Social business remains a hot topic and Microsoft will add some of the much needed social aspects into the next release of Dynamics CRM. Activity feeds á la Twitter, Facebook, Yammer, Chatter and the likes will be integrated also into Dynamics CRM, as can be seen in the demo dashboard below.

In addition to allowing status updates from colleagues, the functionality we saw earlier in CRM 4.0 as the Business Productivity Newsfeed Accelerator (though merely a report) and then later on implemented through 3rd party add-ons like Vibe from Sonoma Partners, now looks to become a core part of Dynamics CRM platform. I’d imagine these automatic feed items are still posted as a result of record updates triggering workflow process rules, like in the aforementioned examples.

Office 365 will become the new home of CRM Online in Q4 as it integrates into the same infrastructure. In addition to subscription management and authentication provider improvements, there’s some interesting benefits for CRM in the Lync integration provided from the Office 365 cloud. No longer will you be limited to only have chats and video conferencing with your colleagues. If the customer contacts in your CRM database are also users of Office 365, their presence information can be federated across organizations (if they choose to, I’m sure) and presented right inside the CRM forms, allowing you to reach out to them through Lync with one click.

Azure Data Market is now being marketed as the “one-stop shop for premium data and applications”. The Dynamics CRM demo included a custom button called Azure Enrich, which went out into the Data Market, opened up D&B’s company database and provided the missing address information for the Contoso account. I guess the big news here isn’t how you can retrieve company data through the API, but rather what the existence of a central marketplace can actually do in making data available to a whole new scale of potential customers, from a variety of global players. The cloud is not only for apps anymore.

In the WPC keynote demo we saw again a Windows Phone 7 client for Dynamics CRM. This time there was also one new screen included, which presents the same activity feed information (labeled as “records feed”). It doesn’t quite compete with the other flashy WP7 Mango demos presented later on in the session, but definitely a useful way for mobile workers to keep an eye on what’s going on in the CRM database while outside the office.

Oh, and of course there was the tablet app built for running Dynamics CRM on a Windows 7 slate. With all the Metro UI goodness, I’m wondering what the out-of-the-box experience could actually become like once we reach Windows 8…

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.

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.

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.