As you know the Social Media Accelerator got released earlier this week on codeplex. Marc Wolenik from Webfortistook the opportunity to install this cool and free accelerator and encountered a few problems.

When installing it be sure to check these points if you run into issues:

1. As noted in the discussions, be sure your date/time format is correct (and restart the Async service if necessary)
   
2. Be sure you have a C:\debug directory on your CRM Server (the Accelerator will error with a non-descriptive error if not present).

Follow Webfortis on Twitter: http://twitter.com/Webfortis

Here is our first Tweet from CRM (we have a ton of other Tweets):

TODAY is the General Availability (GA) release date of the Microsoft Dynamics CRM 4.0 Adapter for Microsoft Dynamics GP 10.0. 

The 12+ month development effort received tremendous praise from Beta customers and is the first of many Out of Box integrations Microsoft will provide amongst the Dynamics family (roadmap in place for CRM integrations to AX, NAV, and SL) .  Some representative feedback from our Beta customers include:

• "I was pleasantly surprised to see how intuitive the user interface is"
• "Every integration tool I have worked with requires you to be a developer on some level, this one does not and is amazingly simple to use"
• "We took advantage of the wizard-based configuration tools to map all the required fields so that we could immediately start sharing information between Microsoft Dynamics GP and Microsoft Dynamics CRM"

From the beginning the focus of this toolset was to provide an integration product that adhered to specific capabilities that are important to Dynamics customers.  Those included:

• Robust ERP to CRM integration that “just works”
• Easy install and deployment
• Minimizing architectural overhead
• A non-developer customization story
• Transparency when things may go wrong

By providing features and capabilities which address each of these, Dynamics customers can get up and running quickly to maximize the ROI from their Dynamics solutions.

Additional information (also available in FAQ found on PartnerSource Landing Page below)

1. The Adapter is FREE!!!  However, customers will need to have an active/current Microsoft Dynamics GP Enhancement/Support plan. In addition, the customer will also need an active/current Microsoft Dynamics CRM Software Assurance (SA) Support Plan.
2. The Adapter can be obtained by the partner organization placing the order for the customer through the standard Microsoft Dynamics GP ordering system.
3. The Adapter will not be compatible with Microsoft Dynamics CRM 3.0 or Microsoft Dynamics GP 9.0 or any other previous versions of Microsoft Dynamics GP or Microsoft Dynamics CRM. In order to utilize the Adapter, the customer would be required to upgrade to Microsoft Dynamics GP 10.0 Service Pack 4 and Microsoft Dynamics CRM 4.0 Update Rollup #5. This is a completely new tool, redesigned from the ground up.
4. The main integration engines/services used for the Adapter are web services to eConnect (web services to web services)

For all Dynamics Partners, there will be a webinar that will take place on Tuesday, October 6, 2009 at 11:00 AM (Mountain Standard Time).  REGISTER TODAY THROUGH THE PARTNER LEARNING CENTER (LINK BELOW!)

We will cover the following topics:

• Version 1 Release Goals
• Adapter Architecture
• High-Level Features
• Entity Mappings
• TAP/BETA Feedback
• Version 1 Release Timelines
• Adapter Pricing
• The Software Development Kit (SDK)
• Adapter Frequently Asked Questions (FAQs)
• Future Timelines
• Available Sales/Marketing Collateral

All Collateral going forward will be placed on the following PartnerSource Landing Page (As it becomes available).

Guest Post by: Anthony Ferrari

For a while now I’ve been wanting to compile a list of the most influential Microsoft Dynamics CRM Users to follow on Twitter and I was hoping to have a statistical way of doing this…

I quickly came to the conclusion that this was rather difficult as there are no great tools to really analyze the Twittersphere on who’s influential and who’s not. Even with interesting tools such as Tweetstats, Twitter Grader and Twinflluenceit was hard to do. Instead, I decided to give you my list of people that, in my opinion, contribute greatly to Microsoft Dynamics CRM via Twitter. I gave preferential treatment to those who tweeted in English and actually had an avatar. There is likely a bunch I’m missing and I hope to extend this list based on feedback and comments from you.

I think this list is a good mix of community, strong Microsoft Dynamics CRM Twitter people, and MVP’s who have tried to contribute to Microsoft Dynamics CRM on Twitter. So in no particular order, here are some Microsoft Dynamics CRM People on Twitter that are great to follow. Please note that this list is entirely based on my personal experience on Twitter.

