Leon's CRM Musings

Setting Multi-Level Categories Against a Record Codelessly

2012-01-26T05:59:00.001-08:00

This is a bit of a variation on a theme I did a while ago when I talked about using filtered views for address population. In this case I wanted to explore if we could set up a subject-like hierarchy and then use filtered lookups to enter category levels easily against an account. It turns out it works quite nicely.

Essentially, you set the first category from you list of top level categories. Then, you set level 2 which will automatically adjust to only the valid values, based on the category 1 value. Finally, you set the category 3 value, based on the value in category 2.

So How Do I Set This Up?

First of all, we create a new Category entity.

In this case I have stripped everything out; there are no notes, activities etc. and the record is organization owned.

Next I set up a recursive 1:N relationship so that for a given category I can set an infinite number of category levels, each with an infinite number of categories.

The main points of interest here are the changing of the display name to ‘Parent Category’ and the changing of the display option to ‘Use Custom Label’ so I can refer to the next level down as ‘Sub Categories’.

On the category form I also add the parent category lookup, created as a result of this relationship.

Finally, I add three lookups to the account form so I can add three levels of category to my account record.

Finally, I populate my category hierarchy. Unfortunately, there is no nice tree view to employ so I fill it up in pretty much the same way I would if I was populating, for example, an account hierarchy. My advice would be to do it via a data import.

Where’s The Magic?

So far this will just let us pick three category values from all category values and add them to an account; not exactly exciting.

The trick comes in adjusting the filters on the lookups.

For category 1, we set up a new system view called Level 1 Categories. This just shows those categories with no parent category i.e. they are at the top of the tree.

We then go to our first lookup and force it to only use this view for its values.

The result is when we click the lookup only the values in the top level appear.

For the other two lookups, we use the Related Records Filtering properties of the lookup. For the category 2 lookup, we set it as follows:

The setup for the category 3 lookup is identical, except we replace ‘Category 1 (Accounts)’ with ‘Category 2 (Accounts)’.

This means, clicking on, say, the category 2 lookup shows only the valid values, based on the selection for category 1.

And that is it. With all that set up, all the user has to do is pick the category 1 value and the category 2 values will be auto-filtered. Once the category 2 value is selected, the category 3 values will filter.

Why Not Use Subjects?

Subjects are nice in that they can be linked to an account with a 1:N relationship and they have a tree view lookup. However, they do not, at this time, play nicely with lookup filters. If you add a subject lookup to an account form and try to filter its values, based on the selection in another subject lookup, CRM throws an error. This has been reported and, I am sure, will be addressed in a future roll-up.

Conclusions

If you have a multi-level hierarchy you wish to apply to a record, such as an account, and you are looking for a reasonably user-friendly way to capture the information this is not such a bad solution and does not require code or Silverlight web resources. While my first choice would be the subject entity, because of its friendly tree view, if this is not practical, this solution provides an alternative approach which supports any number of category levels.

Trying a Different Language By Ticking The Box

2012-01-21T02:46:00.001-08:00

Dynamics CRM supports 41 languages. Here they are:

Arabic
Basque
Bulgarian
Catalan
Chinese (Hong Kong SAR)
Chinese (Simplified)
Chinese (Traditional)
Croatian
Czech
Danish
Dutch
English
Estonian
Finnish
French
Galician
German
Greek
Hebrew
Hindi
Hungarian
Italian
Japanese
Kazakh
Korean
Latvian
Lithuanian
Norwegian (Bokmål)
Polish
Portuguese (Brazil)
Portuguese (Portugal)
Romanian
Russian
Serbian (Latin)
Slovak
Slovenian
Spanish
Swedish
Thai
Turkish
Ukrainian

So how do we turn on different languages? Well, if we are using Dynamics CRM Online with the web client, we literally just tick a box. Go to Settings – Administration – Languages and tick the box for the language we want.

Curious to see how Spanish looks? Tick the box. After a little whirring, you have your second language installed.

As a user, you then go to File – Options – Languages and pick the language you want.

That’s it! You are now working with Cuentas y Contactos rather than Accounts and Contacts.

What if you are using the Outlook client or an on-premise deployment?

In the case of the Outlook client, you need to install a language pack on the client machine. Similarly, with an on-premise deployment, you need to install a language pack on the server.

However, for online, having CRM configured so that you can be working in one language and the person next to you is working in a completely different language is literally a tickbox away.

Moving To The Cloud Part Two: Migrating Email To Office 365

2012-01-08T03:05:00.001-08:00

For part one, where I talk about my reasons for jumping on board with Office 365 and how I got a 25% discount on the cost, go here.

In summary, I had a 12G PST accumulated over about 12 years of emailing with Outlook. The regular backing up and periodic maintenance of the PST file (running the Inbox repair tool once a month, compacting etc.) simply never got done due to a lack of time/inclination. I needed a better solution and I was willing to pay for the privilege.

Office 365 was a good fit. I get 25G of storage in Exchange and, the hope was, it would be a relatively simple procedure to move from a PST file to an online version of Exchange with a local OST file for offline access (OST is a local cache of your Exchange content which automatically syncs with Exchange when online). I also had two gmail accounts and one hotmail account to repoint to the Exchange server as the PST file would be decommissioned completely. In other words, other than the OST file, which could be rebuilt automatically from the Exchange server, all my e-mail was in the cloud.

Connecting to the Cloud Exchange

I run Office 2010 at home so connecting to the Cloud Exchange was very simple. Go to File-Account Settings-New and you then type in your name, e-mail address and password.

Outlook does the rest. Outlook will give you a new folder with the usual sub-folders (Inbox, Tasks, etc.)

Moving Stuff Across

First of all, backup/copy your PST file. If everything goes badly, you still have that to fall back on. It is then a case of populating the new Exchange folders with the stuff from your current PST folder structure. For e-mail, I either dragged e-mails across or used the move/copy folder function of Outlook.

What then happens is the folders/emails are moved across to the local OST file associated to the cloud Exchange server. These e-mails and folders are then, in the background, synched up to the cloud Exchange server. I loaded my sync up pretty heavily and it seemed to survive fine. Even if I shut down and restarted later, all was good.

For things like calendar/contact entries, I usually switch views to a list view which lets me easily highlight all records at once. I had some trouble with calendar entries as it would not let me select all calendar entries at once, only those of the same recurrence, but this was sufficient to get all entries across in a timely fashion. The only ones which would not come across were 2003 appointments which it claimed had ‘invalid parameters’. Given I only had a handful of these, it did not concern me. The other thing to note is it will warn you that appointment updates will not affect the appointments you move across; the link is effectively broken if the meeting organiser sends through an update. For me, this happens very rarely so it did not concern me.

Also, I am told there is every possibility that CRM tracking will also break when you move things across to the OST so this is something to be careful of.

One really nice feature was, when I moved my RSS folders across to the OST, the settings (which are held in Outlook and cannot be transferred to Office 365) automatically redirected to the folders on the Exchange server. The upshot is, while RSS feeds will only update when I open Outlook, they will populate directly onto the cloud Exchange server via the local OST file.

This was not the case for TwInbox, which I use to bring my tweet feed into Outlook. In this case I had to create new folders on the Exchange server, redirect the TwInbox settings to the new folders and move across the existing tweets. Like the RSS feeds, as TwInbox resides within Outlook, my tweets will only update when Outlook is open.

My search folders also had to be recreated on the Exchange server.

One word of warning, I had some weird archive behaviour (settings adjusting themselves during the transfer) so make sure these settings are as they should be one you have set everything up.

Initially I thought I had lost my Outlook rules but this was only because, if you change the default location for e-mail, they disappear from the list. If you reinstate the old location, they re-appear. You can then copy them to the new account. If you remove the PST file from Outlook though, the rules are lost forever, so copy them before this happens. While I remembered this for my gmail accounts, I was not as careful with my hotmail account and had to reconstruct those rules from scratch.

I also lost my quick steps, which I use heavily, by switching default folders, and did not work out how to retrieve them, so be careful to note them down before switching across.

Once the rules and quick steps have come across you can repoint the default location to the Exchange inbox and remove the email addresses from the local Outlook and add them to the Office 365 server.

Adding The E-mail Accounts To Cloud Exchange

This was also really simple. You log into Office 365 and go to Outlook-Options

From here, click on ‘Connected Accounts’ and click the ‘New…’ button.

It is then a case of typing in the e-mail address and password and Office 365 does the rest (or at least it does for gmail and hotmail).

Assuming the accounts are no longer in the local Outlook, what then happens is when an email hits your, say, hotmail inbox. It then gets sent over to the Office 365 Exchange server inbox and syncs down to the local OST file on your laptop/PC/windows slate device. This works very smoothly for gmail but, unfortunately, the hotmail inbox e-mails do not get marked as read, even after moving across so every time I log into Instant Messenger it looks like I have a bunch of unread e-mail even though I do not.

The Problems

First of all, the process can take a long time. It is not quick to pump up 12G of data up to the cloud. It literally took me days. although the time it takes is not always obvious (given the local OST is populated straight away). Do not worry about waiting for the e-mails to sync up before switching the e-mail accounts across though as it all seems to work itself out. Outlook/Exchange sync was very impressive in this regard.

Also, while you can send from any of the accounts you link to the Exchange server and replies are smart enough to use the account which the original e-mail was sent to, the default e-mail address for new e-mail cannot be changed and will be the onmicrosoft address that comes with the Office 365 account. Therefore, it is important, for new e-mails, to ensure it is coming from the address you want it to.

One big niggle is gmail addresses are not properly spoofed. What I mean by this is when you send an e-mail, via Office 365, from a gmail address, the recipient will read that it has come from office365account@office365account.onmicrosoft.com on behalf of username@gmail.com, rather than simply username@gmail.com. This is a big problem for exclusive newslists where you are subscribed under your gmail address as any e-mails you try to send to such a list will bounce unless you also subscribe with your onmicrosoft e-mail.

While not a problem as such, note that this setup is not a space saver for the laptop. While we are getting rid of a PST file, it is being replaced by the offline store for the cloud Exchange server, the OST file. What is strange though is that while the new OST is about the same size as the old PST, the space that Office 365 thinks I am taking up is about half.

Here is the OST file:

Here is the quota, according to Office 365.

Go figure.

The Benefits

Obviously I no longer need to back up my PST file because it is now empty and disconnected from Outlook (hooray!)

Also, the trouble I had trying to keep both my personal and work calendars synced with my phone was a nightmare. This problem has gone away. With my workphone, I can link it to my Office 365 Exchange server (I could not link it to my PST file on my home laptop obviously) and to the work Exchange server and it works out the rest. No regular manual synching, no appointment double-ups or conflicts. It just works.

Similarly, it is easy for me to add my cloud Exchange server to my work Outlook and get access to both work and personal e-mails from the office. In this case cloud Exchange will create a local OST on my work computer and I have work and personal within the same program. What is more, if I go offline I still have access to my personal e-mail and all changes will sync when back online; great for plane flights (and no more carrying two laptops!).

I can now check my personal mail via my phone, via my work laptop, my personal laptop or via the web, great stuff.

Conclusions

While there are some niggles (the ‘on behalf of’ thing being the biggest for me) the process of moving everything to the cloud was simple and the benefits of anywhere access without the hassles of backups and maintenance outweigh the issues I have encountered. If you have a big PST file which has you worried about size/corruption issues, this is a great solution for a few bucks per month.

