Ben Riga

benriga

Total Posts: 12 |
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CRM "5": Deploying Line-Of-Business Solutions

Posted By: Ben Riga | Oct 29th @ 2:30 PM
In yesterday’s video I chatted with a few PMs on the CRM platform team.  We talked at a high level about some of the problems they’re trying to solve as they think about CRM “5.  In today’s video we go a little deeper with Humberto Lezama Guadarrama (Program Manager),  Elliot Lewis (Developer Lead), and Scott Head (Developer).  In this video we go deeper on a new concept in CRM “5” called solutions.  We also look at some of the new UI features that are coming.[more ]
Tag: Dynamics CRM

CRM "5": Chatting with the platform team

Posted By: Ben Riga | Oct 28th @ 12:49 PM
This week at PDC the Dynamics CRM team is taking the wraps off a few select platform features coming in the next major release of CRM.  A few weeks before PDC I sat down with some of the program managers and devs on the team to discuss a few of these features. In this first video I chat with Andy Bybee, Humberto Lezama Guadarrama and Allen Hafezipour all program managers on the CRM platform team thinking about programmability and the developer experience.[more ]
Tags: Azure, Dynamics CRM

WCF and AIF in Dynamics 2009: Chatting with Michael Merz

Posted By: Ben Riga | Sep 29th @ 4:56 PM
In this video I’m back on the Advanta campus chatting with Michael Merz, Program Manager for Application Integration Framework (AIF) on the Dynamics AX team. AIF is a standards-based framework that allows you to publish and consume web services.  It’s used primarily in integration scenarios when connecting Dynamics AX with other systems.  AIF is all about web services and is completely standards-based. Under the covers AIF takes full advantage of .NET using Windows Communication Foundation (WCF).  For more complex integration scenarios AIF can also help expose services using MSMQ and BizTalk...[more ]
Tags: Biztalk, Dynamics, Dynamics AX, VSTO, Web Services, Windows Communication Foundation

The Dynamics Duo talk about CRM and Silverlight

Posted By: Ben Riga | Aug 15th @ 12:42 PM
In yesterday’s video we talked about WPF and showed off some mind-altering 2D and 3D animations Smiley.  As we said then, WPF provides access to local data and resources as well as access to bare metal performance including 3D graphics acceleration.  But you can’t take that sort of thing to the web.  While WPF will run in a browser, that browser needs to be Internet Explorer running Windows.[more ]
Tags: CRM, Dynamics CRM, Silverlight, WPF

The Dynamics Duo talk about CRM and WPF

Posted By: Ben Riga | Aug 14th @ 9:05 PM
In this episode The Dynamics Duo dive into the deep rich coolness that is WPF.  We also spend some time talking about the offline data framework that Dynamics CRM provides developers.  In past sessions we built solutions on SharePoint and Office and those are great for the specific scenarios they were intended for.  Windows Presentation Foundation (WPF) gives developers the ability to build rich interactive smart clients.  You’ll have to admit that nothing beats the inherent coolness of a well written WPF app.  I’ve worked on a few WPF projects (here and here) and it never ceases to amaze me…[more ]
Tags: CRM, Dynamics CRM, Offline, WPF

The Dynamics Duo talk about CRM and Office Business Applications (OBA)

Posted By: Ben Riga | Aug 13th @ 4:11 PM
In the last episode we talked about Microsoft Office SharePoint Server; in this one we talk about Microsoft Office on the client side. CRM actually integrates really really well with Microsoft Office Outlook right out of the box.  That’s a natural as it’s the place where many people work day-in day-out (and especially those sales and marketing folks).  But what about those people that need that data in Word or Excel?  In this episode we talk about how easy it is to customize the integration of Dynamics CRM with Microsoft Office on the client side.  This category of applications, often referred…[more ]
Tags: CRM, Dynamics CRM, Microsoft Office, OBA, Office, Office Business Applications, Office Live, Visual Studio Tools for Office, VSTO

The Dynamics Duo talk about Dynamics CRM and SharePoint

Posted By: Ben Riga | Aug 12th @ 5:46 PM
In this segment Girish and I talk about how Dynamics CRM integrates with SharePoint.  We begin with a little guidance for where you might use one over the other and where they work well together.  And they sure do go well together.  “Separated at birth” is how I put it in the video.  Smiley  Girish’s demo shows a custom SharePoint page.  Not many people know that SharePoint can be stylized using CSS to build sites that look nothing like plain vanilla SharePoint.  This is a pretty good example of that.[more ]
Tags: CRM, Dynamics CRM, Sharepoint, Unified Communications, Web Services, Windows Live ID

The Dynamics Duo talk about Dynamics CRM Customization

Posted By: Ben Riga | Aug 11th @ 5:18 PM
Girish on my team has been working on a demo that demonstrates the capabilities of the Dynamics CRM platform.  We figured it would be a lot more interesting to get some of that on video in the form of a conversation (as opposed to a screencast) so I get to play the role of interviewer and Girish is the "talent" Smiley.  In this episode, we started off thinking we'd talk about Dynamics CRM and SharePoint integration but got so deep into the underlying capabilities of CRM that we ran out of time.  We'll show you the SharePoint stuff in the next episode.  I promise![more ]
Tags: ASP.NET, Dynamics CRM, Dynamics CRM platform, SQL Server, Windows Workflow

Reporting and Analytics in Dynamics AX 2009

Posted By: Ben Riga | Aug 11th @ 12:14 PM
I spent some time with Manoj Nuthakki on the Dynamics team chatting about how we take full advantage of SQL Server Reporting Services (SSRS) and SQL Server Analysis Services (SSAS) in the recently released Dynamics AX 2009.  AX 2009 ships with 10 SSAS cubes out of the box so includes tons of prebuilt KPIs and reports all built on the SQL Server BI platform. Manoj walks us through how reports and charts are built in Visual Studio including conditional formating or custom business logic in C# while pulling metadata and data directly out of AX.  The reports are easily put into the AX 2009 rich…[more ]
Tags: Dynamics, Dynamics AX, SQL Server, SQL Server Analysis Services, SQL Server Reporting Services, SSAS, SSRS

Partner Conference: CRM Mobility with CWR

Posted By: Ben Riga | Jul 15th @ 6:03 PM
Another Dynamics CRM ISV that caught my attention at last week's Microsoft Worldwide Partner Conference was CWR Mobility.  Mobility is something I spend a lot of time thinking about and the Windows Mobile solution that CWR has put together is state-of-the-art when it comes to line-of-business apps on the go.  What really got my attention was the inventive way they managed to embed it into the Dynamics CRM Online infrastructure.  From an end-user perspective all you have to do is sign up for their service and they take care of all the hard work by reaching out across the cloud and installing and configuring the app.  Nice![more ]
Tags: CRM, Dynamics CRM, Mobility, S+S, Windows Mobile
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