Andy's World: Blog

How time flies…

Mon, 07 Jul 2008 19:23:19 GMT

OK – yes, it’s been a while since I’ve posted. Although cliche at this point – I’ve definitely been busy.

Lots of stuff has gone by in the meantime – the Yahoo/MSFT mess, the Sonics leaving Seattle, Barack Obama winning the Democratic nomination, BillG transitioning out of MSFT…at the same time, it’s hard to believe it’s the middle of 2008 already…whew!

Closer to home, the CRM team has been hard at work launching CRM Online and digging in on the next release. At this point, we’re not ready to discuss much externally, but we have some pretty cool things on the radar and we’re closely listening to feedback from our customers, partners, and MVPs.

You may have seen some of the posts (like the ones from Jim and Phil) about our recent move to new offices. I find that moving offices is like most things in life – some blue sky and a little bit of gray surrounded by some silver lining. In my case, the dynamics of the new building are interesting (lots more glass), but the extra 20min of commute each way has been more of a drag than I expected. The good news is that the team is settling in and starting to make the building our ‘own’.

So – the holiday weekend is over, WPC is starting, and before you know it, it will be August. Time moves fast, so if you have suggestions for what you’d like to see in the next release of MSCRM, let me know…

Developer Ramp-up kit for Dynamics CRM 4.0

Mon, 07 Jul 2008 18:50:00 GMT

Girish Raja just posted about the new Developer Ramp-up kit for CRM 4.0. If you’re new to developing solutions with the CRM platform, I highly recommend checking out the content and labs in the download, which were originally put together as part of the ISV training program run by the Developer and Platform Evangelism (DPE) team prior to the launch of CRM 4.0.

Thanks Girish!

Sizing and Perf guidelines for 500 seat CRM deployment

Wed, 26 Mar 2008 07:27:21 GMT

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.

Get the whitepaper from microsoft.com

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.

Wow - just missed a bullet

Sat, 15 Mar 2008 06:35:49 GMT

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...

Convergence thoughts - part 1

Fri, 14 Mar 2008 17:24:39 GMT

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...

Arrived at Convergence

Mon, 10 Mar 2008 18:44:15 GMT

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>

Looks like I may need to look into switch hotels for the rest of the week...

WA democratic caucuses are PACKED

Sun, 10 Feb 2008 00:29:40 GMT

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...

Managing offline data filters for your users

Thu, 07 Feb 2008 08:44:08 GMT

One of the things that customers like about CRM 4.0 is the ability to control what data is brought down for offline access when using our laptop / offline-enabled Outlook client experience. The data that is synced to the offline store is controlled using per-user, per-entity Data Groups - these allow the user to stipulate what data to sync using a normal Advanced Find / Query-style interface. Definitely a cool feature.

One of the things that IT administrators and partners don't like about data groups in 4.0 is that they can't be centrally managed - every user is responsible for deciding what data they can bring offline (provided they have access to it in the first place of course).

So naturally - we've received a lot of requests to support the ability to centrallly define and deploy data groups and even lock them down so users can't change the data that they can bring offline.

While we will be looking at supporting centrally managed data groups for our next release of CRM, the good news is that Clint Warriner (one of our great support engineers) has published a tool on his blog that will allow you to centrally manage data groups much sooner!

Now - natural caveats apply...it's not officially supported, don't slam him with e-mail, etc...

Check out the tool on Clint's Windows Live Space!

Attending Convergence this year?

Wed, 06 Feb 2008 07:19:44 GMT

Looks like I'll be attending Convergence in Orlando, FL this year - lots of stuff getting set up, so it's going to be a busy week! We will obviously have a strong CRM presence, so if you are planning on attending, I look forward to seeing you there...

Your XBox360 can blog - the beginning of the end?

Wed, 06 Feb 2008 07:08:08 GMT

The text is obviously templated (like some of those bad online astrology forecasts), but the concept is pretty funny - a blog for your XBOX 360.

Check out what consoles around the world are saying about their owners...

I may have to let my box indulge... ;-)

The rolling thunder of launching Dynamics CRM 4.0

Tue, 05 Feb 2008 09:29:06 GMT

It's always funny to me how product launches at Microsoft have evolved. For some reason, the Windows 95 launch left an indelible memory in the collective MSFT consciousness and ever since every big product launch has promised to be 'bigger with Win95'. Yet - none of them ever are nor have they even gotten close.

Now, I'm not going to wax nostalgic for the days of folks lining up at Egghead to buy boxed copies of Windows, simply because the computing world has moved on.

But....in the current environment of multi-year 'betas' and the never-ending world of internet services, what does it mean to 'launch' a software product?

Well - for CRM 4.0, the launch is really more of a 'rolling thunder' for both marketing and the development team.

For marketing, there's all sorts of fun stuff going on - customer events in various cities around the world, lots of noise around CRM Live Early Access 2. There's also a new VPC that just got released for partners and fields folks to play with along with some very cool new sample tools and data.