In the next part I will talk about moving my 35G of data to the cloud.

Book Review: Microsoft Dynamics CRM 2011 Administration Bible

2011-12-18T23:49:00.001-08:00

Introduction

By way of a disclaimer, back at the MVP Summit last year (end of February), supremely nice guy and CRM MVP Matt Wittemann asked me if I would review his new CRM book. I said I was happy to and it has sat on my desk for the last six months waiting for me to come through on my promise. Today is that day. Given I have to look him in the eye at next year’s summit, it is the least I can do.

If you are unfamiliar with the book, here it is.

Matt Wittemann I know well. To call an MVP a ‘nice guy’ is something of a tautology, given the reason you get the award is for being friendly and sharing knowledge. In Matt’s case though he is really, really friendly, but not in a creepy way. He works at Click Dimensions (who make a really great marketing add-on product for Dynamics CRM) and was the source of my LinkedIn integration post earlier this year.

Geoff Ables, the other author of the book I do not know.

Other than a beer at summit if I am reasonably complimentary, I will receive no compensation for this review other than keeping the review book.

Overview of the Book

The book is a sizeable tome weighing in at 778 pages and, given you can get it on Amazon for US$30 or on kindle for $23 that is great value.

The first thing I noticed was the foreward. Most forewards I ignore but this one was written by Paul Greenberg. Paul wrote ‘CRM at the Speed of Light’ back in 2001; a seminal work on CRM as a philosophy and a technology. The book coined the term ‘xRM’ ten years ago! It should take pride of place on any CRM worker’s desk. It would on mine if someone had not stolen it.

If you think I talk up Matt, you should see what the ‘godfather of CRM’ says about him (all of it true). Paul also gives the book his seal of approval, which is enough for me to read on. He implies that the book will assist in ensuring a successful implementation of Dynamics CRM and I tend to agree with him.

Structure of the Book

The book is divided into nine parts:

Laying a Solid Foundation
Installing Dynamics CRM
Administering Dynamics CRM
Using Microsoft Dynamics CRM
Customizing Dynamics CRM Through the User Interface
Customizing Dynamics CRM with Custom Code
Visualizing Your Dynamics CRM Data with Charts, Reports and Dashboards
Extending and Integrating Dynamics CRM
Appendixes (Integration with SharePoint 2010, Accessing and Using Online Resources)

This is, in my opinion, a good taxonomy as it reflects the tasks which one encounters when implementing and working with the product. For example, if I have been thrown at a CRM project which has been installed and ready to configure, it is pretty easy to work out that chapters 1, 3, 4 and 5 are a good place to start; if I am looking to integrate CRM with another system, chapter 8 suggests it is a good place to go.

Part 1: Laying a Solid Foundation

Nice work Matt and Geoff! This section is a ‘Whitman’s Sampler Tour’ (no surname pun intended) of the product. They cover aspects such as:

Using CRM to manage complex relationships (I am working with a customer using ACT! at the moment which is a great product to see how Dynamics CRM handles complex relationships so well)
Where CRM stops and ERP begins (an often confused area)
Common terminology of Dynamics CRM (e.g. what is the difference between a contact, lead, opportunity and account?)
Unique differentiators of Dynamics CRM, relative to its competitors
Customising and extending CRM
A framework for development and implementation
What’s new in CRM 2011
The differences in the deployment options (advantages and disadvantages)
System requirements

It is almost impossible to work with Dynamics CRM or design it correctly without the knowledge in this part. If you are a client, working with a Microsoft partner, and you want to have enough knowledge to keep them honest, this section is worth its weight in gold. Being able to say stuff like “rather than create a series of web pages to manage the approval process, why don’t we use dialogs and child workflows?” or “rather than implement a series of complex jscripts to manage the visibility of fields on the form, why don’t we create custom forms for the different user groups?” will let the consultant know you are not to be trifled with.

Part 2: Installing Dynamics CRM

The title explains it well. Aspects covered include:

Planning the installation (goals for CRM, integration points, infrastructure in place)
Installing the CRM server (through the next button, via script etc.)
Upgrading the server
Installing other common components (e-mail router, Outlook client etc.)
Setting up internet-facing deployment and claims-based authentication

A good overview of the elements involved. Would I do an enterprise deployment armed with just this book? Not a chance but, again, a great overview so a client can speak with authority to an expert on the subject. Also a good ‘sanity check’ if you are installing a small deployment and you want to make sure you have covered off the essentials.

Part 3: Administering Dynamics CRM

Part three begins where part two left off, setting up those post-installation system settings and some best practices. Aspects include:

Best practices (configuring a backup administrator, backing up)
Setting system settings
Setting up security (a very complex beast relative to CRM 4)
Licensing (this is quite light and needs supplementing now that the licensing model has been released)
Setting up users
Using the Deployment Manager (Product key, server management, organisation management)
Data migration and enriching
Data de-duplication
CRM maintenance (updates, backups, monitoring resources, server and client optimisation
Troubleshooting CRM (turning on developer errors, enable tracing etc.)

This part is an excellent guide for essential system maintenance to keep an existing system ‘ticking along’ and, if you are not changing the system in any way through configuration, this is as far as you need to go in the book because the rest of the book is focussed on how the system is used and how to extend its functionality.

Part 4: Using Microsoft Dynamics CRM

This section is essential reading for staff looking to support the out of the box features of the product. Aspects include:

How to navigate the interface
Record ownership and security
Activity management (and a warning about the hidden nasties of working with them under the covers)
Queues
E-mail templates
Record merging
Mobile devices
CRM Outlook client (including the new features of the massively improved 2011 client)
Sales functions (leads, opportunities, quotes, orders, invoices etc.)
Marketing functions (campaigns, marketing list)
Service functions (cases, contracts, service scheduling)

This section is not designed to be a definitive guide to CRM functionality but more of a high level overview. So, for example, support staff can speak sensibly on the product when dealing with queries. If you are looking for a user deep dive, this one might do the job, although I have not got a copy to review (hint, hint ).

Part 5: Customizing Dynamics CRM Through the User Interface

This is where I do most of my work; configuring the system through the user interface. As the book says you can get 90% of where you need to be through the front end configuration tools without sacrificing a single curly brace or semi-colon. Aspects include:

Data enrichment (a strange place to have this section in my opinion)
Mail merging with Microsoft Word (also unusual since this has not a lot to do with configuring the system)
SharePoint integration and document management (a little more at home in this chapter)
Solution management
Entity configuration and custom entity creation
Processes (the new name for workflows and dialogs)

A great section for laying the foundation for configuration. If you are a small company working with Dynamics CRM and someone on staff wants to be the designated ‘developer’ for the system but they have no coding experience, this is a great place to start as it will teach them how to get started and exactly how far they can go before getting a coder in.

Part 6: Customizing Dynamics CRM with Custom Code

Starting where the previous section ends, this part talks about how the product can be enhanced through code. Again there are some curious entries in here but, to give an idea of how the system can be altered the section does a good job. Aspects in the section include:

Setting up option sets (more at home in the previous section in my opinion and no mention of global option sets that I can see)
Setting up queues (again, as this is codeless I would be inclined to have this in an earlier section)
Setting up mobile express (codeless)
Managing connection roles and relationship roles (very good that the two were mentioned and the difference highlighted. Also codeless and, therefore, probably belong in an earlier section)
Extending CRM (forms, dashboards and processes)
Development options (great when you know the functionality you want but you are not sure how to implement it)
Setting up development and testing environments
Client-side customizations (including a great overview of working with jscript and the CRM form events and some sample code)
Server-side customizations (a great attempt to do a high level summary of a complex set of development tools, including some sample code and a walkthrough of registering a plugin. It also taught me what a REST endpoint is in language I understood)
Connecting to Azure
Building workflow extensions

Other than starting with a bunch of stuff which involves no code whatsoever, the parts which did talk about code are a great ‘101’ for client and server-side coding in CRM. This section will not make you an elite coder for CRM but it will whet your appetite on what can be done, again, perfect when discussing a vision of functionality for the system.

Part 7: Visualizing Your Dynamics CRM Data with Charts, Reports, and Dashboards

An area I am passionate about. If you are going to spend all this time setting up a system to centrally capture information, make sure you and your users have a way to extract it in a meaningful way. The section covers:

Advanced Find and views
Report wizard (my least favourite tool)
Using Excel as a BI Tool (my most favourite tool)
Charts
Dashboards
SSRS Reports (including a walkthrough for creating a custom report and report security)
Fetch

A great summary of the reporting options of the product. Combined with my seven ages of CRM reporting article, you should have an excellent idea of how the information you need to get to can be extracted and presented.

Part 8: Extending and Integrating Dynamics CRM

A very high level review of how to approach having other systems talk to Dynamics CRM. Aspects covered include:

Integration points in the product
Planning the integration
Data movement considerations
Best practices for migration and integration (including a handy chart to suggest which tools are best for which scenarios)
A section of widely used integration tools such as Scribe Insight and Pervasive Data Integrator
Web site integration
Using Add-ons (including reviews of some usual suspects such as Data2CRM, CWR Mobility and Experlogix)
Exploring xRM (in other words, managing business processes outside of traditional sales, marketing and services. This includes a walkthrough of an HR scenario and how CRM could help)

Again this chapter is not designed to make the reader an expert but simply to know the essentials and to make the reader aware of some of the commonly used tools in the market. The explanation of the widely mis-used ‘xRM’ is also straightforward and easy to follow.

Part 9: Appendixes

This section talks at advanced SharePoint integration and provides a table of online resources. The table of web links is a collection of the authors’ favourite CRM administrator and third-party tool links. Worthwhile and, hopefully, they will stay active.

The SharePoint section is very interesting as it gives an overview of common integration points between the products with some common examples. If this is on the cards for your CRM implementation, this is definitely worth a look.

Conclusions

If you know someone who is about to take on the administration of a CRM in the new year, this is a great stocking filler (and at 750+ pages it better be a big stocking). The book is specifically written to give an administrator enough knowledge to do their job and enough to ensure the others they need to interact with (e.g. consultants) are doing theirs.

My only complaint is, as is inevitable with such a book, there are some things which are out of date. The first, and most obvious, are the screenshots which are taken from the pre-released version. I expect this was all the authors had to work with at the time of writing. Fortunately not a lot changed from pre-release to production, so this should not distract in any significant way from the usability of the book. Also, the information about licensing is a little dated, referring to enterprise and professional licensing and not mentioning the ESS license. Again, I imagine this was a function of timing. Given licensing is one small aspect of this very large book this is not a big deal (here is the definitive licensing guide if you are interested).

Overall a really well crafted book. Where I see this book having its ‘sweet spot’ is with smaller implementations (either on-premise or online) who have one person being a ‘many hats’ administrator i.e. someone who manages security, users, configuration and needs to work with a Microsoft partner or customiser. I guarantee you, if you are such an administrator, buying this book will be a great investment the next time someone from the business says ‘how could we make CRM do this…?’

Moving To The Cloud Part One: Office 365

2011-12-09T06:00:00.001-08:00

What do you do when you have a laptop full of e-mail, historical data, and photos and are constantly annoyed you have to haul the laptop around to access stuff? Move to the cloud.

This blog is a bit of a departure from the CRM stuff but, I imagine, talks about a problem many of us face. I am making notes as I go down this path (and there are quite a few of them) so I expect this to be a multi-part blog.

