Thursday, December 18, 2008 at 12:28AM Shan McArthur has a good post up about the value of getting to know your Microsoft Developer Evangelists. I often get asked the question – How do I get into beta’s, how do I get better info on what’s coming out. The answer can be found on the following link!
Check out his post here.
Friday, November 28, 2008 at 12:59AM Not wanting to miss the boat on the American tradition of big sales the day after Thanksgiving I was able to convince the keeper of the magic discount codes to create one good for Friday, Saturday and Sunday!
Use “Black Friday” in the discount code at checkout and you will get the book (print copy) for about 50% off the list price or $50.00 plus shipping.
Go now and order , because I didn’t ask how many that code will work for! http://www.thecrmbook.com
Saturday, November 1, 2008 at 08:34AM At PDC this week Microsoft announced their new cloud service platform Azure Services Platform. This new offering will run in the Microsoft Data Center’s featuring an O/S in the cloud plus several services sitting on top to act as building. The goal is to provide services that can be leveraged by applications. These can be consumed at the lowest lever using simply compute power by doing things like hosting an ASP.NET application in the cloud. Additionally, there are building block services that site on top of the Windows Azure base and provide application developers common services they can leverage when building applications.
Examples of these services are SQL Services, Live Services and .NET Services. .NET Services for example provides a service bus that can be leveraged to build connected applications. By connected, I’m talking applications connected across organizations using the cloud to host the service bus. From a CRM perspective this ability to integrate as well as combine external service offerings as part of the CRM open up a lot of new opportunities. I plan to spend a decent amount of time exploring and trying to share ideas around the use of the new cloud capabilities and CRM so stay tuned!
Where it gets real exciting is when you look at what makes up the new Azure Services platform (see diagram below). There are two building block services that I think you will find very interesting Microsoft SharePoint Services and Microsoft Dynamics CRM Services. While not available yet in the CTP of Azure that was released, these elaborate on strategy Microsoft is evolving to recognize the broader ability of both these products beyond things like simple CRM. You will also notice CRM is on the slide twice, once as a finished service CRM Online and again as a building block service. I believe over time we will continue to see further distinction and separation of the pure “CRM” type functions from the core capabilities the product has today that can be more broadly leveraged. I further believe that the following is the first step by Microsoft towards making that happen.
The idea is developers will be able to use SharePoint and CRM capabilities and choose a deployment model of on-premise or in the cloud. Let me explain that another way looking at the capabilities that both of those offer a developer. SharePoint excels at managing and facilitating collaboration of unstructured data like documents. It also has a slew of capabilities to make it a good portal or gateway to enterprise data CRM on the other hand, excels at managing connected or related data where you have more structured business data like a contact or an account. But even more important is the fact that using the same capability to relate other business data. This could be operational data like project tracking information, or product information like a real estate property. Regardless, we should avoid getting hung up on the CRM acronym because in reality the CRM capabilities are really a layer built on top of the CRM platform core that has much broader applicability.
By leveraging these two core products, developers are able to achieve a level of abstraction from having to compose plumbing using raw services like Workflow, SQL and such. These services are already “glued” together when using CRM and SharePoint as the foundation.
This story is far from over, in fact in many ways I think we are just heading into a period of evolution as the new services take shape and we can think about new applications that in the past would have been considered to challenging to attempt.
Monday, September 29, 2008 at 06:57PM For those of you who missed it, we launched a new CRM Developer Book last week. You can read the details here.
I thought I would share a little behind the scenes perspective on what it takes to get a book out the door. It’s always easy to look at the cover of a book and say oh “Joe Author” did all the work. While it’s true that “Joe Author” did the writing, there’s a lot of stuff that happens behind the scenes to make this all work. Like a stage performance, the stage crew makes things happens silently behind the scenes, the same is true of the book publishing team. Unfortunately, like the stage crew the all the people involved in getting the book out the door also don’t get their fare share of credit. To that end, it’s important to know this book would have never got out the door without their hard work.
