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.

Ross Dembecki is the Lead Product Manager for Microsoft Dynamics CRM in Australia. He recently got interviewed by Partner TV Australia. 

In this interview he talks about what XRM is and how it’s being used by many of our customers to rapidly develop relational line of business applications. In other words; a customer or partner, could leverage or use Microsoft Dynamics CRM as a platform and not strictly as a CRM solution focused on Sales, Service and Marketing.

An often heard requirement is if Microsoft Dynamics CRM has built-in audit capabilities. There is some, but it is very minimal out-of-the-box. So now what? Well, Microsoft Dynamics CRM is not just about sales, service and marketing. It’s a platform for developing line of business applications—applications that can manage and track information and processes far beyond accounts and contacts. Of course it still can be a customer, but it could also be a grant, building, or a potential candidate for hire.

The platform comes with easy to use tools to customize and extend the application and automate processes such as sales processes or case escalations. You can, of course, build the required auditing functionality from scratch, use a third party solution or you can use some of the freely available plug-ins and customizations that have been published on the internet;

1. Business Productivity Audit Accelerator - Link
   
   The CRM Accelerators are a range of add-on solutions developed for Microsoft Dynamics CRM 4.0 customers and partners. Each accelerator is available at no cost and will showcase how the Microsoft Dynamics CRM 4.0 platform can be configured and extended to broaden marketing, sales and service capabilities.
   
   The Business Data Auditing accelerator utilizes the workflow platform of Microsoft Dynamics CRM. Depending on what operations within your CRM system that you want to audit you can tailor the workflows accordingly. The basis of the accelerator is very simple: for each entity that is open to auditing there is a separate snapshot or audit entity, e.g. if you want to switch on auditing for accounts then there is an account audit entity supplied with the accelerator. Depending on what events you want to audit (create, update, assign or delete) then the workflows will create a copy of the current record in the relevant audit entity. This then means that you have a copy of each relevant change to the record during its life.
   
   
2. Microsoft Dynamics CRM Audit Plug-in by James Kent - Link
   
   Microsoft CRM 4.0 Audit Plug-in is a simple-to-use plug-in enabling basic data auditing capabilities. Configured via Plug-in Manager, it is very simple to manage. The audit plug-in can be used by the Microsoft CRM partners and customers to quickly increase the package’s auditing capability to track field level changes. The Audit plug-in is distributed in source format under the Open source licensing as provided by CodePlex license agreement. Knowledge of Microsoft Visual Studio® and Microsoft Visual C#® is required to extend or customize the plug-in.
   
   
3. Microsoft Dynamics CRM Audit Plug-in by Engage (Ryan) – Link
   
   CRMAudit is a tool that allows auditing of any attributes on any entities within Microsoft Dynamics CRM 4.0. The audit records are stored within CRM allowing users to run standard CRM Reports and finds including Quick Search and Advanced Finds.  Users will only need Read access to the Audit entity. Find out when and who changed a field including what the value was before the change.

Have you created audit or similar type of functionality by leveraging the out-of-the-box tools and features of Microsoft Dynamics CRM?

It is possible to have performance issues when you’re using the combination of Microsoft Dynamics CRM and McAfee VirusScan 8.x in your organization.

McAfee has a feature called ScriptScan that scans and analyzes each webpage opened on your computer via either Outlook or a web browser. Since we rely on JavaScript on some of our web forms; load time of the actual page might take some time because it’s being scanned by the ScriptScan upon opening.

The current and not preferred possible workaround for this particular problem was to entirely disable ScriptScan on the client workstations and unregister SCRIPTPROXY.DLL. Understandably, not everybody felt comfortable doing this.

The McAfee Knowledgebase article that describes the necessary steps in detail can be found here.

The good news? McAfee has been working on improving ScriptScan. The patch (register modification), which adds a a new feature to ‘whitelist’ URLs is published here. This enhancement is expected to be made available in VirusScan 8.5i or later. So far, the results and feedback have been positive.

I would encourage you to test the suggested solution if you’re dealing with the above described problem. Feel free to leave a comment with your results.

Source: Steven Vlaanderen Oldenzeel

I must say that I love the title of the guest post on Destination CRM, but in my opinion it actually fails to talk about Social CRM. I guess understanding the concept of Social CRM still has a long way to go. I slightly modified the definition that George Colony uses in his article;

“Social (CRM) is like sex. It’s fun to talk and read about, but you can’t truly comprehend unless you do it.”

The above definition is of course more attention grabbing than the CRM 2.0 definition from the CRM 2.0 wiki:

“CRM 2.0 is a philosophy & a business strategy, supported by a technology platform, business rules, processes and 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.”

I think to make it even easier, we could say that Customer Relationship Management + (Customer Conversations – which may or may not include Social Media) = Social CRM or CRM 2.0. Organizations should generate conversations about their products or services with friends, prospects, partners, customers or suppliers with the goal of creating meaningful business relationships.

I see a lot of potential in connecting or extending a CRM solution with Social Media. It can, for example, help your organization with providing better customer service or generate new leads. Comcast or Ford are great examples of this using Twitter. In a very interesting article on Silicon Republic, Ed Thompson from Gartner believes that the future of CRM is Social. I agree 100% with this, but like Ed rightfully points out, organizations should not forget about traditional (analytical) CRM, as this, in my mind, is required to be succesful when going Social!

Using CRM solutions tactically alongside Social Media sites such as Facebook, Twitter or Linked-In is still fairly new. So I am curious to hear your thoughts on this topic. What have you seen work or what are things your customers inquire about?

Our customers have provided us with very positive feedback on our release predictability; every 8 weeks we ship a Rollup Update. Update Rollup 5 is targeted for the first week of July.

Rollup 4 is a tested, cumulative set of updates for Microsoft Dynamics CRM 4.0. It includes performance enhancements that are packaged together for easy deployment. This article describes the hotfixes and the updates that are included in this update rollup. This update rollup is available for all languages that are supported by Microsoft Dynamics CRM 4.0.