For the development team, we've been very busy - shipping additional languages for 4.0 as well as a whole bevy of additional tools, documentation, and samples to help make things a little easier. Phil has been doing a much better job of keeping up with the various releases - check it out!

Happy Holidays!

Wed, 26 Dec 2007 01:47:21 GMT

Well - we shipped 4.0 earlier in the month and I'm taking a well-deserved break with the family. Once January rolls around it will be time to roll up the sleaves again, wrap up some remaining 4.0-related projects and start in on the next thing (much too soon to discuss externally yet).

Hope everyone is having a great holiday season and that you have a wonderful New Year!

Living the digital media lifestyle

Fri, 12 Oct 2007 08:36:01 GMT

I'm a big believer in the power and value of continuously improving technology. It shouldn't be a surprise to anyone who knows me that my home is a veritable bounty of laptops, desktops, DVRs, HD video, media players, game consoles, digital cameras, and wireless networking.

I love it when stuff just works. Apple gets praised for this all the time, and I give them props for much of what they do, but just because the chains are gold, doesn't make them any less restrictive.

Getting an end-to-end experience to work and hold together is challenging, but ultimately very rewarding for the customer. Some recent personal examples - my DirecTV TIVO DVR. XBox Live Arcade + 360. Halo 3.

Getting an experience to work with an ecosystem is just downright hard and not for the faint of heart. It so frequently fails (e.g. Windows), that customers are surprised when something actually works. Recent example - I have a Creative Zen Microphoto that was a pain in the ass to get working with my Dell running WinXP. Lots of software to download, install, etc. While I was on my recent trip to Toronto, the battery was about dead, so I decided to try plugging it into my Toshiba running Vista, even though I hadn't installed any software or drivers. Lo and behold, in under 10 seconds, Vista recognized the device, configured it, and offered to sync.

Nice!

What really sucks though are when things you expect to work, don't.

Example 1 - HD DVR from DirecTV. My family was so happy with our Tivo DVR from DirecTV that we held off on getting HD until this summer. It looked like they had worked through most of the bugs and the box was ready for rollout - it was on sale, things looked good. Unfortunately, the whole experience was a complete disaster. The installer was late, took forever to complete, and left the old dish lying on the ground outside our house. The unit itself kept locking up and had to be restarted multiple times a day. Shows wouldn't record, or it would look like they were recorded, but they would disappear after a restart. After a couple more software updates, things got a little better and the thing has somewhat stabilized, but it's really soured my family's relationship with DirecTV. What a bummer.

Example 2 - Music subscription from Urge / MTV. I refuse to buy in to the Apple golden-chain model. We've got a number of Creative Zens in the house, so I wanted a service that would support them. I also really liked the new media library and searching I got from WMP 11 and Urge. We have a pretty extensive CD collection, but we're always on the lookout for new music, so a subscription seemed like a great idea. At first it was. But when I started trying to actually use the download and sync with media device, I could never get it to work. After multiple calls to Urge support, I gave up trying to get subscription music onto my Zen. To add insult to injury, the whole Urge / Rhapsody merger now means I have to ditch WMP 11 and start using RealPlayer (ugh). What a piece of garbage.

So - experiences matter. Now I just have to get them working...

Back from Toronto - thoughts on the CRM 4.0 surprise

Fri, 12 Oct 2007 08:03:02 GMT

Just got back today from presenting at the partner readiness event in Toronto. It was a pretty fast trip - I was really only in Toronto for a day, but with the distance and time zone differences, it turned into a 3-day trip.

It was a little bit of deja vu for me since I did the same event in Toronto for the CRM 3.0 launch as well - same flight, same building (Toronto Congress Center), although different hotel (much better this time). Overall pretty fun though.

The sesssion itself turned out pretty well - it can be challenging to keep peoples attention with one speaker for more than an hour or two. I was on the hook for 4. Not surprisingly, my voice was a little hoarse by the end of the day.

As always, the MSFT and partner folks in Toronto were great and very generous in their session feedback. Thanks again to everyone who attended!

The big thing that I'm starting to notice is that we've been pretty quiet about what's coming with the next release of Dynamics CRM 4.0. We've spent quite a bit of time with ISVs and development partners over the last year, but the general VAR community has still been largely focused on 3.0. Now that they are starting to get a more complete picture of what's coming, I think they are a little surprised at how many new capabilities are in the product besides CRM Live and the 'multi-tenant, multi-lingual, multi-currency' mantra that marketing has been pushing for six months. Phil Richardson has been posting some great screencasts of some of the new things in 4.0 - worth taking a look.

I also had to laugh at a recent post from Mary Jo Foley complaining about the confusing nature of MSFT NDAs and somewhat making fun of Ben Vollmer's attempt to explain how we are trying to stage the outreach / awareness effort for 4.0. Don't shoot the messenger, Mary. Sometimes it's better to broadcast your message than to play the telephone game, and we want to make sure that the product is available and people have all the facts and information before they get aggressive with it. Multiple that times three channels (on-premise, CRM Live, partner-hosted), and you need to be thoughtful about how you push the message.

