I've been cheating. Not on my wife - but on my favourite coffee shop. When I arrived here I dated a few of the usual ones: Uptown Espresso, Ladro, Zoka etc. Then I found Vivace. Apart from a brief torrid afair with Victrola I've been relatively loyal. Now there is someone new on the scene. A lover whom I knew from another city (it isn't cheating if it is outside your city right?). Now they have moved here. So now I find myself neglecting the Vivace and sitting here in Stumptown. The Portland roaster's two new Seattle locations are proving to be a strong challenge to Vivace. Head to head Vivace is still better: they focus on two varieties, their seating is better and the parking is free. Vivace could improve their music selection (sitting through the Brady Bunch Album on loop at Alley 24 one day doing CRM5 planning became a little painful). However I still find myself here at Stumptown. Indulging in disloyal conduct.... throwing back their fancy Rwandan beans.

Now I know how LTG lives....

Once again - according to the internet - here are our customer numbers. I personally don't keep track of such things (I could ask the Eloi in the marketing department I suppose).

Microsoft, which started its business applications division in 2001, now has 475,000 users of its CRM products in 11,000 customer companies, Raikes said. In its fourth quarter, Microsoft added 85,000 new users, he said.

Awesome. They actually call it 'Felony Cheese Making'. It begs the question: is there misdemeanor cheese making?

via The Consumerist

Mike Synder of Sonoma Partners asked me the other day: "why isn't there any voice over on your sceencasts?". The answer is simple: expediency. Most of my screencasts are down at mid-night while I'm sitting at home on the couch (connected to CRM Live or using a VPC). I do them in 'one take' and then encode them.

Next week I promise to find some quality time, close my office door and encode one with voice using a recent build. Stay tuned!

M3 has a good post over on his blog about firing your customers. Some good links in the post to some other articles. Using CRM systems to locate troublesome customers is often controversial. Consider using remedial actions to turn a problematic customer into an intensely loyal customers: after all most problems are in fact opportunities.

At the end of the day you can't do business with everyone and it's OK to pass on a piece of business once in a while.

David Yack has a great post on his CRM blog which shows how to launch a CRM 4.0 'Titan' Workflow from the Web Services API.

Yep - I know my RSS feed is totally busted. Duplicate posts etc etc.

I need to find some time to build totally new syndication code. My blog uses the BlogEngine.NET (this thing I found on internet). Like all free things one finds lying around on the internet there is bound to be problems. Essentially I need to go create a fork which will meet my special needs (ie. cut out some of the 'fad' features in the product).

The internet tells me our product is now cheaper. The warlocks in the pricing department don't share with me - so I know nothing extra.

Fake Steve Jobs (aka Dan Lyons) was speaking on campus today. Extremely funny. One of the things I love about Microsoft is that a man can compare our CEO to Uncle Fester and we will still invite him to come and speak.

Today's screencast shows the Many To Many (n:n) Relationships feature in CRM 4.0 (Titan). This is a 'pure' n:n construct. Two entities are joined via this relationship. Each side of the relationship is symmetrical. You can't store additional data on the relationship (but there is a different feature in Titan which enables this).

In this example I create a n:n relationship between the Account Entity and the Contact Entity to model an 'influencer' relationship. An account can have many influencers (who are contacts) and a Contact can influence many accounts.

Screencast: Many to Many Relationships

As previously mentioned I'm presenting at the Microsoft SOA and Business Process Conference next week. Here are the details for my session:

Microsoft Dynamics CRM: SOA Platform for Building Custom Business Applications
Thursday November 1st
1:00pm to 2:00pm
St. Helens/Rainier Room
Track: SA 204

My session a '200 level component' in the 'Solution Architecture' track which according to the web site means:

The Solution Architecture track will focus on the design and implementation of service oriented and business process solutions. We will provide best practices and proven patterns for handling challenges with many aspects of solution architecture including: data, identity, user experience, messaging, workflow, and rules. We will also focus on key capabilities such as service and process analysis and design, service enablement, service composition, process modeling, service instrumentation, service & process lifecycle management and others.

What does this all mean? I'll simply 'tell our story'. Microsoft CRM 4.0 'Titan' is a powerful platform for creating customer centric applications. I'm going to spend a fair amount of time showing our web based workflow editor, our web services and discussion our approach to 'app building'. Some marketing guy also volunteered some other marketing person to show up at my presentation to show some integration demo that this other marketing team built. They assure me that the integration works (marketing teams are infamous for showing 'inspirational demos' as opposed to 'practical demos'). I imagine I'll give them 5-10 minutes at the end to show their thing.

So if you are interested in finding out more about CRM 4.0 come along to my presentation. The Q&A should be fun...

See the conference agenda for more details.

Unfortunately I'm not in København this week for Convergence (Microsoft's Business Software focused customer/partner conference). There are a handful of CRM engineering team members attending and if you are also going to the conference I strongly urge you to 'track them down' and 'talk CRM'. I imagine there will be some kind of 'booth' setup and that is probably a good place to start. Now is a great time for customers and partners to mold our thinking about future versions.

Michael Lu has supplied another Titan Screencast - this time showcasing the Outlook client. In Titan we have continued to evolve the client story with vast performance improvements, ribbon enhancements and task management functionality. For the technical people we have offline plugins/callouts, offline web service SDK, new installation mechanism (install is separate from config), troubleshooting tools and a host of other cool stuff.

Screencast: CRM for Outlook

Via David L's blog. If you are in Sydney or Melbourne - it is definitely worth checking out these two Titan events.

Sydney – Monday, 19th November, 2007 from 9am – 5.30pm @ Microsoft Sydney

To register for the Sydney Business Track click here

To register for the Sydney Technical Track click here

Melbourne – Tuesday, 20th November 2007 from 9am – 5.30pm @ Microsoft Melbourne

To register for the Melbourne Business Track click here

To register for the Melbourne Technical Track click here

Michael Lu did a quick screencast showing the new Word Mail Merge in action. CRM 4.0 (Titan) allows you to integrate directly with Word 2003 and Word 2007's own Mail Merge feature.

Screencast: Mail Merge