In order to make Activity Feeds a shared, trusted source of information on customer related events, the organization using Dynamics CRM needs to provide its users a path that they can follow to become a member of this community. Although it is possible to build custom business logic through the SDK that automates the following of records, wouldn’t it be better if teams of users could themselves choose topics that they wish to follow, and also broadcast their posts to other users following the same topic? You know, like #hashtags on Twitter. Well, there’s no built-in support for hashtags in the current release of the Activity Feeds solution, but here’s a description of one possible workaround which I’ve come up with.

In my previous post on the topic, I covered the general process of how to enable Activity Feeds for entities in Dynamics CRM. The natural choice for supporting a team collaboration scenario would be to use the default entity Team to display relevant posts for its’ users on the entity form. Unfortunately you can’t enable Activity Feeds for teams, since that’s not a supported entity. In fact, you cannot enable Activity Feeds for any organization-owned entities, even custom ones.

Luckily there’s nothing stopping your from creating a user-owned custom entity and enabling it for Activity Feeds, so let’s go ahead and create a new entity called “Group”. No need for new fields, just publish the entity, then create a Post Configuration record with the same entity name (new_group or something like that). After this you’ll need to go and adjust the form so that the Record Wall is directly visible when you open the form, by moving it below the first General tab.

Now you’re all set for starting to use the group entity in Activity Feed posts. No matter on which record’s wall (or your personal wall) you’re writing a post to, you can perform a mention by entering the @ character followed by the group’s name. In this case I’ve created a group called CRM, so I’ll add a mention of @CRM on an account record wall. You’ll see how that turns into a hyperlink to the group record.

How the user’s personal wall works is that it will display all Activity Feed posts that contain any reference to a record that the user has followed. It doesn’t have to be the record where the post has been written on. This is what enables us to make following updates concerning a certain topic easier for the end user, as long as the posts contain a mention/link to the group record. For manual posts the users will need to indicate that they wish to direct the post to the group’s followers by performing the @[groupname] mention as seen below.

So, does this mean that the mentions can only be utilized with manual user initiated posts? Absolutely not! There is a new attribute available in the workflow editor, called Post Url (Dynamics value). You can read this post on the MS Dynamics CRM Team Blog for details on how the feature can be leveraged in building workflow rules that create Activity Feed posts with mentions referencing other records. This allows us to reference multiple related records in a single post and make it appear on the personal wall of anyone who’s following one of the records.

Let’s say we want to create an auto post whenever a case record is created and it has the value “CRM” in the subject field, to notify anyone who’s following the CRM group. Ok, so we can find a relationship to the related subject record but since that’s not supported for Activity Feeds (just like teams aren’t), we wouldn’t be able to use it for creating a mention. Also, since the group entity we created doesn’t have a relationship to the case entity, it’s not available in the workflow dynamic values menu.

Should we go and create a relationship through entity customization? Well, that would be a bit cumbersome, since you’d then have to include a reference into the actual group record in every case record you wish to create a post a mention on. You’d pretty much have an additional subject lookup on the case form as a result, which is not a good solution in terms of usability (at least if you already use the default subject entity in your processes).

Luckily there’s one more place on the Activity Feed post entity that you can use in the workflow: RegardingObjectId. Normally this would represent the main object of the post (such as the opportunity record which has had a state change event that triggered the post), but you’re free to select a record from any of the entities that have been enabled for Activity Feeds through the Post Configuration records. So, let’s proceed by creating a workflow that runs whenever a new case is created, checks if the subject is “CRM” and creates a post record with the following attributes:

Let us now return back to the new user sign up scenario. In the beginning the personal wall is going to look quite empty and the user will not necessarily know which records he or she should start to follow, in order to get an idea of the activities going on in the system.

After the user clicks on the follow button on the group record, all the posts that contain a mention of the group’s name will be visible on his personal wall. The user will immediately be up to speed with the latest activities around the topic of the group.

An added benefit of following groups or topics instead of individual records is that this makes it much easier for the users themselves to apply noise controls if the number of updates on the Activity Feed walls gets to high for them to keep up with. All they’ll need to do is unsubscribe from groups that are not providing updates relevant to their own work. No need to start selecting accounts, opportunities etc. that they wish to unsubscribe from, or to contact the sysadmin and request an adjustment to the workflow rules that are generating low value auto posts into the feed.