Net - 4.0 is going to surprise a lot of people and it will be here soon enough...

Thoughts on recent CRM happenings

Sat, 21 Jul 2007 23:04:51 GMT

It's been a while since I posted on CRM-related happenings - I guess that's what happens when you're insanely busy.

Dynamics Live CRM Pricing

There was certainly a lot of commotion from our recent announcements at the Microsoft Worldwide Partner Conference in Denver.

(btw - Live Search really needs to work on their news search. Check out the Google results for the same query - there's a HUGE difference...it's really unfortunate)

It was predictable that people would react strongly to the pricing that we announced for Dynamics Live CRM. As usual, the tech bloggers like Mary Jo Foley and Josh Greenbaum have some interesting opinions, but I particularly found humor from the competitor quotes...lol

Microsoft Q4 Results

Microsoft announced 4th quarter earnings on Thursday. That $1 billion charge certainly didn't help, but the rest of the business lines looked pretty good. Adding 85,000 seats of Dynamics CRM seats in the quarter certainly didn't hurt either. :-)

My Ongoing XBOX 360 Saga

Sat, 21 Jul 2007 22:07:44 GMT

I was having a lot of fun with my 360 this spring - playing Oblivion, Gears of War, downloading video, streaming music - life was good. Then one day it happened - the dreaded 3 red lights.

My box was only 7 months old, so support didn't give me any hassles. They were actually pretty good about the whole thing - minimal wait time, knowledgeable staff - definitely had to give props to the support team.

They sent me a return box, I sent my console in and waited. A couple of weeks later, I got it back, supposedly good as new (so the support agent had assured me it would be). I was excited to get the console back. Went home, plugged everything back in and had my son playing PGR3 in no time.

2 hours later, I put in NBA 2k7 and it froze again. Rebooted the box and got the 3 red lights - again.

Crap.

Called support and went through the whole routine again. It's now been three weeks since I sent it in a second time with no word and no console on my doorstep.

Ah - how a $1B warranty extension can change things.

I called support this morning to see when I would getting my console back. Waited on hold for 20min before I talked to an agent. Gave her my name and asked about my console repair and suddenly I was talking to myself - the phone got disconnected. Called back a second time and had to wait another 35min. When I finally got to talk to an agent, she informed me I was getting a replacement console (as opposed to fixing my old one) and that it had just been sent out today.

Now I go back to waiting, but at least I know it's on it's way and have a UPS tracking number to check.

:-)

Attending Convergence 2007

Wed, 07 Feb 2007 08:42:44 GMT

(the last of my mini-blog storm for tonight)

I'll be attending Convergence 2007 this year in sunny San Diego. We have quite a number of sessions and activities for Microsoft CRM partners and customers, so it should be a good time. If you're planning on attending, feel free to drop me an e-mail if you're interested in chatting while you're there...

Software development at Microsoft and the pernicious spec

Wed, 07 Feb 2007 08:34:10 GMT

Having worked for a number of product development teams at Microsoft over the last nine years, I can tell you that there's one constant about the Program Management job - every team tries to be rigorous about their feature design process, and every team ends up doing it differently. (the more things change...)

Enter the pernicious spec.

In concept, specs are intended to capture the detailed requirements and design for one or more functionality aspects of a software product. In reality, Specs are both evil incarnate and the best thing since sliced bread.

Huh?

Their duality is completely reflective - they are what you make them. And therein lies the key to walking the fine metaphoric line between heaven and hell.

I've been on a number of teams that treated the specification process very loosely - if it got done, great, if not, as long as development felt they knew what had to be built, that was OK too. The eventual problems with these situations is pretty obvious - how do you know when something isn't working the way it's intended? Without a written statement (e.g. a spec), the options are a) guess, b) use your best judgement or c) get the team together and decide. To be fair, spec or not, this still happens a lot later in the development cycle when you start finding 'bugs' that no one expected - that's what team bug triage is for. BUT - if you take that route from the very beginning, you're asking for trouble - you're either going to get a failed feature or a very small set of people who actually know what the feature is supposed to do (try not to think about what happens to your product development when those people move to a new team or company).

Scrum seems to be the latest favorite excuse for some teams to stop writing things down - "We don't need to write specs - everything we need to document is in the code!".

Yeah, right.

OK - so not writing specs is bad. What's wrong with writing them?

In short - nothing is wrong with specs themselves - they're just documents after all. What *is* wrong is treating specs like they are the code that you are shipping. They're not. Until someone (probably Microsoft Research) invents the magical spec compiler (followed soon by the mystical v2 Executive Edition - the Powerpoint compiler), specs don't ship. Customers don't install specs. Partners don't sell specs. Retailers don't stock specs on their store shelfs. You get the idea. Some teams don't.

Specs are tools used to track and capture the creative and synergistic design work that your software development team does to figure out how they are going to implement a feature. Specs are artifacts of a much more important effort - figuring out what to build. When specs start to stifle that creative energy rather than foster it, you know that you're due for a change.

