Identity is becoming more and more of a challenge nowadays. The requirements for SSO, Federation and complex authentication mechanisms are beginning to significantly tax developers. Not to mention the fact that soon regular username/password schemes won't be able to outrun Moore's Law (ie. desktops will be able to crack most passwords).

A lot of people haven't spent much professional development time examining newer Authentication and Authorization mechanisms. Perhaps the Zermatt Beta (from Microsoft's Federated Identity team) is a good opportunity to dive in. BTW: Their samples and documentation is really impressive for a beta.

TechReady (internal Microsoft field technical training conference) is rapidly approaching. For those Microsoft field friends who would like to drop by and say hi... I'm now in Building 42. Please feel free to drop by and say Hi if you are on main campus.

I'm not sure I agree with Brent: @learyb Social CRM: Twitter IS, Email Marketing ISN'T...But That's OK!.

I agree with Brent about the transition from Traditional CRM to Social CRM. Brent posits that the traditional Campaign to Lead process is replaced by the Content to Conversation process. The idea that you can attract a customer through interesting content and then pull that potential customer into your sales cycle with an authentic conversation (eg. Email/IM/Phone) is very compelling to me. Naturally MSCRM is well positioned to take advantage of this with it's Outlook Integration (that's why that integration was built - not to shore up a franchise).

I'm confused as to where Twitter sits in the Social CRM spectrum..... will people 'discover' your Twitter feed (ie. Content) and begin a Conversation? Is it for existing customers - to entice them to give you repeat business? Is Twitter 'opening the kimono' just a little too much (the Scoble's of the world would say that you can't be 'naked' enough).

Y Combinator puts CRM at #6 of it's list of 30 ideas it would like to fund. It's also good to see 'Outsourced IT' at #4. I think the industry is about to experience to major paradigm shifts:

The Cloud is one of these shifts. Over the next ten years companies of all sizes will seriously question the need to have servers and infrastructure in house. Do people want their own generators or do they want to buy off the grid?

The IT Rebellion will be another. The fact that most CIOs can never become the CEO is telling. I believe that many companies will begin to radically restructure their IT arrangements. These restructures will go beyond simple outsourcing arrangements and will be synergistically tied to cloud migrations. Today these IT Rebellions are limited to regional and departmental skirmishes. Expect these to become enterprise wide.

Microsoft is well positioned as neutral party in both these paradigm shifts. We are well positioned with respect to the cloud (I wouldn't have moved from my beloved CRM team to Cloud Services if I didn't believe that). On the IT Rebellion front we are always faithfully served both business user and IT department and I believe we will continue to do so.

Apparently my new work computer with it's NVIDIA 8800 GTS GPU is 'ready to die'. Great.