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 poised to offer "choice" of LIVE service.

Our position as the innovator around easy to use, roles based business applications that are simple to customize and deploy provides strong differentiation and our investments in R&D, marketing and sales in MBS will make it even stronger going forward.

I will for sure watch and cheer for Dynamics and Office small business efforts & partners. THANK YOU.

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 we had settled on price!!

This spirit of “minimalism” has helped us a ton as we have looked to evolve our apps and make them modern both in terms of user experience, runtime infrastructure and design time tools.

On the UX side we have “tailored” the user experience to “roles” (in effect reducing the UX footprint per-role). On the runtime infrastructure side, we have added several Microsoft technologies from reporting to analysis to portal capabilities. In doing this we have first gotten rid of a bunch of code in our existing runtimes that had duplicative middleware (e.g. all our portal presentation layers are now native in Sharepoint, reporting in native in SQL SRS).  It’s not just a simple case of substitution but actually a reduction in code/abstractions we have to maintain and also democratizing the access to our data/logic. When it comes to design time we have been religious about keeping our development meta-data driven.  I play around a lot of with competitive products and their extensibility (add entities, add a couple of fields, relate these relationships, add some form, write some logic, expose the logic as a web service, create an RSS feed out of it, etc). Its mind boggling how hard the development environments can get to do something like the above list. The meta-data driven modeling tools we have are key to how we achieve & maintain simplicity (key driver for our partner productivity) for the most complex of customization tasks , while still adding new runtime capability (workflow, process, role tailored ux).

“Making complex things simple” is the slogan that resonates in our engineering hallways.

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 dashboards for sales and service as well as predictive analytics such as product recommendation, lead potential rating, marketing list generation, and more.  Watch for this in the Dynamics Community site...

With the coming of Dynamics LIVE CRM, additional services such as Ad Center integration, Sharepoint services for collaboration, SPLA announcement for ERP products that enable choice for our customers… we are well on our way to make Dynamics a core part of the overall push towards SaaS.  What is the next online business process you would like to see as part of Dynamics LIVE? Feedback/discussion on this would be welcome. We have some exciting work already on the way here…

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, additional add-on services & community

·         introduction of the Dynamics ERP products in the SPLA program to enable SaaS verticals and other service providers

·         availability of Dynamics AX 4.0 in 36 countries by EOY

·         availability of Dynamics CRM on ERP price list to enable Dynamics Suite sales (CRM Server is included in Advance Mgt)

·         launch of a new version of Dynamics CRM to support Office 2007 and Windows Vista

·         launch of a community focused on the role business management software can plays in a company’s environmental sustainability efforts

You can follow the conference at www.convergingcomments.com & www.microsoft.com/dynamics .

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 between Microsoft Office productivity features and core accounting & customer mgt apps.
• Rich integration between back office financial app (Microsoft Office Accounting) with front office sales and marketing features ( Microsoft Outlook with Business Contact Manager) and front office tendering system (Microsoft Dynamics Point of Sale)
• Rich / seamless integration between desktop and Web 2.0 services. We have eight subscription based services that we have built internally and with partners:
• Listing and transacting with eBay
• Electronic invoicing and payment processing via Paypal
• Online credit monitoring via Equifax
• Online payroll processing via ADP
• Online collaboration with CPA via OfficeLive
• Online merchant card processing with Chase Payment Services and Verisign
• Online banking (one way and two way) using OFX1 and OFX2 protocols
• Emarketing (for Microsoft Outlook with BCM)

Check out the online demo on the web site & download the software

For our Dynamics partners, Office Accounting represents an opportunity to enable small businesses that Dynamics customers collaborate with in their in their supply or distribution chains. And also our Office Accounting customers will upgrade to Dynamics as their businesses scale.

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

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 is provided as a service through another partner (Streamline Solutions). This is a great example of vertical extensibility and software-as-service (SaS) model coming together. We see this as an increasing trend our goal with Dynamics will be support this model along with LIVE, On-premise.

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’. 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 responseJ

Bill has over the last few years spent many hrs with us in architectural reviews. Dynamics business was new to him and he was able to use these reviews to give us feeedback and also drive broader agenda around model driven development and roles based user experiences across the company. This has been invaluable to us and has helped shape Dynamics roadmap.

Bill in his new role will still be close to Dynamics. Yes both of Bill’s other interests – The Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation and Corbis – use Dynamics to run their business. So I am sure we will continue to get lots of feedback.

Need to sign off…. to prepare for a Bill review tomorrow!! Just a reminder to myself that that Bill is still Chief Software Architect for a while to come.

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; and on the client new UX extensibility; Open XML Formats. All these services enable developers to start using Office as the “data middle tier” and “client” that “composes” multiple back end applications into more “role centric” experiences.

We in Dynamics already deliver on the promise of integration today across our CRM and ERP product lines.  Dynamics CRM is the canonical example of what one can do on the client side of Office for business process activities (i.e. immersive integration of sales/marketing/service roles within Outlook). Dynamics AX 4.0, being released at Tech Ed, has its entire portal in Sharepoint. Dynamics SNAP apps are great examples of “business mash-ups” we deliver using VSTO and enable Word, Excel and Outlook to get at any business entity from within Dynamics in the context of the Office document.

Its important to note that “out of the box” Office 2007 OBA services will work with Dynamics given that work we have already done exposing Dynamics in Sharepoint and also general Web Services infrastructure in Dynamics. That said we will exploit some of the new capabilities in Office 2007. For example in Dynamics GP 10.0 (early CY 07), will go further and embed Office 2007 Server and exploit BDC, BI, search and workflow capabilities.

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 – “Business Mash-ups”. Darren and James will show how we are doing “mash-ups” of Office and Dynamics for specific roles & business process/functions. Ray Ozzie in his keynote at Tech Ed will talk about how to integrate web 2.0 services such as Windows Live local with vertical Dynamics solutions.

So all in all… some real fun learning on how to extend Dynamics.

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 represents some significant progress on SQL performance and we will be announcing results on this at our WPC conference in July.

We have been engaging with partners and customers as part of our TAP program. And this has been a great help for us to ensure that we hit the right quality and functional completeness bar for the release. We will be posting links to Podcasts with Mike Giles (CEO Iteration2) & Greg Lush (CIO, The Linc Group) on their experience as part of the Dynamics AX 4.0 TAP program. The introduction to the series is attached to this post.

Check out the podcasts here:

1. Intro (attached)
2. Why Microsoft Dynamics AX
3. Involvement in the TAP program: ‘All the right components were there’
4. The features of Microsoft Dynamics AX: ‘Looks and feels so Microsoft-like’
5. Customizations to Microsoft Dynamics AX from the customer perspective: ‘We don’t call it customization, we call it personalization’
6. Customizations to Microsoft Dynamics AX from the partner perspective: ‘Can’t say that all business processes should fit all businesses within an industry’
7. Empowering customers to focus on their business goals: ‘We like to believe that we’re changing the industry’
8. Empowering partners to innovate on the Microsoft Dynamics AX platform: ‘These features are deeper and more useful right out of the chute’

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 historically the Dynamics community has the most organic reach to deliver “micro-verticals” and “highly localized” business applications. These attributes are being referred to as the phenomenon of Long Tail by the new media types.

We as a community need to make our “content” (localizations, customizations and ISV extensions) more discoverable and sharable. We need get all the various solutions that span our community into Solution Finder. And get better at sharing our custom extensions through community mechanisms such as Dynamics SNAP.

Dynamics Code Gallaries in GotDotNet 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).

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).