Today, Thursday May 15th, it is Bike to Work Day! I have been contemplating for a while now to bike to work but always have put it off. Today I will bike to work and join thousands of fellow bikers in moving proof that bicycling is a viable form of transportation in this city.

San Francisco can't beat The Netherlands when it comes to biking, but at least you can bike here. Most cities in the U.S.A. don't even have bike lanes...

Tags: bike
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This solution, provided by Anthony Ferrari who is based out of Phoenix, AZ and is the new addition to our team, will solve two issues on the Microsoft Dynamics 4.0 CRM VPC. First of all it will address the issue that when sending mail within CRM a dialogue box prompts you to change your email integration settings and secondly the same solution solves the problem of not being able to change and save your preferences in the CRM Options dialogue.

When you try and make the change in CRM Options and “allow Microsoft Dynamics CRM to send email using Outlook” the application hangs after pressing OK and when trying to Cancel a CRM error message is displayed.

In order to FIX the error you need to run the The Microsoft Dynamics CRM  4.0 Client Diagnostics on the VPC. The MSCRM Client Diagnostics feature can be executed from the ‘Start’ menu, under ‘Microsoft Dynamics CRM 4.0’, by clicking ‘Diagnostics. The output of this will display a number of issues found. After selecting Fix All you can then go back into CRM Options / Email, and save your changes with no error.

This solution also enables you to save your other preferences without receiving a similar error message. So killing two birds with one stone. Thanks Anthony!

Tags: support, vpc
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I've noticed that the "Summary of Ascentium's "Microsoft Dynamics CRM as a Business Platform" post has been quite popular. In short; the summary and the Ascentium white paper explain how you, a customer or partner, could leverage or use Microsoft Dynamics CRM as a platform and not solely as only a CRM solution. We have created a new acronym for that: xRM (eXtended Relationship Management)

Having said this, I wanted to make you aware of another white paper, similar but is more geared towards the ISV community. In this white paper David Yack and Microsoft explain how, with Microsoft Dynamics CRM, an ISV can quickly build, deploy, and manage line-of-business applications in a multi-tenant Software+Services environment.

Tags: xrm, partners, documentation
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Amanda Easton wrote a great internal summary on the “Microsoft Dynamics CRM as a Business Platform” whitepaper by Jason Hunt and Aaron Elder of Ascentium. The whitepaper is a great read and a fantastic approach to building custom applications using Dynamics CRM as a Platform and thus reducing overall development time, mitigating risk and decreasing update time as technologies change.

“It Doesn’t Pay to Grow Your Own”

• When building a custom application, most organizations “spend most of their time on the plumbing” (see below) and don’t have enough time for  business functionality.
• Ascentium has found from their experience they SAVE  “50% to 70% of the development time” using Microsoft Dynamics CRM as the Platform
• Using Dynamics CRM as a Platform allows Developers to “focus on solving the employees’ problems and solving them well [functionality], so that they choose to use your application”
• “Custom business applications are often not extensible or scalable over the long term” due to time restraints around development
• When technology changes you have to update and modify your Platform, using Microsoft Dynamics CRM – Microsoft takes on that cost
  • New versions of SQL Server, Exchange, Office, SharePoint

Benefits to the Business

• Centralization of data (Prevent Silos of information)
• Standardization of user experience – inherits Dynamics CRM web-like UI (user adoption, lower training costs)
• Simplification of development (Using Customization UI, Web Services, SDK, Service Oriented Arch [SOA], any .NET language)
• Integration with organizations existing systems (Web Services, common SQL Server tools)

What Dynamics CRM provides (The Plumbing)

• Security Model with Authentication tied to Active Directory
• Presentation Layer :: UI Framework (Tool build forms, tabs, add fields, IFrames without any coding)
• Data Model
  • Structure of the Data (Tables, Fields, Etc.)
  • Integrity of the data (Relationships, Dependencies on one another)
• Extensibility of the Data Model without SQL (Tool to add tables, fields, relationships without any SQL)
• Software Development Kit (SDK) – access to the entire SDK used by the developers of Dynamics CRM themselves
• Workflow Engine (Windows Workflow Foundation – build through simple UI)
• Built In connection with Outlook / Office

Don’t miss the “The Skeptical Developer” a great real world story.

Tags: partners, documentation
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Infuse your services business, expand your software offerings, and increase customer satisfaction with Microsoft Dynamics CRM!
Microsoft is bringing customer relationship management (CRM) software into a new era with Microsoft Dynamics CRM. It is a flexible CRM solution that works the way your people do, works the way your business does, and works the way IT wants it to.

