A CRM Riff

A friend of mine pointed out this fine article from the WindowsITPro.com site. I thought I'd share it with my CRM blog posse.

Don’t Shoot the Application

When troubleshooting an application error, you might need to look beyond the application to pinpoint the problem.

Most of us have heard the expression, “Don’t shoot the messenger” or “Don’t shoot, I’m only the piano player.” That’s still a good admonition when it comes to modern applications that we deal with. Often those ugly errors that we see from application are like a “damsel in distress” calling for help as the freight train speeds toward her.

Read more...

I work with friends and family computers. Actually I am their go-to guy and I have learned a lot by trying to help them. Whether it is hardware or software, the matrix of all the parts comes into play for any problem. So many times, it isn't the part or program that is having the problem that is causing the problem.

Anyone else drooling over the Miles Davis "50th Anniversary Kind of Blues" collection due in at the end of the month?

This happy list contains links to the Microsoft Dynamics CRM 4.0 product documentation, books, and training resources.

Product Documentation

· Microsoft Dynamics CRM 4.0 Implementation Guide http://www.microsoft.com/downloads/details.aspx?familyid=1CEB5E01-DE9F-48C0-8CE2-51633EBF4714&displaylang=en

· Microsoft Dynamics CRM 4.0 Server Readme http://www.microsoft.com/downloads/details.aspx?familyid=1DB2D16D-7885-4561-A461-20B948913B3F&displaylang=en

· Microsoft Dynamics CRM 4.0 E-mail Router Readme (On-Premise and Microsoft Dynamics CRM 4.0 Service Provider Editions) http://www.microsoft.com/downloads/details.aspx?FamilyId=C54B428B-3565-4037-B4F3-C553F3288C45&displaylang=en

· Microsoft Dynamics CRM 4.0 Software Development Kit http://www.microsoft.com/downloads/details.aspx?familyid=82E632A7-FAF9-41E0-8EC1-A2662AAE9DFB&displaylang=en

· Microsoft Dynamics CRM 4.0 Logical Database Diagrams http://www.microsoft.com/downloads/details.aspx?familyid=B73912E8-861E-43AE-97B4-72B3E809F287&displaylang=en

· Developing ISV Applications using Microsoft Dynamics CRM 4.0 http://www.microsoft.com/downloads/details.aspx?familyid=1217EFFF-BE8F-4AC8-8E32-AF367305FBA9&displaylang=en

· Microsoft Dynamics CRM Developer Center http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/dynamics/crm/default.aspx

Books

· Microsoft Dynamics® CRM 4.0 Step by Step http://www.microsoft.com/MSPress/books/12643.aspx

· Working with Microsoft Dynamics™ CRM 4.0, Second Edition http://www.microsoft.com/mspress/books/10598.aspx

Community Resources

· Microsoft Dynamics Resource Center http://rc.crm.dynamics.com/rc/regcont/en_us/opdefault.aspx

· Microsoft Dynamics CRM Technical Community https://community.dynamics.com/crm/home.aspx

Training

· Microsoft Dynamics Sure Step information available on PartnerSource (registration required) http://go.microsoft.com/fwlink/?LinkID=88066

· Available on PartnerSource (registration required)  https://mbs.microsoft.com/partnersource/training/

· Available on CustomerSource (registration required)  https://mbs.microsoft.com/customersource/training/

Luv this stuff.  :o)

Walt Mossberg sez,

"Meanwhile, Microsoft hasn't been sitting still. The second beta version of IE8 is the best edition of Internet Explorer in years. It is packed with new features of its own, some of which are similar to those in Chrome, and some of which, in my view, top Chrome's features.

Google's Chrome browser displays thumbnails of a user's most-visited pages when a new tab is opened, rather than a blank page.

For example, while IE8 also groups related tabs, it assigns a different color to each such tab group and allows you to close them all with one click. It has a "smart" address box of its own, that drops down a list of suggestions as you type, though it retains a separate search box.

IE8 also has breakthrough privacy features that exceed Chrome's, and includes a new technology called Accelerators, which allows you to take rapid action on any selected word or phrase on a Web page, such as generating a map for a place name, without switching to a new page."

Read more...

Smile.

I really enjoyed this Labor Day weekend. There was lots of family visiting, events scheduled, and quality time with the people I like to be around. One of the events this weekend was the Dissonance, a jazz xTet gig at Ballard Locks. And it got me to thinking about building and maintaining successful teams and organizations.

