benriga

CRM "5": Deploying Line-Of-Business Solutions

benriga — Wed, 29 Oct 2008 21:30:00 GMT

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)

As I mentioned in yesterday’s video, don’t look for any schedule information in here. Also features and feature names may and probably will change before we ship. CRM “5” is still a long way away. We’re talking about this developer-focused stuff early to help developers with design and architecture as they think about future designs.

In CRM “4” you create components (entities, forms, reports, etc) and then there are various means to deploy those components into a customer’s implementation.

In this video we go deeper on a new concept in CRM “5” called solutions. Think of solutions as providing to CRM the same sort of capabilities that Windows has with its capability to add and remove programs and features.

The concept is quite powerful as it allows components to be layered on to the base system but also on top of other solutions (i.e. when there are inter-dependencies). It also provides a way to protect the intellectual property of the components in your solution. It also includes change management and versioning

In a sense ISVs that build on the CRM platform will now have the ability to package up their applications much like you would package up windows applications into MSIs.

Elliot gives a pretty good explanation of the architecture for how this is implemented. Like any good architect he couldn’t resist a blank white board and jumped up to diagram out the way a solution and components. He explains in a clear way how solutions layer on top of one another and still provide for versioning, uninstall and rollback.

Humberto gives us a lap around the UI for creating publishers (e.g. ISVs) and solutions. In doing that he gives a quick look at some of the new stuff coming in form design. That includes some cool stuff like drag and drop and sub-grids. Another feature is the ability to create lookup attributes. This one will save a lot of time and effort.

If, as Humberto joked, lookup attributes will “save you a thousand clicks” then another feature called global lookups or option sets will save you like a gazillion. :) It certainly will make ISV solutions much easier to manage. This will allow you to create pick lists that can be reused across many entities. I know there are many ISVs out there that have been doing this by creating their own entities but in many cases that leads to an inordinate number of entities (sometimes into the hundreds).

Humberto also gives us a lap around some of the new features in the page model. This includes a new way of presenting commands across the top of a form. Another thing that will get some attention is the dramatic reduction in the number of clicks and windows that end users will have to use to work with the UI. (“Less clickiness” :) ). Tabs have been moved to the left hand side and the tab sections have been moved to create one form. Again this reduces the clickiness of the app but makes for a much easier way to get to the information you need quickly.

You can already build some great dashboards on CRM data using SharePoint. Folks that have been waiting for way to provide that sort of capability directly to end-users will love the new inline charting (including pie, bar, funnel charts, etc).

Humberto left one of the more interesting features for the very end. The ability to add Connections to entities provides a way to sort-of tag entities and build unstructured relationships among entities in the system.

Update: Humberto’s Session at PDC where he discusses many of these topics is now public here. Full Disclosure: Humberto asked me to help him out with a demo in that session. :)

CRM "5": Chatting with the platform team

benriga — Tue, 28 Oct 2008 19:49:00 GMT

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 addition to many new end-user and developer features introduced with CRM 4 there were numerous infrastructure enhancements made that enable some great new scenarios. CRM 4 added lots of good stuff including big pieces like multi-tenancy and 64-bit support. A lot of that work was around taking CRM 4 to the cloud and much of it was infrastructure or plumbing. Another important thing that happened with CRM 4 is that the idea of using Dynamics CRM as a platform started to take hold as it provided developers the ability to build line of business applications cheaper and faster

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. We talked about some of the thinking that went into CRM “5” (that’s a codename, by the way). Don’t look for any schedule information in here. CRM “5” is still a long way away. We’re talking about this developer-focused stuff early to help developers with design and architecture as they think about future designs.

The team is still committed to power of choice and so will continue to use the exact same code base across on-premises, partner-hosted and Dynamics CRM Online. The features that you see in revisions of CRM Online will fold into CRM “5”.

Since the folks I was talking to think mostly about the platform they had a lot to say about that. CRM “5” is not about building generic applications. The team has a laser focus on enabling the patterns they see over and over again when devs are building line-of-business applications.

One area they are thinking hard about is how to solve some of the problems that ISVs run into when building on the platform. A primary concern is simplifying the deployment and upgrading of applications and protecting intellectual property (IP) rights of those applications.

Another area you’ll see a lot of work in is the user interface. The team talked about the work done on end-user experience with the page model. They are working to improve usability and help with the density of information.

Andy talked a lot about cloud services. BTW, when we recorded this a few weeks ago the Azure brand had not been announced so we just referred to this generally as “cloud services”.

