Satya's Blog

So Long......

2007-04-14T23:37:11Z

I move to my new role next week. The last 6 years in MBS have been a memorable journey. I have learnt a lot from our customers, partners and team members. THANK YOU. We made tremendous progress with Dynamics ERP, CRM and Office Small Business product lines. Six years ago we were not a player in biz apps... the acquisitions in ERP got us to leadership position in mid market and now we are contender in Enterprise, CRM has helped us grow the fastest server product line in Microsoft's history and now...(read more)

The Laws of Simplicity

2007-03-04T18:58:00Z

I recently read The Laws of Simplicity by John Maeda . He has a cool web site as well. In the Dynamics group there is a lot of passion around this subject. John’s first rule – REDUCE: Simplicity through thoughtful reduction…strikes me as the most critical, when it comes to software design. I remember going to for my first meeting with the technical team at Navision before the acquisition. Their entire presentation was around how little code they have in their application. Mind you this was before...(read more)

Dynamics CRM - LIVE & Analytics Foundation

2007-01-16T23:42:00Z

Last week we released our early access to Dynamics Live CRM (code name: Titan) to partners.... this is a huge milestone for us. I have been playing around with my Dynamics LIVE account and it’s great to explore some of the things we can enable with the deployment choice of LIVE. Will be keenly looking to get feedback from partners.... Also we are close to releasing to Dynamics CRM community a set of tools called - Analytics Foundation . This drop will includes a UDM for Dynamics CRM 3.0 that enables...(read more)

Microsoft Dynamics in the "Live Era"!!

2006-11-06T11:34:00Z

Bill’s keynote at Convergence EMEA is going to focus on two topics – Role Based User Experience advances & Dynamics in the “Live Era”. Role Based user experience advances. We continue to raise the bar when it comes to user experience advances. The coming together of Office and Dynamics user experience to drive role based productivity is core to our vision. Today Bill will showcased the next generation UX that will first ship as part of Dynamics NAV 5 and will incorporate metaphors from both Office...(read more)

Convergence EMEA – NOV 6th-8th 20006, Munich, Germany

2006-11-06T05:02:00Z

Today in Munich the Microsoft Dynamics team will kick off its first Convergence customer conference for the EMEA region. Over 3,200 customers and partners from 75 countries will come together three days of learning and networking. We’ll have keynotes from Bill Gates, Doug Burgum, Neil Holloway, Tami Reller, and me, along with 108 sessions and 24 “chalk and talks”. Key news at the conference will include: · Bill’s keynote on Dynamics in the Live era with more details on our upcoming Dynamics CRM service,...(read more)

Microsoft Office Accounting 2007 - New Wave of business software for Small Business

2006-10-29T23:50:00Z

New wave of business software for small businesses launches tonight!! Check out www.ideawins.com late Sunday night. Microsoft Office Accounting 2007 Express… is available for free download!! We have three 3 core themes driving our innovation on behalf of small businesses and their demands of next generation business applications – i) Saving Time; ii) Getting Organized and iii) Getting Online. In support of these themes we have the following technical innovations: Continuing to raise the bar on interoperability...(read more)

Dynamics Customer Model Poster and White Paper on Roles Based Business Productivity

2006-08-18T20:31:00Z

I have gotten a couple comments pointing out that my previous links to the Dynamics Customer Model are not working. So here is a fresh link: http://www.microsoft.com/dynamics/product/familiartoyourpeople.mspx...(read more)

Dynamics LIVE CRM - Choice in Deployment and Partner Opportunity

2006-07-11T18:46:00Z

This was announced today at WPC in Boston . The demo that Brad did on stage with Steve showed CRM/Office/Windows LIVE all mashed-up!! It was awesome. The key for me is that we are thinking through the partner opportunity every step of the way on this. Everything we do across Dynamics – LIVE or On-Premise will continue to build on the partner model. During my keynote tomorrow, I will show a vertical solution that was built on CRM 3.0 by a partner/ISV (DRS Systems) for the Phrama industry. This solution...(read more)

