What has now been labelled as the agile release model for Microsoft Dynamics CRM will mean that an update/upgrade to the core platform will become available every six months. Contrast that to the previous 2-3 years in between major releases and you can see it’s no minor readjustment but rather a whole new way from the Microsoft Dynamics team to deliver products to the business users.

Funnily enough, the SoD whitepaper claims that CRM 2011 is the fifth major release of the product. While it goes by the 5.0 version number, I guess some of the folks in Redmond have already forgotten that there never was a CRM 2.0 realease, rather we saw the version number incremented from 1.2 to 3.0. Oh well, time flies when you’re having fun working in the field of CRM, so let’s move on…

The new release cycle is of course a direct result of the Cloud Power in action. No longer can you spend years in designing and developing features for your new product behind closed doors, even if you are Microsoft. Cloud applications have taught us consumers into living in a world of perpetual beta products that constantly get updated with new functionality, without any effort required from us to physically upgrade the apps. If Google can do it for Gmail, then why would the enterprise users settle for working with a standarized XP/2003 toolset for almost a decade? In the scheme of CRM, if you’re competing against Salesforce.com that has a monthly release cycle (or so I’ve heard), delivering a huge box of new features once every three years (which is what 2011 does offer over 4.0) means you’d have to actually keep three years ahead in terms of development, just to avoid slipping behind your competitor again. Doesn’t quite sound like a winning strategy.

During the CTP and Beta phases of the Dynamics CRM 2011 release process there were many times when I found either myself or someone else on the forums & blogosphere expressing their thoughts along these lines: “these new features are really awesome, but I just wish the small details of X and Y could be included before RTM, so I can really truly make the most of the product”. In the world of the old release cycle, hearing MSFT representatives reply back with the words “thanks, we’ll try to include it in v.Next” didn’t give much comfort. If the next version was three years away, it’s effectively the same as “forget about it”, if you contrast it with how fast the world of applications keeps turning these days. Facebook grew from 10 million to 310 million active users during a timeframe like that.

Smaller packages of new features twice a year should definitely help Microsoft fill the gaps in product functionality that inevitably appear whenever a big release deadline approaches and planned features have to be dropped to meet the real life requirement of shipping a release. At the moment, Dynamics CRM 2011 is lacking some functionality on three distinct areas that the Statement of Direction says will be addressed in upcoming versions to be released within one year:

• Cross-browser support. Transforming Dynamics CRM from an Internet Explorer only application to a true cross browser app through a new HTML5 UI, thus finally making the platform an option for Mac users as well.
• Mobile devices support. The Mobile Express client in 2011 is identical to what we had in 4.0, but with more and more iPads and Android/iOS/WP7 smartphones found in the workplace, the out-of-the-box mobile experience should be much better, with possible 3rd party apps taking it on an even higher level (offline data access etc.).
• Social CRM. There are two dimensions in which a CRM application needs to be “social enabled” these days: 1) internal collaboration on customer information and activity feeds á la Yammer and Chatter, and 2) capturing and enabling a dialog with the customers in social media channels like Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn.

Dynamics Marketplace will also presumably play a role in addressing some of the needs that don’t quite fit into the core product delivered by Microsoft. The accelerators that we saw released for CRM 4.0 were nice proofs of concept, but they weren’t proper add-on products that could have been deployed by the end user organizations without customization and development services provided by MS partners. The solution management framework included in CRM 2011 will make the distribution of apps much easier and I would expect to see development also on the Marketplace functionality as a channel for app delivery (eventually commerce). When the base platform of Dynamics CRM is built on one single product edition (meaning no separate standard/enterprise or sales/service versions), modularity is enabled throug the solution packages. While the verticals will likely remain a partner driven domain, I’m expecting to see some interesting releases coming from Microsoft Dynamics Labs as well.

The single codebase in Online and on-premises versions is a critical requirement for Microsoft to be able to pull off the planned schedule of shipping packaged software every six months. It will be interesting to see how the on-premises customers will adopt these updates into production use, and more specifically, how will they handle the annual upgrades. Here’s how the Statement of Direction defines the terminology:

Updates deliver new capabilities to Microsoft Dynamics CRM deployments without requiring a full upgrade. Upgrades may deliver deeper functionality enhancements and improvements, may incorporate significant Microsoft platform innovations (e.g. the next releases of Windows Server and desktop, .NET Framework, SQL Server, Office), and will have their own Microsoft support lifecycle for mainstream and extended support.