The Problem

I have a laptop with a 12G PST file comprising of about 12 years of accumulated e-mail. I also have about 35G of data (excluding stuff I could easily ‘regenerate’ such as music and movies).

To back up, the theory goes that, on the weekend, I hook up my laptop to my media player and xxcopy the hard drive contents. Not the most elegant solution but it would work, if I ever got around to actually doing the backup. Also, I am known at work as ‘that guy that travels with two laptops’. Why? Because when I travel interstate I want to catch up on all things CRM and most of this is set up to happen through Outlook on my personal laptop. This includes emails, subscribed distribution lists, RSS feeds and twitter feeds (thanks to TwInbox). It all feeds into the PST file for centralisation and easy searching.

So my goal is to:

eliminate the need to backup or, at least, automate it
give me an easy way to read and process e-mails/RSS feeds and tweets while away from home without carrying an extra laptop

Note that what I mean by ‘processing’ is reading e-mails, filing them in a folder, setting myself appointments and tasks resulting from them and so on. So while I can read my e-mails on pretty much any internet-enabled device e.g. an iPad or an Android slate, this is not productive for me and not practical as a solution. Outlook is so much more than an e-mail client.

Looking To The Cloud

Microsoft are making a bit of noise about Office 365 at the moment so I thought I would look into it. Essentially for a per user per month fee you get:

Online collaboration via SharePoint (10G +500M*# of users of storage)
Online meetings and communication via Lync (at a very high level, think of it as a corporate version of Live Messenger crossed with a softphone)
An online version of Exchange (25G of storage)

For my e-mail the last point was the important one. With an online version of Exchange you also get the Outlook Web Access client (OWA) which is a pretty good approximation of Outlook online. OWA would be sufficient for my needs. It would show all my Outlook folders, let me drag and drop emails and let me create Tasks and Appointments which would come back to my laptop when I was back at home. What’s more, my 12G PST is within the storage limits and, hopefully, give me growth for another 12 years.

So what does Office 365 cost? Well, according to the US site $6 per user per month for the simplest plan.

PLEASE NOTE: I signed up for the P1 plan despite strong suggestions from fellow MVPs to go with the Enterprise E1 plan. Evaluate the differences before signing up and take note you cannot move from a P1 to an E1 if you change your mind later.

Signing Up And The Australian Complication

I thought this is sufficiently low cost to give it a try. Being a good Microsoft citizen, this is the process I followed:

Go to www.bing.com
Type in “Office 365”
Click the first result link
Click the ‘Buy’ button
Follow the steps

Where this process comes unstuck is when you select the country. There is a long list of countries available but Australia is not one of them. Confused, I consulted the FAQ.

So, by rights, Australia should be there. Unsure what to do I clicked ‘United States’ figuring I would either change it later or delete the account and start again one I figured out what was going on. This turned out to be a bad choice as it eventually asks for a US address.

The problem is you cannot officially sign up to Office 365 for Australia via the US web site (which is the one Bing sends you to). You have to go to the Australian equivalent site (which, ironically, Google sends you to from the outset when you type “Office 365”).

The next problem is, despite the black and white claim of global pricing, Australians pay over 30% more for their Office 365.

While the reasons are not completely clear, Office 365 is provided through a third party in Australia (namely Telstra) so I am guessing they are adding a little extra to cover their overheads. This flies in the face of the global pricing claim though.

The Unofficial Workaround

The problem I now had was it turned out to not be possible to delete my account or change the country. I could have started again but I wanted to keep my free vanity domain you get when you sign up. I was also a little put out that Australians were paying more for a cloud solution than the rest of the world.

The problem was a lack of a US address. Fortunately my wife has an American Express card and they have a member benefit, courtesy of http://www.myus.com which means card holders get a complimentary US address and reduced shipping rates. The reason for this unusual benefit? A lot of US suppliers flatly refuse to deal with people outside of the USA and will only ship within the USA. This service gets around that.

Wielding my newly found US address and my credit card I signed up at the global rate of $6 per user per month. Can Microsoft or Telstra force me to go through Telstra and spend $7.90 per user per month? Well, by my interpretation, this would be third line forcing which is illegal in Australia.

Even if you do not have an American Express card, you can sign up to myus.com and pay a once-off fee of $10 and get an address. Within six months you will have recouped the difference (6 * ($7.90-$6.00) = $11.40), assuming US$/A$ parity.

Experience So Far

Well I will save that for the next blog, along with a bunch of tips and tricks I have learned along the way for transferring my PST over to Exchange Online and for configuring SharePoint Online but, overall, the experience has been very positive. Assuming Microsoft and Telstra do not kill my account for that little nugget above, I expect to be using Office 365 for the foreseeable future.

The Interplay of People, Process and Technology

2011-12-02T06:29:00.001-08:00

Before I get into the article, Google Analytics is telling me I am not getting as many hits as I used to.

While this may simply be a seasonal thing, I am keen to keep my audience. Therefore, if there is a specific type of article you would like to see or, if you feel I have been dropping the ball of late, let me know. Generally I write one of three types of articles:

Codeless tricks for Dynamics CRM
Competitive analysis (often directed at salesforce)
Thought leadership on CRM in general

Today’s article is in the ‘thought leadership’ camp.

The Processing of Information

There is a reliable model in IT circles when it comes to implementing software into a business which is the model of People, Process and Technology. The idea is that if you are processing information e.g. converting an order into a delivery or going from a lead into a sale, inevitably these three elements will be involved.

Overall it is a pretty good model in that it is understood that all three elements have to be considered for an IT project not to fail. To put it generally:

People: who is involved in processing the information?
Technology: what systems are being employed in processing the information?
Process: How is the information transformed/transferred?

What is often overlooked, and the purpose of today’s blog, is the consideration of their interplay.

Scenario One: The Dreaded Timesheet

A few employers ago, my boss asked me to look at how we could improve the internal process of lodging timesheets. The consultants complained that the process involved multiple handling of emails from the resource manager (the person that assigned them to projects), their calendar and the ERP system where they eventually logged their time. All three elements held basically the same information but none of them were linked, except through the keyboard of the consultant.

The resource manager complained because his calendar, showing all consultants, was not linked to the CRM or ERP system so he had to monitor when deals closed and then assign resources manually. The general manager complained because the numbers in the ERP system of closed deals never matched the resource manager’s calendar of completed work and the CRM system of future deals never matched the resource manager’s calendar of upcoming and assigned work. It was a mess.

As an aside, for those of you not in the consulting game, this situation is nothing new and is pretty much par for the course in most consulting businesses.

I began reviewing the situation and quickly concluded that Dynamics CRM could be used to resolve the situation.

When a sales opportunity is closed in Dynamics CRM, a workflow could automatically create a project task for the resource manager
The resource manager could assign this to a consultant and it would automatically appear in their Outlook calendar
When the work was completed, the consultant could mark the activity as completed and this would then feed into the ERP system via an integration component
Everything could be monitored through CRM’s Service Calendar or through SRS reports

An elegant solution and entirely practical. All the resource manager would ever have to do would be to assign jobs to consultants and all a consultant would have to do is complete the work and mark it as such in Outlook. The systems would take care of the rest.

I was so excited about the possibilities, I mentioned the idea to my boss’ boss, the general manager. To my surprise he was lukewarm on the idea of using CRM as the ‘glue’. His response was “let us look at the process first and then we can look at the technology”. Unfortunately, despite lovely process diagrams being created, nothing changed and the business continued to drown in poor information and overly manual processes. Because so much time was being spent on the manual processes generating inadequate information, there was never any time to improve the situation and, as far as I know, the situation remains the same to this day.

Scenario Two: The Dream System

Another time, the company I worked for was asked to deliver a system, using Dynamics CRM, which met the specifications gathered by a third-party system-agnostic business analyst. We were told it was the system the client’s staff had designed and it was vital to give them what they wanted to guarantee user adoption, no further workshops required. Unfortunately, the consultant involved (who will remain nameless to protect the inexperienced) accepted the challenge and the project horribly failed with budget blowouts and compromised solutions. No-one got what they wanted.

Scenario Three: Consolidating on the One Platform

The final situation was a conversation I had with a client where they loved Dynamics CRM so much they wanted to do everything through it, including their financials and inventory management. Fortunately, I managed to convince them otherwise but it is an excellent example of when you have the CRM hammer how everything looks like a nail. For the client, it did not matter that CRM has no concept of a general ledger or that the accounting department would have to learn a completely new system which would deliver a fraction of the functionality of the incumbent ERP software.

Why Considering Elements In Isolation Never Works

The problem in each of these scenarios is that one of the three elements was being considered without regard to the others (process, people and technology, respectively). This happens a lot and is often why CRM projects fail. Use your favourite search engine to find lists of reasons why CRM projects fail and you will see lists talking about how one or more of the three elements are being ignored.

If you focus on the technology and process but do not ensure the people are equipped and motivated to use the system (through training) user adoption will be compromised.

If you focus on process and people but ignore the technology, the misalignment will lead to expensive development to make the system ‘fit’ blowing out budgets with minimal gain.

If you focus on the people and technology but ignore the process, you risk automating and magnifying inefficiencies or failing to deliver what the business actually needs.

Getting in the Zone

A rough analogy can be drawn to the idea of the head, heart and hands and the idea of being ‘in the zone’; that state of mind, similar to Csikszentmihalyi’s ‘flow’ where productivity is achieved effortlessly.

Hugo Kehr researched this area and came up with the ‘Compensatory Model’. The theory goes that if the head (rationale for an action), heart (personal motivation to perform the action) and hands (perceived ability to perform the action) are aligned, the individual will achieve effortlessly. If they are not, without intervention, achievement will be difficult or impossible. A classic example is a smoker who knows quitting is good for his health (head) and he has the ability to stop (hands) but his heart is not in it. To achieve success will require willpower; it will not be effortless.

In our case, we can consider the process as the head (the logical approach to processing the information), technology as the hands (the tools to enable the processing) and the people as the heart (those performing the action who must be personally motivated).

Reviewing the misalignment through this filter:

If the people are unmotivated e.g. they perceive CRM as unhelpful and merely a ‘big brother’ system, they will be able to achieve the outcome but there will again be frustration and the requirement for willpower.

If the technology is inadequate but the people and the business both agree the outcome is necessary, creativity and problem solving will be used to ‘work around’ the systems e.g. Excel and Access systems will be created.

If there is no process, people with the right resources can achieve the outcome, but there will be frustration and willpower (volitional regulation to use Kehr’s terminology) will have to be employed.

Conclusions

The idea of considering the elements of people, process and technology when implementing an IT solution to help with a business process is a good start but it is not everything. Changing one of the three elements inevitably affects the other two and, often, in subtle ways. Therefore, it is also necessary to consider how all three are linked in the ‘as is’ process, how this will change in the ‘to be’ process and what steps will be necessary to transform from one to the other. Being rigid with one element and expecting the others to fall into place is a recipe for disaster.

The closer all three are aligned, the less frustration there will be with the system and the more consistent the process: business nirvana.

Why Woolworths Homeshop Needs a CRM (And Maybe You Do Too)

2011-11-27T05:19:00.001-08:00

For those of you from foreign shores Australia, basically, has two supermarket chains (Woolworths and Coles). Both offer online shopping and delivery (for a charge). I use Woolworth’s Homeshop and while, in my experience, the range is a little more limited, the costs are a little higher and the quality a little inferior, relative to the the physical stores, the benefits of time saving and convenience outweigh the negatives.
All was fine until we moved house a few weeks ago when the problems began.

