Tech Tips, Comments and Curious Stuff

xRM at the PDC!

2009-11-13T22:08:00Z

Oh yes; next week you will be able to see firsthand some of the coolest enhancements that we’ve done to the xRM platform. Andy, Barry and Nikhil will be presenting 3 sessions at the Professional Developers Conference. All of them highly recommendable:

http://microsoftpdc.com/Search?term=Xrm

· Developing xRM Solutions Using Windows Azure. Come learn how Microsoft Dynamics CRM can be used to rapidly develop on-premises or services-based "anything" Relationship Management (xRM) applications on the Microsoft platform.

· Managing the Solution Lifecycle for xRM Applications. See how xRM (Anything Relationship Management) provides a set of tools that allow developers to rapidly build extensible, high scale .NET-connected business applications on ...

· Build a .NET Business Application in 60 Minutes with xRM and SharePoint. You know the Web Services let you quickly build interoperable applications; come see how quickly as we use the business application building capabilities of Microsoft Dynamics CRM ...

I guarantee that people that haven’t seem CRM5 bits before will be in awe to witness all of the enhancements that we’ve done (so far…more to come). Since V3 Microsoft Dynamics CRM has been know as a rapid application development platform but with CRM5 we are taking that to the next level.

Go xRM!

Teaser: I was offered the opportunity to present at PDC and I sadly had to decline. Why? Well, it was either present at PDC or focus on the designs of yet more enhancements to our platform and you know which one win. I’m driving 4 features all of them related to extensibility of the product; 2 of them in particular will enhance client side (Web Application) extensibility in both expected and surprising new ways J.

Keep them coming! more and more CRM Online trials

2009-11-11T20:24:00Z

So far I'm still on the standing list to win the prize for guessing how many new trials of CRM Online we will get from November 1st to November 30. The response has been fantastic but my number is still way north so I need more of you to encourage your customers to get a trial!! To be fair the number that I entered is the fourth largest so I was very optimistic; still I believe we can get there with your help.

Trial CRM Online today! no strings attached whatsoever; the app really rocks!

http://crm.dynamics.com/

Get a free CRM Online trial in just minutes!

2009-11-05T04:33:00Z

The latest and greatest CRM Online version (internally called R4) was released this week. While this is not a brand new major version there are a ton of enhancements: Enhanced home page (with charts), improved import data tools, getting started sections and a ton of enhancements around performance and reliability of the outlook client.

My favorite enhancement is the simplified sign-up process and what we call “instant provisioning”. It literally takes 2 minutes to get you up and running into a fully functional organization in CRM Online. Don’t believe me? Go and try it yourself!

http://crm.dynamics.com Click Free Trial (no credit card needed, no attachments, just a lot of cool stuff)

While you are getting a trial, help me out to win a bet. There is a contest on the team to guess the number of new trials that we are going to provision until the end of November. I can’t give you the numbers nor my guess but suffice to say that I bet on a BIG number and I trust that all our existing and prospective customers and partners won’t let me down J… help the cause and get a free trial! You will like it!

P.S. If I win I'll post a sneak peak of one of my favorite CRM5 features... tempting huh?

Improved CRM Outlook client released (aka R4 client)

2009-10-23T22:38:00Z

Today I received the news that our outlook CRM team just released an improved outlook client (that we internally have refered to as R4 client) which works with CRM online and CRM4 on-premise.

There are A TON of enhancements and I'm sure that someone from our marketing or outlook team will do a blog post with details soon. The one thing that you should know... you want it, period :) Honestly I've personally been dogfooding it for several months and the improvements are noticeable, really snappy!

What, you are still reading? Go and download it!

http://www.microsoft.com/downloads/details.aspx?displaylang=en&FamilyID=60c4a6cc-59d7-416e-9f44-0ae8ff249768

Congrats to the CRM Outlook team!

Check out the new look of the CRM dev center!

2009-10-22T00:55:00Z

New look, new content... the CRM dev center rocks!

http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/dynamics/crm/default.aspx

Feedback welcome, happy to pass that along to our documentation team :)

Zune HD, Quad Core desktop, SSD laptop or LED TV?

2009-10-18T23:15:00Z

I don't usually post personal stuff on this blog but since I'm still not supposed to blog about all the things that I'm working on* I decided to break my own rules he he.

