Let’s take a look at some of the recent news surrounding the world of CRM, to gather evidence of where we might be heading towards.

Takeways from #SFDC #DF11

On the last week of July, Salesforce.com held their annual Dreamforce conference in San Francisco. As a person working with Dynamics CRM for a living, it’s a good idea to keep an eye on where the other CRM solution providers are focusing their development efforts on, and SFDC certainly is one of, if not the main competitor that Microsoft has their eyes on. In his opening keynote, Marc Benioff made it very clear where his team’s focus is on, and that is the concept of a social enterprise. I’ll spare you from the marketing flare and instead present a few screenshots captured from the presentation, highlighting the new feature announcements.

So, what’s in the pipeline for Salesforce.com during the winter 2011/2012 then?

• Contact profiles will be “social enabled” by default, showing public feeds from networks were your customers are present
• Data.com, previously known as Jigsaw, will power the social data discovery and data import, in combination with D&B’s database
• Chatter Now extends the functionality from microblogging to instant messaging with presence information
• You can invite your key customer contacts to specific Chatter networks, or even publish Chatter on the web as a customer service channel
• Radian6′s technology will monitor those customer complaints that are not targeted at your helpdesk, enabling you to jump in on the conversation
• All of this follows you everywhere you go, as touch.salesforce.com promises to deliver a HTML5 client that’ll make your iPad or smartphone a full-fledged social CRM control panel

Even if you leave away some of the over-the-top scenarios presented, like friending the Coke machine or having network routers tweet you on social networks, it’s still clear that with all the promised functionality at your fingertips (once it’s available and working in a reliable manner), the possibilities for you to design and implement new business processes will be dramatically expanded. Whether companies are able to make use of and, more importantly, make money out of these new possibilities is a different question, but it surely does push the boundaries of CRM as we know it.

Social CRM is where it’s at

“Social” certainly is an attractive attribute to include in your product description these days. Gartner, for example, has predicted that the market for Social CRM would reach a total value of one billion dollars by the end of next year. Predicting the future with concrete figures is always a challenge, but it’s even more difficult when people don’t even agree on the definition of the market to be predicted. Several analysts have commented on Gartner’s reports, starting from reminders that an SCRM market may not really exist yet, or they have questioned Gartner’s choice of products included in their SCRM Magic Quadrants as including applications aimed at other functions than what CRM systems traditionally are about – managing customer information, that is.

Aside from the numbers, an important prediction that Gartner made is that the Social CRM market (however you define it) would begin to see a shift towards more integrated platforms over the initial point solutions that have emerged during the first wave of the social business boom. In the age of the cloud, both developing as well as buying and deploying new applications designed for addressing a specific business need can be lightning fast, compared to what the corporate IT projects were like a decade ago. This can easily lead to a situation where individual departments have gone and acquired “shadow” solutions to help them get started on participating in social media, monitoring the buzz around topics and measuring results of their actions. Now, the next step of tying all this back to the customer records in the company’s operational IT systems will often be much more complicated than signing up for the new service initially. A quote from Gartner describes the situation further:

The need for integration will favor more-traditional CRM vendors that add social capabilities. Integration did not matter much when enterprises were just experimenting with social CRM,” Mr. Sarner said. “However, companies are asking for the integration of social data with other customer data within sales, marketing and customer service processes, which will require the integration of social CRM with applications such as a knowledgebase for customer service, multichannel campaign management, sales force automation or e-commerce, Web content and Web analytic applications, master data management, and even back-office applications.

Sounds convincing to me. The first mover advantage is unlikely to be such that it would overshadow all “oldskool” CRM functionality and allow the new players to start building an empire from a clean slate. Gradually we will see everyone adopting the new social paradigm into their product offering, in one form or another.

Upcoming social features for Microsoft Dynamics CRM

We’ve already seen Microsoft lay out their roadmap for new features in the Statement of Direction whitepaper released in May 2011. “Microblogging, business activity feeds and social intelligence” is what we’ve been promised. During the WPC 2011 keynote we saw pieces of this type of functionality utilized in the CRM demo and now we have what appears to be the first official screenshot of the activity feeds leaked out into the open.

So, what we will definitely get is an activity feed of different events taking place inside the CRM database, combined with the ability to post updates and reply to posts. If you’ve used Twitter, Yammer, Chatter or any other microblogging app, you should know the drill by now.

How about the social world outside the firewall? Traditionally Microsoft has preferred steering clear from committing to any specific 3rd party networks. For example, the Outlook Social Connector does not integrate with Facebook or LinkedIn out-of-the-box, instead you have to download a separate provider per each network (there’s not too many of them, btw). With the release of Windows Phone 7.5 (Mango), Microsoft now appears to feel comfortable enough with the top 3 networks of Facebook, Twitter and LinkedIn, by integrating them right into the core of their product: the People Hub. Check out the picture on the left and tell me if you spot a slight resemblance in the two feed UI’s… If this is anything to go by, I’m expecting to see the same three brands bundled into Dynamics CRM’s default integration points.

As for the rest of Microsoft’s social CRM plans, we’ll need to wait and see if there will be any deeper integration to services such as social media monitoring or whether the Redmond folks simply decide to support and promote some of their partners’ solutions more heavily. In the age of cloud & social, it’s still all about developers, developers and developers, which is why a healthy ISV ecosystem remains a crucial asset to cherish.

My feed is your feed and your feed is mine

Not too long ago, Yammer was accusing Salesforce.com for being a copycat when releasing their Chatter product. Now at Dreamforce ’11, the mascots for both companies were holding hands under the “Friends With Benefits” slogan of the campaign that announced integration between Yammer and Chatter. Well, you know what they say: keep your friends close and your enemies even closer.

Yammer does already integrate with SharePoint. By the time Microsoft incorporates the Activity Feeds into the core product of Dynamics CRM, I assume there will be a full API available for 3rd parties to tap into the event data of the feeds. Therefore I’m expecting that we’ll also see Yammer providing a solution for Dynamics CRM integration.

Where does this feed actually belong to?

Looking at Microsoft’s big stack of software products, it’s not so very obvious where all this new type of social activity functionality should be built into. SharePoint is the collaboration platform, Lync is for unified communications and, well, CRM could be considered as the solution for managing interactions and processes related to customers. So, tell me then, what specific application will the Microsoft end-user be using when he engages in the types of activities that a Yammer user has already grown accustomed to? “All of them” is not a very good answer, because that leaves you without a name to assign to the activity. Without a name, you don’t have a brand, and unless you have a brand, it’s very difficult to make anything stick. Just like with CRM implementation projects, user adoption is the golden key which you will need for unlocking the door that leads to ROI from your social business initiatives.

Much of the functionality needed as the building blocks for a social enterprise is already included in Microsoft’s portfolio today. The thing that is missing is the super glue to attach all the pieces together and make them really stick, i.e. work effortlessly in real life business scenarios. I’m not tallking about the “regular” glue, which in IT terms would mean configuration, customization, development and integration work. With enough skills available you can do great things with the stack already today and build the solutions needed. What the new, cloud-based players on the field of social business are promising is however a different value proposition: products built for the exact scenarios that companies encounter when dealing with their customer base in this world gone social. A solution you can just grab and start using.