CRM itself does not run in Windows Azure (formerly known as Red Dog). Applications running outside the firewall would run great and be easiest to develop on Windows Azure. In the CRM world we refer to these as self-service applications. On the other hand, if you’re building line-of-business applications that would run behind the firewall those would run great and be easiest to develop on Dynamics CRM. Microsoft .NET Services (formerly known as “Zurich”) provide the glue that can pull those two types of applications together so that they can share information. The Azure Services Platform makes service-to-service integration much easier and safer by providing capabilities like identity, access control, relay service and workflow. Andy does a great job of describing on the whiteboard how CRM and .NET Services work together to build systems that avoid what Humberto calls the “funky stuff”. :)

Code on the server is a pain point today for devs trying to build applications on the CRM Online platform. Allen talks about some of the thinking that went into designing this core new feature. As you can imagine this sort of thing has important implications in so many other areas (coding, debugging, operations, monitoring etc). Also, although the thinking first started with the idea of getting code on the server for CRM Online, what the team has done actually provides important capabilities to all types of deployments.

We’ll go into a lot more detail on this cool stuff in a couple of other videos later this week. Stay tuned to this site for that.

WCF and AIF in Dynamics 2009: Chatting with Michael Merz

benriga — Mon, 29 Sep 2008 23:56:00 GMT

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. AX also has .NET Business Connector (BC.NET) for integrating with .NET applications. BC.NET is more for client side integration. 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.

With Dynamics AX 2009, the team ships a bunch of services (about 60 out of the box) that are ready for use. That includes, for example, the more common scenarios like integration with sales orders or customers. AIF allows you to create, read, update and delete those sales orders while maintaining the integrity of the database (i.e. without directly touching the database at all). This is done independent of the transport so when developing you could begin by updating via http and later switch to MSMQ. This can be as simple as enabling the service then “generating” which generates the WCF interface (i.e. WSDL). That web service is then available to be consumed by any standards-based client (including apps written in php, java and naturally any of the languages in Visual Studio). You can also configure the service endpoints to change the binding or authentication parameters.

In the video, Michael walks us through using a standard Excel Visual Studio Tools for Office (VSTO) project to consume a AX 2009 sales order service that is exposed using AIF. He also shows us how, by using WS-Addressing in the WCF headers, you can pass a target company for a web service call. By default, AX limits error messages coming back from the server for security reasons. Michael shows us how to configure AX to propagate those errors when you need to see them.

Dynamics AX is a rich platform for supply chain management and financials. AIF opens up AX so that ISVs can build on that richness by integrating their own applications. Sometimes when you do that you need to consume a web service exposed by external applications. We see here how you can plug external web services into the AX processes. In this case, Michael shows us how when trying to create a customer in Dynamics AX with a name that has been blacklisted by the US government (“Bin Laden”, for instance. Yikes! :) ) the customer create process calls out to an external web service in the cloud to verify the customer name. This seamless integration of external processes is a boon for ISVs that need those deep integration points. Michael explains how. In order to do this sort of integration you build a Service Reference in the Application Object Tree (AOT) to provide the parameters. AX takes care of much of work by generating the artifacts (compilation, deploying, bundling etc) that are deployed and executed on the server. CLR interop is available in order to use .NET DLLs and their classes.

Some code samples are available here:

Application Integration Framework Overview (MSDN)
Calling the Customer and Vendor Services (Dianne Siebold)

The Dynamics Duo talk about CRM and Silverlight

benriga — Fri, 15 Aug 2008 19:42:00 GMT

In yesterday’s video we talked about WPF and showed off some mind-altering 2D and 3D animations :). 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.

Silverlight changes all that. Silverlight v1, which has been out for over a year, was primarily focused on media scenarios. Silverlight v2 goes much farther with numerous new features including a compact version of .NET. It’s now an ideal platform for building web-based line-of-business applications like the ones ISVs build today on the CRM platform. CRM and Silverlight 2: seems like a marriage made in heaven. If you’re looking for a way to light up your CRM applications, Silverlight is the way to go.

Silverlight runs in IE, Firefox or Safari across Windows and Mac. It will soon be on mobile devices (including Windows Mobile and Nokia). There’s even a project to get it working on Linux.

So bottom line; WPF is very rich, Silverlight is very reach. :)

As always, Girish delivers a demo that clearly demonstrates how Silverlight can take CRM farther. We continue the professional services scenario. In this case, a client has booked a new project and we need to figure out when it’ll fit into our schedule. That means we need to do some project and resource planning. Girish does that by dropping an iframe that includes a Silverlight control into CRM. When it loads it uses web service calls to pull in team member names and their project and schedule information.

