Microsoft Dynamics CRM @ Joris Kalz's WebLog : Demo Tools

CRM 4.0 RTM VPC, Tools and Sample Data

Joris Kalz — Tue, 05 Feb 2008 04:55:00 GMT

Thanks to Michael Rich the new VPC Image is now available as a download. In addition there is a great demonstration tool, which helps you to prepare your demo environment and demo data. The VPC image is a one computer setup including Microsoft CRM 4.0 and associated Microsoft Dynamics CRM clients for Microsoft Office Outlook and Microsoft Internet Explorer.

The base language is English and the following language packs are already installed: German, French, Danish and Dutch, However, you can easily add other language packs by downloading them here. Beside the basic infrastructure components the image contains Microsoft Office Professional 2007, Microsoft Office SharePoint Server 2007, Microsoft Performance Point Server and Microsoft Office Communication Server to help you to demo the overall Microsoft value proposition.

But please keep in mind: Much more important than just a good demo platform are your skills to prepare and execute a software demo. There is fortunately a good book, which explains the art of demonstrating software in a very impressive way. By using the right demoing methods and by avoiding common pitfalls you can easily improve the quality of your software demonstrations and win more customers.

Learn more about this great book at amazon: Demonstrating to Win!

Best regards from Whistler

Lazy Emulator for CRM Mobile Express

Joris Kalz — Mon, 12 Mar 2007 22:02:00 GMT

As promised in my last posting, I want to write about a small demo tool to demo CRM Mobile Express without a need for a real device / emulated device. CRM Mobile Express is a mobile client for Microsoft CRM that offers a lightweight, mobile browser client for viewing and editing data in Microsoft Dynamics CRM 3.0. Now you can manage important Sales, Service and Marketing information from your Windows Mobile, Smartphone and HTML 4.0 compatible devices! You can find more information about our mobile clients here http://blogs.msdn.com/crm/search.aspx?q=Mobile&p=1 or here CRM Mobile Express

So let’s talk about how to demo CRM Mobile Express. Imagine you are demoing Microsoft CRM and there are just a few minutes left and the audience would like to know more about our mobile solutions. Now there are three ways to demo our solutions:

Having a real device in place and hand it out to your audience or instead of that you can show the display of the real device by using a tool called “ActiveSync Remote Display”, which is part of the Windows Mobile Developer Power Toys
Second, instead of a real device you can use a device emulator for a smart phone or even a pocket pc. Just install it in your demo environment: Device Emulator 1.0. This is a standalone version of the Device Emulator that shipped with Visual Studio 2005. You can install this and use to run and showcase device applications.
Third, instead of using a full blown device or emulator, for CRM Mobile Express you can just use a normal browser, because it is a normal html application. But instead of just using the browser, I created a small tool, which looks like a device inside the browser. So I named this tool Lazy Emulator. The trick is, to place a device picture behind the web site. A picture says more than words:

Download the demo files here: Lazy Emulator.

To install just copy the files inside the zip file to your "mobile application" folder on your webserver. To access it use the following URL: http://[CRMMobileServer]/Mobile Application/LazyEmulator.aspx

Hope that helps! Joris

New stuff in the pipeline

Joris Kalz — Thu, 08 Feb 2007 20:59:00 GMT

Right now I am in Seattle and getting all the news about our products. There is so much amazing stuff out there that it blows my mind: MOSS 2007, WCF, WPF, WWF, Vista, Office 2007, Office PerformancePoint, Live Communication Server, Longhorn Server, Titan, the next version of Microsoft CRM etc.

Right know I have some new stuff in my blogging pipeline and as soon I will have the time I will write about the following:

Proposal Management with Office 2007 and VSTO SE. Just look at the video to get an idea of it:
A Lazy Emulator to demo Microsoft CRM Mobile Express. The idea is, to show Microsoft CRM Mobile Express just in a normal browser and put a photo of a mobile device into the background. By doing so, you don't have install the mobile emulator images.
And an updated version of my Multi-Field-Desktop-Search now based on the Windows Vista Sidebar.

By the way, I just had a funny chat with one of our ISV-Partners c360. They are adding great value to Microsoft CRM in several areas. So you definitely should take a look at their solutions. When the sales men presented me their solution, he also wanted to highlight their search solution, which is much better than mine. The funny thing, instead of presenting their solution, I got a presentation about my own solution, which I have added to our international VPC image :-)

Caching Tool

Joris Kalz — Wed, 09 Aug 2006 22:10:00 GMT

Hello CRM-Friends!

I just made a new version of the caching tool for Microsoft CRM. Instead of an annoying system tray application it now resides in the system as a windows service. It is now running in the background but more important there is now a delay between each ping so the activity of the caching service will not disturb your work or maybe your presentation. For the first roundtrip there will be only small delay (10ms) but for every following roundtrip you can specify the delay between each ping in seconds in the config file.

What is the caching tool?
The caching tool is a small windows service which speeds up Microsoft CRM. Thanx to god, Microsoft CRM is using caching techniques to ensure a perfect user experience and a rapid-responding application. On the other hand it takes a few seconds when starting Microsoft CRM for the first time. But these few seconds could be very long especially when you are doing a presentation. The caching tool pings each relevant URL and as result Microsoft CRM seems to be faster, because some of the data is already loaded into the cache. You can use this tool not only for Microsoft CRM, any web-based application might be used.

How to install: Download the installation file here: CachingTool.zip and execute the setup.exe. During installation you will be prompted to enter the user account the service should run. E.g.: contoso\gerdf. It should be the user which you are using for demoing Microsoft CRM. Enter the password two times and complete the installation. The Service will automatically start after system start up but for the first time, you have to start the service manually by typing “net start cachingservice” into command box.

In the installation folder of the service (“CRMTools/Caching Tool”) you could specify additional settings. The URLList.txt is used to specify all the URLS you would like to ping. For each URL use one line. The URL could be complete like http://contoso/index.aspx or you coudl use a space holder in the URL “{0}” to let the service replace it with the DefaultServer which you could define in the config file.

If you are interested how the service works just download the source code here: SourceCode.zip

Please let me now if you find any errors, even errors in the text of my blog.

Greetings, Joris

How to Demo the Small Business Edition / Small Business Server Fax

Joris Kalz — Fri, 09 Dec 2005 00:20:00 GMT

There is a great article from Ben Vollmer about how to demo SBS fax integration with Microsoft CRM: http://blogs.msdn.com/midatlanticcrm/archive/2005/12/05/500196.aspx. In addition he provides us with a couple of demo faxes.

update of my caching tool

Joris Kalz — Thu, 08 Dec 2005 22:22:00 GMT

I just made a new version of the pre caching tool for Microsoft CRM. Instead of an annoying console application it now resides in the system tray and it gives you a few more options.

Download: CachingToolSetup.exe

Sorry, I have not enough time to explain more details, but if you know the old version you will undestand how it works! It is based on .NET Framework 2.0 so you have to instal it first: Microsoft .NET Framework Version 2.0 Redistributable Package (x86)