It has taken Microsoft a massive effort to work its way into the current position, where their crown jewel productivity tools are available as cloud services you can subscribe to. The next shift that will need to take place is the integration of these services into a whole that is greater than the sum of its parts. Instead of just using traditional business applications like SharePoint or CRM, the new business processes for the social enterprise need a technical foundation that effortlessly extends beyond the corporate firewall and reaches the conversation that is taking place “out there”. Not so easy to achieve with on-premises building blocks alone, but hey, that’s when you gotta go “all in” to you know where…

Microsoft confirmed already last fall that also Dynamics CRM Online will eventually be migrated onto the same Online Services Delivery Platform as Office 365. In addition to being a natural fit with SharePoint and Exchange, CRM Online should also gain benefits into both its subscription management as well as authentication options as a result of  this migration. However, there’s no official timeline or feature set communicated yet, so we’ll have to keep waiting possibly until Q4/2011, when the next update for Dynamics CRM has been scheduled to become available, as announced in the latest Statement of Direction document.

Ever since Dynamics CRM 2011 was launched with built-in SharePoint document library integration, there’s been a bit of anxiety on when this functionality could be leveraged with the cloud versions of CRM and SharePoint. Since BPOS was built on SharePoint 2007, it wasn’t possible to utilize the Microsoft Dynamics CRM 2011 List Component for Microsoft SharePoint Server 2010 in the Online environment. This meant that setting up a document management enabled trial environment with CRM Online required an on-premises SharePoint server, which wasn’t too convenient. Nor was it for any customer looking to go “all in” with their MS applications. Oh well, but now that Office 365 is available, that’s all a thing of the past, isn’t it?

Wrong! Despite of the better together marketing message surrounding Office 365 and CRM Online, there’s actually still no way to integrate the SharePoint document libraries with the CRM List Component. Sure, you can upload the solution file into a SharePoint Online site and publish it. What you cannot do in the Online version is to take care of the second part of the installation steps, which involves the AllowHtcExtn.ps1 PowerShell script,used for enabling .htc file extensions to be served from SharePoint.

Why is this important? Because without the .htc support, you can’t actually do anything with the document library. The folder creation can be configured and it flows through as it should when accessing the Documents menu for a new record, such as an account. However, after that you are presented with the following prompt:

“The action buttons are disabled because the SharePoint server that you are using does not allow HTC component files. To enable the buttons, contact your system administrator.” What this means is that the document library will be rendered nicely inside the CRM entity form, but you can’t upload any documents to it. Clicking on the buttons does nothing, as they’re all disabled.

How about on the SharePoint side of things then? We can see that the entity specific document libraries are created and also the corresponding folders for each record where the document location has been defined. We can also of course use the native SharePoint UI to upload documents into the library.

Then when you access the corresponding record through CRM, you can see that the document does appear in the library. But with all the controls disabled, you again cannot do anything with it, like open the document, for example. How nice…

How did we end up in this situation where the latest and greatest cloud offerings from Microsoft are not working together like they obviously were inteded to? That’s a very good question. The problem with Office 365 SharePoint Online limitations and their implications to Dynamics CRM document management functionality has been a known issue throughout the whole beta phase of Office 365. There are several threads on the Office 365 community forums regarding this. Yet the response from Microsoft has been that this cannot be resolved by GA (general availability) of Office 365 (as in “today”), but rather we’ll have to wait for the first service update, probably. Come on! How can 6 months not be enough to allow one .htc file to perform its work and provide the document integration between CRM and SharePoint? I find it extremely strange that the product management behind Office 365 has allowed such a flaw to be included in the initial release version.

Of course eventually this issue will be solved and we’ll be able to experience the full document management process flow with Microsoft’s cloud applications.

The concept of XRM is probably pretty clear to most of us by know, but since PDC is not a Microsoft Dynamics event, an introduction was of course presented. The example used by Andrew here was the familiar HR scenario for processing job applications.

In the next slide the MS pieces of the puzzle are laid over the solution components.

With the native support for SharePoint integration in CRM 2011 (limited but extendable through SDK), drawing the document management box inside the XRM platform is already perfectly valid. ERP in the cloud is not a scenario actively promoted yet, but that’s where AppFabric and CRM 2011′s Azure aware plug-ins come into play, allowing the cloud apps to exchange data with on-premises apps. The whole Azure side of things is of course presented in less detail, as these are more of generic services rather than the XRM framework which Dynamics CRM 2011 tries to deliver us. Anyway, compared to the first application development platform talks around Dynamics CRM, it’s safe to assume that Microsoft’s cloud message will become inseparable from the XRM story and form a single Cloud XRM concept. In order to challenge SFDC and Force.com, the hybrid model and power of choice will of course remain in the marketing materials, but I’m sure no one wants to build a non-cloud demo for these kind of conferences anymore.

The actual demo applications were not taken from a HR scenario. Rather we were first presented with a Twitter application built into a CRM 2011 solution. By the looks of things, everything appeared to be on quite a functional level in the demo, so let’s hope this will become one of the first accelerators that Microsoft releases for CRM 2011 as a downloadable solution packet from the Dynamics Marketplace. Defining search criteria for harvesting tweet data, converting tweets to cases with a process dialog and mapping tweets on a Twitter Dashboard with a Bing Maps component (shown below) were some of the highlights in this demo.

Andrew also presented the Configuration Page functionality available for CRM 2011 solutions. This is an area where I would love to see more information and examples of use cases. You can set either HTML or Silverlight web resources to be the configuration page for a solution. The page on the Twitter application looked quite flashy at least.

After Andrew’s demo, Girish took over the presentation and walked us through a demo of a Windows Phone 7 application that was working with data consumed from and updated to CRM 2011 Online. WP7 must have been on of the biggest stars of PDC10, especially since every attendee received a free device. What better way then to capture developer attention for business applications than make ‘em run in that new, fluid UI of WP7. The order entry process used in the demo may not represent an everyday scenario for most companies, but it’s a good reminder for all of us that one way of driving CRM adoption inside a company would be to give the sales guys the kind of tools that are compelling and fun to use. Everything doesn’t need to be just grey forms anymore, not even during the office hours.

To close things off, here’s a summary slide taken from the presentation that can also be downloaded from the PDC site. Even though the visible UI changes in CRM 2011 will be the most notable enhancements for the casual CRM users, I’ve yet to decide whether the developer and platform management enhancements are actually even more significant. Guess we’ll soon see if the release of version 2011 can kick-start the XRM solution ecosystem growth into full speed.

With the fairly recent release of Dynamics CRM 2011 public beta, there was certainly a lot for Microsoft to present on the CRM front. Having been working with the product since CTP3 already, I wasn’t expecting too many surprises for myself in the CRM 2011 session contents. It’s still interesting to observe what is being said about the new release and how the customers and partners react to it. There is such a wealth of new, important features included in CRM 2011 (see my walkthrough slides for starters) that you can’t really construct the one right pitch for the product. You could say that there’s something for everyone.

