Andy's World

For those of you thinking about deployment on-premise Dynamics CRM, you may be interested in the whitepaper our Business Systems Architecture team just released last week detailing the hardware, workloads, and performance for a 'typical' 500 user deployment. 

 

 

What is 'typical'?  Well, that's what the paper describes.  Obviously your organization may look very different, which may require slightly different sizing, but the doc is a great starting point.

 

 

So I just back in Seattle - my flight arrived from Atlanta around 7:45p or so.  I got home and checked out MSNBC only to see that Atlanta has just been hit by a major storm.

 

Wow - the real irony is that my flight didn't leave Atlanta until 5:15 EST, so I just missed it...very happy about that...

 

Well - it's been an interesting week. 

 

As usual, Convergence was pretty crowded, although not as bad as last year (probably because the Orange County Convention Center is clearly larger than the San Diego Convention Center from last year).  In general, everyone I met seemed pretty upbeat on business prospects and very positive about CRM 4.0, although customers were usually still in the evaluation stage ( either looking at upgrades from 3.0 or still in the decision phase on new 4.0 projects).

 

Paul Greenberg wrote an interesting post - Microsoft Convergence - Right Stuff - Wrong Convergence - that focused primarily on thoughts from the SteveB keynote.  While I can understand his general point about how the message isn't as effective as it could be, I also know that the product strategy we're pursuing is on point and messaging can (will) evolve. 

 

You can check out the keynote for yourself at the Convergence Presspass site.

 

Gotta get on the plane now - I'll post some more thoughts on the fun side of the week a little later...

 

Well - I arrived in Orlando last night for Convergence.   Didn't get in until pretty late and arrived at the hotel even later (12:30a), but the trip wasn't so bad...

 

Strangely enough (probably due to sheer number of people), by the time I registered back in mid-January, the only hotels available for booking were all Disney World properties.  I figured if they were official event hotels they had to be decent.  I went ahead and booked a room at the Disney Port Orleans Riverside.

 

Little did I know that I would have to cross a river to get from the main lobby to my room...

 

I also figured that they would have some kind of desk situation, but since the only connectivity option was wired ethernet, I have to put my laptop where the network cable is....on the nightstand next to the bed.   <sigh>

So I attended my first caucus this afternoon - it was a pretty interesting experience.  Normally I haven't bothered with the caucus - the nominees are usually decided by the time that Washington state gets around to voting, and the candidates themselves have been less important than general party affiliations (e.g. I thought John Kerry was an OK guy, but he didn't particularly motivate me one way or the other.  As long as he wasn't Bush, I was fine).

 

This year is obviously different.  The caucus itself was held at the local elementary school gymnasium.  I was expecting good turn-out, but it was *packed*.  Case in point - they had a table set up for each precinct, and each of the tables held 10-12 people.  My precinct ended up with 25 people voting and a number of kids there for the experience.  There were 10 precincts, but many of them were larger than mine, so you can see how the numbers add up pretty quick. 

 

After going through all of the sign-in, the initial vote was:

Clinton - 12

Obama - 11

Undecided - 2

 

We went around and folks have 1 minute to make the case for their candidate.  After everyone had a chance to speak and a little back and forth, we ended up splitting the undecided votes and ended Clinton - 13, Obama - 12.

 

The turnout across the Puget Sound has been similarly overwhelming - check out this school in Ballard or this caucus in the Central District..

 

It was also really interesting to see how the demographic trends that folks have been reporting on across the country (Women and 60+ for Clinton, Youth and men for Obama) held pretty steady (in my neck of the woods anyway).  In Seattle-proper, I think it was a little more skewed toward Obama, but still pretty interesting...

 

Getting this many people out and engaged in the political process is goodness all the way around...I can't wait to see what the general election turnout looks like...