Andy's World

Fun video on XRM – infinite possibilities

atbybee — Wed, 15 Jul 2009 21:51:51 +0000

Given that I’m expecting my next series of posts to talk more about XRM and how you can use it to quickly build some amazing solutions, I figured I would start with something on the fun side…check the XRM video our marketing team just unveiled at WPC.

We also made a number of annoucements about Dynamics CRM and provided some new collateral for XRM – the Presspass site has the official release.

Battlestar Galactica – best series finale ever?

atbybee — Sat, 21 Mar 2009 19:33:11 +0000

Just watched the BSG finale last night – wow!

It’s hard to end a series with a mythology, especially if it’s been on the air for too long (I’m talking about you X-Files). When you take a story beyond it’s logical arc, you either start completely contradicting yourself (completely ruining the show) or you do so many gymnastics to make everything line up that it gets really hard to follow. Knowing that this was their last season certainly helped the BSG crew craft some really interesting sub-plots. For the finale, I was glued to my seat and thought there was some great closure.

If you haven’t seen it yet, I won’t get into spoilers. If you have, you may be interested in checking out the Discover article where they interview Ron Moore and the cast at the press screening of the finale earlier this week (warning – massive spoilers). Looking through the comments was pretty interesting – definitely more of a mixed reaction than I was expecting, but some people just seem to look a little too deep (it is just a TV show after all )

Speaking of Discover magazine – they also had a really interesting article on metamaterials that I thought was pretty facinating. It’s a little difficult to describe, so you’ll have to read it - but it’s an interesting commentary on some unexpected extrapolations of nano-scale engineering.

Enjoy!

PDC is coming

atbybee — Fri, 24 Oct 2008 04:36:30 +0000

Well – PDC starts up next week and it should be a pretty interesting conference! We have a number of folks from the product team that will be presenting (including yours truly).

If you’re planning on attending, Phil Richardson put together a good post on suggested sessions to sit in on.

See you in L.A.

How time flies…

atbybee — Mon, 07 Jul 2008 19:23:19 +0000

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

atbybee — Mon, 07 Jul 2008 18:50:00 +0000

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

atbybee — Wed, 26 Mar 2008 07:27:21 +0000

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

atbybee — Sat, 15 Mar 2008 06:35:49 +0000

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

atbybee — Fri, 14 Mar 2008 17:24:39 +0000

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

atbybee — Mon, 10 Mar 2008 18:44:15 +0000

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.

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

WA democratic caucuses are PACKED

atbybee — Sun, 10 Feb 2008 00:29:40 +0000

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…