We saw the first glimpse of CRM 2011 during Kirill’s keynote, when Reuben Krippner showed a bit of Process Dialogs in the Dynamic Business demonstration. From there on, Reuben was a busy man, since he was giving demos in the next four consecutive CRM sessions on the agenda. Great job pulling it off, Reuben! Let’s hope Liverpool picks up their pace in the Premier League, so we can see some more of them in future CRM demos

Barry Givens held the last CRM session of the day, focusing on data visualization in CRM 2011. Not like we hadn’t seen the charts a few times already during the day, but hey, I always enjoy hearing Barry talk about his favorite topic i.e. analytics in CRM. While the out-of-the-box charts in CRM 2011 certainly do deliver value, you should really look at the broader picture of what the visualization features introduced in the new version truly mean in terms of customization and application design. The charts are actually one alternative method of navigation, due to their tight integration with grids and the drill-down capability. They can be embedded not only on grids but also forms (through sub-grids), bringing visualizations to every part of the CRM UI. Oh, and don’t forget to check out my post about editing the .NET Chart Controls for CRM 2011. Dashboards, on the other hand, are not just an item in the main menu but rather a new form type. By allowing flexible arrangement of embedded components like grids, charts and web resources, the dashboard forms might actually one day become the next generation UI for navigating in Dynamics CRM. You know, something for the future ahead of us when every modern web app must be built in RIA fashion, with Silverlight controls and what have you.

No matter how nice the new charts look in the demos and screenshots, there’s no denying that the main theme for Convergence 2010 in EMEA was the same as in Atlanta earlier this year. Yes, I’m talking about the cloud, and so is certainly Microsoft, event after Ray Ozzie’s departure from the company. As was noted by many presenters at Convergence, it’s a tough job demonstrating the cloud as a feature, since the web applications will look exactly the same to the end user, regardless of where they are hosted. This didn’t take away the fact that the agenda was simply overwhelmed with cloud related topics. It’s safe to say by now that CRM Online is the default configuration Microsoft has in mind when they are talking about their products, and I wouldn’t be surprised if more and more of the new features will be introduced first in the Online version, then later for on-premises (if at all). The power of choice is still there, but the preferred option has shifted faster than you might have imagined.

I didn’t read about it until browsing my Twitter feeds during the cab ride back from the airport, but Microsoft went out and announced Office 365 during the same day as Convergence Prague took place. If there was any metion of it in the event, I surely missed it, but it’s more likely that the Microsoft considered this to be something not falling directly under its Dynamics product line and therefore no need to integrate it into their Convergence story. Nevertheless, the announcement has big implications on the future of Dynamics CRM, since it has been announced that CRM Online will be added into the Office 365 service portfolio in 2011.

In the early days of Windows Azure press releases, the concepts of Dynamics CRM Services and SharePoint Services were presented as a future part of the Azure platform. We all know that the contents of Azure today is a bit different from those planned features. SharePoint has been taken into the cloud as a part of BPOS and CRM Online has enjoyed success as an independent product. When CRM will now be finding a home as a part of BPOS 2.0 a.k.a. Microsoft Office 365, it’s starting to clearly look like this will be how Microsoft is aligning it’s two business application development platforms. Not as a generic service available to 3rd party cloud app developers but rather as the foundation of basic information worker infrastructure provided to all businesses operating in the MS Office world.

Salesforce.com will most likely continue to be the main rival to Dynamics CRM, as proven by Microsoft’s recent www.dontgetforced.com campaign. Comparison of the pricing of the two CRM applications already proves how Microsoft has been aggressive in trying to undercut SFDC. At Convergence 2010 EMEA this gap was further widened by Microsoft’s promotional pricing for CRM Online, which now puts the price point at $34 / €31 per user per month for the first year (hmm, the real USD/EUR exchange rate would put it at €24, but that’s the premium us Europeans so often get to pay). Now, consider that the price of Office 365 Enterprise edition with Exchange, Lync and SharePoint will be $24 / €22.75 when launched. Once the Office 365 service offering will be extended to cover also Dynamics CRM, do you think the price for this “Ultimate edition” will be $24 Office + $34 CRM? Of course it won’t, so the question really is (in the famous words of Chuck D), how low can you go? I’m not going to speculate a future price tag, but the message to the Dynamics CRM ecosystem is clear: CRM is becoming an everyday office application, it’s getting cheaper and easier to purchase and most typically it will be served from the cloud. Now go and plan you own strategy accordingly.

I did also attend one Dynamics NAV session, to get a glimpse of what the guys on the other side are talking about. Considering that Microsoft CRM has been a pure web application starting from version 1.0 in 2003, you sometimes forget how big of an advantage this is over some older applications that weren’t born into the web era. The NAV Software Plus Service Strategy session did of course promote how the application can be moved towards the cloud with the help of hosting partners. At the same time, hearing talks about how they’re now moving the last remaining business logic from the client side to the server, or how the number of concurrent NAV users was recommended to be less than ten, this all made it quite clear why the Dynamics CRM Online offering is so much further up in the clouds already than Microsoft’s ERP offering. Oh well, at lest NAV 2009 R2 is promised to have built-in integration to CRM.

Just like in Convergence 2010 Atlanta, also the Prague event venue disappointed me by not offering a free WiFi network  for the conference attendees to use on their mobiles or laptops. I simply cannot comprehend why we still need to be struggling with such basic infrastructure requirements in the year 2010. I’d gladly pay 10 euros more for the ticket if it included a no-hassle access right to high quality wireless network for the duration of the conference. Acquiring hotel vouchers for WiFi feels almost like asking for your credit card details to get to the men’s room. The contrast between the “all in” cloud evangelism presented in Microsoft’s sessions and the reality that awaits the attendees when they step into the expo lounge should ring some bells in someone’s head. From what I heard, also the exhibitor stands were struggling with connectivity issues.

As a result of not being connected during the event, I didn’t even bother trying to contribute into building a Twitter backchannel for the #CONV10 hashtag. One directional, SMS based status updates are hardly what it’s about, the whole point would have been in seeing what others were posting about the event and the session contents. This worked quite nicely during the US Convergence, which can probably be attributed to A) higher Twitter penetration and B) more local attendees with a working mobile data plan in Atlanta. Even though we all live in one big EU over here, mobile roaming with reasonable data charges is still merely a distant dream in Europe. No wonder the mobile apps market and innovation have shifted so heavily towards the States during the past few years.

Speaking of which, the first Windows Phone 7 devices were announced the week before Convergence, but we didn’t get to see much of them in action yet. While WP7 did allow the Redmond crowd to again make jokes about “that inferior mobile device” (no, not the one starting with W but the one with i…), the only live application I remember seeing run WP7 OS was the keynote demo of a custom app consisting of a flashy quantity scroller to adjust CRM (or was it the ERP) integer field values. As there’s no announcements of any official new mobile clients for CRM 2011, it will most likely be up to the ISV’s to leverage WP7 in their applications. Having said that, on the expo floor there was quite a number of  of iPads being used in product demonstrations and I don’t see these getting replaced with your standard HTC running Windows Phone anytime soon…

(Stop the press: Microsoft has said there will be integration between Windows Phone 7 and CRM Online. More details expected at the WP7 SMB launch events.)