The Dissonance is a band I've been establishing for four years. We had three new musicians for this gig. Such is often the case when you have an event on a holiday weekend. So with our new singer, sub trombonist, and new drummer, we set out to get ready for this gig. We even had a new tenor sax player visiting from Vancouver who had to leave the day before the gig because of a family emergency.

But because of the community I belong to, a community of musicians, I was able to staff the combo and have a great event. I'm very proud of this group. We are all hobbyists and have day jobs, families, and other activities. So making this combo work is no small feat.

This band isn't for a soloist, it's about ensemble work. Most of us have an ensemble team at work that help us create successful solutions. People come and go. Emergencies happen. But the strength of your support group or community is key to the success of any venture. What are you adding to your team? Are you building relationships that are mutually beneficial and based on common goals and interests? For me, that is a labor of luv.

The Dissonance does Freddie Freeloader on YouTube.

Shorten the sales cycle for you and your partners with the NEW 4.0 version of the Hosted Microsoft Dynamics CRM Trial Site*!

Previously in pilot, the Hosted CRM Trial Site is now widely available providing FREE 60-day TRIALS for anyone who wants to evaluate the product prior to a purchase.

New features to experience:

• The trial instance is an organizational level deployment with administrative permissions. This means that each trial user has full access and control over their trial organization to add users and share the CRM product with others. In the previous version, the trial instance was provisioned as a business unit thus permissions were limited.
• A trial instance can be localized in the user’s language of choice – the product is available in 25 languages (including English). Users worldwide can now experience their CRM trial the same way they’ll consume it!
• Trial users can now change and reset their passwords without the involvement of Trial Support.
• Enhanced reporting for regional Microsoft trial site administrators enables them to analyze trial subscriptions by country and region.

With these improvements, one capability that is not supported is Outlook integration into the trial environment. Although Outlook integration is a very compelling feature of CRM, the effort to support such an experience in a trial deployment would have presented significant support challenges given the unknown state of each user’s PC/laptop configuration, OS, software, settings, etc. Proof of concept deployments specific to a customer or VPCs are effective alternatives to showcase this integration.

*Note: The Hosted Microsoft Dynamics CRM Trial Site, while hosted by Microsoft, IS NOT Microsoft Dynamics CRM Online. The CRM Trial Site is a distinct implementation available for trial purposes only, available to worldwide prospects, Field and Partners.

Is it too early to start talking about what is looking to be a really good PDC? The keynotes and events scheduled will be very interesting and venue compelling. Here's some cherry-picking from my viewpoint.

Chris Anderson and Don Box will be delivering one of the keynotes at this year’s PDC. For the third consecutive PDC, Chris and Don will defy the odds and perform feats of live coding against “fresh” platform technology in front of thousands of attendees. This year Don and Chris are taking an entire keynote to view a pantheon of new technologies through the lens of a text editor. [more...]

Countdown to PDC2008: In this week’s edition of the PDC Countdown (only 65 days to go), Mike and Jennifer host the event marketing manager of the conference who talks about all of the great opportunities to win, win, win! Trips to LA, tickets to the Dodgers or Lakers, a movie premiere, or a trip down the red carpet at the Emmy’s could be yours. [more...]

The CRM booth will be in the Pavilion this year. Come meet some of our developers and PMs. Do you have your tickets yet?

I'm listening to Jeff Lorber's "Chopsticks" on Pandora.com.

Some of you know I have a habit of starting up new bands that become long-running traditions, opportunities for hobbyist musicians, and usually all about the jazz genre. To this end I've started a quasi-official Microsoft Jazz Band at work. The number of musicians at Microsoft is staggering. So many classically trained musicians, many of whom were pro musicians until they decided it would be nice to eat on a regular basis. Don't get me talking about what a cut-throat, low-paying business the world of jazz is for most jazzers.

This year the band will have some really truly stellar musicians, some of the best on Seattle's eastside. My challenge is to come up with some music that we can practice twice and then perform to a decent standard. Not only that  but this year I'm introducing a vocalist who used to be pro. So much goodness in this the fourth year of this project.

So here is the draft set list.

• Hayburner (Basie)
• The Red Door (Mulligan)
• Do Nothing - vocal
• Summertime
• Stormy Weather - vocal
• Goovin’ Hard
• Misty or Harlem Nocturne (lead alto’s choice)
• Makin’ Whoopee - vocal
• Blues in the Night
• My Funny Valentine - vocal
• Basie Straight Ahead
• Groove Merchant
• Jumping at the Woodside (Basie)

Yes, it's only an hour, but we do it three times on the Day of Caring if you include practice and the two gigs. I need to add two more songs. Suggestions are welcome. :o)

Today the Silverlight team released the source code for the Silverlight Blueprints for SharePoint—based on the Silverlight Beta 2 release. These blueprints provide examples for developers to  integrate Silverlight applications with SharePoint. Silverlight is a popular technology and with the increase in SharePoint adoption there appears to be a lot of interest in integration examples and solution sets.

