take from SharePoint. I immediately drafted one of my ideas and wrote this blog post.

BTW. if you're attending Convergence, the discussion rooms are limited to 50 people but the upside is that discussions are very deep and engaging . Well, with thousands of people attending, you must arrive early! I twittered about it earlier and realized one another fact which I also twittered regarding a room full of attendees.

Networking

Being a corporate person, I don't get a lot of opportunity to get face-to-face with the ISV partners that I help out. The EXPO booths, where partners exhibit their solutions was my favorite hang-out to meet with a lot of Partners and learn about their solutions. You'd be amazed at the amount of expertise the partners have. Some of the solutions they had were pretty cool and I will blog about each of those as I check them out.

Finally what better tool to network than partying! There is plenty of parties to attend at Convergence and right now I am heading out to the Universal Citywalk for the Mega party and it should be a lot of fun. And oh BTW, I don't drink any kind of alcohol or atleast that's what my wife thinks ;-)

Technorati Tags: Convergence, CRM, MSCRM, Dynamics