Next April will again see the Convergence 2011 take place in Atlanta. If you ask me, I think the one day events arranged in EMEA offer only a “Convergence Lite” experience, which doesn’t really give enough room in the session agenda to go deeper into specific topics of interest, let alone to have more technical discussions. While the Dynamics CRM blogosphere, forums and tweeps do a great job in passing on information and facilitating discussions, there’s no way you can beat the real live events. Therefore, if you’re in the process of planning your travel budget for next year, be sure to include one trip to Atlanta in there.

Refreshed Virtual PC image with Portal Accelerators

Microsoft released an updated version of the VPC image that comes with Dynamics CRM 4.0 preconfigured, available for download on CustomerSource or PartnerSource. There’s more on it than just CRM, check out the following list for all the goodies:

• CRM 4.0 with Update Rollup 11
• Windows Server 2003 R2 SP2
• SQL Server 2008 SP1 – SSRS, SSAS
• SQL Server 2005 Express Edition
• Office SharePoint Server 2007
• Office Communications Server 2007
• Office PerformancePoint Server 2007
• POP3 Server
• Visual Studio 2008
• IE8
• Office 2010 SP1
• Windows Mobile 6 SDK and Activesync

The image has been tweaked to include two virtual hard drives (VHD), allowing the swap file to be physically located on a USB drive, which is promised to improve performance by ~30%. How that figure has been determined is beyond me, but the environment works quite well on my Core i3 2.26GHz, 4GB, Win7 x64 setup. It would of course have been super nice to get your hands on a SharePoint 2010 environment, but the hassle of x64 environment virtualization with Hyper-V instead of Virtual PC would have not been worth all the trouble (although I’ve heard VirtualBox should be able to run also 64-bit images without Windows 2008 hosts). Let’s just settle for MOSS 2007 with Office 2010 client components.

What made this VPC image especially interesting to me was the latest versions of the Portal Accelerators. Now, I never really had hands-on experience with the first wave of Portal Accelerators released for CRM 4.0, but from what I’ve heard the results delivered didn’t quite live up to people’s expectations. This new breed of accelerators, on the other hand, is based on the technology found in the commercial products of Adxstudio, who have built a full blown content management system on top of Dynamics CRM. I simply had to test drive the Customer Portal and Partner Relationship Management Portal, after seeing them promoted in Convergence 2010 Atlanta.

When accessing the portal side of the content, the sites offer you the kind of WYSIWYG editing controls you would expect to find in a modern CMS. Hover over content and you get the editing menu for in place editing of text, images and links. Any changes you peform on the content here will be stored to a record on the Web Page entity. Going into the CRM world and accessing the Content Management tab gives you a list of all the components that the portal site is made of. Effectively it’s the CMS database but presented with Dynamics CRM entities, lists and forms. You’ll find even site settings such as CSS attribute definitions as records on a grid, just like a customer contact would appear on your basic installation of Dynamics CRM.

At first this might seem like a freaky way to build a website, but it really goes to show what the XRM concept can be like when taken to extremes. Just because Dynamics CRM as an off the shelf product is geared towards presenting sales managers a web page of accounts, opportunities, cases etc. doesn’t mean the platform couldn’t just as well deliver data on web page formating. Once you realise that all of the information on a website is being retrieved from the CRM database tables, it doesn’t take long for your imagination to start running wild when thinking about how the traditional customer related data could be pulled from the system and mashed up with web portal content. Typically any dynamic CRM attributes you need to present on a customer facing website means there’s lots of laborious integration planning and design sessions ahead before you get to see even the first rough demo. Building the CMS and CRM systems on top of the very same database flips things around and can certainly unlock ideas for designing portals that you might otherwise be hesitant to explore. Sure, plenty of development resources will still needed for implementing real solutions for production use, but the concept is quite impressive.

When considering building portals on top of CRM, it’s good to keep in mind the implications to license requirements. Presenting CRM data to external users and allowing them to interact with it will force you to buy an External Connector license from Microsoft for your on-premises environment. For a smaller organization that might otherwise find modifying the accelerator templates to their needs to be a sufficient solution, the cost of an EC license may well be prohibitive, which is really a shame considering the potential of the platform. However, CRM Online or partner hosted SPLA licensing models do not require External Connectors (see this post by Shan McArthur). So, not only is the cloud version of CRM much quicker to deploy than an on-premises IFD environment, the license pricing is becoming more and more favourable in the era of Social CRM, where the customer relationships data will increasingly be generated and collected somewhere out there in the clouds, beyond the corporate firewalls.

LightSwitch

If Dynamics CRM can be used as a generic platform for rapid development of custom Line Of Business (LOB) applications or dynamic content portals like seen with the accelerators, then how should the product really be positioned in the market? Or even inside Microsoft’s own product portfolio? Comparisons between Dynamics CRM and SharePoint as application platforms has been discussed in many great white papers, one of my favourites being “Relational Productivity Applications: Leveraging Microsoft Dynamics CRM and SharePoint for Enhanced Business Impact“. But could there be even more alternatives to consider?

The recent beta launch of Visual Studio LightSwitch made me think about this topic some more, since so may of the selling points mentioned in Microsoft marketing material for LightSwitch ring a bell from the XRM gospel we’ve seen pushed for Dynamics CRM lately. LightSwitch is a SliverLight app development tool that’s being branded as the “simplest way to build business applications for the desktop, web and cloud”. “Quickly build custom LOB applications that rival off-the-shelf solutions.” “Simplifies the development process because it lets you concentrate on the business logic and does a lot of the remaining work for you.” “Designed for non-programmers, you don’t have to write any code for navigation, toolbars/ribbons, or dirty checking.” Yep, that’s CR… no, I mean LightSwitch. Check our this blog post from the product team for an introduction to the feature set included.

The conclusions behind the value proposition of LightSwitch do sound valid. Most mid-size organizations would surely benefit from being empowered to build their own LoB apps to replace overgrown Excel sheets, also most of these apps could share the same form, grid, search etc. concepts offered in familiar MS style UI wrappings. However, the approach is coming from the opposite direction than with Dynamics CRM. Whereas CRM has been first sold primarily as an application for business people to manage their customer data and later on expanded towards being an actual application development platform, LightSwitch is a component of the Visual Studio IDE used by programmers that now tries to reach the business users by promising no-code application development tools. You can already read plenty of furious “who is this sh** for?” type of comments from the VS user community, when MS is offering seemingly “dumbed down” development tools that aim to offer SilverLight app creation for the masses.

Since we already know that CRM 2011 will continue to have a traditional web application UI, not SilverLight, one question that comes to my mind is: will the two paths ever meet? In this era of “app internet” many are claiming that RIA clients are the future of web (which, according to credible sources, is already dead) and that there’s really no need to waith for HTML5 to come and save us. The bigger the ecosystem of existing customers, applications and services around the familiar Dynamics CRM becomes, the harded it can get to plan the platform’s evolution from “just” a web app to a rich internet application.