So, it looks like there could be a major release like a CRM 2012, CRM 2013 etc. every 12 months that can require an upgrade project to be conducted, similar to how current CRM 4.0 customers now need to plan for their strategy for moving to CRM 2011. For the IT department this means answering questions like:

• Can we do an in-place upgrade or do we need to migrate to a new environment?
• Does our existing hardware meet the minimum requirements of the new version?
• How about related MS stack like SQL Server and SharePoint versions, still supported?
• How will we minimize downtime for the end users? Who’s going to take care of client upgrades after the server is upgraded? Will offline data cause problems?

Another aspect to consider is how much further will the legacy code and API’s from previous versions be supported from now on. CRM 2011 does have backward compatibility with CRM 4.0 plug-ins and the 2007 endpoint for web services (see the SDK for code upgrade instructions), but CRM 3.0 callouts or endpoints will no longer work in CRM 2011. What about in Q2/2012 when there will be a new version available? If you choose now to take the easy way out with your 4.0 to 2011 upgrade and not touch any of the existing custom code in your system, will you face problems a problem in 2012 when the backward compatibility might no longer cover 4.0?

Of course it is perfectly possible that the Dynamics CRM platform itself has now reached a level at which there will be less needs for disruptive changes introduced between major releases. If we would summarize the road already travelled, the extremely high level timeline of Microsoft Dynamics CRM platform development could be described with these bullets:

• 2003: CRM 1.0, the beginning
• 2005: CRM 3.0, custom entities (a.k.a. XRM)
• 2007: CRM 4.0, multi-tenancy and the cloud
• 2011: CRM 2011, solution management

So, is the platform now “ready”? Of course it never is, but compared to the situation in 2005 when I first started working with Microsoft CRM (before the Dynamics brand was introduced), I have to say it’s truly come a long way. The building blocks we now have available as results from these previous releases could be seen as the catalyst for why the new agile release model has become possible in the first place. Together with the cloud delivery model of CRM Online, it looks like the evolution of business applications is about to accelerate like never before.

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.

If the cloud computing movement is about the shift in technology, then the social web revolution is all about the people and their new forms of behaviour. Sure, it’s powered by some tech innovations from Web 2.0, but it would be a stretch to claim that the source code behind services like Facebook or Foursquare contains the magic ingredients that have caused the eruption of the social media volcano. To prove my point, just take a look at the following slide:

This “social customer stack” is taken from the Deriving Value from Social Networks session by Nikhil Hasija and Paul Greenberg. It was the best 60 minutes spent during Convergence 2010, hands down (even better than The Return at Tabernackle or The Geeks Band at Hard Rock Café). One particularly great thing about it was that there were absolutely no sceenshots of Microsoft applications, like in all other Convergence presentations. No attempts to push products like the Social Media Accelerator or anything else MS branded. Everything was built around the core message: what has changed since the invention of traditional CRM and why the customer is now in charge.

Social CRM is of course not a brand new concept. Having said that, it’s still far from an established or clearly defined concept. The following presentation contains much of the content that Paul was presenting at Convergence, so flicking through these should give you a good idea of the what, why, how of SCRM:

Be sure to also read Paul’s blog post titled “Microsoft Convergence 2010. Finally Getting Rid of the But….?” on ZDNet.

Returning to the social customer stack, it was quite delightful to see that Microsoft has been able to grasp the fact that the future of applications needed for any company to adopt a holistic practice of SCRM activities is not something they alone can engineer by themselves at Redmond. Maybe this can be partially attributed to the phenomena uncovered by the recent study by NetProspex, which found that Microsoft employees were the most social media-savvy in the world. If the company is able to transform this savviness into products and services that encourage coexistence and integration of applications from outside the Microsoft stack, then all those hours wasted by MS employees in reading each other’s Facebook status updates may actually deliver a nice ROI in the long run. Heck, maybe they’ll even survive beyond the looming death of the desktop operating system.

What does it all mean for Dynamics CRM? Well, your guess is as good as mine, but I believe the business applications world will be moving towards the app store model that we’ve seen grow quite popular in the consumer mobile arena. In order to get there, it’s going to require a little bit of work from Microsoft to make this transformation possible, but I see them taking the steps into right direction. With the Solution Management features to be introduced in CRM 5.0 (edit: now branded as Dynamics CRM 2011), the possibilities for creating real application packages that a CRM using organization could easily consume will be at a whole new level. With its Azure platform, Microsoft has a natural expansion tank in place to facilitate the growth of its CRM customers’ solutions to become a network of applications.

Even though it is somewhat disappointing that there doesn’t appear to be any Chatter type of functionality built into the upcoming version of CRM (guess you’ll need to use SharePoint 2010 for that) to foster the social enterprise approach for transparency on CRM customer data, perhaps this isn’t the most important thing Microsoft to focus on. Social CRM will not be a module you can plug into your existing application, it’s about being able to support whatever new methods of communication and collaboration emerge “out there” between companies and their customers. Get the right pieces in there and the ecosystem may just invite you to be a part of the conversation.