There’s lots of neat things included in the update, such as multi-category charts, user access auditing, lookup and date fields for dialogs, ignoring null values and inactive records in duplicate detection rules etc. Have no doubt, though, this release will be remembered from the Activity Feeds, so let’s proceed straight to them.

More than just an accelerator for CRM

Microsoft has split the delivery method of the Activity Feeds functionality into two tiers. The platform level changes are delivered with Update Rollup 4, which brings us a selection of new default entities, such as the feed Post. These will provide the building blocks not only for the visible Activity Feeds released now but also web services API enhancements, which are covered in the 5.0.7 update of the SDK.

The Update Rollups can nowadays be considered pretty much as “business as usual” hotfixes like the ones released for other Microsoft products, both on server and client side, as they are delivered through the common Microsoft Update mechanism. Testing and planning for the Rollups is of course very much recommended still, as significant changes can be included in them, and yes, they do occasionally break compatibility between versions. Furthermore, the Update Rollup 5 required for Activity Feeds to function cannot be uninstalled if things go wrong.

Anyway, unlike the hotfixes that can be expected to be installed on almost all CRM environments, the Activity Feeds user interface components will probably remain missing from many instances. Why? Because there is no automatic delivery method for them, unless you are using a CRM Online environment that has been provisioned after the R7 release became available. You see, Activity Feeds still are kind of like an accelerator package, as the solution file will need to be downloaded from the Dynamics Marketplace and installed by the system administrator.

Not even installing the solution file and publishing the customizations is enough – you still need to configure them. The menu item for “What’s New” will appear in the UI after the solution installation, but none of the entities in your CRM have yet been enabled for Activity Feed posts. To do this, you’ll need to navigate to Settings and go to Activity Feeds Configuration menu. Create a new Post Configuration record for each entity that you wish to relate posts to. The configuration UI of the solution is not too nice, as you’ll actually need to use the logical name of the entity rather than the display name. So, to enable the new functionality for the user entity (which is the very first thing you must do!) is enter the value “systemuser” and click save. Make sure you check the box for “enable walls for this type of record form” and don’t forget to publish the entity’s customizations after clicking on save.

What’s a “wall”? If you’re on Facebook (and who isn’t), you’ll know this refers to the place where the posts related to a user will be displayed in a descending chronological order. Now, in CRM it’s not only users that can have walls, but any entity for which you have created a Post Configuration entry for. Even your custom entities, like “project” or “event” can be set to have their own Wall. However, bare in mind that not all the system entities are supported for the Activity Feeds functionality, so you can’t have a discussion related to, say, competitor or product records (which kind of sucks, as those are some very common topics for employee discussion around the water cooler, but guess you’ll still need to get away from your desk every now & then). For a complete list of supported system entities, see this page on the SDK.

As you can see from the image above, the wall is actually a web part that is presented on a new tab, that is located before the first default tab (general). The tab will be collapsed by default and the form actually scrolls to the general tab right after the form script is loaded, so a user may not notice anything new on the form. However, if you click on the anchor on the left side navigation, the Record Wall will be revealed in all its glory. Here the user will have the option of adding the record into his list of followed CRM records, see who else is following it, and of course post an update on the wall. (By the way: if you have multiple forms per entity, you’ll need to add the Record Wall web parts manually, by following these instructions.)

There’s also a Personal Wall that shows the user all the content from followed records, and that’s the first entry visible on the updated sitemap for Workplace. What’s really nice is that you have a link right after the “What’s New” header, which will allow you to pop up the wall in a new window. This way you can have the feed view quickly available for you at any time, no matter with which CRM entities you are currently working on in the main application window.

Furthermore, every user has a User Record Wall, which would be identical to the concept of a Facebook profile page. Sorry, no timeline design available here yet!