Could we somehow get the best of both worlds? One approach would be to use LightSwitch to build entity data driven forms to reach non-CRM users in the organization (as suggested by @CplCarrot), but this again brings up the licensing issues discussed earlier. While Dynamics CRM offers a far more advanced set of pre-built plumbing than LightSwitch, everything comes with a cost. If you’re an ISV and your solution would require the customer to purchase licenses for both CRM and your own application at the same time, the equation may well make you reconsider if all that plumbing is necessary after all.

Salesforce.com or Microsoft Dynamics CRM, which horse to bet on?

I really enjoyed reading Behind The Cloud, in which Marc Benioff tells the story behind Salesforce.com. No matter what you think about their product in terms of CRM, you have to give credit to the company that has been such a major force (sic) behind launching the SaaS movement into the massive cloud hype that we see everywhere around us today. Challenging the traditional “Enterprise 1.0″ giants like SAP and Orcale (Marc’s previous employer) in the race for the next generation of business applications has earned Salesforce.com the status that is now making tech media around the world consider Microsoft as the underdog in the game of CRM. Just like SFDC in its early days gained big boost from ceaselessly attacking it’s nr. 1 enemy Siebel, I’m positive this head-to-head battle will only do good for Dynamics CRM in the long run.

Richard Knudson wrote a spot on article about the competitive setting between MSFT and SFDC. The announcement of Dynamics CRM 2011 has drawn a wealth of attention on the subject, now that Microsoft is finally promising a near-identical CRM feature set for both on-premises and cloud hosted deployment models. Looking at the signs out there, I’m inclined to believe in Richard’s prediction that “over the next couple years, the CRM market will be a two-horse race”.

The AppExchange marketplace is certainly something Microsoft will have a tough time replicating overnight, so I’m expecting the introduction of the Dynamics Marketplace to be just the first iteration of a long project in developing a solution that truly bridges the gap between the SMB customers and the vast but fragmented ISV ecosystem. And while Chatter may not be a revolutionary application when compared to the front line collaborative solutions out there (more like “lipstick on a pig“?), it’s still offering a solution that Microsoft doesn’t have a direct answer to in CRM 2011.

One big reasons why you shouldn’t underestimate Microsoft’s chances in the CRM horse race is because, well, this is exactly what Microsoft does. Looking at the company’s history, it never is the first player on the new market, or the most technically advanced application of the day, yet it tends to roll onwards like I giant freight train. Slow to get on the way, but almost unstoppable once the wheels are in motion. You could blame it on just an endless marketing budget, but that would be depreciating MSFT’s incredible business hunch and the track record it has for striking when and where the competition is at its weakest. At the end of the day, so many of Microsoft’s customers are also freight trains. That’s corporate IT and it doesn’t like changes that take place overnight, unlike what we as individuals in the corporate IT world might think about the pace of change.

Of course even Microsoft itself is now proclaiming that the end is near for traditional server deployments and that the clouds with silver lining are already upon us. Coming from the mouth of Steve Ballmer, you could think that such a message would totally play in the hands of Marc Benioff, but I wouldn’t be so sure. Call me a sucker for Microsoft’s marketing propaganda if you will, I still think the company is building it’s Azure offering and cloud momentum with exactly the right steps to challenge the early SaaS pioneers with a next level architecture that goes beyond the initial “hey, let’s outsource servers and save some $$$” thinking. Ok, that may be a gross exaggeration, but what I’m saying is that coming to the party late gives you more time to select the dress and finalize the make-up. And Microsoft is always late.

As long as most new cloud app users are coming from the MS Office world, Microsoft will likely continue to have an upper hand in the Outlook client development (read an example of SFDC’s Outlook 2010 woes). No matter how data driven the CRM applications become through the real time feeds of social network alerts and what have you, there will always be an office worker physically using the application. He or she will want to print documents from the data, pull it into Excel and synchronize it with the address book. Unless Microsoft loses the battle for the office market to Google Apps and Android, there’s bound to be a strong selling point there for Dynamics CRM for many years to come.

What does your CRM look like? Examples of industry verticals

When you spend most of your days working within a particular instance of CRM for a specific industry, it’s always refreshing to get a look at what someone else has built from the same ingredients. Lauren Carlson from Software Advice sent me a link to her review of 15 industry specific vertical solutions built on top of Dynamics CRM by Microsoft Partners. This is a great snapshot of what the market out there looks like in terms of packaged CRM/XRM offerings. I urge you to click through to some of the vendors’ sites and explore the ways how CRM is being sold to markets that are likely to be totally unfamiliar to you.

Although I’m sure these partners have invested a great deal of time and their industry expertise in packaging these solutions, the question that comes to my mind is “does this particular one size fit all”? Building a vertical solution must be an effective way to get your foot in the door and talk to the potential customers, but with the exceptional customizability of Dynamics CRM, how many customers will end up deploying only the contents of the standard package and not twist it to their specific needs and business practices? Probably not so many, which of course isn’t a bad thing by any means. It just means that out of any predefined selection of solutions, there will be an huge number of permutations that people will call “our CRM”.

Buzz on CRM add-ons

One of the applications we have lately spent time deploying and training in our organization is the CoreMotives Marketing Suite. While we initially were searching for merely a tool to replace our previous email marketing system integration that couldn’t scale to meet our growing CRM userbase’s requirements, what we ended up buying with CoreMotives goes far beyond just email blasts and click-rate tracking. The real selling point is in being able to start tracking website visitors already when they are still anonymous to your business, then later on convert them into identified leads with a page view history that the sales person can use for profiling the lead. To get an idea of what possibilities the CoreMotives tracking scripts open up, have a look at this piece of news regarding their latest enhancements to web form data capture to CRM.

Capturing more data is not an automatic road to success, so having the tracking capabilities of CoreMotives Web Intelligence at your disposal will definitely require also your online marketing process to be well thought out, with clear conversion targets in your mind. Nevertheless, the typical response from any marketing person that has been shown what you could do with the tools has been along the lines of “holy sh**, this is awesome!”, which leads me to believe that the investments needed on the process development side will probably also surface.

The CoreMotives solution is built on Windows Azure as one of the first Dynamics CRM applications on that infrastructure. You might want to glance through this Microsoft case study (where I also contributed a few words) that takes a look at what the new cloud service models mean for start-up ISV’s like CoreMotives that want to rapidly expand to international markets.

Another application that has caught my eye during the summer has been the M-Files for Microsoft Dynamics CRM. Developed by Motive Systems Oy, this document management system integration is a welcome addition to the relatively new market of Dynamics CRM add-ons developed and productized by Finnish companies.

Some more add-on products are also being actively promoted in Finland during this fall on the CRM Festival 2010, a joint roadshow from Anvia (the company behind the hosted service CRMpalvelu.fi) and a selection of partners like Snoobi and BookIT. Multiple sources have told me the registrations for these events have already been a great success, which gives an indication that the interest towards Dynamics CRM in our local market is steadily growing.