@tekoppele @ceibner @MSDynamicsCRM@CplCarrot@TheCRMGuy @coloradojules @davidyack
@BarryGivens @Shan_McArthur @crmwatcher @joecrm @JaAG @sundium @CRMLarry @cmespinoza @girishr @astanton SanjayJain369 @rosslotharius @arvindraman

Some of you might recall my post about Microsoft CRM Mobile 3.0 in December of 2005. It was one of my first blog posts that I ever wrote. That particular post however, spun off my blog to now be amongst the most read Microsoft Dynamics CRM blogs worldwide. I think the interest in mobile solutions has only grown since then and over the years I have seen several ISV’s such as CWR Mobility and softBRIDGE develop great mobility solutions for Microsoft Dynamics CRM as well.

Mobile Express for Microsoft Dynamics CRM 4.0 is available for free for existing Microsoft Dynamics CRM customers. With Mobile Express for Microsoft Dynamics CRM 4.0 organizations can provide salespeople with up-to-date information about their accounts and contacts, and help them better manage sales opportunities and track sales-related activities.

Mobile Express for Microsoft Dynamics CRM 4.0 extends the standard toolset of Microsoft Dynamics CRM to any mobile browser for online data access.

• Compatible with any HTML device
• Browser independent
• Managed with metadata
• Delivers information in a dynamics, role-based UI

Attention: The download also installs Update Rollup 5 for Microsoft Dynamics CRM 4.0 (KB 970141), a tested, cumulative set of updates for Microsoft Dynamics CRM 4.0.

Customer Support or Lead Generation via Twitter? It is now possible with the free Social Networking Accelerator for Microsoft Dynamics CRM. Available for download early next week!

What do people do these days when they don’t get the right customer service or buy a bad product? Yes, probably complain about it online. Some do it via blogs but more recently people have been doing this via Twitter.

Twitter is a free social networking and micro-blogging service where users can post and read online messages (also known as tweets) that are limited to 140 characters. Tweets are displayed on the author's profile page and delivered to other users - known as followers - who have subscribed to them. Users can send and receive tweets via the Twitter website, Short Message Service (SMS) or external applications such as Tweetdeck or Twitterrific.

Comcast, Ford and Starbucks are great examples of large organizations that noticed this paradigm shift in consumer behavior early on. They joined twitter and other social networks and started monitoring customer gripes. With their presence on the web they are now able to pro-actively engage in conversations and in case of problems make an attempt to quickly resolve them.

For a while now, I have been telling my partners and customers to be present on the web. Not only with a great looking website, but engage in customer conversations using social networking services such as Linked-In, Facebook and Twitter in combination with CRM.

This is also known as Social CRM as defined by Paul Greenberg; a philosophy & a business strategy, supported by a technology platform, business rules, workflow, processes & social characteristics, designed to engage the customer in a collaborative conversation in order to provide mutually beneficial value in a trusted & transparent business environment. It's the company's response to the customer's ownership of the conversation.

With the new Social Networking Accelerator for Microsoft Dynamics CRM organizations are now able to monitor and analyze customer conversations. Provide them with real-time updates, drive customer satisfaction and identify new opportunities. Click here to see a demonstration video.

Did you know that Microsoft, in response to customer feedback, has extended the support timelines for key Microsoft Dynamics Service Packs?

The change in support policy on service packs is applicable for products such as Microsoft Dynamics SL, Microsoft Dynamics GP, Microsoft Dynamics NAV, Microsoft Dynamics AX, and Microsoft Dynamics CRM.  Previously, when a new service pack was released for these products, Microsoft provided 12 months of support for the previous service pack. With the change you will have up to 24 months of support for a previous service pack, when a new service pack is released.

Microsoft lists the new support periods for Dynamics service packs on its help and support page here

I have heard this request many times: “Why can’t you make the Implementation Guide available in an online format?”.

So as of today, the entire Microsoft Dynamics CRM 4.0 Implementation Guide 4.4.0, all 477 topics, are now published on TechNet. This represents a huge step in IT Pro content discoverability and ease of use for our customers and partners.

http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/library/dd979443.aspx

So now you can easily access the Planning Guide, Installing Guide, Operating and Maintaining Guide, the SDK and the Report Writers Guide whenever and wherever using your favorite browser.

How do I connect a Microsoft Virtual PC 2007(SP1) image to the Internet? This is a question I hear very often from either partners or customers. I’ve been meaning to blog about some of the possibilities for quit some time now.

After installing Windows Server 2003, Windows Server 2008, Windows Vista or Windows 7 into Microsoft Virtual PC’s virtual machine (VM) as a guest operating system, there are several ways to connect to the internet. In this post I want to focus on the 4 most common (easiest) ways of doing this.