Late Deliveries

Woolworths provides customers a range of windows for delivery. One Monday we picked 6am-8am so that the delivery was part of the usual morning drama of getting the children and ourselves ready for work. 8am came and went and nothing turned up. My wife called and asked what had happened. She was told the bad weather and traffic had delayed the delivery and it would be there soon. At 8:10am it turned up. A minor delay and a little disappointing but these things happen. I wrote it off as an outlier.

Eight days later it was time for the next shop. Again we picked the ‘morning madness’ slot. 7:45am and nothing had arrived. My wife’s spider senses began tingling so she called Homeshop. She was assured the driver was on his way and would be there by 8am. 8am rocked around and still no groceries. My wife called again and was told the driver was running late and he would be there at 8:10am. Nothing at 8:10am and she called back. She was told the delivery was delayed and that is the way it is. An apology is apparently not part of the standard customer service.

If you imagine the Hispanic wife from Modern Family with an Australian accent, this is my wife. Respect is a big thing for her. No apology when groceries are late and a cold attitude is not the way to go with her. She was told the next delivery will be free and asked if there anything else that can be done. My wife asked to speak to the warehouse manager so she can give him some selected thoughts on improving his operations management. After all, she has knowledge of operations management from her time at a Fortune 100. The customer service operator refused and suggested she get her manager to call later. This was accepted. Unfortunately, the customer service operator failed to organise this call.

With two late deliveries, being generous, I put this down to a coincidence.

Eliminating the excuse of traffic, we decided to opt for a Sunday delivery. Sure enough, the clock chimes 8am and no delivery. My wife, again, puts in the call and receives an apology from the operator who assures her it should not happen. Next delivery will be free. My wife tells the operator she values her time more than a nominal delivery fee, suggesting she will give the business one more chance before moving to Coles.

The groceries turn up as she puts down the phone. Unfortunately, no checklist is provided and some foods have been substituted for cheaper alternatives (despite us ticking the box ‘no substitutes’ on the online order and no discount given for the inferior product).

Three in a row is now a pattern and suggests something systemic is involved.

Where Are The Problems And How Can A CRM System Help?

To see where the problems are, let us look at the steps in the process:

Customer orders online and selects a delivery window
Goods are selected from a warehouse and loaded into a truck
Driver takes goods to home
Goods arrive late and customer phones up customer service, receiving mixed service

Let us also summarize the issues experienced in the three deliveries:

Goods were consistently late, despite a two-hour window
Customer service did not know where the trucks were
Customer experience from the call centre was mixed
No reliable escalation process
Cheaper substitutes provided despite the order specifying not to

So how can a CRM system help?

Traditionally, CRM systems were about sales automation; helping sales people track sales opportunities and converting them to sales but, these days, they cover a much wider range of processes than just sales.

In the case of Woolworths, a good CRM system would link the online ordering system with the warehouse and the customer service centre. It would also allow for better management of the process of delivering excellent customer service. Let us review the specific issues.

Late Goods

This one is probably beyond a CRM system. Given the consistent inability to deliver on time to our new address, relative to our old address, I can only conclude Woolworths have a predefined route for the area and we now fall towards the end of that route.

Where a good CRM system could help would be in reporting on complaints received and determining the cause. It is likely others, nearby, also have the same experience as us and in the effective capture of these complaints and consolidation of reporting through a business intelligence (BI) system this issue could be identified and remedied through a review of the route or through the hiring of more drivers.

A cynic would suggest that Woolworths are willing to endure some level of dissatisfaction in order to maximize profits but I am sure this is not the case, given the high level of competition with Coles.

Customer Service Not Knowing Where The Trucks Are

In these days of ubiquitous GPS systems, it would be a relatively simple procedure to link a GPS tracking system with a CRM system via wireless internet, allowing the call centre to know where the trucks are at all times. Failing this, another option would be electronic signature for deliveries, similar to what is experienced with many courier companies (Homeshop still has a paper-based signature). The electronic signature would be transmitted back to the CRM system and the call centre, presented with an ordered list of deliveries, would be able to see where the truck is up to and estimate a delivery time (or the CRM system could estimate for them).

Mixed Call Centre Experience

There is little excuse in today’s world for an inconsistent call centre experience. Most CRM system provide a scripting facility and the ability to automate the process of servicing the customer. In my opinion, it is clear the Woolworths Homeshop call centre do not have access to standard procedures for dealing with common complaints and, unfortunately, have to improvise to the detriment of the customer.

No Reliable Escalation Process

It is often the case that call centres are geographically separate from management so it is not practical or possible for the call centre to escalate a call directly to a manager. Therefore, it is sometimes necessary for a call centre operator to request a customer be called back by management to deal with an issue more appropriately. Where the system breaks down is if there is not a simple system to action this escalation. Most CRM systems have a workflow engine, allowing the automation of activity as the system is used. In this case, the call centre operator could tick a box in a CRM system and the system would take care of the rest; contacting the most appropriate senior member of staff, based on the type of complaint. Even then, if the issue has not be addressed within a fixed time period, the system automatically escalates the issue further. Most call centres, meeting international standards, have such systems in place as well as well-defined service level agreements (SLAs).

Cheaper Substitutes Despite Instructions Otherwise

In this case there appears to be a breakdown between the online ordering system and the warehouse picking slip. Given substitution, when it does happen, appears to be a cheaper product, the same cynic from before would suggest there is a conscious decision, on behalf of Woolworths, to ‘try it on’ and occasionally slip in a cheaper product to improve profit but, as before, I doubt this is the case because the cost in customer satisfaction would massively outweigh any benefit in a few pennies extra profit.

If the picking slip from the warehouse was generated from the same CRM system as captured the online order, it would be a simple case of ensuring the ‘no substitutes’ option was displayed in large font on the generated picking slip.

Taking it a step further, let us assume a barcode reader is used for inventory management, scanning the items as they are removed from the warehouse to update the ERP system. If the CRM system presented an on-screen picking slip, rather than printed out, it would also be possible to link the scanner to the CRM system so that, when a substitute is picked for a ‘no substitutes’ order, the warehouse operator received a warning so they could fix the mistake or automatically generate a credit, email to the customer etc.

Conclusions

Ultimately, people implement CRM systems to improve communication, either internally or externally. In the case of Woolworths Homeshop there appears to be communication issues between the online ordering system, the warehouse, the delivery drivers and the call centre. A consolidated CRM system has the potential to address these issues, improve customer satisfaction and provide a competitive advantage. Let us hope Woolworths starts reviewing their process before our next order, otherwise we will be going to Coles.

The challenge for the rest of us is to look at our own businesses and consider whether we also have communication issues, which affect our ability to deliver excellent service, and consider how technology can be used to improve the situation.

Salesforce’s Third Quarter Results (and fixing up a small mistake)

2011-11-18T07:22:00.001-08:00

Salesforce has just released their third quarter results. This gives me an opportunity to see how they are tracking financially but also to fix up an error in a previous post. Back in September I had suggested that salesforce was getting away from Microsoft in terms of subscriptions. It turns out my ability to combine tables was in error and thus the conclusion that salesforce was moving away from Microsoft was also in error. Let us delve into it shall we?

The Third Quarter Financial Results

For the details, you can go here.

My last review of the financials was back in September. At that time, salesforce had made a loss for the first time since the start of 2009. Unfortunately they have now made it two quarters in a row. The loss is smaller than before, but a loss regardless. If salesforce do not make a profit of more than $7.5m in the last quarter, they will make a net loss for the year. Marc should make some calls into the North Pole. They have a bunch of folk up there trying to track customers worldwide and delivering goods to them via overnight delivery. They might need some help in the next couple of months.

Here is the graph of the financials.

Those non-GAAP revenue costs appear to be tapering but those pesky operating costs keep growing. If only salesforce did not have to operate a business (improve the product, pay commissions, paint the world in adverts, run offices etc.) they would be making a fortune.

I again embraced the pleasure of listening to the earnings conference call and no one bothered drilling into the loss. Marc was certainly unconcerned, but this is no surprise. The fact that the analysts on the call were not overly concerned either was surprising. The analysts have noticed the slowdown in billings growth but that is about it. So, like a water balloon left on a running tap (faucet for our American readers), it is all still about growth and not about the long term consequences.

Subscription Numbers

Unfortunately, salesforce no longer report subscription numbers with their quarterly results. However, the revenue results can give us a clue. Here is the obligatory table of financial results.

	2011 Q1	2011 Q2	2011 Q3	2011 Q4	2012 Q1	2012 Q2	2012 Q3
Revenue	$376,813	$394,372	$429,087	$456,867	$504,364	$546,002	$584,260
Revenue Cost	$71,581	$77,790	$82,131	$92,311	$103,066	$120,910	$128,565
Operating Cost	$272,182	$286,900	$311,800	$364,947	$404,101	$440,840	$465,852
Salesforce Income	$17,745	$14,744	$21,072	$10,913	$530	-$4,268	-$3,756
Subscribers	2,319,000	2,554,400	2,790,400	3,000,000	3,321,800	3,640,000	3,895,067
Customers	77,300	82,400	87,200	92,300	97,700	104,000	111,288
Revenue Per Subscriber	$162	$154	$154	$152	$152	$150	$150
Revenue PUPM	$54	$51	$51	$51	$51	$50	$50
Revenue Growth ($) yoy	$71,889	$78,311	$98,538	$102,818	$127,551	$151,630	$155,173
Revenue Growth (%) yoy	24%	25%	30%	29%	34%	38%	36%

The first four rows and the Revenue Growth ($) are in the thousands.

Numbers in red are my best guesses using the average company size as an indicator of subscriber numbers.

In this last quarter we have had to be a little smarter because the customer numbers were not released. In this case I have used the Revenue Per User Per Month which has tracked at around $50-51 for the last 18 months. Combining this with the Revenue numbers gives us a number for subscribers and, again, using the predicted average company size we can get a number for customers.

Assuming things are on track, salesforce is poised to make four million subscribers before the end of the next quarter.

Fixing Up My Market Maturity Numbers

As mentioned, back in September I made an error with the market maturity numbers which led to the conclusion salesforce were getting away from Microsoft. Time to fix that error. Here is the corrected table.

	SFDC Subscribers	SFDC Customers	MSFT Subscribers	MSFT Customers	Subscriber Ratio	Customer Ratio	Difference in Subscribers	Total Subscribers	Customer Size Ratio
Mar-06	423,667	22,298	150,000	6,000	2.82	3.72	273,667	573,667	1.3
Oct-06	556,000	27,100	250,000	8,000	2.22	3.39	306,000	806,000	1.5
May-07	775,200	33,704	400,000	10,000	1.94	3.37	375,200	1,175,200	1.7
Mar-08	1,198,333	44,383	500,000	11,000	2.40	4.03	698,333	1,698,333	1.7
Feb-09	1,533,800	56,807	750,000	15,500	2.05	3.66	783,800	2,283,800	1.8
Jul-09	1,769,600	63,200	1,000,000	20,833	1.77	3.03	769,600	2,769,600	1.7
Apr-10	2,319,000	77,300	1,100,000	22,000	2.11	3.51	1,219,000	3,419,000	1.7
Jul-10	2,554,400	82,400	1,400,000	23,000	1.82	3.58	1,154,400	3,954,400	2.0
Apr-11	3,321,800	97,700	1,700,000	27,000	1.95	3.62	1,621,800	5,021,800	1.9
Jul-11	3,640,000	104,000	2,000,000	30,000	1.82	3.47	1,640,000	5,640,000	1.9

Essentially, the error came because salesforce quote their financials by fiscal year. So the most recent results are Q3-2012 even though we are still in 2011. This led me to put the previous years subscription numbers in for salesforce in all but the last quarter. I also misunderstood when the salesforce quarters started. I had assumed fiscal year started on the first of January. It appears it actually starts on the first of February so this has also been adjusted. The above table, as far as I know, is now correct.