I would like to express my thanks to the countless people who helped and inspired me to get this far with the book. Without the encouragement, I probably would have been willing to just stop and put the book on the shelf to collect dust. Like a runner in a marathon, nothing is worse than feeling like your almost done, but realizing your only half way to the end.
Having gone down the traditional publisher route before, this time I wanted more control of the whole process. The only way I saw that happening was self publishing. Looking back, we now have a clearer picture of what that really involves and there’s a lot we don’t think about when working with a traditional publisher. The fact that we decided to explore self-publishing required a lot of extra work that would typically be done by an outside publisher. For that, I thank Julie Yack my partner and wife that really stepped up and jumped in to take on many of the traditional publisher roles. From editing to managing the review process, to figuring out how the logistics of getting the book into distribution, her contribution was critical. I’m not sure I even know all the magic she performed to figure out how all this worked because unlike other things there’s no cheat sheet that you can rely on. Not to mention at the same time while doing this book, she was technical editor on IT girl’s guide to becoming an Excel Diva and contributed to the writing on Voices of Change.
Cathy Hardman, one our developers, also spent endless hours helping to package up some of the code samples and enduring my crazy requests like “How about we include a Silverlight 2 example”. Her patience and attention to detail made a definite impact on the amount of samples included in the book. Not to mention her effort in reading through and providing feedback on all the chapters.
As the final content was completed it was time to conduct a final book review. I put out a call for help in doing the reviews to Microsoft and the CRM MVPs. The support offered amazed me and realized what a great group they were to help out. Within about 20 minutes I had a bunch of people offering to review and provide feedback on the book chapters. I would like to thank each of the following people for taking the time to help with the final push. The feedback and catching of my errors by each of you will clearly make a difference.
Ayaz Ahmad, Marco Amoedo, Nythya Balasubramanian , Jim Daly, , Aaron Elder, Humberto Lezama Guadarrama, Michael Hohne, uMar Khan ,Amy Langlois, Darren Liu, Ronald Lemmen , Larry Lentz, , David Jennaway,, Matt Parks, , Guy Riddle, Praveen Upadhyay, Jeffry van de Vuurst , Mahesh Vijayaraghavan, Matt Wittemann
Throughout the process Philip Richardson who at the time was a Sr PM on the CRM team always had the answers to my questions or knew who to find to get me answers. My next book may have to involve Cloud Computing since that’s the new group Philip joined!
Through publishing my blog, conducting training classes around the world and attending conferences were I got to meet a lot of people doing CRM development your thoughts and comments helped to shape each chapter. I could not possibly list each of you here, but to each I extend my thanks.
Wednesday, August 20, 2008 at 11:05PM In this new video we look at how you can enable JavaScript IntelliSense so when your working with CRM scripts they can show properties of your custom entities. The video highlights one of the tools of the book, but the concept is available to anyone that has Visual Studio 2008. The book framework just makes it easier to use because it can generate the hint files from the CRM Metadata.
Watch the video here.
http://www.thecrmbook.com/Video/Customization/EnableCRMJavascriptIntellisense/viewvideo.aspx
Monday, August 11, 2008 at 11:05PM In my spare time (ha! ) for the last year I have been working on writing a book targeted to developing applications on CRM 4.0. Originally, the book was going to be a short book focusing on workflow but has grown to over 600 pages covering all developer centric topics. In the book I talk about everything from setting up a developer environment to using SilverLight with CRM. You can read the full press release on the book on MarketWatch here.
This is not a "user" book, it's a developer book. I might even go as far as saying a power admin that wants to understand more about what's going on would benefit as well. The book goes deeper into developer topics like client scripting, web services, plug-ins and workflow than any of the other books currently released.