As a final note from Convergence 2010 Atlanta, I want to touch one subject of far less importance than the cloud or the “SocialX” future, but something which relates to them quite closely. If there’s one thing that has changed in conference audience behaviour during the past couple of years, it has to be the explosion of mobile applications for social networks. Yeah, I’m talking about Twitter et al. The backchannel of tweets during the sessions is nowadays something you can expect to take place in any larger tech oriented event. Some people are even writing books about it and building applications targeted to amplify and leverage this phenomena.

I guess Convergence is nowhere near SXSWi in terms of mobile geek penetration rates (just watch this video), but it would have been awfully convenient if Microsoft had provided complimentary WiFi for all attendees, to facilitate the emergence of a proper backchannel. Perhaps the U.S. crowd didn’t have any problems utilizing their data plans, but for an overseas attendee the ridiculous WiFi rates charged by the Georgia World Congress Center for 24h access were a showstopper. Luckily there were plenty of CommNet terminals around, which weren’t locked to browsing only the Convergence site. Tweets thru SMS during the session and a quick review of updates with #CONV10 hashtag during the breaks managed to keep my social network addiction at bay.

Girish Raja showed a cool demo in his Azure themed session about using The Archivist to collect a database of tweets for analyzing trends and other kinds of data mining activities. Perhaps by Convergence 2011 we will hear how Microsoft has managed to make use of the backchannel analytics. I’ll see you in that session then!

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.

Database

• SQL Server is where performance tuning gives the most “bang for the buck”
• Creating custom indexes is supported and encouraged
• Custom search attributes for entity Quick Find view do not automatically get indexes
• Database index should be moved to a different disk system
• Old customization versions are stored in the database
  • Performing many customization changes will slow the system down over time
  • Data is not and cannot be utilized in the UI, so what’s the purpose?
  • There are workarounds for cleaning the old data
• Performance comparison of out-of-the-box setups between v3.0 and v4.0 on identical hardware show 50% reduction in CPU utilization and disk queue length
• SQL Server 2008 will provide performance improvements for CRM out of the box

IIS

• Disabling authentication from static content has been done in v4.0, heavily recommended for also v3.0
• 401 error page size has been reduced, should be done manually for v3.0
• v4.0 uses content compression to reduce the amount of data transferred
  • Compression can create an overhead on the client when rendering content
• Image Strips(?) are used in v4.0 to reduce round trips
• CRM default home page (my activities) round trips have been reduced by 50% between v3.0 and v4.0

Workflow

• Common client for Windows Workflow Foundation is being developed
  • May ship with CRM v.Next
• Workflows are still a heavy operation even in v4.0
• Workflow performance measurement is almost impossible, due to the unlimited number of variations how workflows can be built
• Workflow queue database table is not automatically purged of old data or indexed, should be done manually
  • Table size can grow to become so big that maintenance cannot be run, hotfix is available

Performance general notes

• Tests done using Cisco WAAS application accelerator in WAN environment have proved to improve performance by up to 50%
• Official toolkits for measuring the performance of an existing CRM implementation do not exist
  • Performance measurement toolkit can be used only with test data, prior to live environment deployment
• New MOM (a.k.a. Systems Center) pack for CRM v4.0 will include CRM specific performance analysis tools
• Outlook client improvements in v4.0:
  • Reduced memory footprint, but still quite resource intensive, also due to new requirements from Vista and Office 2007
  • CRM client start-up should no longer slow down the email data transfer upon Outlook start-up, client loads in the background

I was pleased to see a strong focus on application usability and user experience improvements in many of the presentations. Seems like Microsoft is serious about leveraging its decades worth of experience from producing software for the consumer market and using that understanding as a weapon against its competitors on the business applications playing field.

Once I’ve managed to grab the presentations and review them, I though I’d share some of my Convergence 2008 session notes here in this blog. Most of the truly valuable information is usually not in the PowerPoint slides but rather in what is said during the presentation. It would be interesting to also read what the other session attendees wrote down, just a shame that the Dynamics Community site is so poor that I’ll probably need to hunt down this information in various CRM blogs around the net.

Copenhagen was a nice city to visit, check out my Picasa Web Albums for some of the pictures I managed to take during the conference and the afterhours downtown. Would be fun to go back there on a warmer time of the year, so you could truly enjoy all the different flavors of Tuborg beer. Since next year’s Convergence will not be in Denmark anymore, I guess I’d need to pay for the trip myself then.