Andy's World

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! :-)

Photo Album: Fun in Europe

Sat, 19 Nov 2005 23:20:57 GMT

Fun in Europe

Venice - Thurs and Friday 041

Venice - Thurs and Friday 015

Venice - Thurs and Friday 059

Neuschwanstein Castle 002

Neuschwanstein Castle 015

Neuschwanstein Castle 023

Photo Album: Recent Pictures

Wed, 15 Jun 2005 07:19:26 GMT

Recent Pictures

Untitled Photo

Custom List: Disclaimer

Sat, 15 Jul 2006 22:48:49 GMT

Disclaimer

These are my personal points-of-view and the posts in no way represent the official point-of-view of Microsoft or any group.
These posts are provided "as-is" with no warranties and confer no rights. So chill. :-)

Blog list: CRM Blog list

Wed, 28 Jun 2006 09:49:02 GMT

CRM Blog list

Phil Richardson
CRM Team blog
Ben Vollmer
Mid-Atlantic CRM TS blog - very good
Simon Hutson
UK CRM TS team
Jim Glass
Arash Ghanaie-Sichanie
Charlie Wood