For the past month or so I’ve spent countless hours wondering what to purchase from the items mentioned on the title. And yes, they have radically different prices but is not about the amount itself, it’s about discipline to pick the one that is going to give me and my family most satisfaction. By that standard I have two finalists… can you guess which ones?

*I’m crossing my fingers because after PDC this year theory says that you should be hearing a lot more about CRM5 which will in turn make my posts a lot more interesting :)

CRM 4.0 and Dynamics GP 10 connector

2009-10-05T19:23:00Z

Did you know that the Dynamics CRM-GP 10 connector has already been released and that is Free? Yup... you can find all the information that you need in the GP's team blog here: https://mbs.microsoft.com/customersource/worldwide/us/productinformation/factsheets/MDCRMGPAdapter

I haven't personally dowloaded/tried the connector but I imagine that a ton of partners will be anxious to give it a try.

Areas that display this entity...

2009-09-09T16:33:00Z

I recently received a question about the "Areas that display this entity" section that appears on the entity editor of CRM 4.0. The question was how to programmatically manipulate that section. You see, that section is directly tied to the Sitemap and not to the entity itself so you don't use the metadata APIs but rather change the sitemap using import/export (this article has more details).

Happy coding.

Long wish lists :)

2009-09-04T20:17:00Z

Today I spent a fair amount of time looking at customer suggestions and I'm super excited that we will be addressing many of them in our next major release :).

One thing that I noticed is that sometimes people log a long list of suggestions within a single suggestion entry. While we appreciate all sorts of feedback not login individual suggestions makes it very difficult to track your feedback :( so whenever possible I encourage you to help us by voting/ logging individual suggestions for each enhancement that you would like to see in the product. That way we can follow up with you much more effectively and definitively increases the chances to successfully deliver what you are asking us :), it also give the community an opportunity to weight in (e.g. vote) and that helps us make decisions.

What do we do with those long wish lists that we sometimes receive? Do we toss them away? Of course not! We try to do our best to provide feedback and split the requests so that we can track them but I have to be honest, it is not as effective as if the suggestions were logged individually in the first place.

Dynamics CRM Certification (Logo)

2009-08-06T17:27:00Z

I recently received a couple of emails asking about CRM certification guidelines for ISV solutions and whether or not some things are allowed. It was very evident that people haven't read the certification guidelines as those clearly had the answer to the questions posed... the puzzle then was why people didn't read the certification guidelines before asking the question? Shortcut? Guileless not clear enough? Guidelines not discoverable enough? Most likely, all of the above but discoverability is something that I find particularly interesting. If you bing for “Dynamics CRM Certification” all the top hits refer to certification for professionals but not for solution, changing the query slightly to “Dynamics CRM Logo” yields a bit better results but still not good enough.

These are the resources you are looking for:

Innovate On: http://www.innovateon.com/pageLayout.aspx?pageID=Dynamics_Home

Certified for Dynamics CRM Logo: http://www.lionbridge.com/lionbridge/en-US/services/software-product-engineering/testing-veritest/product-certification-services/microsoft/certified-for-dynamics.htm

I might repost this in the team blog to increase discoverability even further :)

BTW, I’ll be working on the Certification Guidelines for the next major release of CRM, if you have any suggestions, send them my way.

Some Interesting Facts about Your Suggestions

2009-08-04T22:09:00Z

I just got an Outlook reminder about the fact that I haven’t blogged in a while; Gee... I honestly feel bad about it. When I reflected on the reasons behind my posts scarcity I came to the conclusion that there is very little I can share from all the good stuff that I’m doing or that the CRM team is doing hence my lack of posts. Well, ok, there is also another reason… I’ve been crazy busy getting ready for a visit back to my home country, Mexico J

One particular area that I’ve been spending a lot of time on and that I can definitively share with you is our Customer Suggestions Program. We’ve been pushing very aggressively to be prompt and responsive to all your suggestions. We still have some ground to cover but I believe we are on the right track. Today I just got several emails from different Program Managers thanking for the great opportunity to connect directly with our customers.