Not just for mindless chatter: business logic for Auto Posts

If all that Activity Feeds provided was the ability to chat with your colleagues or manually post updates related to records, then it would have a tough time competing with established enterprise microblogging apps like Yammer. Luckily the Dynamics CRM platform can offer much more than that. By allowing certain events related to CRM records to generate content for the Activity Feeds the system can actually serve as a tool that removes the need for you to email information about business events or type updates into a microblogging app. A traditional way to demonstrate the CRM workflows has been to create email alerts on closed opportunities, but now you can reduce the clutter in your inbox by moving these into the right context (opportunity form) with the ability for users to comment and see others’ comments.

The way to configure what gets posted on the walls is through the Activity Feeds Rules menu in the settings area. It’s here where you can enable or disable rules that have been tied to certain events, such as qualification of a new lead, case routed to a queue, appointment closed for an opportunity and so on. If you follow the record that these events have been associated to, you’ll see a pre-formated Auto Post on your personal wall after the event takes place.

Great, so how do I create new Post Rule Configuration records? Well, unfortunately, you don’t. You see, all the entries visible in the list have been created as the result of enabling Activity Feeds for an entity. There is no UI available for creating new rules, nor modifying existing rules – all you can do is change the status. If you want to have different events triggering Auto Posts, you’ll need to either use a workflow rule or plug-ins. Here’s a quick example of a workflow that executes every time a new contact is created, checks whether the parent account relationship type is “customer” and then proceeds with creating a Post record with the contact details inserted as dynamic text. Note that the RegardingObjectId is set to the account and not the contact record. This is very important, since a new contact will not have any users following it at the time the record is created into the database, so the Auto Post would only show on the Record Wall but not the users’ Personal Walls.

As we see from this example, it makes all the difference what kind of a following strategy the CRM users adopt. How to get the right amount of posts in the feed, without missing out on any important pieces of information? Also, how to handle the process of unfollowing? There’s a limit to 5000 records a user is allowed to follow, and managing a list as long as that will require some planning.

I also tried this the other way around, with a workflow rule that would be triggered based on User Posts creation, which would email the post text to a user, but apparently that particular field is not  compatible to be inserted into workflow generated records (even though the workflow editor allows you to select it). Also, it’s worth noting that even with plug-ins you can only create Auto Posts with text content, not the rich XML content that the out-of-the-box Activity Feeds Rules utilize to present their information with customized images and other tricks. Furthermore, while the default Auto Posts will be presented in the user’s language, this is not available for custom Auto Posts yet.

So, is this now Social CRM?

No, not quite yet. The first release of the Activity Feeds solution for Dynamics CRM is squarely focused on introducing the data model and user interface components needed for sharing information in a more modern, social way inside the corporate firewalls. The customer (the first letter in the CRM acronym) has not yet been invited to be a contributing member in this internal community, as all the data in the Activity Feeds will be from either employees or  internal business rules configured in CRM. To really step outside of the traditional silo of CRM and adapt it to the world we now live in, where the customers are A) social and B) in charge, a lot more will be needed. To get an idea of Microsoft’s roadmap for developing their Dynamics CRM platform to become a business hub that supports input from external communities, be sure to check out this presentation on Slideshare, especially the “Beyond Wave 1″ part.

However, as there is an API available already today, expect to see new 3rd party ISV solutions that tap into the CRM feeds and push content from external networks right into your lead or contact walls when they post content on Twitter. Technically it’s not difficult at all to achieve, but a more important aspect to consider is how you will make that customer contributed data add value to the CRM users and enable them to gain new insights based on it. It’s a fire hose of data out there in the social networks and online communities, so simply linking up your CRM system to that data pipe may not be a smart choice.

Even for the internal communities use case, it’s very important to remember that just because you built it, doesn’t mean they’ll come. In this case “they” means the CRM users, who shouldn’t just be expected to automatically adopt the new social features of Dynamics CRM, even though they have been installed into their system. Not only will the new ways of working require support from top management, a plan on how & why these new information management capabilities will be leveraged, but also a conscious effort from Dynamics CRM system customizers and administrators on making these new features approachable, usable and relevant for the everyday tasks that the CRM users need to perform.

Thanks to the Activity Feeds in Dynamics CRM, we now have a lot more toys to play with and certainly a lot to learn about them. So, what are you waiting for? Let’s get to it!

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…

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…

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.

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.