Of course, getting teams to go through a culture change is probably best saved for another post...

Until then, have fun designing!!

Shame on me

Wed, 07 Feb 2007 08:25:57 GMT

Shame on me for being such a blogging slacker over the last few months.

I certainly had good intentions of picking up the post frequency, but kept finding myself getting either consumed with work or dealing with the series of weather-related problems that hit the Puget Sound in November and December.

As usual - lots of stuff going on. Some interesting, some not. ;-)

Nice to see Mini-Microsoft picking up again - his latest post on his feelings of closure after the release of Vista and Office 2007 certainly resonated with me.

I'm hoping to get some posts out on learnings from recent experiences on the CRM development team relating to software design....

Gotta finish it first...:-)

New version of MSCRM Implementation Guide available

Tue, 03 Oct 2006 06:47:05 GMT

If you're planning on deploying MSCRM in your organization anytime in the near future and you're the person responsible for getting everything installed and rolled out, I strongly recommend you take a look through the recently updated MSCRM Implementation Guide (3.0.5).

Well worth the browse if you're working with the product!

My refresher course as a small business consultant

Tue, 19 Sep 2006 07:56:23 GMT

My kids just started at a brand new private school (Tall Cedars Academy) this fall and they're having a great time. The headmaster, Bill Alsdurf, is a former teacher of theirs, he's run private schools before, and he does an amazing job with the kids. Over the last few years, Bill has become a friend of the family, and he's on a startup budget, so of course I offered to help him get his IT infrastructure going.

Hmmmm - and I'm paying him *how* much in tuition this year? ;-)

Ah, the fresh smell of small business consulting in the morning!

Actually, I kind of enjoyed doing it. See - I used to work at a smaller IBM business partner in San Diego that sold Point-of-Sale and Inventory Management to speciality retailers and the like (e.g. Williams Sonoma, Harry & David, Claires, Petco). In addition to the bigger guys, we sold a lot of smaller deals to - 2 and 3 story chains that were just getting started. It was fun meeting different people and getting the systems set up for their business. I was mostly on the senior consultant side - managing projects, requirements analysis, training, and the like. Occasionally I had to get involved in a lot of crawling under tables and counters to install POS terminals and help troubleshoot wiring. Lots of dust bunnies, wires, bad connections, and occasionally faulty hardware.

Doing the stuff at Tall Cedars reminded me a lot of my time in San Diego.

It took the better part of the Labor Day weekend, but in the end, we got everything up. In the interim, I ended up consulting with Bill on a wide assortment of things - which computers to buy, what hardware he needed for a touchscreen that students could sign-in with, how to set up his phone system, etc. I also did the dirty work of getting everything installed - drivers, cables, USB hubs, print servers, touchscreen, security patches, etc.

The experience left me pondering a couple of thoughts that I figured I'd share:

It's all about Trust, stupid! - I hammer this point on a regular basis with MSCRM partners that I talk to, but I can't over-emphasize how important it is to build trust with your clients. They're looking to you to help them make smart decisions for their business - take the time to learn about what the customer does, how they do it, and why. You'd be surprised at what you can learn. Pragmatic empathy is a great skill for a consultant.
The coming SaaS battle - shame on Microsoft for not doing a better job with providing small business services. The Windows Live services are fairly invisible to the average small business owner and the next step direct from Microsoft after that is the purchase of Small Business Server ($599 for Standard, $2000 for Premium server s/w and 10 CALs). For the moment, he's just doing a peer network between PCs, but we're talking about doing something more sophisticated. Here was a guy who needed *everything* - HR, accounting, student management, e-mail, network access, internet filtering, business web portal, custom domain, fax services, client PCs, productivity software, educational software, etc. How much did he buy from Microsoft? Windows and Office for each PC. Everything else went to a large number of other vendors. I'm a firm believer in the power of on-premise software, but I'm also positive that Bill shouldn't have to think about the complexities of software management and shouldn't have to pay $200 - 500 / month to outsource management of a server to a small business partner. There's no question that Software-as-a-Service is the future in the small business space. As Om Malik points out (and fortunately for Microsoft), no one else is doing a very good job here either (even Salesforce). The next couple of years are going to be interesting...

So - the customer is happy, the dust washes off, and my kids get a kick out of signing in with the new touchscreen. Not bad...

Now I just have to figure out what to do about Small Business Server for him...

Trying out Windows Live Writer

Sat, 16 Sep 2006 05:42:32 GMT

It's been a while since my last post - lots of stuff going on at home and work, so haven't had much time to think about the blog. Got lots of interesting stuff coming up though, so I'm looking forward to getting back into the swing of things blog-wise...

One thing to check out - Windows Live Writer beta. Downloaded it a couple of weeks back, but this is my first post with it. The tool is pretty slick for a beta - not too dumbed down, not too complex. The jury is still out on the long-term impression, but so far, so good! :-)

Adjusting to Spaces upgrade

Sun, 06 Aug 2006 08:23:01 GMT

The upgrade to the new Windows Live spaces has been a pain in the ass. The site has been effectively unavailable to me for the last few days, so I haven't been able to post anything. I'm hoping the redirect is working now...I'll be interested to what happens with the social circle stuff...

