Today an article of mine has been posted to the Dynamics CRM Team blog as a guest post. This article discusses all the books which are currently available for Dynamics CRM 4.0. Next to these books you can of course get a lot of information in trainings, MOC's, the SDK and from the internet. Drop by at the team blog to look at which books are available and which matches your needs.
Although we're in the middle of web 2.0, most companies do not integrate social media in their organizations, including CRM. Avanade has concluded this based on a research which has been conducted under more than 500 global executives.
There are a lot of interesting facts published in the press release which can be downloaded from the CRM Social Media website of Avanade.
Happy new year to everybody!
After a nice holiday of more than a month, I'm back in the office. Whole december I've been free and doing as least work related stuff as possible. And I have succeeded in that quite good. Except for answering some questions, helping some colleagues out, writing an article for the CRM Team Blog, giving a presentation on CRM 4.0 for my Dutch colleagues, I have not done much work related stuff.
Okay, maybe I did do a bit much CRM related stuff in my holidays, but I have spend time the correct way as well. I've visited Hannover (Germany) for Christmas shopping, went to Austria on Holidays and moved houses. Unfortunatly the month is of free time is over and I need to get back to work.
In fact, I'm in the Munich office for the coming 3 weeks. Here I'll be working on a nice data migration from Salesforce to MS CRM 4.0 by using Scribe Insight. If you happen to be in Munich, please let me know and we can have a beer!
I hope that everybody has enjoyed the christmas time as much as I have done so and I wish everybody a great new year!
Ronald
An article that I wrote some weeks ago for Channelweb was published in Dutch. I have translated the article because of the many requests that I got. Read here the English version of the column 'The power of choice'.
The power of choice
Microsoft will release the newest version of its much discussed product Microsoft Dynamics CRM in 2007. There are big changes to come which will make it possible to use this application in even more organizations.
The market of Customer Relationship Management was entered by Microsoft in the end of 2003. The first version was primarily aimed at small and medium businesses, but also enterprise organizations implemented this application. Microsoft Dynamics CRM 3.0 was released in December 2005 to serve all target groups at best. Better scalability as well as a service oriented architecture (soa) was added for the large organizations and a partner hosted solution has been made available for the smaller organizations.
The successor of Dynamics CRM 3.0, which is still known under the codename Titan, will offer the clients even more choices. This Titan-release will be able to run multiple installations on the same server (multi-tenancy). The hosting partners are not depending on virtual servers anymore because of this multi-tenancy. Therefore they can lower the prices even more. Also Microsoft will offer CRM as a service themselves under the name CRM Live. This offer will be available in North America in the first place. International releases will follow as soon as possible.
International employees of a multinational will be able to work with Dynamics CRM when working with this Titan-release. This release will enable the users to choose their own language (multi-lingual) and own currency (multi-currency) within one installation. This means that large-scale, international operating companies with multiple establishments and business units can use Dynamics CRM even better. And they can do that from one centralized maintainable organization or from a decentralized maintenance organization on a hosted environment. Another large change is the extension of workflow possibilities. Dynamics CRM does now use its own workflow engine, but this will be replaced by Windows Workflow Foundation in Titan. This will further improve the integration with other Microsoft applications.
The new possibilities mentioned above do give the clients many advantages. Not only the SMB but also the enterprise organizations can optimize the use of CRM with these advantages. Microsoft does let the client choose between different offerings of CRM, but the final choice stays with you. What will you choose for?
Ronald Lemmen
Senior Associate Consultant at Avanade Netherlands
The power of choice. It's one of the powerful marketing slogans Microsoft uses for promoting Microsoft CRM. And it is the title of a column that I wrote for Channelweb. If you go to the website at http://www.channelweb.nl and browse to 'business software', then you'll find my article. Ofcourse you can also go to this link directly: http://www.channelweb.nl/artikel.jsp?id=1906469
The article takes a glimpse in what will be offered as soon as Microsoft released Titan. Warning, it is in Dutch though :)
Update: Here's the English version:
http://ronaldlemmen.blogspot.com/2007/04/english-version-of-column-on-channelweb.html
Jim Glass e-mailed me some time ago. This was the content:
Together with Sahin Ozdemir, one of my direct colleages, I have written an article regarding MS CRM 3.0 for the nr 1 Microsoft Developer magazine in the netherlands: .NET Magazine. Ofcourse all the Dutch readers already have a free (yeah, Dutch people love free things) subscription, otherwise get one now at: http://www.microsoft.nl/magazine !
Back to the topic. We wrote an article, in Dutch, for programmer's. The main topics are:
- Customization tools
- ISV script / Form customization
- ISV code
- Import / Export
- Pre / Post-callouts
- Workflow services
- CRM Reports
A quote of one of the many replies we've got:
"This is the first time that a business application which improves productivity for programmers is exposed in a highly technical magazine on a way which is very interesting for .NET developers. This article does show perfectly what the addition is of Avanade in .NET minded Netherlands!"
Download the article here (Dutch only).