Again, the numbers in red are best guesses based on the information at hand.

The total number of subscribers for the two companies continues to grow unabated with it likely that the two products are already serving six million subscribers or more.

The graphs no longer show the jump seen previously. We now see that either the ratio of subscribers is flattening to just below two or the ratio is decreasing and the difference is flattening out. Time will tell which is correct. What is clear is that salesforce are not pulling away through the subscriber land grab acquisitions as previously speculated and Microsoft are still in the chase. Honestly, nothing would please me more than another drop in the subscriber ratio and a reduction in the subscriber difference. I cannot wait to see if Santa Marc will package that up for me in the next quarter results.

Google Trends

Here is the latest difference between “dynamics crm” and “salesforce.com” according to Google trends. In the past I have used a linear trend line but I do not feel this accurately represents the movement (with an r-squared value around 50% its presentation was unjustified). To this end I have changed the trend line to a moving average graph, akin to what is often used for stock prices. The advantage of this kind of trend line is it smooths out the fluctuations and still gives an indication of the general direction of movement. The graph indicates Dynamics CRM continues to gain mindshare amongst the Google search population.

Conclusions

My first conclusion is avoid crunching numbers in the wee hours (although I am writing this at 2am so I am not good at taking my own advice). Moreover, as any good theoretical physicist will tell you, if you do crunch numbers and a strange result pops out check and re-check to make sure you are not going to put something out there which is a nonsense.

In regards to the salesforce numbers, I predict that salesforce will make their four million subscribers by the end of the year and this year will result in a financial loss for the company. I often say “one is an outlier, two is a coincidence and three is a pattern”. Let us see if salesforce can turn their financial losses into a pattern next quarter.

As for accelerating away from Microsoft, this is far from the case. Microsoft continue to pursue salesforce like a dog chasing a car. Whether the car will stall or shift into second gear is yet to be seen.

Finally, Microsoft continue to gain public mindshare and this does not appear to be slowing. While it was close in July 2011, we are yet to see a day when more people search for Dynamics CRM than salesforce.com. Appearances would suggest that day, however, will be soon.

Socialmention Battle Arena: Battle of the CRMs

2011-11-06T19:20:00.001-08:00

I came across this tool called socialmention and thought I would give it a bit of a plug. Essentially it is a free social analysis tool covering quite a wide range of sources. Here are the results of the vanity search:

Most of it is pretty self-explanatory. The four measures in the top left are as follows:

Strength: Likelihood of keyword being mentioned socially (turns out I am not mentioned very much)
Sentiment: Ratio of positive to negative mentions (this is a pretty dodgy measure as it appears to use keyword matching to determine the sentiment of messages)
Passion: Measures how likely people are to repeatedly talk about the keyword. For example, if it is a small group of people that constantly mention ‘leontribe’ this will have a high passion score even if the relative Strength of the output is low.
Reach: A measure of influence

They also offer a service similar to Google Alerts, although I have not been able to get it working yet.

Battle of the CRMs

Using the CRM’s mentioned by Gartner we get the following results (I used all quadrants except the bottom left):

Salesforce.com	Dynamics CRM	Oracle CRM	Siebel CRM	SAP CRM	SalesLogix

The Winners

In terms of likelihood of being mentioned (Strength), SalesForce is the winner, closely followed by Dynamics CRM. Except for SAP CRM, the others are far behind.

For sentiment, SAP CRM can do no wrong but, as mentioned I am somewhat sceptical of this measure. Any system which gives Hitler and Osama Bin Laden a three positive to one negative ratio has got limitations.

For passion, look no further than SalesLogix. That small group of social networkers talk about SalesLogix the most frequently. Interestingly, SalesForce has the smallest passion score meaning the people mentioning it are not concentrated to a small group.

In terms of influence (reach), Siebel has the longest arms, closely followed by Oracle CRM and SalesForce. SalesLogix had the shortest arms so while the SalesLogix socialites talk often, they do not talk to a diverse group.

Review of the Keywords

The keywords of the different products also offer some insight. For SalesForce we see their focus on the cloud and for enterprise business to make use of social channels. We also see mention of Benioff, their CEO, speaking at the strong influence he has on their brand. They also mention Oracle, which may be because of the recent circus at OpenWorld.

For Dynamics CRM, the terms are a little more general but talk about office software and a customer focus.

The Oracle and Siebel keywords talk about business software with a strong salesforce automation and marketing focus.

The most interesting, in my opinion, are the SAP CRM keywords which are more about the people who work with the product and their career than about the product itself or the customer.

The rather strange keywords regarding SalesLogix are because of a recent press release put out by Sage regarding one of their customers.

Conclusions

If you are looking for a free social analysis tool, this is not a bad place to start and, while it is not as comprehensive as many of the non-free alternatives it is a good way to get an idea of what a brand is up to. If you are feeling bored, you can also play the Social Mention negative sentiment game where you (and as many of your friends as you like) try to find ANY keyword phrase which has a negative sentiment score i.e. more negative mentions than positive (it took a colleague and I about an hour to find one). If they are family-friendly rated, feel free to add them to the comments

CRM Things To Come: The Release Preview Guide For Q4 2011

2011-10-22T07:41:00.001-07:00

This came out a few weeks ago but is worth a going over because there is a fair amount of stuff coming. For those that have not seen it, here is the link. This is Microsoft’s vision for Dynamics CRM as at August 2011.

The Executive Summary

It is good to see they are still going with the ‘familiar, intelligent and connected’ line. As CRM becomes more social and collaborative these will become more and more relevant. They also introduce the idea of ‘waves’ which seems to be the term they will be using for the major updates. The only other observation is a linguistic one. The summary uses the word “you’ll”. They could have used ‘you will’ but went with the less formal version. The piece wants you to be a friend, not a cold analyst (I rarely contract in my blog because I want to pretend I am, at least, a little bit formal).

Background

They mention this is the fifth major release. By my reckoning it is the fourth (v1.2, v3.0, v4.0 and v2011). There was v1.0 as well so maybe they are including this one.

Improved Agility

Here they again confirm the twice yearly cycle for major releases. If you are thinking that every six months you will get the same kind of bang we got when CRM 2011 came out you will be disappointed but, hopefully, there will be a few goodies to look forward to each time.

Key New Capabilities

There is a lot of love for online here. Stuff either works online only or for both online and on-premise. No features for on-premise only. In terms of what all this means we have the next few sections.

Unified Office 365 Experience

While Microsoft lay it on thick with how awesome Dynamics CRM and Office 365 are together, the fact is these two products will be getting closer and closer together as time goes on. The Q4 release is the start of this. Sign up for one and you will be able to get the other. Rather than get two charges it will be one or, at least, that is how I am interpreting ‘Unified Provisioning’ and ‘Unified Billing’. The administration bit I think refers to Microsoft’s internal administration simplifying as the products come together.

Enterprise Cloud

Identity Federation

Today, you can log onto CRM Online any way you like as long as it is with a Live ID. This is a little annoying, especially if, like me, you have a Live ID for IM, Live ID for forums and then Live IDs for CRM logins. Q4 will allow people to use Active Directory, much like Lync does today. No more Live ID logins (hooray!)

Enhanced Data Recovery

I am a little underwhelmed by this one. They will be doing backups in the same region as the data centre. What I want is the ability for CRM Online customers to do their own backups. I do not really see this adding value but just achieving expectation.

Feature Enhancements

Enhancements to Dialogs

Dialogs have the shortcoming that, while you can input values into a dialog, the types of values you can enter are limited. This will be addressed in the Q4 update, meaning that lookups and dates can now be entered as input. Again, not so much raising the bar but achieving a baseline level of functionality.

The ability to generate dynamic hyperlinks is great. One of the common uses of workflows is for ‘reminder’ or ‘escalation’ notifications. The problem is that while you could tell someone about a new record or a record that has not progressed, you could not give them a link to click on to get them to that record. They still had to open up CRM, navigate, go to quick search etc. Being able to generate a dynamic hyperlink fixes this for dialogs and, hopefully, for workflows. I am not sure what is meant by “hyperlinks that guide users to…content in…external applications but I am intrigued.

Additional Business Intelligence Capabilities

We are getting multi-series charts! The new charting capability of CRM 2011 can already produce multi-series charts but you have to export the chart, hack the XML and then re-import. With the Q4 update it will be possible to configure such charts directly through the application; no more XML hacking. The sky is the limit with CRM Charting because the underlying tools are so feature-rich. I imagine each major release will give us a little more each time.

Extended De-duplication Rule Processing

Another shortcoming removed from the product. To understand the problem, try de-duplicating a contact on an e-mail address. You will see that any contact with a blank e-mail field is labelled a duplicate with any other contact without an e-mail address. The new enhancements fix this. If only they would also give us SOUNDEX matching…

Social Investments – Wave 1

While many of the improvements up until now have been ‘fixes’ in the sense that they bring functionality to the table that a general user would expect to begin with, the social investments are the meat in the Q4 update sandwich.

Microsoft introduces its social model of three communities:

Internal: communities within the organisation e.g. a company Yammer group
External Managed: communities involving the organisation and external parties in an environment controlled by the organisation e.g. a corporate Facebook page
External Unmanaged: communities in an environment not controlled by the organisation e.g.a fan page

Microsoft also suggest Dynamics CRM is the hub at the centre of these communities.

Activity Feeds

Essentially Chatter for Dynamics CRM. The way they describe it I am guessing the ‘Activity Feed’ is another entity with a special summary page akin to a Facebook wall called ‘Your Wall’.

Mobile Activity Feeds

Similar to the mobile express client (only hopefully a bit more graphically rich), Windows Phone 7 users will be able to check their wall via their phone and perform related actions. While I understand Microsoft want to leverage ‘the stack’, I think it is fair to say that there are at least a couple of CRM customers who use phones with different OSes in them. Maybe the mobile activity feed will make it to the iPhone and iPad some time in the future.

Leon’s Conclusions

There are some good ‘fixes’ in here. I am especially happy about the ability to generate links in dialogs and, hopefully, workflows. Also, the improvements to graphs is great and is very practical.

In terms of the social stuff, it is a good start and, while not necessarily a healthy slab of steak, it is a good quality piece of ham in the CRM sandwich. This is because I can see how the internal needs are considered in the activity feed but it is not clear to me how it addresses external managed and unmanaged requirements. Hopefully, the Microsoft team have seen Parrot and can take some tips from this for the external components.

Extending Dashboards Without Code

2011-10-16T04:10:00.001-07:00

If you have played with the new dashboard feature of CRM 2011 you will find that it is one of the jewels of the product. The ability to codelessly create a dashboard of graphs, grids and iframes, which show real time data, and allow for drilldown is simply fantastic.