Performance tuning tips for IIS

Let’s face it, Dynamics CRM is not a particularly fast web application when used over a WAN connection with high latency due to physical distance from the client to the server. This is a common scenario for companies who need to operate on global markets with regional offices, some of which may struggle to find a reliable internet connection provider to begin with in their local market. Application response times are a critical factor in driving the adoption of systems like CRM, so paying attention to the service level of your application server and the underlying infrastructure is a must.

Did you know that you can reduce the number of HTTP requests from the CRM client to the application server to almost half by removing unnecessary authentication settings from static content? The solution we have adopted so far has been to disable NTLM authentication from images and scripts by manually going through the various folders on the CRM website. No need for that anymore! As discovered by Dave Berry, there is in fact a registry key setting that will make IIS remember the Kerberos authentication after the initial HTTP request. Read KB917557 for more details on how to set this up on your Dynamics CRM application server.

It’s coming! CRM 2011 beta

Ok, I’m sure most of you know by now that CRM 5 is CRM 2011 and the RTW of CRM Online is promised to take place before the end of the year, as announced in WPC 2010. The beta version is arriving already this month and that will surely cause an information explosion in the CRM blogosphere. Having had the privilege of using the CTP3 version of CRM 2011 Online as a part of the Microsoft Early Adopter Program our company is participating in, I can only say “it’s worth the wait”. Once the NDA is lifted, hopefully I will have the chance to share many more thoughts about the upcoming version and how we’re planning to utilize it. Stay tuned for updates.

So much for the branding. Underneath it all we will have the “CRM5″ engine evolving from CRM 4.0, with quite a few important improvements on how the application can be utilized as a platform for developing your own custom applications, a.k.a. the XRM mantra that Microsoft has been heavily promoting and showcasing between the product version releases. While this side of the coin will surely play an important part in gradually turning Dynamics CRM into part of the core enterprise infrastructure like SharePoint has become, the first thing most new users will see from the application will still be the Outlook client and traditional customer data management functionality. Which is why there have been some big investments from the Redmond boys on developing that side of the CRM product, as you can see from the picture below.

Instead of merely wrapping the web client page into an Outlook frame, the new rich client interface introduces whole new components that attempt to follow the faimilar Outlook UI experience. Tabs will help in keeping the number of pop-up windows under control while the preview pane we’ve learned to take for granted in processing our email inboxes is now also available in the scope of CRM entity forms. Since Dynamics CRM 2011 now comes with the ribbon interface like most other MS products, the CRM functionality now blends into the Outlook toolbar and gets presented in all its context sensitive glory. I myself have always preferred to use CRM through the web client, since the Outlook version has faded away some of the native CRM application navigation in order to remain Outlook-ish. With the new 2011 version, it looks like there will actually be better functionality (and hopefully usability as well) available through the rich Outlook client, which may make the web client look thin in comparison. Now, this of course raises the question that will any of these rich UI features be available if you stick to Office 2007 or do they require Outlook 2010? Remains to be seen.

Among the new features there is the ability to connect to more than one CRM organization through a single Outlook client. In my opinion this has always been one of the key shortcomings of the XRM offering from Dynamics CRM. Although multi-tenancy would allow you to easily create multiple different organizations on the same application server and leverage CRM as a framework for building non-CRM applications, the curse of a default organization for the Outlook users has meant that one major selling point of the core CRM product, i.e. familiar Outlook experience, has been somewhat paralyzed in the XRM scenarios. I’m not sure whether email tracking to multiple organizations is among the list of supported features, though, so some barriers may still remain on the road towards a ubiquitous “set regarding” button for all the activities encountered during the office hours of a knowledge worker.

Another common integration point after the Exchange/OCS messaging infrastructure is of course SharePoint for document management, which is also becoming a native part of Dynamics CRM 2011. The OOB functionality is unlikely to offer much glamour over the previous custom integrations of showing document libraries in an iFrame. The big deal would however be in synchronizing the user rights across the CRM and SharePoint realms, which is where I would put my money on MS to deliver a solution. What I would also like to see offered is a native integration to the FAST based search, thus providing a more Google like search experience for CRM users, but since SharePoint 2010 is highly unlikely be a system requirement for CRM 2011 implementation, this will surely remain a custom solution to be offered by the Dynamics CRM implementation partners.

The release of SQL Server 2008 R2 already introduced maps and geospatial visualizations into the Reporting Services (SSRS) feature set. With Dynamics CRM 2011 investing heavily on data visualization and built-in dashboards, perhaps we will finally get an easy way to map address attributes from CRM entities into a nice looking view like the one below. Or then maybe it will still require populating some additional coordinate data onto the records and paying for Bing API usage. Time will tell (or some fellow bloggers?).

Going beyond what CRM offers out-of-the-box has always been what really makes the product so intriguing. There are countless ISV’s and individual developers out there who have built tools, enhancements or full-blown service integrations on Dynamics CRM.  Keeping track of the offering as a CRM end user or gaining visibility for your product as a service provider has not been so straightforward, due to the lack of a clear forum for these two parties to meet (here’s my personal link list on the topic). If both the user and the partner working on a CRM implementation project are small companies, exploring the world of ISV’s for solutions that would fit an identified need may just be too much of a hassle to be undertaken when there are more than enough customizations and plug-ins to worry about. This is where a simple solution could potentially unlock a big new market and that is what the newly announced Microsoft Dynamics Marketplace is going to attempt when it is launched in September 2010.

Initially the Microsoft Dynamics Marketplace looks to provide the existing catalogue of products from the Microsoft Dynamics Solution Finder. Also it will be built on the existing Microsoft Pinpoint platform. This combination in itself will not yet provide a huge leap forward in streamlining solution discovery and distribution, but at least it’s a start. Later on the Marketplace is promised to offer proper e-commerce functionality, thus allowing the exchange of money like a true marketplace ought to. In Dynamics CRM 2011 the Marketplace will be an integrated part of the application (probably á la Resource Center introduced in CRM 4.0), which will certainly help in bringing down the barriers to commercial transactions taking place in the ecosystem. The biggest dependency to Dynamics CRM 2011 in my opinion will be the upcoming solution management functionality, as this promises to deliver a controllable environment for the service providers to package their applications and not having to invest unfeasible amounts of support resources into ensuring whether the solutions will fit the unique CRM puzzle of each and every customer that wants to install it.

Building a marketplace is relatively easy, but getting it to work for the benefit of all interest groups (sellers, buyers and the platform provider) can be very tricky. Just because Apple has done such a phenomenal job on this front and built a whole new value adding layer around their core product experience with the help of 3rd party developers doesn’t mean that any app store would automatically be a success. Nokia, the previous leader in the smartphone field had launched their own Software Market around 10 years ago, failing to get much traction on the concept, and finding itself still struggling today, chasing Apple with a not so appealing concept called Ovi Store. Or have a look at the Windows Mobile / Windows Phone Marketplace and compare that to what Apple and Android have. Get the picture? The moral of the story is that you need so much more around the Marketplace concept than just a pretty site with some links to random products you have on sale. App stores only work when they are truly designed to serve the application ecosystem, not just to make money from the service or use the partners as a showcase for your own offering. Solve a real problem first, then watch the revenue streams accumulate later as a result of the value that you injected into the process first. Here’s hoping that Microsoft can build a serious contender for Salesforce.com AppExchange and the likes, as this will surely be one of the key success factors in the brave new world where rigid business applications are transforming into flexible services that the customers assemble into customized solution packages on-demand, pay-as-you-go.