1. If you have a guest operating system that does not need a fixed IP address, such as Windows XP, Vista or 7, you can set the Networking Settings for the VM to use Shared Network (NAT) as the network adapter.
   
   
2. If you have a guest operating system that does not need a fixed IP address, such as Windows XP, Vista or 7, you can set the Networking Settings for the VM to use your LAN or WiFI connection as the network adapter.
   
   
3. If you have a guest operating system such as Windows 2003 or 2008 Server that does not require a fixed IP address, you can set the Networking Settings for the VM to use a Loopback Adapter as the network adapter. This requires you to install the loopback adapter locally on your host first and have your network adapter set to DHCP within the VM.
   
   
4. If you have a guest operating system such as Windows 2003 or 2008 Server that does require a fixed IP address, you need to enable two Network Adapters within the VPC settings. The first network adapter needs to be set to “Local Only” and the second Network Adapter needs to be set to either your LAN or WiFI connection.
   

Lets use this last option as a way to enable internet access for the latest Microsoft Dynamics CRM VPC that is available on Partner- and CustomerSource.

1. Open the Virtual PC Console and click on “Settings”

2. Navigate to “Networking” and make sure the “Number of network adapters” is set to 2. Select “Local Only” from the dropdown list for Adapter 1.  Select your “Ethernet” or “WiFi” connection for Adapter 2. Click on OK to close the settings dialogue.

3. Now start the Microsoft Dynamics CRM VPC and login.

4. Once you’re logged in we need to enable the second network adapter. This can be done by navigating to “Network Connections” and right click on the adapter called “Local Area Connection 2” and selecting “Enable”. I typically also rename this to say something like “Internet”.

5. After the second network adapter is enabled we need to remove the gateway on the first “Local Area Connection”. You can do this by right clicking on the adapter called “ Local Area Connection” and choose properties. Scroll down and double click on Internet Protocol (TCP/IP) and empty out the gateway address. After you’re done you can click twice on OK to close the Network Properties dialogues.

You are now free to browse the internet, assuming that by now your internal DHCP server or router has assigned an IP address to the “Local Area Connection 2”. Open a browser and give http://www.bing.com a try.

As you know Microsoft Dynamics CRM 4.0 is designed to help enterprise organizations attain a 360-degree or 3-D view of customers, achieve reliable user adoption, adapt quickly to business change, and accelerate project delivery and returns–all on a platform that provides enterprise levels of scalability and performance.

In working with our partner, Intel, engineers from our two teams completed benchmark testing of Microsoft Dynamics CRM 4.0 running on Microsoft Windows Server 2008 operating system and Microsoft SQL Server 2008 database software running Intel Xeon 5500 series processors and using Intel® X25-E Extreme Solid State Drives. Benchmark results demonstrate that Microsoft Dynamics CRM can scale to meet the needs of an enterprise-level, mission-critical workload of 50,000 concurrent users while maintaining performance at sub-second response times. In addition, the architecture employed during this test cost less than $35K – or less than $0.70 per user, and incorporated new energy-efficient processors that generate up to 30% less power within an IT or datacenter environment. 

Test results were achieved with a system running several customizations, including workflows to simulate a real-world Microsoft Dynamics CRM deployment. Standard optimization was applied using guidelines published in the Optimizing and Maintaining Microsoft Dynamics CRM 4.0 whitepaper. Extensive customer research formed the basis of the test design, test scenarios, database sizing, and record counts used in the testing.

These results reflect a snapshot of how Microsoft Dynamics CRM 4.0 performs in a specific environment. Customers may be able to achieve higher levels of performance and scalability through further customization and a finer level of optimization.

With version 4.0 of Microsoft Dynamics CRM we introduced a new/additional deployment option called Internet Facing Deployment (IFD). In plain English this means that this is a way to make your on-premise Microsoft Dynamics CRM 4.0 available from the Internet, with or without the need of a VPN connection.

The CRM Product Team has released a document that covers how to set up Microsoft Dynamics CRM 4.0 to make it ready to be accessed from the Internet. It will cover the following Internet-Facing Deployment (IFD) scenarios for Microsoft Dynamics CRM 4.0.

• Install or Upgrade Microsoft Dynamics CRM 4.0 through the user interface (UI) setup
• Install or Upgrade Microsoft Dynamics CRM 4.0 with a configuration file

This document will not cover the steps that you must complete to make a server available from the Internet. There will be additional steps depending on if you are using ISA server, firewalls or anything else in your environment that may need to be configured to get your server accessible from the internet.