Books on Microsoft CRM?

Sun, 23 Jul 2006 21:47:11 GMT

Looking on Amazon.com, it looks like there are only two books about working with MSCRM 3.0 (there are more for CRM 1.2):

Working with Microsoft Dynamics CRM 3.0 and Microsoft CRM 3 for Dummies.

Both of the existing books are really solid (the 'Working with...' title is a good all-around reference), but I can't wait until we have more books than Sharepoint. ;-)

Working with import/export of CRM customizations

Sun, 23 Jul 2006 21:08:42 GMT

One of the cool aspects of MSCRM 3.0 is the ability to build 'no-code' solutions pretty quickly using the customization tools in the web client and then export those solutions for use in another environment (e.g. test => production).

When we were early in the v3 cycle, we really wanted to focus our customization tools on streamlining the VAR scenarios. That meant that we prioritized the models where customizations moved between environments that mirrored each other (e.g. VAR custom development -> customer test). We knew that ISVs would still have some challenges to deal with, especially having to merge their packaged customizations in with existing customer changes (e.g. adding a new tab to an existing Account form), but we knew that ISVs could handle the merge task programmatically if needed.

Fast forward a bit - most VAR partners I talk to have used our customzation capabilities to build solutions for their new customers to use - it's a way to bootstrap the customers quickly without having to re-invent the solution (so to speak). Since this is the same mechanism that our full-on ISV partners use to deliver their solutions, it starts to blur the line between what Microsoft has traditionally defined as a VAR (consults on custom solutions, handles integration, and resells existing products) and an ISV (builds and packages software for general distribution).

As we were getting in the end-game for shipping MSCRM 3.0, we saw this subtle merging of the VAR and ISV scenarios occuring and wanted to make sure we addressed it in both the short and long-term.

In the short term, we knew that we couldn't / wouldn't change the core model for import / export. Instead, we wanted to focus on the ISV story and provide some assistance in handling customization merge, so in the March update of the MSCRM 3.0 SDK, we delivered some new documentation and helper classes to manage updates to a customization file. If you are responsible for delivering customizations to customers, I recommend taking a look! It really simplifies the amount and type of code that you have to write if you're responsible for merging existing customer customizations with new changes that you are building or integrating.

Looking forward to the next release of CRM, we want to continue investing in our customization packaging and deployment model. One of the ways we think we can significantly improve the experience is by providing increased granularity of import / export. We're still evaluating a few different approaches, but I'm excited about the potential the changes have to really simplify the lives of everyone dealing in MSCRM customizations.

SuperSonics sold to Oklahoma City group

Tue, 18 Jul 2006 20:01:03 GMT

As a Sonics fan and a resident of the Seattle area, let me just say that this sucks. It's not unexpected, but it's incredibly unfortunate that the Seattle area couldn't get it's act together and come up with a plan to keep the team here.

Bummer. :-(

SuperSonics sold to Oklahoma City group - NBA - MSNBC.com

If youi like good wine...

Mon, 17 Jul 2006 05:55:26 GMT

If you like good wine, I highly recommend Chateau Saint Michelle in Washington state. Tosh and I have been a member of their wine club for a number of years now and have really enjoyed just about every bottle. The best thing is that they can ship the wine right to your door!

Sound interesting? You can apply for the club online!

Enjoy! :-)

Reactions to Microsoft CRM Live

Mon, 17 Jul 2006 05:48:54 GMT

Some interesting reactions in the blogsphere to our announcement of CRM Live last week.

There's lots of positive stuff, like this post from Sonoma Partners. Then there's other side of the fence like the ZDNet post discussing comments from Marc Benioff, and the related blog posts from ZDNet's Phil Wainewright like this one and this one.

The 'it's vaporware' comments from Phil aren't even worth answering - I'll simply say that he's welcome to try out the service when it launches next year.

It's also worth mentioning that the Titan release is more than just CRM Live - it's a whole new release that will have all sorts of great things for hosting partners and on-premise customers. There are also a lot of things that make sense for all of our channels (like multi-lingual UI support).

Net - there are always going to be naysayers about anything Microsoft does these days. I'm always open to constructive feedback, but for the most part, I'm going to focus on making sure we deliver on our goals.

WWPC 2006 Coming to a Close

Thu, 13 Jul 2006 19:43:18 GMT

Today is the last day of Microsoft's Worldwide Partner Conference in Boston. It's been quite a week. The first few days have been great - lots of interesting discussions with partners, lots of excitement over the announcements around CRM (especially CRM Live), and lots of walking :-) (the Boston Convention Center is pretty big, and I have a pretty nasty blister on my heel to show for it).

Overall people are very excited and agree that FY06 was great but FY07 is going to be an amazing year for Microsoft CRM!

I've got some expo booth time and a couple of additional meetings this afternoon, but I'll have some additional posts later tonight with some thoughts on things I've seen and conversations I've had over the last couple of days...