There are five blueprint samples:

1. Hello World

2. Media Player

3. Slider Control

4. Custom Navigation

5. Colleague Viewer

Included in this release are docs for each of the samples and the source code. Also posted to the site is an FAQ document which is a good read.

The two ways to get to the good stuff are:

1. http://www.ssblueprints.net/sharepoint/ 

2. http://www.codeplex.com/SL4SP

Let play time commence.  :o)

The Professional Developers Conference starts on 26 October this year. Not only does Content Owner Mike Swanson issue his PDC Hard Hat Geek Challenge in the form of a poem this week (be the first to figure it out and win a limited edition PDC2008 shirt), but Jaime Rodriguez, who is driving the PDC pre-cons, talks about all of the awesome content you can get for just a mere 400 bucks! Pre-cons plus PDC = a can’t be missed bargain. [more...]

And there's a PDC blog this year to give you the inside track to what's coming up, what's "must see" and other tricks and tips.

Due to popular demand, the PDC2008 Early Bird Discount has been extended three weeks. Register by 11:59 PM Pacific Time, Monday, September 8^th and save $200 off the Full Conference Registration. With many of youse out for summer holidays, it just made sense to extend it out.

I'm luvin' the Italia CD by trumpet player Chris Botti.

I'm luvin' these video by Ben Riga and Girish Raja.

In this series, dubbed The Dynamics Duo, they talk about:

• Dynamics CRM Customization
• Dynamics CRM and SharePoint
• CRM and Office Business Applications (OBA)
• CRM and WPF
• CRM and Silverlight

Very cool. Take a peek.

Ran across this very interesting video from Channel 9.

"We use a SharePoint List Web Part to pull data from CRM to show a list of CRM users and the hours from their time sheets.  This was pulled directly from CRM using web services.  We also show how could use that data to display a dashboard style gauge using Dundas Gauge for SharePoint.  You can pull CRM data directly into SharePoint to build a dashboard.  You can then pull that dashboard into the CRM web client (minus the SharePoint chrome).  By pulling it into the web client it automatically shows up in the Outlook client.  Speaking of Outlook; in the last segment we talked about customization but didn’t show the Outlook client so Girish gives us a quick tour of how that works also.

Each of the forms in CRM are URL-addressable.  Girish puts that to good use in showing how you can pop a CRM form directly from within SharePoint.  He also shows how CRM lights up automatically when you have Office Communicator installed leaving room for some interesting Unified Communication scenarios.  We should probably do an episode on UC soon."

View the video...

Another technology to play with. Joy.

I found this Wired Magazine coverage from last year very enlightening.

"Twitter is the app that everyone loves to hate. Odds are you've noticed people — probably much younger than you — manically using Twitter, a tool that lets you post brief updates about your everyday thoughts and activities to the Web via browser, cell phone, or IM. The messages are limited to 140 characters, so they lean toward pithy, haiku-like utterances. When I dropped by the main Twitter page, people had posted notes like "Doing lunch and picking up father-in-law from senior center." Or "Checking out Ghost Whisperer" or simply "Thinking I'm old." (Most users are between 18 and 27.)

It might seem like blogging taken to a supremely banal extreme. Productivity guru Tim Ferriss calls Twitter "pointless email on steroids." One Silicon Valley businessman I met complained that his staff had become Twitter-obsessed. "You can't say anything in such a short message," he said, baffled. "So why do it at all?"

They're precisely right: Individually, most Twitter messages are stupefyingly trivial. But the true value of Twitter — and the similarly mundane Dodgeball, a tool for reporting your real-time location to friends — is cumulative. The power is in the surprising effects that come from receiving thousands of pings from your posse. And this, as it turns out, suggests where the Web is heading."

Read more...

So if I Twitter, will I seem young?  ;o)

This download covers how to set up the Microsoft Dynamics CRM 4.0 Web site to make it available on the Internet. The following Internet-Facing Deployment (IFD) scenarios are covered:

• Install Microsoft Dynamics CRM 4.0 through the user interface (UI) setup
• Install Microsoft Dynamics CRM 4.0 with a configuration file
• Upgrade Microsoft Dynamics CRM 4.0 through the UI setup
• Upgrade Microsoft Dynamics CRM 4.0 with a configuration file

This document is intended to cover how to set up the Microsoft Dynamics CRM 4.0 Web site to make it available from the Internet. This document will not cover the steps that you must complete to make a server available from the Internet.

