Managing offline data filters for your users

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?

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?

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

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!

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

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

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

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

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

(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…