The parable of CRM, voting rights, and the 2004 election

Fri, 07 Jul 2006 07:56:50 GMT

I picked up the recent issue of Rolling Stone so I could take a look at this in-depth article summarizing a four-month investigation into the voting issues surrounding the 2004 presidential election.

In the interests of disclosure, let me say that I absolutely believe the election results in 2004 were rigged / manipulated and that the people currently in power got away with a fast one (one of many they have engineered in the last six years unfortunately). However - to lambast you with the crimes and power-mongering of the current administration is not my goal at the moment. (I'll save that for another time when I'm *really* fired up).

No - what I found more disturbing was the insidious way that voting rights were compromised (or downright assassinated) for such a large part of the populace. The ability to vote and have your voice heard is one of the core rights / responsibilities / benefits of being a U.S. citizen. The fact that people could be so deviously disenfranchised is criminal and the fact that it took a reporter from Rolling Stone four months to uncover it is a testiment to why we need to protect freedom of the press.

The other thing that struck me was just how much of a CRM (or VRM - Voter Relationship Management :-)) problem the whole scenario was. The subject changes (from 'customer' to 'constituent') but the questions that need to be answered are very similar. For example:

How many people are eligble to vote in a particular region?
How many voting machines and staff are needed to meet expected demand in each precinct?
How do we ensure the right resources are scheduled and arrive at each location?
How do we communicate late breaking changes to precinct staff?
How do we capture operational issues as they arise (e.g. broken voting machines, higher than expected turnout, long wait times)?
Have we recorded a vote for every citizen that expressed a vote?
Are there any discrepancies (expected or unexpected) between # of voters and # of votes recorded for any given region / precinct?
How can duplicate votes be prevented?
How do we protect voting information from tampering?

I'd love to see our public election officials get smarter about all of this and I bet that Microsoft CRM could help them do it. Interestingly enough, the Missouri House of Representatives is already moving down this direction (check out an old article here and a Microsoft Press Release).

Yes - there are significant security concerns to address. Proof and storage of voter identity. Systems tampering. Audit logs and Paper trails. Network exposure. Each of these is non-trivial, but the payoff of solving them would be huge! It would also make it a lot harder to steal elections.

It all makes me think it would be interesting to do a voter management sample and go pitch it to some public sector partners... :-)

Disclaimer - As always, technology can only be part of the solution. Having a great CRM system in place to help answer of the questions above would have done nothing to prevent the Ohio Secretary of State from pulling the election adminstration stunts that he did. Similarly, part of the RS article talks about how certain folks at a certain voting machine company colluded with public officials to tamper with electronic voting results by reprogramming the machine counts.

BUT - there's clearly a lot of room for improvement that technology could help with here...

The moral of this story is that transparency is good for everyone, whether it's getting news on sales projections or finding out where suspicious voting results turn up. Microsoft CRM is all about making it easy for businesses to be efficient and transparent at the same time. Without transparency, bad things start to happen (the sleazy salesman with no production gets promoted to sales manager, the wrong person gets elected president...wait, should that be the other way around?).

I just hope state governments can get their act together before 2008...

Star Wars claymation parody - TOO FUNNY!

Fri, 07 Jul 2006 06:05:16 GMT

So at the end of Star Wars (ep IV), Darth Vader goes spinning off into the void, having been taken out by Han Solo. When I first saw the movie as a kid, I used to wonder what would happen to Vader - would he ever make it back? Would his ship run out of air? You get the idea. (hey, I was a kid!).

I probably would have never guessed that the next scene for Vader would have looked like this video from the Robot Chicken folks. (thanks to Bill Patterson for sending the link - LOL!)

Back from holiday break

Fri, 07 Jul 2006 05:59:31 GMT

Took a little break from the blog during the holiday weekend - sounds like most folks had a pretty good 4th of July. I had to spend *way* to much time working around the house (mostly yard work). It looked good in the end, but man my legs are sore...

I definitely have some things to catch up on though post-wise...look for more soon!

What's up with the Mariners?

Fri, 30 Jun 2006 08:38:45 GMT

I think it’s funny that the Mariners kick butt over the NL, but can’t seem to catch a break playing anyone in their own division…this is probably why I can never seem to quite get on the Mariners bandwagon (even when they won 116). I still think Safeco field is a great park though…

Money = Horns?

Fri, 30 Jun 2006 08:27:49 GMT

Phil Richardson agrees that Microsoft CRM can become a billion dollar business. He also makes some interesting analogies about MS culture where products treat their revenue as status symbols. I couldn't agree more.

What's even more interesting is how much large amounts of revenue warp your perspective. Besides leading product teams to make uninformed (or even plain misguided) technology decisions, you lose sight of how amazingly unique it is for a business to make hundreds of millions of dollars in profit. For example, I was meeting with a partner a few weeks back who was ecstatic about how he had spun up a new MSCRM business in 3 months, was hiring people as fast as he could, and was still in the black by $10,000. Would that kind of money make a difference if it was my bank account? You bet. How does that compare with the $12 Billion that the Microsoft Business Division made last year? It doesn't, and it's not supposed to. But it's easy to lose sight of that when you are removed from the business-side of things as often happens with large groups at Microsoft.