So what’s up with the cloud then? Well, the jokes about running applications in your very own cloud hosted on the server hidden in the closet have just become a tad less funny, as Microsoft went and announced the Windows Azure Platform Appliance. Bundled with Windows Azure, SQL Azure and some other goodies, this will basically be a cloud-in-a-box type of a solution, which is trying to bridge the gap between on-premises and online. The underlying strategy behind the Azure appliance will surely be speculated from a plentitude of different angles, but my take on this is that it’s a one big step on the path towards Azure and the cloud becoming the default platform rather than the option. Companies who don’t want to or aren’t allowed to move their applications to CRM Online will be offered the possibility of replicating the Azure services inside their own (or hosted) server room. Once on Azure, the step towards handing it all over to Microsoft’s cloud will be not that far away anymore. By giving a clear message that Microsoft is focusing “all in” on the cloud, Steve Ballmer is also saying that the investments to their remaining traditional applications development will be steadily decreasing. You will continue to have the power of choice, but choosing to opt out from the cloud will just become more and more difficult to justify.

First of all, getting to Convergence 2010 in Atlanta this year was not easy, as I’m sure many fellow Europeans noticed. No, the problem was not in acquiring tickets or hotel accomodation, it was in the physical act of getting to Atlanta through the volcanic ash cloud that paralyzed the airspace in most of Europe the week before Convergence was set to start. I was in Kuala Lumpur at the time of the eruption and had to re-route myself directly from Malaysia to United States, without visiting my home base in Helsinki. The one week trip in South-East Asia turned out to be a three week trip around the world, which was a bit of a rough ride, but I’m glad to have made it to all the meetings I had planned, attended Convergence for the whole duration of the event and returning safely back home (with a huge pile of laundry in my luggage).

The event took place in Georgia World Congress Center in downtown Atlanta. Even though there were over 8.500 attendees to this years Convergence, which is a huge event on my scale, it still felt like GWCC was half empty, which should give you an idea of the sheer size of the building complex (check out some fun facts here). This meant a lot of walking between the sessions, but a small exercise never hurts. Feeding all the thousands of people cannot be an easy task, but the organizers pulled it off quite nicely with the help of the gigantic buffet hall and of course a countless number of coffee and snack stands everywhere. All in all, great surroundings for the event, which is probably why it was announced that also Convergence 2011 will be held in Atlanta.

The opening keynote this year didn’t deliver anything spectacular. GP 2010 was announced, as was the upcoming global availability of CRM Online, but all of this was very much business-as-usual. Kirill delivered basically the same Dynamic Business message as he did in Convergence 2008 Copenhagen, with the added flavour of cloud computing. There was a nice R&D Labs demo of a product concept utilizing a touch screen overlay for a “65 screen from NextWindow and a business application that allowed touch-based adjustment of sales forecasts derived from fictional social network data analytics. While I’m somewhat sceptic about companies reaching that level of sophistication in mining the social buzz level around their product lines anytime soon, the in-store utilization of touch screen UI’s presenting unified product catalog data in both web stores as well as retail outlets may not be such a distant concept anymore. Expanding the usage of ERP data to the new retail use cases with direct customer interaction will surely require a whole new mindset in application design, something which is might be considered the ERP equivalent of the Social CRM movement (more on that later).

Click the image to access video clips from Convergence 2010 keynote

“We’re all in”, that is the primary message from Microsoft these days. The “in” is of course the Cloud, which MS is considering to be at least as big a shift for IT business as the invention of the graphical UI or the browser based Internet. I think many people in the audience were still cautious when estimating the impact of cloud computing for their own field of information management and application development, which is an understandable approach at this early stage, when the hype surrounding the cloud is still at such a peak level. Nevertheless, everyone needs to keep their eyes open and observe what is going on in the world around them. For example, I guess almost all of the CRM related sessions at Convergence 2010 were using specifically CRM Online for the demos (except for a few local virtual machines that were probably needed in some cases). The big shift is that the Online offering has taken the center stage in Microsoft’s CRM product message, with the on-premises version slowly but surely becoming an option that is still available. Will we eventually see MS CRM going 100% hosted á la Salesforce.com?

A good example of the benefits of running your Dynamics CRM in the cloud instead of your own server behind the firewall are the recently announced portal accelerators for CRM Online. The package that initially includes Event, eService and Partner Management accelerators is presumably going to offer a full Portal Development Toolkit (see the MS Partner Network presentation for May 2010 release). What you effectively get is a CMS system for building websites with dynamic content straight out of your Dynamics CRM Online database, with out-of-the-box content hosting and CRM integration running on Azure. There have already been products like this offered by ISV’s like Adxstudio before (who, I believe, are also behind the portal accelerator development), but providing it as an extension to CRM Online can lower the barrier to such a level that I’m sure many customers cannot resist the temptation to try it out. Considering that there is no External Connector license model for CRM Online (like there is for on-premises installations), the total cost of having the basic web + CRM functionality could potentially be highly attractive for many SMB’s.

Since the Office 2010 wave of products was released very recently, there was of course some promotion of SharePoint 2010 and how it can be “better together” with CRM. On a practical level there wasn’t too much to show about the synergies, as the demos were along the lines of showing SharePoint search results in an account form iFrame. Useful, but hardly revolutionary. Many vendors are promoting their automatic document library integration products, but if you want my opinion, I’d say you should wait to see what CRM 5.0 (edit: make that Dynamics CRM 2011) will offer on that front before committing to ISV add-ons. All in all, the best demos related to Office 2010 were actually the PowerPivot examples of building dynamic data cubes directly on the client PC instead of relying on SQL Server Analysis Services. Very cool stuff, wish I could convince our corporate IM department to upgrade my Excel so I’d be able to try some of that “personal BI” magic…

That’s it for the first part of the article. Check out Part 2, where I’ll be discussing how the word “social” is changing the world around CRM and Microsoft.

I was lucky to recently get access to a CRM Online development environment, provide to us by CoreMotives as a part of our evaluation use of their Marketing Suite. Here are some of my initial impressions on the differences and similarities between Dynamics CRM Online and the good ol’ on-premises Dynamics CRM.

Outlook client setup

Since my work laptop’s Outlook is connected to a production CRM instance, I decided to try the CRM Online with my home PC. The installation file download took a while, but soon we were on our way.

I decided to skip the SQL Server installation to speed things up and settle for the online-only version. After all the patches had been applied, I was greeted with a login window for the Outlook client.