The control displays that in an interesting way; showing transparent cylinders to designate the amount of available hours or capacity and then pours in the project schedule information to show which projects are currently scheduled to which team member. Adding all the team members makes for an interesting data visualization showing where we have time to add additional projects. Once you know that you can layer the new unallocated projects on to the graph. The power of Silverlight comes in when you start interacting with the data; moving unallocated projects around to ensure that we are optimizing staff resources while delivering projects on time.

Of course, the beauty of Silverlight and WPF is that they are so very similar. Learning one automatically gets you the other; giving you the ability to deliver both desktop and web applications as appropriate to your customer needs. User-experience design also becomes much easier as the workflow between designers (using Expression Studio) and developers (using Visual Studio) is well-thought out and seamless.

One interesting twist is that Silverlight 2 doesn’t currently support the CRM web services so it was a simple matter for Girish to add a WCF web service that bridges the two. Girish will be posting this code on his blog here. I know this because I have that promise on video. ;)

The Dynamics Duo talk about CRM and WPF

benriga — Fri, 15 Aug 2008 04:05:00 GMT

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 the way you can reduce complexity and immerse users in the experience.

If your solution requires a desktop apps then WPF is absolutely the way to go. If you’re building web apps then Silverlight is the right way to go. When you’re not sure then you should think a little harder about your requirements. Things like access to local PC resources require WPF. Also if you’re doing heavy graphics that would require graphics acceleration then WPF is the right choice. Finally if your app needs to be both online and offline then WPF also would be a good choice.

In keeping with the series of demos for a professional services organization, Girish shows off an eye-popping jaw-dropping WPF app that radically improves the time sheet entry process. The scenario is an offline one. Dynamics CRM provides a great offline framework as part of both the end-user experience and the developer toolkit. By designating an entity in the system as available offline, the framework will automatically pull data from the CRM server and store it locally. In order to make the experience a natural one a local web server (Cassini) and database server (SQL Server Express) are used. In this demo we used the Microsoft Office Outlook client to take CRM offline. I even surprised Girish by yanking out the network cable. :)

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

benriga — Wed, 13 Aug 2008 23:11:00 GMT

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 to as Office Business Applications (OBA), help to unlock the value of line-of-business (LOB) systems, such as the ones built on the Dynamics CRM platform, and turn document-based processes into real applications. There’s lots more info about these types of apps over at OBA Central.

In the demo Girish put together, we see how the app is surfaced with a custom ribbon. This in turn opens a Status Report template which has a custom task pane. That task pane pulls all the relevant information for my status report from the CRM server (in our case CRM Online). It authenticates and then grabs the project info. When I choose a Project it also pulls in the work items for that project. Just like with the SharePoint example, it’s trivial to open a CRM form right from within Word where I review more detailed info or even start an Office Communicator session with the owner of the work item.

I can then insert the work items along with descriptions and hours worked directly into the status report. Since you’ll want to share that status report with your customer, Girish built in the ability to publish it to Office Live Small Business. Office Live is the ideal place for sharing documents with customers or partners who won’t have access to SharePoint sites behind your firewall (and it’s free!).

The secret sauce that allows these kinds of apps to be developed so quickly is right in Visual Studio in the form of Visual Studio Tools for Office (VSTO). As you might expect, the same authentication code we used in the SharePoint example is used for authentication from with the OBA. Then it’s just a case of using the Dynamics CRM web services to pull info from CRM and post it into the Word doc. Nice!

The Dynamics Duo talk about Dynamics CRM and SharePoint

benriga — Wed, 13 Aug 2008 00:46:00 GMT

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. :) 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.

We use a SharePoint List Web Part to pull data from CRM to show a list of CRM users and the hours from their time sheets. This was pulled directly from CRM using web services. We also show how could use that data to display a dashboard style gauge using Dundas Gauge for SharePoint. You can pull CRM data directly into SharePoint to build a dashboard. You can then pull that dashboard into the CRM web client (minus the SharePoint chrome). By pulling it into the web client it automatically shows up in the Outlook client. Speaking of Outlook; in the last segment we talked about customization but didn’t show the Outlook client so Girish gives us a quick tour of how that works also.

Each of the forms in CRM are URL-addressable. Girish puts that to good use in showing how you can pop a CRM form directly from within SharePoint. He also shows how CRM lights up automatically when you have Office Communicator installed leaving room for some interesting Unified Communication scenarios. We should probably do an episode on UC soon.