It's practically heretical given MSFT cash management policies, but I'd love to see MS institute revenue sharing with all employees and give all remaining profit back to shareholders as dividends. If you're making that much money, don't be ashamed to put it to effective use. On the philanthropy side, that's what the Gates foundation is all about. On the business side, it could show as a lot of things. The revenue sharing would need to have a framework around it (e.g. different models based on business / product stage), but it would be great to see the rank-and-file developer get as excited about landing that big deal as the field does.

I'm likely rehashing the long-famous 'weenies, not shrimp' memo, but there's certainly a lesson here that anyone working on a software project has to internalize for themselves. For just about every other business in the world, every dollar and customer matters. If you're making software for them, it pays to remember...

The sweet and sour of project reviews

Fri, 30 Jun 2006 05:55:44 GMT

So we had a project 'checkpoint' review today that sprawled out over most of the afternoon. (This is normally where you'd expect a software geek to start railing on the inefficiencies of management reviews and how everyone should just go back to being a developer so we could write more code...I'm not going there). Were there spots where I was bored and thankful I had my laptop? Yes. But (trying not to sound too poly anna) there were also many more spots where I was glad we were having the discussion and identifying some potentially thorny issues to resolve before we got too deep into the milestone.

So - say what want about process overhead and non-productive meetings...today, I was glad we had the discussion (I just wish it had been about an hour shorter) :-)

A Billion dollars a year

Fri, 30 Jun 2006 05:41:15 GMT

$1 Billion dollars a year is a lot of money.

CRN has an interesting news post on the recent org change that moved the Microsoft CRM team into the same group (Office Business Platform group) with Sharepoint, Project, Groove, and similar business server products. In the article, 'Microsoft executives' are quoted as saying Microsoft CRM is the $1 Billion / year product for Microsoft.

OK - so I'm on the CRM team...do I believe that prediction? Absolutely! Our customers are super excited about the product, we have strong revenue now with great growth, and we have amazing opportunities to partner in a whole swath of areas.

I am realistic enough to know that we won't get there overnight, but it will sure be fun trying though... <g>

Agile development on the Microsoft CRM team

Thu, 29 Jun 2006 02:37:12 GMT

We've been having a lot of discussions lately on the CRM team about how we can do a better job of adopting 'agile' development practices. For the most part, I'm a big fan - I think the overhead that's grown up around product development at MS is in desparate need of a trim and we pay people too much money (and they spend too much time at work) to be poorly utilized.

That doesn't mean that 'agile' methods are the silver bullet for whatever ails you, and it doesn't provide license to skip past basic project management principles.

I'm a big believer in having a mission and being passionate about that mission. I think it makes all the hard work go that much easier. I know that when I'm doing recording sessions at home, I can crank through 12 hours of recording and mixing without breaking a sweat, but only because I'm on a mission to capture some great music, I have strong sense of what I'm shooting for (emotion-wise), and I'm in control. The same thing applies to software development.

Before you even get to selecting a project management methodologies, know the basics - what is the role of the team, what meta-level 'problem' are you trying to solve, who are your customers, what does success look like? Once you answer those, it will be a lot easier to see the forest for the trees (so to speak) and pick (or build) a project management methodology that gets you there in the most efficient, effective way possible.

On the CRM team, we have some fairly developed methodolgies, but there are problems that those methods don't help us solve as well as we'd like, so we're piloting a modified version of Scrum for developing some of key platform components for the next release of Microsoft CRM (aka 'Titan').

The key phrase there is 'some'. We're being clear about all the questions I posed above and making sure that the model fits. There is still the not-so-small matter of execution, but we have a great team, so I'm very positive about our chances of doing well.

In the end, 'agile' methodologies will give way to some other trend. The important thing is to be really clear about your mission as a team and make sure your development model is helping rather than holding you back.

Thoughts from TechEd 2006

Wed, 28 Jun 2006 09:35:24 GMT

I was really pleased about the opportunity to present two Dynamics CRM related sessions at TechEd this year. It was my first time in Boston and I thought the city was pretty interesting - I could definitely feel the sense of history to the whole place. very nice.

Overall I think the Dynamics products have a tough crowd at TechEd. This was only our second year there, so attendance is still building and we tend to have a pretty diverse audience, split between the IT folks that don't know anything about CRM and the folks that have already deployed Microsoft CRM and are looking for the next 3-4 levels down of detail on how to get the most out of their deployment.

As the saying goes, you can't please all of the people all of the time, so we have tended to play more to the people that don't know as much about the product, but are technically savvy. Next year, I'd like to see us offer a much clearer split so that customers with existing CRM deployments can be more targeted in the sessions they attend...

All in all - a lot of interest at the expo booth and a lot of positive feedback. Pretty successful I think...