In case you had any doubt that we take your suggestions very seriously let me give you some interesting facts. Currently we have 20+ Program Managers looking at your suggestions (myself included). We are actual members of the engineering team that “own” features in the product. We’ve literally changed the design of some features to make sure that we could address some of your suggestions. Sometimes your suggestions are one of the main factors that help us make a decision (e.g. keep or cut a certain feature). There is really no other channel, for product suggestions, that offers you this short circuit right into the core of the engineering team J.

Does the above mean that every suggestion will make it into the next release? No, that wouldn’t be realistic but we do look pretty close at all your suggestions and try to do our best. It is super rewarding to see that we are going to be able to address a ton of your suggestions in the next major release of CRM (CRM5)…if I had to give an estimate I would say that ~50-60% of the suggestions that I’ve seen have a very good chance of making it.

As I highlighted in this post you can help us do a better job by voting for existing suggestions and clarifying scenarios when we need more information. Please do note that this is not the channel to report bugs; actual defects/malfunctions with the current/previous product should be directed via our support channel which is truly the most effective way to address those problems.

XRM Video

2009-07-16T01:28:00Z

Waaay cool... http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Yru5CkANOKA

IIS URL Rewrite and Application Request Routing

2009-07-15T06:06:00Z

A couple of years ago, back in my home country, one of the main projects that I worked on (as a programmer btw) was a “reverse proxy” that we called “redirector”. Fundamentally it was an ISAPI filter for IIS 5/6 that reverse proxied internal HTTP sites and did some basic load balancing across web servers (the code was mostly built by others before my time). The end result was that users requested http://server1/jsp/page.jsp (server1 was an IIS front end) but the page was actually processed on http://server2/page.jsp; and yes, I was a java developer back then ;)

I’ve never been a fan (from the IT/business developer perspective) of creating software that performs what should be “core” functionality provided by lower level components. I fundamentally believe that the majority of IT developers should focus on solving real business problems instead of having to deal with issues that companies like Microsoft (or other providers of “core” infrastructure software) should solve. So what did I do with our ISAPI reverse proxy? I got rid of itJ. On my quest to look for potential replacements I evaluated Apache mod-rewrite (pretty cool btw) but I ended up proposing and convincing management to buy a hardware level replacement (Cisco layer 7 switch) that worked amazingly well; for 30k+ back then...it better right?

Why is this relevant now? Well because the destiny has led me, once again, to look again at very similar topics. The big difference? Guess what, IIS now actually has some pretty cool modules that take care of all the heavy lifting for you. Both the IIS URL rewrite and the Application Request Routing are free add-on modules developed by Microsoft that you can take advantage of.

But the question is, how does all the above relate to CRM, or more specifically, to the next version of CRM? Mmmmm… Interesting isn’t it? Stay tuned.

CRM Mobile Express (for Microsoft Dynamics CRM 4.0) Released

2009-07-10T19:02:00Z

Indeed, this baby is now officially released.

http://blogs.msdn.com/crm/archive/2009/07/09/product-release-mobile-express-for-microsoft-dynamics-crm-4-0.aspx

And how much extra you will have to pay for it? Nothing! Nada! Nichts! Zéro! Because it is free for CRM 4.0 customers; well anyone can download it but it will probably be of no use if you don’t have CRM in the first place right? J

I remember back when the feature team in charge of Mobile Express started adapting it for CRM 4.0 one of their goals was to make sure it run in virtually any mobile device. I was really skeptic and I’m so glad they proved me wrong. Someone may say “what is the big deal, you just made a standard html app and it will run everywhere”, that someone is probably not aware of all the subtle differences between browsers and devices; there was a bunch of work to fix bugs for particular devices, the team didn’t just waive their magic wand and things worked automatically.

Kudos to the CRM Mobile Express team!

Cool Web Sites

2009-07-08T00:25:00Z

I always like to keep up to date and observe “trends” that emerge in the webosphere. Yesterday I spent some time looking for “cool” websites (I was mostly looking for new UI paradigms/controls). It was so funny to find a 2005 Time magazine list of the coolest web sites back then…some of them look so 90s now. Anyhow I found a couple of sites that besides looking great they accomplish their task pretty well instead of just being eye candy; check them out.

Netflix is another site that I really like and the fact that they have optimized versions of their app for different platforms is fantastic.

How will the Web look like in a couple of years? When will Neo come to wake us all from this dream :)?