If we missed you at the Dynamics CRM Partnership Opportunity for Northwest Platform Partners
webcast on Wednesday, April 30th (or if you would like additional information and/or to follow-up with our team members about taking your partnership to another level), please see below.

Great news, you can still learn how to start your CRM Practice today.  To view the webcast recording on-demand or to download the PowerPoint presentation click here

“The small and midsize business (SMB) segment for CRM is currently growing faster than any other segment. Forecast to grow at annual rate of 18.3% through 2010.”
(Source: Gartner Dataquest, Forecast: SMB Applications 2005–2010, July 2006)

Next Steps to starting your CRM Practice:
1. Sign-up for the Microsoft CRM “Software Advisor Program”
2. Complete CRM Certifications- Applications Installation and Configuration Customization
3. Earn the “MBS Competency” for Microsoft CRM Specialization
4. For more information: call 1-888-477-7989 (Option 2) or email mbsjoin@microsoft.com

Tags: partners, sales
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Ending the month of April with a collection of links to great posts about Microsoft Dynamics CRM.

• Upgrading CRM 3.0 SBE to CRM 4.0 Professional Part 1
• Upgrading CRM 3.0 SBE to CRM 4.0 Professional Part 2
• Register your copy of Microsoft Dynamics CRM!
• Microsoft Dynamics CRM as a Business Application Platform
• Email Templates with Custom Entities
• Calling a .NET assembly in Microsoft Dynamics CRM 4.0 workflows
• CRM 4 Metadata: Working with Labels
• Integrations with CRM 4.0
• Business Process
• Installing CRM 4.0 on SBS 2003 R2 with SQL 2005 Workgroup Edition
• Change your MRU for CRM 4.0

Tags: link love
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Finally! Microsoft has released localized sample data for Microsoft Dynamics CRM 4.0. It's available in the following languages:

• Dutch
• French
• German
• Italian
• Spanish

The sample data includes a set of comma-separated values (CSV) files that contains the sample data and an XML data map file that maps the data to Microsoft Dynamics CRM 4.0. To install the sample data on your on-premise installation or VPC, you must use the Data Migration Manager. Visit the Microsoft download site to get the Sample Data.

This is great for sales and marketing presentations.

Tags: tools
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On April 30th, we celebrate in the Netherlands, the Netherlands Antilles, and Aruba Koninginnnedag or in English, Queen's day! Years and years ago this Dutch holiday actually started as a day to celebrate the queen's birthday and over time has known a few different dates, but after 1948 we stuck with the current date, April 30.

Lot's of people now mainly see this day for the 'vrijmarkt' (literally 'freemarket'), the one day in the year that anyone is allowed to sell anything in the streets and 'koninginnenacht' (Queen's Night) on the preceding night. On this day you typically see everyone and everything in orange. We call this the "oranjegekte" (orange craze). There are orange flags, painted people, banners, orange colored foods and drinks, and extreme amounts of orange clothing and creative accessories are worn as well.

So why Orange? Well if you open up your history books, you will see that it's referring to the name of the Dutch royal family (Willem I of Orange). We not only have this orange craze on this day, you usually see us do the same with sporting events such as speedskating, soccer, field hockey...actually now that I think of it, we do this at any sport we're good at!

So yep, we are still a Monarchy and recent research has shown that more than 70% of the population is still in favor of it. I agree, we should keep this history in place and not become a republic.

So for everyone that is celebrating it today, have fun and post some pictures so I can enjoy it a little over here in San Francisco as well.

Pictures: quantz

Tags: dutch
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As most of you know, Microsoft had to withdraw Update Rollup 3 for Microsoft Dynamics CRM 3.0 due to a regression discovered in one of the included fixes. Nick MacKechnie has a real nice and complete post about this and I encourage you to read it if you want the full details.

As of today, the Sustained Engineering team re-released Rollup 3 for Microsoft Dynamics CRM 3.0 client and server. Just something I would like to outline is that Update Rollup 3 for Microsoft Dynamics CRM 3.0 requires Update Rollup 2 for Microsoft Dynamics CRM 3.0.

Tags: support
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So what is this tool and what can it do for me and my organization? Well Microsoft Dynamics CRM 4.0 doesn't have an out-of-the-box option to bulk export data. So with this said, some smart people at the Microsoft CRM Product team in IDC have created a sample tool that is available for download on CodePlex.

Using the Bulk Data Export tool users are able to connect to an OnPremise or Online Microsoft CRM 4.0 organization and export records of CRM entities in form of CSV files.

Bulk Data Export Tool
Unzip the file CrmDataExport-1.0-Binary.zip, and launch CrmDataExport.exe.

Refer to CrmDataExportTool.doc for exact usage.

Tags: tools
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