Shameless plug

Wed, 28 Jun 2006 09:15:36 GMT

I admit it. I think Technorati is cool. Phil Richardson and I recently wrote a whitepaper for BillG's thinkweek talking about the opportunity for tagging in the enterprise space.

Needless to say, I'm creating my Technorati Profile

The stupidity of election year politics

Wed, 28 Jun 2006 09:04:53 GMT

Every time elections roll around, politicians start doing crazy things. The razor-thin senate vote around a flag-burning amendment should be proof-positive that a large percentage of folks in our nation's capitol have their collective heads up their collective rear ends.

MSNBC has more details...

Just ridiculous...<ugg>

I'll be at WWPC 7/11 - 7/14

Wed, 28 Jun 2006 08:58:32 GMT

Just a heads up that I'll be attending the Microsoft Worldwide Partner Conference this year (July 11 - 14 in Boston). It should be a pretty great event! I'll be splitting time between the Expo Hall and side meetings with partners, but if you're interested in chatting about CRM, feel free to stop by or use the RIO networking tools to set up a meeting.

See you in Boston!

The WinFS saga - over or beginning again?

Wed, 28 Jun 2006 08:51:33 GMT

Before I joined the Dynamics CRM team, I spent some time on the Windows Shell team responsible for thinking through what the storage, sharing, and sync experience would be for Longhorn (now Vista) when using WinFS. Keep in mind that this was before the infamous 'reset' in Aug 2004 when WinFS got the boot.

Some other folks have done a more elaborate post-mortem of what happened with WinFS and Quentin has been catching a lot of flack for his post last week announcing that WinFS was dead as a stand-alone component.

As someone who experienced a lot of the pride and pain of the WinFS work first-hand I have mixed feelings about the whole situation. I have to give props to Quentin for getting the news out - he has always been a pretty stand-up guy, and I think he got skewered unfairly. That said, his timing (announcing right after a bunch of WinFS sessions at TechEd) was questionable at best.

More importantly - what about the WinFS dream? At the time, I remember *many* long meetings trying to work through the semantics that were necessary to navigate a rich object-relational store while maintaining NTFS compat. It certainly seemed like a big challenge, but ultimately achievable. In hindsight, there's no question that WinFS was certainly a classic victim of scope creep. However, it's also important to recognize that the reality of what people are ready for is also played a huge factor - the general populace are so used to working with simple folders and explicit physical location that the concept of complex object graphs and multi-instance data stores (ala sync) may as well be string theory to them. The perfect proof point here was what happened with 'virtual folders' in Vista. Everyone that saw them in Beta 1 completely barfed on the concept because they felt like they didn't know where their files were ("it just says documents - are the on the c: drive?"). Next Vista CTP - virtual folders are gone.

It's great that we're responding to customers, but it just goes to show that customers (and the 600M desktops running some variant of Windows) are still lagging behind the techno-trend setters that are pissed off about WinFS not getting shipped.

In that respect, the decision to push LINQ and Entities into Katmai /ADO.NET is a great decision. SQL is the storage bet for MS. Would it be nice to have a rich relational store in the OS? Sure. Can I deliver an app built on a relational store (or using relational semantics) before then? You bet! Solutions built on SQL (like Sharepoint and Dynamics CRM) are already delivering richer relational semantics and experiences today that are only going to get better. More importantly, these products provide a great platform for developers to build solutions that work better in the role- and process-centric environments of most organizations. (Yes, I know those products don't address consumer scenarios and that I'm shilling for my own team a bit, but only to make the point that WinFS is/was just a means to an end.)

If there's a lesson to learn out of all of this, I think it's that continuous innovation and rapidly evolving your product based on customer feedback is a surefire way to stay relevant and meet your objectives. As a wise man once said - don't try to boil the ocean. :-)

Time to start causing trouble

Wed, 28 Jun 2006 08:07:58 GMT

I've gone back and forth on whether I wanted to jump into blogging or not. I'm not sure if using MSN Spaces (soon to be Windows Live Spaces) makes me a hopeless newbie or trendy. Hmmm..

In either case, it seems like the right time to start weighing in on what's going on - the good, the bad, the pathetically stupid...all of it.

I'll be covering some different ground here - I spend much of my daylight hours thinking about CRM and how to enable the next wave of business productivity. I spend much of my nighttime hours hanging out with my wife and kids, playing music, and reading up on happenings around the world. In between I love to spend time with good science fiction, politics, and most things related to technology. My posts will follow the same general trends.

Should be fun!

The Loss and Return of LOST

Wed, 12 Oct 2005 22:40:14 GMT

I really enjoy Lost. Especially when they pull this kind of stuff to compliment the new story lines. Yes - it's corny, yes, it's a little cliche, but it's still fun. If you use https:// instead of http://, it then takes you to a flash movie with some 'dancing' polar bears and a page title that's all in morse code. Looking to a trusty morse code conversion program, turns out the page title is "Sometimes a polar bear is just a polar bear"

Go figure - a conspiracy web site about how there's no conspiracy ;-)

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