Most of the chapters in the book have samples that go along with them. There's also a Jump Start Framework that's over 13,000 lines of reusable code to jump start your learning of the platform. The license of the code is simple buy the book use the code....any questions? It includes things like client script to make calling the web services easier - no more concatenating strings and hoping it works. It also includes plug-ins, workflow activities and more. I will be blogging more in the future about some of the cool things in the samples and the framework that you can leverage. Realistically, even if you only used a few lines of the code it would pay back for the book 2-3 times over.
The book is available from the book web site http://www.thecrmbook.com and will be available in a month or so on Amazon and other retailers. The book is also available in e-book with simple content control - no complicated DRM (rights management) to drive you nuts. I've also started recording How-To videos here. They are starting really basic, but I will be diving deeper over time. If you have request send them my way.
Since you put up with my blog posts, I wanted to make it worth your while since many of you helped shape the content of the book. When you purchase your copy if you put daveblog in the discount code field on the checkout you will receive $10.00 off your print book purchase.
Why are you still here? Go buy your copy here http://www.thecrmbook.com/Purchase/PurchaseBook.aspx
Wednesday, August 6, 2008 at 08:25AM One of the more popular questions I get asked is when will the Analytics be released for CRM 4 - Yesterday Microsoft announced that they will be released in Q3 2008 - you can read the full details here.
Tuesday, July 22, 2008 at 08:19PM I love the fact that the CRM 4.0 Outlook client is smarter about being able to drop me to offline when it detects the network connection is gone. The problem I have is I'm on and off the network a lot and I find myself getting left in offline mode.
It's really my fault, I just forget to go back on-line when I connect back to the network. In reality though, I think that CRM should take me back on-line automatically when the network connection to the server is available - after all that's how Outlook handles it's connection to Exchange server.
This has been bugging me for a while and I have had an idea on how I could try to fix it, I just haven't had time to build my idea. My idea is a simple Outlook Add in that you never see that simply uses the NetworkChange class that ships with the .NET Framework. Using that class you can ask to be notified when the network connectivity changes. I then use the Microsoft.Crm.Outlook.dll assembly that comes with the SDK and exposes properties that tell me if the CRM Client is Loaded and if the client is offline.
So what I do is in the add in when it starts up I register to be notified. In the notification handler I check if the CRM client is loaded and offline - if not I'm done and no further work is required. Next, I retrieve the Intranet/ExtraNet servers from the registry and then use "ping" to check if I can access the server. If I can, then I prompt the user as you can see in the following example.
I prompt because while I really want to go online most the time, there are times where I'm in a hurry and I don't want to take the time to Sync right then.
If the user clicks Yes, then I use the SDK assembly to call the GoOnline() function. Using this method, I'm able to start the CRM standard Go Online process that uploads changes from the offline queue to the CRM server.
Once that's done, I do something a little bit unexpected - I actually call the GoOffline() function to go back offline. The reason for this is simple, it helps me make sure my offline store is as current as possible when I drop the network again. This isn't 100% necessary as CRM 4 now has a new feature that can trickle update the store every so often that you can turn on. Using this capability while your online the offline store is updated every N minutes based on your configuration. You can find this setting in the CRM menu in Outlook on the Options dialog, Local Data tab. The following is an example of the option on that tab.
By default this setting is not enabled you need to turn it on after installation of the CRM Outlook Add-In.
I have found that the more frequent you sync up and keep current the less the risk is for having synchronization issues.
Once the GoOffline is completed, I turn around and do a GoOnline() call again. This time the GoOnline runs really quick because no work was done offline that needs to be uploaded. Once this process is completed you will see the following dialog to let you know the process is completed.
Disclaimer: The following link contains very new code that may or may not work in your environment. It's intended for a developer not an end user - so if you can't compile it you probably shouldn't use it ( but I do include an installer if your crazy enough to try it) I'm running Outlook 2007 on Vista and that's what this code has run on so far. If you find an issue - please let me know via the Contact Me link, however, don't expect me to fix it that's why I posted the code :)
http://crm.davidyack.com/storage/downloads/OutlookOfflineHelper-072208.zip