However, the tool does have its limitations. One of the key ones is the limitation of only being able to display six panels. This can be circumvented with a little code for on premise. Here is an example from Amreek Singh’s blog.

Another more subtle one is with limitations to layouts. For example, if you want three squares on the top (maybe three graphs) and two rectangles on the bottom (maybe two grids). The closest you can get is the three-column multi-focused dashboard.

But if you want the three on the top to be equal in size it does not work. Your choice is boxes of quarter size or half size. Similarly, if you pick the three-column regular dashboard.

Your choices are columns of 1/3 or 2/3 but not of quarter and half.

The Solution: Loving The Iframe

This is a handy tip passed onto me by Microsoft’s Craig Steere. His official title is Dynamics Solutions Specialist but I know him as a guy to go for excellent Dynamics CRM information (he is also a pretty good source for information on competitors).

The trick is to display a secondary dashboard in an Iframe. So, say we pick the three-column regular dashboard and combine the bottom three windows into one window the width of the screen. We get this:

We now create a second two-column regular dashboard to embed via an iframe. This one we use only one row of blocks.

Getting The Child Dashboard’s URL

To embed the Child Dashboard in a URL we need to know its web address. Practically every form in Dynamics CRM has a unique web address and the trick we use with normal views and records also works for dashboards. However, for dashboards, we have to do it in a slightly different way.

From the left navigation bar we click the black arrow and find our child dashboard. We then right-click and have the option of opening in a new window. When it pops up we can copy the address straight from the address bar. We then add this to the iframe on the parent dashboard.

You will notice I turned off the cross-frame scripting restriction. When I initially tried to do this, I did not use system dashboards but personal ones. For some reason the embedded dashboard was stopped from showing. For personal dashboards the cross-frame tickbox is not editable. I tried with system dashboards, turning off the restriction and it seems to work.

The result is this:

You can get rid of the embedded scroll bar by increasing the height on the iframe, but the ‘Child Dashboard System’ title I could not get rid of.

Conclusions

If you have a specific format in mind or, if the grids you are working with lend themselves to a specific format, but the dashboard formatting is causing you some grief, this might get you out of it. Also, this will work online whereas the coded solutions, as far as I know, do not.

Finally, in theory, this opens up the possibility for a 36 box grid (six boxes, each showing a six box dashboard). If, and I have not tried this, you can embed dashboards another layer down, the number of boxes is only really limited by the screen resolution and size.

Being An MVP

2011-10-07T06:19:00.001-07:00

This week Microsoft renewed my MVP status meaning I am an MVP for another 12 months. This is my third year of being an MVP so I thought it might be a good opportunity to write about my experiences with the programme and the kinds of things I do to stay within the programme.

What Is An MVP?

An MVP (Most Valuable Professional) takes its name from the US sporting accolade of Most Valuable Player. For those of us outside of the USA, this is broadly equivalent to a ‘Man/Player of the Match’ or a ‘Best and Fairest’ award. The Wikipedia article sums it up pretty well:

The Microsoft Most Valuable Professional (MVP) is the highest award given by Microsoft to those it considers "the best and brightest from technology communities around the world" who "actively share their ... technical expertise with the community and with Microsoft".

The key thing to note is the reference to community contribution. What the award does not recognise is elite programming skills. As some of you may know I am not a programmer. I used to code C++ a long time ago but I am not a .Net programmer and yet I am an MVP for Dynamics CRM; a program built on .Net and extended using .Net .

Also, the award does NOT recognise those that exclusively drink the Microsoft Kool Aid. MVPs are often the most outspoken critics of the flaws in the products they work with. Microsoft welcomes this because, to stay competitive, they need to know what is not working with their products. While MVPs do not often post scathing criticisms on forums or in their blogs they do, behind closed doors, let Microsoft know in no uncertain terms where the problems are with their products. I will talk more about these closed doors a little later.

How Do I Become An MVP?

This is a question that is often asked and it is difficult to answer because there is no specific ‘track’ to getting the award. There is no set of certifications or qualifications which are needed. One thing that is required is nomination. In my case I was nominated by another CRM MVP and this was seconded by a Microsoft employee working with Dynamics CRM. Traditionally, this was how prospective MVPs were put forward (one external, often an MVP themselves, and seconded by a Microsoft employee). However, this is not necessary. Anyone can e-mail someone they believe is deserving of the award (including themselves). The details are here.

Once nominated, a panel within Microsoft reviews the application. I have no idea who is on this panel, nor where they are located (although I assume it is in Redmond). Community contributions from the previous 12 months and technical knowledge are considered. There are no official levels of activity required and it is presumably a subjective decision weighed against the relative merit of other candidates and existing MVPs. Intakes into the programme are quarterly (January, April, July and October).

Once successful, MVPs are reviewed on an annual basis and must be able to demonstrate community activity on par with that which got them into the programme in the first place. If an MVP stops contributing, they will not be renewed.

What Is Meant By ‘Community Contributions’?

Occasionally, Microsoft do release a document talking about the activities considered to be contributing to the understanding and appreciation of the product by the broader community. Typically, the kinds of things mentioned include:

Participating in the online Microsoft forums
Blogging
Tweeting
Giving talks at user groups or conferences
Organising events for the public such as user groups or public demonstrations

Of these, the forums are the easiest one for Microsoft to measure. You need a live ID to login, meaning it is easy to track how long you are in the forums, and the forums track who proposes answers and whether they are acknowledged as an appropriate answer to the question being asked. The most difficult of these for Microsoft to measure are public appearances. If you are running a user group in a remote foreign land, this is much harder to verify than your forum activity.

What Are The Benefits Of The Program?

Certainly there is no money in it so if you are looking for some kind of monetary reward for getting on the forums and blogging excellent code, you will be sorely disappointed. In my opinion, the biggest benefit is an invitation to the MVP Summit held in Seattle each year around February-March. While it is up to the MVP to pay for flights, accommodation is subsidized and Microsoft keep all attendees fed and watered for the entire time. You get to meet the product team, you get to tell them what you really think and you also get to find out where the product is heading (under an NDA agreement, of course). You also get to go to the Microsoft Shop at the Redmond Campus and buy Microsoft goodies at staff rates.

Throughout the year MVPs also get access to exclusive email groups where they can raise issues they may be having and get ideas from other MVPs and from the Microsoft product teams. The MVPs also use these channels to provide feedback on improving the product. With the sheer volume of communication that occurs in these channels, it would be fair to say the number of messages I try to get across has probably doubled since getting into the programme. However, for understanding the finer aspects of a product, there is no better source of information.

Other benefits include a subscription to MSDN/TechNet, free Microsoft support tickets and free or discounted software from third parties.

What Does Leon Specifically Do To Remain Active In The Community?

Obviously there is this blog. I try to write an article once a week but will often give myself one weekend off so that I generally put out three articles per month. Articles mostly fall into one of three types:

Codeless solutions or handy, lesser-known features of Dynamics CRM
Commentary on how CRM is stacking up to its competitors (you know who you are)
General thought leadership of marketing and business practice

I also tweet when I come across something I feel would be of interest to non-coders involved with Dynamics CRM (users, non-technical administrators, buying decision makers etc.)

I try to propose answers for at least ten forum questions a month but, with the friendly rivalry between the forum participants, it is difficult to get to a question before someone else has answered it. It is really surprising if a question does not get some kind of response within an hour or two.

I will talk at any event about Dynamics CRM and often do so for free. A great example of this are the online Decisions conferences. A number of CRM MVPs regularly present at Decisions with no compensation other than the satisfaction of getting a soapbox to stand on for 30 minutes. If you are looking for a speaker on a Microsoft product, I strongly recommend approaching an MVP. Generally they present well, are knowledgeable and very friendly. As I often say, I will attend the opening of an envelope if it means I get to speak on Dynamics CRM.

To provide content for my blog and tweets, I read a lot of articles on Dynamics CRM and the CRM industry in general. These come to me, almost exclusively through Outlook and are sourced from RSS feeds, Google alerts, LinkedIn groups and tweets. I also read the posts to the forums, via an RSS feed in Outlook.

These are my personal Outlook folders I read every day:

Using Outlook rules, messages get diverted to ‘holding bays’ for reading when I have time. As you can see, there are literally thousands of messages I have waiting to be read and while I will not get to read them all tonight, they are in my PST waiting for me when I get bandwidth (airport terminals and plane flights are excellent for this). For the tweets, I use TwInbox, an excellent product for tracking tweets in Outlook.

All of the above I generally do outside of working hours as I have a full time job. I also have a wife and two kids so I often do things like read articles once the little ones have gone to bed. As an example, I am writing this blog at midnight on a Friday night. The television is on (showing Conan) but I am watching it over the top of my laptop screen.

My Experience With The Programme

My experience has been very positive. I am yet to meet an MVP I did not like. By their very nature, the are smart, eloquent and willing to share information or talk to others, especially if it is about the product they got awarded for.

In terms of the work involved in maintaining the award, to be honest, I would be doing these things anyway. I tend to be a little obsessive-compulsive when it comes to knowledge and learning so squeezing as much information as possible into my brain at every possible opportunity is kind of who I am.

Also, getting to see the human side of the Microsoft ‘machine’ in the form of online discussions involving the CRM product team is great. It is all too easy to consider Microsoft as a faceless engine pumping out software and making a few bucks along the way but, like every organisation, Microsoft is made up of people and getting to know these people is a rare and welcome experience.

If I did not enjoy it, I could simply resign; an option that is available to every MVP but I have no motivation to do that at this time.

Final Thoughts

If you are looking to becoming an MVP as a badge of honour, you will struggle. The fact is, to become an MVP and keeping the MVP status requires a lot of work in terms of maintaining relevancy and expertise. It also requires a paradigm of being willing to share this hard sought knowledge at the drop of a hat. My advantage in this regard is I did a physics degree, not an IT degree so the academic philosophy of sharing knowledge for the benefit of the many is hard wired into me. There are many people in IT who are experts but who hoard their knowledge to maintain an advantage over others. This is not the way of the MVP.

If, after all this you think the MVP programme is for you, I wish you the best of luck. It is a lot of work but I enjoy it immensely and I look forward to seeing you at ‘Summit’.

Why The Customer Is Not Always Right

2011-09-24T06:56:00.001-07:00

One risk when doing a CRM project is giving the client EVERYTHING they ask for. This might be a strange thing to say. After all, isn’t the client always right? The answer is an emphatic “no!”

The reason I say this is, often in CRM projects, the client asks for everything which would be ‘nice to have’. The client does not always realise that to give them precisely what they ask for will, to put it plainly, cost a small fortune. If you are building on top of a platform, like Dynamics CRM, some things are easy to deliver, some things are more difficult. The value a consultant brings to the table is separating one from the other.

The trick is to always consider the cost of delivering an item and the benefit it is going to bring.

How Accurate Do We Have To Be?

My personal feeling is absolute accuracy is not essential as long as the cost-benefit is being considered by the consultant and the client. For example, it is common for a client to ask for a Word template to be converted to work within CRM. This is a relatively easy procedure taking, say, a couple of hours, depending on the complexity of the template. However, it is also pretty easy to export a list of contacts out of CRM and then point the existing Word template to it, saving that consulting work.