The segment wouldn’t be complete if we didn’t show some code. Girish built the list part using the Visual Studio Web Part project template. The code to pull in the time sheets into a list web part is about 10 lines of C#. The hardest part was doing the authentication. CRM provides a plug-able authentication mechanism and 3 different auth options out of the box. On-premise deployments will likely use Active Directory, while CRM Online uses Windows Live ID and finally if you’re deploying in a partner-hosted mode you’ll use form-based authentication. Girish shows how as an ISV you can build your application once and take all of those options into account. After that the code you write is portable across all the deployment options.

The Dynamics Duo talk about Dynamics CRM Customization

benriga — Tue, 12 Aug 2008 00:18:00 GMT

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" :). 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!

The demo that Girish has been working on uses the scenario of a fictitious graphics design firm (i.e. a professional services organization). Clearly CRM works great for automating sales, service and marketing functions. What we think about is the stuff under the covers that can be used by developers and ISVs to build new applications that may or may not be related to CRM. That’s what we mean by the CRM platform.

This includes the basic metadata required to store the data related to a line-of-business application. CRM uses the concept of entities and attributes to store data whether your online or offline (all stored in SQL Server). It also makes the building of relationships among those pretty simple. Once you've got your metadata defined then building forms for the UI (ASP.NET) and workflow (Workflow Foundation) for process are next.

We’ll get into a lot more of the platform (and in particular the extensibility options) in the next few episodes.

Reporting and Analytics in Dynamics AX 2009

benriga — Mon, 11 Aug 2008 19:14:00 GMT

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 desktop client and the enterprise portal web client (built on SharePoint). With the role center integration a developer can build reports, charts and KPIs that appear only for the appropriate roles. Since AX is an international product, localization is built right in.

Partner Conference: CRM Mobility with CWR

benriga — Wed, 16 Jul 2008 01:03:00 GMT

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!

Partner Conference: SalesCentric Silverlight CRM Relationships

benriga — Wed, 16 Jul 2008 00:28:00 GMT

I spent most of last week in hot and humid Houston at the annual Microsoft Worldwide Partner Conference. I did get to a few sessions but mostly I hung out with ISV partners in 1:1 meetings or in the exhibit area. There were tons of CRM ISVs showing interesting solutions.

One that caught my eye was SalesCentric. Their solution is a simple but important one. Many sales cycles are very complex and long, involving interactions with many people within an organization. SalesCentric takes the list of contacts in the CRM system and makes the the relationships among them easier to visualize and discover. I was most interested in how they had transformed their ActiveX product into a brand new Silverlight solution. I thought others might find this interesting as Silverlight starts to get some attention. I also get excited at the possibility of seeing this as a mechanism for bringing information from other systems such ERP systems for example or maybe even social networks for the ultimate selling tool.

Hal Howard, Mike Ehrenberg, Sukumar Rathnam chat about Dynamics AX 2009

benriga — Fri, 13 Jun 2008 00:23:00 GMT

Last week the Dynamics AX team announced general availability of Microsoft Dynamics AX 2009. While the team was basking in the glow of a job well done I grabbed a few folks for a chat. In this Channel 9 video I sit down with Hal Howard, Mike Ehrenberg and Sukumar Rathnam. Hal is the General Manager for Dynamics ERP (he runs the R&D for all ERP products at Microsoft). Mike is senior architect for the entire Dynamics team. He’s also a Microsoft Distinguished Engineer. Sukumar is Architect for Dynamics AX.

In our short chat we talk about a lot of different topics. Of course, Dynamics AX is an ERP product and there are numerous new features for customers using the product (literally hundreds of new features actually). For this chat we focused completely on the ISV and SI developer experience. Dynamics AX 2009 takes a major step forward in integrating itself into the Microsoft stack. That includes deep integration of web services with Windows Communication Foundation, process workflow with Windows Workflow Foundation, storage, reporting and business intelligence with SQL Server, a brand new role-tailored user experience in either a rich client built entirely in .NET or a web client built entirely in SharePoint/ASP.NET, and finally tight integration of unified communication with Office Communication Server/Office Communicator. I definitely need to dive into some of these in more detail. Look for more Ch9 videos on these topics soon.

I think Sukumar said it best: “Grab Windows Server 2008; Go get SQL Server 2008; Get Visual Studio 2008, Add AX 2009 and go party with it. Go write some code.”