Bill Gates & His Legacy

2006-06-15T20:29:00Z

Bill Gates – is a unique guy. What he achieved at Microsoft is a story that is well known and celebrated. I was lucky enough to have been part of the that ride since 92’ and its been exciting to say the least. I will never forget the first BillG email I got. It was exciting that that the CEO was directly sending me mail on a feature that I was working on. It was a Saturday morning. And I spent rest of weekend composing my response to is criticism of some of our architectural designs J Bill has over...(read more)

Office Business Application services & Dynamics

2006-06-11T07:17:00Z

At Tech Ed, Microsoft will announce Office Business Application (OBA) services. This announcement nicely builds on the previous two posts. Think of OBA as the platform support for “business mash-ups” in Office. To date we have been using Sharepoint 2.0 on the server and VSTO on the client in Office 2003 for our integration. With Office 2007, we get many additional services across – on the server we get Business Data Catalog, Workflow, better provider models for security & search, new Excel server;...(read more)

MBS @ Tech Ed - Extensibility, Customization and Business Mash-Ups

2006-06-09T21:08:00Z

At TechEd Darren Laybourn & James Utzschneider will be presenting a keynote at the MBS track. As usual lots of demos are planned. There is a new RSS feed demo for Dynamics AX 4.0 using its web services framework (AIF). They will go through how to build CRM Sharepoint parts using the CRM web services APIs. In addition Darren will have sneak preview of our next generation “customization” work we are doing for Dynamics Wave 2. There is a lot of focus and emphasis on concepts we introduced at Convergence...(read more)

Dynamics AX 4.0 RTM

2006-06-09T18:30:00Z

We hit Dynamics AX 4.0 RTM today. This has been a year of major Dynamics Wave 1 releases for us (CRM 3.0, GP 9.0). I am super proud of what we achieved in this release. We are delivering on all the Wave 1 themes (new UX, search across structured/un-structured, SharePoint portal, SQL & Office BI integration, full support for Web Services). On top of that we have many advances in business application value - RFID, Alerts, MSO, Fixed Assets, Dimensional hierarchies and many more. Also this release...(read more)

Economist Survey on New Media and Implications for Dynamics

2006-04-25T02:44:00Z

Finished reading a great survey of the New Media in the Economist . A lot of what it talks about in terms of new kinds of user generated content applies to work we as a community are doing (Dynamics blogs, newsgroups, solutions finder etc). One could replace “media” with “software” and ask the question of what role does community development and even advertising models apply? Clearly what we are doing with our Code Galleries such as Dynamics SNAP is a step in that direction. But more broadly and...(read more)

Dynamics Code Gallaries in GotDotNet

2006-04-13T19:46:00Z

Dynamics Code Gallaries in GotDotNe t are growing rapidly. Both the CRM and SNAP communities now have over 1K members. And they are listed as “hot” in terms of activity (vs tipid or cold)!! I am still trying to figure out how they compute the “hotness” number (CRM is at 98.8722 & SNAP is at 98.1203)....(read more)

Dynamics Customer Model

2006-04-12T04:53:00Z

I just got the new Microsoft Dynamics Customer model poster hung in my office this week. This is more than just another poster for us. It’s been the catalyst for real cultural change throughout the organization driven by the awesome initiative of our UX team.

The customer model is the repository for all information and research regarding processes and people; it is a shared resource that is used to ensure that we are focusing on a common set of people and processes. Our development teams use it for everyday tasks within our product cycle. It’s the common language that helps us with our user experience and features design. It also helps us do prioritization and decide on what features are in or out, because we want to consider the completeness of features for a given “role” and “process”.

The model is powered by an ongoing body of primary research. We have to date done 1400+ interviews and observations of real users including 280 site visits. The model today spans 61 roles, 5 departments, 15 organization charts, and 155 processes that make up 33 business process groups.

One of the more salient points of impact is that it has helped us factor “process” complexity based on size and business need. For example when you design “paying supplier” process in a small organization, Annie (a persona in our customer model) does all the tasks. Whereas when designing the same process for a larger organization, we need to coordinate the process flow across April (AP), Arnie (AR), Phyllis (Accounting Mgr), and Ken (Controller).

We have started to include the customer model in our implementation methodologies and believe that it something that can be extended by the community for any given specific deployment. Our goal would be for each organization using Dynamics to have a “poster” that was a real living model of their people and processes (and this will be something we generate from the software “models” we capture).