From here onwards everything seemed to work just like in the familiar on-premises CRM world. Perhaps even a bit too closely, as the first prompt that greeted me when accessing CRM Online was a notice about scheduled maintenance downtime later on the same day.

Oh well, I guess the cloud needs some regualr reboots, just like any Windows machine.

CRM Online user inteface

Like with the Outlook client installation, most things look very familiar inside the CRM Online UI. The home page does however present some new features to us.

CRM Online contains a feature called Get Started Panes, which provide contextual information at the top of the main CRM window entity screens. By default these contain categorized instructions on common tasks a user might want to perform when working with e.g. accounts or opportunities.

What’s really nice about this feature is that it provides an additional customization point where you can inject your own help menus into the Get Started pane. See the SDK for more information on how you can use the GetStartedPanePath and other variables to customize the panes through Sitemap XML. Looking forward to having something similar in the on-premises CRM, at least by the time CRM 5.0 is released, since I can think of many cases where providing company-specific process instructions right inside the CRM UI would be very practical.

Another visible new feature is of course the dashboard style charts that are presented at the CRM Online home screen. Although not too fancy in their appearance or feature set, it’s nevertheless a nice addition to the product, making basic data visualizations something that can grab the attention of the CRM end-user more easily, maybe even driving him or her to have a closer look at the actual reports menu. The charts have a few settings available for the user to customize to his liking, including record type, selected view and the type of chart.

For those users who need to rely on CRM Online as their only system for reporting on customer data, things are still not so great, as using SQL Server Reporting Services for building custom reports is not an option. Well, there are of course ways to arrange it, as outlined in this post on the Dynamics CRM Team blog recently, but exporting offline data snapshots might not sound appealing to all users.

Internet Lead Capture

One additional marketing feature not available outside CRM Online is the Internet Lead Capture menu.

Basically what Microsoft does is they offer to host landing pages or online forms that feed data to your CRM Online database. While this sounds like a nice idea, I’m not too sure how many companies would in practice be willing to utilize a hosted contact form page that exists outside their website (you can find some live pages by searching for “dynamicssite.com”). For a quick’n'dirty landing page for some specific campaign this might be an option worth considering. The editor makes creating integrated forms a fairly easy task, so playing around with the option is a fun little exercise.

I won’t go further into details, as the lead capture form has been covered with many screenshots in this blog post by MS. One thing to note is that the Internet Leads are stored into a separate entity from the regular Leads, thus allowing you to filter out spam messages before assigning the data to your sales reps. Importing data from external lists collected from other sources into the Internet Lead entity is supported through a wizard.

Mobile Express

Ok, this is not a feature limited to only CRM Online, but since I hadn’t previously had the chance to use a CRM server that could be accessed directly through the web, I wanted to test how the Mobile Express client has evolved since the days of 3.0.

What’s the verdict? Well, let’s just say that it’s “a nice try” and better than nothing, but there’s still a long and winding road for Microsoft to travel, if they intend to reach a mobile user experience that would somehow be at least close to what is delivered through the web and Outlook clients. The whole process was full of pitfalls that shouldn’t really exist: from trying to desperately log into the service with a Windows Mobile phone (HTC Touch Pro2, with Opera as the default browser), fighting with the useless default customization configurations, to the point of eventually realizing how the relational data model of CRM is only partially supported in Mobile Express. There could be some specific use cases where the mobile client would serve its purpose, but as a CRM system admin I might hesitate on promoting these to the CRM users who don’t understand the limitations.

Conclusions

The overall impression from Dynamics CRM Online is definitely a positive one. It’s not a lite version of CRM, it’s the real thing, with only a few differences and some limitations that you need to be aware of. Combining the ease of deployment with the integration possibilities gives a very interesting value proposition for the product.

During my test usage, the response times from the CRM Online server were surprisingly decent, compared to using one of our own on-premises CRM server in US through a web client from Finland. With a proper roll-out to international markets and the enhanced solution management functionality promised in CRM 5.0, I’m sure the service can become a very viable option for companies of all size.

Both Kim and Patrick stated that the pull from the customers’ side on Microsoft offering an online version of Dynamics CRM has been tremendous. Given that CRM has been designed as a pure web application since day one, it’s no wonder that especially smaller companies today would be questioning what exactly they need their own server for, since so much of the competition is using a purely hosted strategy in delivering their flavor of customer relationship management apps.

Although it may seem like Microsoft has been somewhat conservative in their efforts to roll out their CRM Online offering, this may rather be an indicator of how serious they actually are about ensuring that their cloud experience lives up to the hype. The following quote from Brad Wilson highlights the strategic importance of CRM Online to Microsoft:

“In three years, 100% of our CRM business will start with an Online experience.”

To me that prediction makes perfect sense. Gone are the days when you could sell business software armed with a website full of marketing bullets and some on-site sales presentations with selected screen shots of how the application looks like, “if you buy” or “if you commit to a PoC”. Today the rules of the game are quite simple: give me a demo account and a URL to log in. What, your application requires me to install something? Hmm, well maybe I’ll try it sometime later then.

If you can present your application through a browser, getting your foot through the door can be so much easier. This seems to be precisely what Microsoft is planning to use CRM for. Patric’s presentation included a cycle that presented the typical order in which they expect the customers to adopt cloud based services. Microsoft considers Dynamics CRM to be the most likely entry point for companies to try hosted replacements for their existing business applications. Once the customer data is in the cloud, presence (OCS) and document collaboration (SharePoint) are quick to follow into the palette. After that, having your own Exchange will start to feel outdated etc. etc.

Will this gateway theory work in reality and bring new business to Microsoft? If anything, it does at least sound like a plan where the phases are in the correct order. There would appear to be fairly little functional benefits in moving existing monolithic services like Exchange into the cloud, but going there with a customizable and extensible platform such as Dynamics CRM offers a whole lot more opportunities. As long as CRM Online manages to build an attractive ecosystem around the core product and pull in services that demonstrate the benefits of building integration in the cloud, as opposed to behind the firewalls, it has a great chance for stealing the momentum in business application development.

Will Microsoft make more money out of SaaS than it’s traditional licensing model? That may not be the right question to ask. In order to keep on makin’ money like they have, MS must first find a way to fight the new competition, just like it fought off Lotus & WordPerfect back in the days when the battle was on the C-drive. If Dynamics CRM gains more mind share as a result of this brand new warfare, so be it.

Patric ended his presentation with the following bullets on the key considerations companies should focus on when planning their investment in the cloud:

1. Know where and how cloud services fit into your company’s IT architecture. (strategic or tactical)
2. Prepare your company for the changes associated with cloud services. Prevent anarchy, just because you can sign up to anything doesn’t mean you should sign up to everything. Remember: integration still is key.
3. Attend to your identity management system. User access, security, and integration.
4. Choose the right apps. Most companies will move into the cloud gradually, so it’s a matter of deciding where to get started.
5. Select the right cloud service provider.

While many of the points may sound somewhat obvious, they are all too easy to forget at the high peak of the hype cycle that cloud computing has been riding on. Yes, the cloud will change almost everything, except the mistakes that we will repeat all over again.