Lemphers is leaving Australia. It's true - I caught up with him last week in Redmond. The good news is he's coming to work here on some kind of Cloud thing. Lemphers is/was probably the best field ISV guy CRM has/had: which means PTY (Microsoft slang for Microsoft Australia) will need to work twice as hard to replace him.

If you are interested in Lemphers' old job he can be contacted via his blog.

I've noticed a subtle change in my behaviour lately (that's behavior for the Americans - this word is one which I abhor using Americanized spelling). The change is simple: I've become less 'bitchy' on email. The cause of my re-programming hasn't been the result of covert bio chemical campaign by my coworkers (although one never knows) - the change has resulted from aggressive use of CRM to track emails.

Any email about a Feature, Customer, Partner is tracked in CRM. This means that email is never deleted and anyone with the right permissions in CRM (ie. our team) can read that mail. The last point is the real advantage here: CRM liberates that important data from the cold dark corner of the mail server and makes it available to all who need to see it. Since tracking is set to be opt-in - things which need to stay private will stay private (and Information Rights Management in Office 2007 still gets a nice workout from time to time).

This pattern of behaviour now means I archive almost no email. The only folders I keep now are Personal (review scores, stock options, job interviews, travel plans etc) and Management (stuff about my team's review scores, stock options, job interviews etc). Everything else gets tracked in CRM or deleted permanently.

So now that my 'general' email archive can be read by the whole team (but not all of Microsoft) I've become far less bitchy.

Oh my! I'm shocked they don't intend to integrate their retail networks (I'm guessing their back office and trading operations will absolutely be merged). Retail branches are far more scalable than they were 10-20 years ago. In NSW their branch territories overlap significantly so a network merge must happen. It will be interesting to see if the government lets this happen (since the FSU will no doubt kick up a royal stink).