The question is not whether it can be done (it can) or whether the client has asked for it (they have) but whether the cost is worth the saving in time and the general convenience. In this case, the client and I guessed exporting the spreadsheet and using this would add an extra five minutes to the process. This process was done around five times a day, taking just shy of half an hour a day. This then equates to about two hours a week, or almost a day of work each month. In consideration of that, a couple of hours of template rework suddenly seems reasonable.

In another case the client wanted to add a button to the ribbon so that when a set of contacts are selected, their e-mail addresses were copied to the clipboard for pasting elsewhere. Setting up this little gem is not simple and would take, say, half a day to a day. An alternative would be to simply highlight the records in CRM and use the Excel export to get them out of CRM. From Excel it was then a case of copying the e-mail addresses. When the alternatives were put to the client, the client agreed the Excel export was a better option for them as they did not do the process that frequently and the cost would not save significant effort.

Every project has elements like this where the “developer’s solution” may give the client exactly what they want but not what they need.

What Is So Bad About Giving The Client Exactly What They Are After?

From a consulting perspective, what I am suggesting sounds like suicide. I am suggesting, as a consultant, is to push back on work a client is more than willing for you to perform. Here is the problem. Your job, as a consultant, is not to do stuff for people without question; it is to be a trusted advisor.

The client who spends a fortune in phase one of a CRM solution will not sue you and will acknowledge you have delivered nothing they did not ask for but when it comes to phase two, there will be no phase two. When it comes to recommending the software they will say “it works really well but it wasn’t cheap and you might want to shop around”. When it comes to recommending you they will say “he was really friendly and helpful but now that we have used the product we are finding we do not need half the things we asked for. It is a shame he did not tell us about the features and push back a little more”.

Conclusions

Never be afraid to tell the client they are wrong if it is in their best interest. Your job, as a consultant, is not to tell them things CAN be done but whether they SHOULD be done. If the client is asking for functionality which, you suspect they will never see benefit from, tell them or, even better, lead them through the exercise of working it out for themselves. By doing a quick cost-benefit consideration you not only validate your thinking on the subject , you generate client buy-in for the ultimate decision.

The other benefit of such an exercise is the transparency it brings to the process. With a choice of meeting their needs exactly, using out-of-the-box functionality plus a little effort or abandoning the requirement completely, the decision can be made with all eyes open.

While the system will not be the Utopian vision they WANTED, no software system ever is and it will be the system they NEED. More importantly, the client will see significant benefit and will respect you as a trusted advisor.

Dynamics CRM vs Salesforce: User Adoption July 2011

2011-09-10T07:08:00.001-07:00

Last year I reviewed the subscription numbers of Dynamics CRM and salesforce. At that time I came to a few conclusions:

Your average Dynamics CRM customer has about 50% more subscribers than a salesforce customer
Average company size for both is growing but appears to be tapering to 30 for salesforce and 50 for Dynamics CRM
Subscriber growth continues to grow and the market has not yet matured
Based on the subscriber and customer ratios, Dynamics CRM is catching up on salesforce
Salesforce will make 3 million subscribers by October 2010 and Dynamics CRM will make 1.5 million subscribers by December 2010

If you saw my “Microsoft Dynamics CRM vs Salesforce: The Main Event” presentation at Decisions Spring earlier this year, you will have also seen me predict:

Subscriber difference appears to be tapering
Subscriber ratio is heading towards 1.5
“Dynamics CRM” is catching up on “salesforce.com” in Google trends
Microsoft’s numbers will be buoyed by their international online rollout

Given Microsoft released some figures at the Worldwide Partner Conference and salesforce recently released figures as part of their second quarter results, I thought it was a good time to revisit. Unfortunately, with Microsoft only intermittently releasing numbers and salesforce confirming, in the quarterly results call, this would be the last quarter where they release customer numbers, it will be difficult to do this kind of review in the future. However, as salesforce is diversifying outside of their stock ticker namesake (CRM), a direct comparison of numbers is becoming less relevant, unless we start bringing in the Microsoft ERP, CMS and BI solutions as well.

Customer Size

Here are the numbers for salesforce taken from the salesforce detailed financials:

Year	Month	Subscribers	Customers	Average Company Size
2003 Q4	Dec-02	76,000	5,700	13
2004 Q1	Mar-03	85,000	6,300	13
2004 Q2	Jun-03	96,000	7,000	14
2004 Q3	Sep-03	107,000	7,700	14
2004 Q4	Dec-03	127,000	8,700	15
2005 Q1	Mar-04	147,000	9,800	15
2005 Q2	Jun-04	168,000	11,100	15
2005 Q3	Sep-04	195,000	12,500	16
2005 Q4	Dec-04	227,000	13,900	16
2006 Q1	Mar-05	267,000	15,500	17
2006 Q2	Jun-05	307,000	16,900	18
2006 Q3	Sep-05	347,000	18,700	19
2006 Q4	Dec-05	393,000	20,500	19
2007 Q1	Mar-06	438,000	22,700	19
2007 Q2	Jun-06	495,000	24,800	20
2007 Q3	Sep-06	556,000	27,100	21
2007 Q4	Dec-06	646,000	29,800	22
2008 Q1	Mar-07	742,900	32,300	23
2008 Q2	Jun-07	800,000	35,300	23
2008 Q3	Sep-07	952,500	38,100	25
2008 Q4	Dec-07	1,100,000	41,000	27
2009 Q1	Mar-08	1,177,200	43,600	27
2009 Q2	Jun-08	1,287,900	47,700	27
2009 Q3	Sep-08	1,398,600	51,800	27
2009 Q4	Dec-08	1,500,000	55,400	27
2010 Q1	Mar-09	1,660,400	59,300	28
2010 Q2	Jun-09	1,769,600	63,200	28
2010 Q3	Sep-09	2,000,000	67,900	29
2010 Q4	Dec-09	2,102,500	72,500	29
2011 Q1	Mar-10	2,319,000	77,300	30
2011 Q2	Jun-10	2,554,400	82,400	31
2011 Q3	Sep-10	2,790,400	87,200	32
2011 Q4	Dec-10	3,000,000	92,300	33
2012 Q1	Mar-11	3,321,800	97,700	34
2012 Q2	Jun-11	3,640,000	104,000	35

Here are the Dynamics CRM numbers:

Month	Subscribers	Customers	Average Company Size
Mar-06	150000	6000	25
Jul-06	200000	7000	29
Oct-06	250000	8000	31
May-07	400000	10000	40
Mar-08	500000	11000	45
Jul-09	1000000	20833	48
Apr-10	1100000	22000	50
Jul-10	1400000	23000	61
Apr-11	1700000	27000	63
Jul-11	2000000	30000	67

Numbers in red are my best guess, based on the known numbers. Essentially I have estimated the customer size and then used this to generate the subscriber size. I thought it was important to include my large tables of numbers, rather than just show the pretty graphs so others can see how I generated them and also slice and dice them as they see fit.

As can be seen, Dynamics CRM’s average customer is now almost double the size of the salesforce average customer. Graphing the company sizes, we see my previous thoughts that the sizes were tapering was unfounded, both are increasing and it appears Microsoft’s are growing a little faster as the ratio has now gone from 1.5 to 2.0.

Market Maturity

Here is the apples to apples combined data.

Month	SFDC Subscribers	SFDC Customers	MSFT Subscribers	MSFT Customers	Subscriber Ratio	Customer Ratio	Difference in Subscribers	Total Subscribers	Customer Size Ratio
Mar-06	267,000	15,500	150000	6000	1.78	2.58	117,000	417,000	1.5
Jul-06	315000	17500	200000	7000	1.58	2.50	115,000	515,000	1.6
Oct-06	366700	19300	250000	8000	1.47	2.41	116,700	616,700	1.6
May-07	482000	24100	400000	10000	1.21	2.41	82,000	882,000	2.0
Mar-08	742,900	32,300	500000	11000	1.49	2.94	242,900	1,242,900	2.0
Jul-09	1324809	49067	1000000	20833	1.32	2.36	324,809	2,324,809	1.8
Apr-10	1696800	60600	1100000	22000	1.54	2.75	596,800	2,796,800	1.8
Jul-10	1878243	64767	1400000	23000	1.34	2.82	478,243	3,278,243	2.1
Apr-11	2449000	79000	1700000	27000	1.44	2.93	749,000	4,149,000	2.0
Jul-11	3819600	106100	2000000	30000	1.91	3.54	1,819,600	5,819,600	1.9

***STOP PRESS*** 2011-11-18 Leon says: There is an error in this table and the catch up graphs below. I’ve fixed this up here.

In this case I have extrapolated the salesforce data to match the month the Dynamics CRM numbers were announced. So if the Dynamics CRM number was announced one month after a salesforce quarter announcement, I guess the SFDC customer number and then use the guessed average customer size to generate a subscriber number.

Total subscribers across both products know no bounds and both products continue to bring on subscribers.

It is fair to say this market is still far from maturing with no signs of populations tapering.

In terms of my previous predictions, the trending of Excel came through with the goods. Salesforce made three million subscribers somewhere between September 2010 and December 2010 (I predicted October 2010). Dynamics CRM made 1.5 million subscribers somewhere between July 2010 and April 2011 ). I predicted December 2010.

For my next set of predictions, I believe salesforce will make four million subscribers before the end of the year but after the Q3 results. Dynamics CRM will make 2.5 million subscribers before the end of the year and probably before November.

Is Dynamics CRM Catching Up?

***STOP PRESS*** 2011-11-18 Leon says: There is an error in the market maturity table and the catch up graphs below. I’ve fixed this up here.

So the big question is if Dynamics CRM is catching up on salesforce. The answer, unfortunately for those of us on the Microsoft side of the fence, is no. The boost in numbers from the international rollout has either not happened or has been insufficient. Here is the evidence.

***Begin erroneous speculation due to my inability to combine numbers into one table correctly***

The subscriber ratio (SFDC subscribers/MSFT subscribers) was dropping or, at least, was stable at just under 1.5 until the last quarter where salesforce has jumped away. The subscriber difference tells the same story. While there was a possible turning point in mid-2010, this appears to be an aberration with salesforce running away.

~~So what has happened? Has salesforce become really good and left Dynamics CRM in the dust? Is something else at play?~~

It is true that salesforce has been making a lot of acquisitions but, functionally, the differences in the Sales Cloud and Service Cloud products are more on the edges than at the core and equal on both sides. Salesforce has Chatter, Dynamics CRM is soon to have a Chatter equivalent but has SharePoint and Lync instead. Dynamics CRM has better Outlook integration but its browser client is limited to Internet Explorer (until early next year) and so on. This idea of equivalency is also confirmed by the ~~Gartner and Forrester reports~~ ~~which rate both products very highly.~~

My speculation is the reason the salesforce numbers have leaped is because of the mix of products that make up the totals. The salesforce numbers cover all their products, not just the Sales Cloud and Service Cloud products. They include Chatter, Jigsaw, Heroku, Radian6 and so on. I imagine it only includes paying Chatter clients but it is not clear. Unfortunately, with salesforce announcing they will not be regularly releasing customer figures any more, it is difficult to know.

***END ERRONEOUS SPECULATION***

As for popularity, Google Trends suggest Dynamics CRM is still catching up with salesforce in terms of search results.

This is a graph of the search popularity of “dynamics crm” and “salesforce.com”. As can be seen, the gap is narrowing.

Any Financial Insights?

I talked last week about my concerns for any company selling ten dollar bills for nine dollars. Combining the finances with the subscription numbers we see something else of interest. Back in May I noticed that subscribers are becoming increasingly less profitable for salesforce. Here is the graph.

