Andy's World: Microsoft CRM

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.

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...

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...

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!

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...

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...

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!

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.

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.

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...

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...

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!