I'm listening to Lee Ritenour's Crosstown Kids. It's a great Monday morning here in Seattle.

On the eve of 08.08.08 and the excitement around the XXIX Olympiad, Microsoft and NBC Sports have teamed to deliver event coverage on a scale never seen before on the Internet, let alone on TV.  NBC and Microsoft will be streaming more than 3,500 hours of Olympics video to millions of online viewers in the United States, including LIVE coverage of every minute of competition from 25 sports. This is the largest media event ever done on the web, an unprecedented moment in the history of the Internet. 

MSN is providing distribution of NBC Olympics video content --  which lives exclusively on the MSN network -- to all of our US visitors. The site itself is designed to handle more than 2.3 terabytes/second of traffic and will provide a flawless viewing experience for customers.  Silverlight 2 is the core technology behind the Olympics video player and provides the high-quality, interactive experience. The combination of this unprecedented amount of video coverage from NBC and Microsoft technology will change the way people experience live sports.

Here are all the ways you can experience the 2008 Summer Olympics from Microsoft and NBC:

· Click http://www.nbcolympics.com/video to jump right in and experience high-quality, interactive video using Silverlight.  This could even be better than being in Beijing! Get amazing, crisp HD video quality on the web that’s always optimized for your connection using Silverlight’s new adaptive streaming capability, watch up to four live streams simultaneously in the same player, and get expert commentary (hot-linked so you can go back right to the exact moment that Michael Phelps touches the wall for gold) all within a rich Silverlight application running within the browser.

· Beginning tomorrow and throughout the Games, the MSN homepage will prominently feature a dynamic Olympics module which will enable people to see results (or hide them if you don’t want any spoilers), get the latest news and see exclusive video coverage. Our partnership with NBC and the world-class editorial team in MSN will make MSN the best portal for up-to-the-minute Olympics coverage.

· Get the latest medal counts by sport or by country, or find out about all 10,000 of the athletes competing in the 2008 Summer Games using the Live Search Olympics Instant Answer

· Install the new MSN Toolbar that gives you one click access to the medal tally and many other highlights.

· For us Zune babies, Zune Marketplace will kick off a series of daily 2008 Olympic Games videos from NBC Sports, giving viewers special on-the-go access to the 2008 Beijing Olympic Games. For approximately 99 cents–$1.99 per episode (with post-Games content TBD), footage will include memorable highlights from the Opening and Closing Ceremonies, “best of” compilations, “best match” replays and a post-Games wrap-up feature. Users will be able to download each episode onto their Zune device for viewing whenever and wherever they go.  Additionally, XBOX users will be able to purchase and download a daily wrap-up of the day’s events from NBC Sports, with a complete wrap-up at the end of the Games. And as you saw earlier today, from Windows Media Center, head for NBC Olympics On the Go service in the Online Media strip.

This was a strong cross-company effort, with many people and teams working together to make Microsoft’s and NBC’s coverage of the 2008 Olympic Games a reality.  For a behind-the-scenes look at what was involved, check out the Olympics channel on onTen and CNET’s take here, along with press coverage of Microsoft’s participation in the Games, including yesterday’s Seattle Times and today’s Seattle P-I.

Check it out and let me know what you think.

Today's post is from the CodePlex Weblog which is devoted to all thangs CodePlex.com.

Myth #1:  Software hosted on CodePlex is only for developers
Fact: CodePlex is for any open source software application. Some of our top projects include Rawr, a .NET tool for World of Warcraft players, and the Vista Battery Saver, an app for managing your laptop battery life. 

Myth #2:  You have to purchase Microsoft software to use CodePlex
Fact: Visual Studio Team Explorer is free for use with CodePlex. Other clients include TeamPrise, TortoiseSVN, and the CodePlex Client.

Myth #3:  CodePlex is only for Microsoft projects
Fact: There are over 350 Microsoft projects on CodePlex.  The other 5,000 projects are owned by members of the community.

Myth #4:  CodePlex projects must run on Windows
Fact: CodePlex welcomes all technologies.

Myth #5:  CodePlex is run by Microsoft
Fact: This one is true! =D

Have you checked out the free code, examples, and source on CodePlex.com?

My myth buster:

Myth #6:  CodePlex is Hard
Fact: What? Have you even tried it? Too easy.

Cheers.