Here I have taken the salesforce subscription numbers above and the financial numbers from the detailed summary I used in last week’s blog. ‘PUPM’ stands for ‘per user per month’. So, in the case of ‘Revenue PUPM’, this is the revenue received by the average subscriber each month. In this case the number has tapered to around $50 and has been stable for the last 12 months. Revenue Cost is a figure salesforce use claiming it is the expenses directly related to the revenue, ignoring those inconvenient operating costs of sales and marketing and research and development. The revenue cost per subscriber per month is at around $10 and has been there for almost three years. Those pesky, expensive operating costs (sales and marketing, research and development and general and administrative costs) have hovered at around $40 per subscriber per month for about two years.

Doing the maths, the profit of a subscriber is $50 (revenue) – $10 (revenue cost) – $40 (operating cost) = $0 (profit). The variable for profitability appears to be the operating costs per subscriber. While it is hovering around $40 per subscriber per month, if this could be reduced, this would bring salesforce into profitability.

Conclusions

Both products are growing without obvious bounds and the market still appears to be growing for the two products. In terms of customer size, Microsoft CRM is penetrating the enterprise more effectively than salesforce products with the average Dynamics CRM customer size now being double the size of a salesforce customer.

In terms of catching up, it seems as if the range of salesforce products is getting away from Dynamics CRM, but that is ok. Without a clearer understanding of how the salesforce customer and subscription numbers are broken down, the comparison has only limited value. As for ‘front of mind’, Google Trends suggests Dynamics CRM is catching up on salesforce.

Finally, the financials for salesforce mean that they are not making money from their subscribers and the financials seem to be settling at around breakeven. Without reducing their operating costs, it is not clear how this situation will change.

Does Salesforce Have Their Head In The Clouds?

2011-09-02T07:55:00.001-07:00

This week I was going to do an update on the subscription numbers for Dynamics CRM and salesforce. However, the Q2 results of salesforce have something in them which means the numbers will have to wait another week.

Salesforce’s Q2 Announcement

If you want to see my thoughts on the salesforce financials, I recently wrote this blog. However, there is something disturbing, beyond the financials, in the latest update which is worth calling out. To see the Q2 results, here is the link. Here is a high level graph of the financials thanks to this nice summary.

The scale on the left is a logarithmic scale. This is not smoke and mirrors, it just makes the issue at hand really, really obvious. Because the most recent quarter was a loss it does not show here (log scales cannot handle negative numbers). We can look at a normal linear scale to see the same data with the latest quarter included.

So, first we play a game of spot the difference and see that while revenues and costs are moving in the same direction, because total costs are growing faster than revenues, the income is dropping. Salesforce is not demonstrating any economies of scale. In fact, they are acting like a reverse internet start-up. Generally internet start-ups run at a loss initially and then become profitable as they scale. Salesforce is doing the opposite.

However, the problem I have is not that salesforce is making a loss, although that is not good for any business. The problem is not that cash is flowing out of the business rather than in (as evidenced by the Q2 cashflow statement). The problem is not that salesforce promotes non-GAAP reporting which excludes the cost of giving shares to employees as compensation to ‘align their interests with those of our stockholders’ (here is Warren Buffett’s thoughts on hiding stock-based expenses).

The problem is they are not calling out the fact they are losing money and explaining what they are going to do about it in the long term.

The six bulleted highlights for Q2 mention nothing of making a loss for the first time in at least two years. Three of them refer to revenues (which are up), two of them talk about customer numbers (which are up) and the final one talks about operational cashflow (which is up but is dwarfed by the massive cash leaving the business through their purchase of Radian6).

I will not exhaustively go through the rest of the text other than to summarize each section with a bullet point.

Dreamforce plug
Revenue
Earnings Per Share (a heady combination of GAAP and non-GAAP numbers without reconciliation)
Customers
Cash (nothing about the overall loss)
Deferred revenue
Guidance
GAAP – non-GAAP reconciliation per share
Conference Call plug
Salesforce plug
A big section on their use of non-GAAP measures “Non-GAAP financial measures are not meant to be considered in isolation or as a substitute for comparable GAAP measures”
Safe Harbour Statement
Financial statements
Unaudited additional metrics
GAP – non-GAAP reconciliation (seems strange to have this right down the end but maybe it is normal)

Other than the financial statements, if you were to follow the text, you would think everything was fantastic for salesforce and there was nothing to stop them flourishing. Incidentally, GAAP is simply a convention on how to present financial information so that different company financials can be compared. Non-GAAP accounting is a divergence from this convention.

What About The Earnings Call Transcript?

You can read the transcript here. One disappointment in there is they say they will not be reporting customer numbers any more so my upcoming update of the subscription numbers will be the last for quite a while. While I can understand that the acquisitions will make the numbers a little muddy, even indications would be nice.

By their own admission, figures discussed in the call were non-GAAP. If “non-GAAP financial measures are not meant to be considered in isolation” why would they do this?

So what did Marc Benioff, Chairman and CEO of salesforce have to say about the financial loss? Here is a summary:

considers the Q2 results to be ‘strong’
talked about revenue growth justifying their growth strategy
talked about non-GAAP earnings (not mentioning the GAAP loss), revenue, operating cashflow and customer numbers
talked about some big deals signed
talked about his travels
talked about the cloud
talked about some more recent deals
talked about Chatter and Force.com
talked about the market potential
talked about Forrester’s predictions
talked about Dreamforce

In short, nothing about the loss in earnings.

Next was Graham Smith, CFO of salesforce. Here is what he said:

considered it an ‘exceptionally strong quarter’
talked about revenue and the drivers behind it
talked about revenue from different regions
talked about what the components of the revenue were
talked about their non-GAAP gross margin
talked about expenses, admitting they were up, attributing it to mergers and acquisitions and ‘aggressive hiring’
talked about how ‘aggressive hiring’ would continue for the rest of the year
talked about how R&D is the fastest growing expense and this ‘investment’ would continue
talked about how sales and marketing expenses were up and suggested this expense would continue for ‘building awareness’
mentioned a legal settlement which he quantified in per share terms but not in dollar terms
talked about how general and administrative expense had increased and how they intend to reduce it ‘in the long term’
talked about how the non-GAAP operating margin was down which was attributed to acquisition
talked about the non-GAAP tax rate
talked about non-GAAP earnings per share
talked about operating cash flow
talked about capital expenses due to acquiring office space
talked about cash being down, due to acquisition
talked about deferred revenue
talked about receivables
talked about the Radian6 acquisition
talked about non-GAAP guidance
talked about Dreamforce

The GAAP loss did not rate a mention. The closest to a profit strategy was the intent to reduce the general and administrative expenses, but that was it. No comprehensive strategy was mentioned for bringing the company back into profit. Nothing specific was mentioned for arresting the growth rate of expenses, relative to revenues.

What About The Q&A?

After the presentation, the audience of analysts had an opportunity to ask questions. Mark Moerdler from Sanford C. Bernstein & Co, Inc. got to the crux of the matter, forcing the issue of GAAP profit. Asking about the expected loss for the full year (around 10c per share) he asked what contributed to this. For more of Moerdler’s thoughts on salesforce, there is this nice summary.

Marc Benioff replied and made it clear why there is no focus on the loss and, in fact, why it is actively ignored (along with Moerdler’s question). Here are a few quotes:

“my job … is not to focus on that GAAP profit number”
“if we were focused on the GAAP number … we would be probably running a much leaner machine”
“the ultimate number and the most important number is the top line” (this means revenue)

To translate, at this point, Marc has no interest in ensuring salesforce runs at a profit. His focus is on revenue (top line) growth. The problem I have with this is there is no talk of how the company will move to profitability or how long they can run at a loss. The non-GAAP accounting simply gives us the measures salesforce believe are important for its future success. The GAAP numbers tell us what is needed now to run a profitable business and the fact is salesforce is not profitable and, based on the trends in my graphs, it will not be so for quite a while.

So Why Is It Such A Big Deal To Be Profitable?

In the short term it is not such a big deal. If you suffer a loss in a quarter, you simply dip into your cash reserves to cover the difference. The problems occur if this is on-going. If you continue to dip into your cash either you run out of cash (also known as bankruptcy) or you must find more cash (generally through borrowing from a bank or issuing more shares). If this continues either the banks refuse to lend because they are not confident you can pay them back or the share price drops so low as to be worthless.

For three plain English measures to ward off bankruptcy, here is an article worth reading. While salesforce has plenty of cash (around half a billion), the key concern I have is that of viability (over time the business must be profitable). It is well and good sacrificing profit for growth but there must be a plan for long term profitability and I cannot see it.

Surely Those Stock Options Are Aligning Staff To The Shareholders So Profits Will Come

This is where things get a little troublesome. Warren Buffett calls out the fundamental problem with stock options as a tool for behaviour control; while normal shareholders have used their own cash to buy their shares, stock option recipients sacrifice nothing for their options; they have no skin in the game. Moreover, the goal of a stock option holder is to get the share price as high as possible at the point where they can exercise the option (buy the share) as they can then immediately sell the share for a profit. This is not necessarily the same as ensuring the future viability and prosperity of an organisation, which is the goal of a long term shareholder.

At this point let me put a massive disclaimer here. Firstly, I have no position in salesforce stock and have no intention of getting one in the next 72 hours (which is the disclaimer I see on other blogs like this one). Secondly, what I present is not an allegation, simply a discussion of how stock options can lead to poor behaviour.

Firstly, if we see employees of a company receive shares through options and then immediately sell them, this has to be for one of two reasons:

they need the cash or
they believe the price will go no higher

There have been a lot of sales by directors at salesforce. You can see them all here. In fact, the CFO from the quarterly update is one of them. Unfortunately in terms of buys, there appear to be none happening. In contrast to selling, people buy shares when:

they have the cash
they think the price will go higher

For our inside sellers, the motivation is to ensure, on the day of sale, the share price is as high as possible. Therefore, they are not motivated to talk about financial loss and expenses growing faster than revenues because this could lead to the share price dropping. Moreover, they are not motivated to change the formula for ‘success’ as this could affect market perception and also kill the share price.

While I am sure salesforce does have a strong desire for revenue and are deeply focussed on the idea of ‘build it and the profits will come’, with the structures in place, there is no motivation for anyone receiving stock options to question how much growth is sustainable for the business and whether salesforce should focus resources on stemming expenses over growing revenues.

Incidentally, the accountants do have a measure of a sustainable growth rate. This is the rate at which a company can grow its revenues without borrowing additional money. My calculations put this at 9% for salesforce, in contrast to their growth rate for Q2 of 38% year on year.

Conclusions

Salesforce is very happy with their Q2 results and, while revenue growth is great, it must be sustainable. To be sustainable, focus must be given to long term profitability. In the case of salesforce, the CEO is clear that profitability is not his focus at this time. To this end, salesforce has other measures which they use to monitor the health of the business, the so-called non-GAAP measures and while these measures may provide an insight which GAAP measures do not, they do not make $1 equal $2. The business still made a loss this quarter for the first time in over two years.

While a cynical man may assert that their pre-occupation with the non-GAAP accounting is, in part, driven by their motivation to deliver good news to the market and maintain the share price for exercising their stocks, I do not personally believe this to be the case. I believe Marc and Graham are just very optimistic about salesforce’s future, based on their non-GAAP measures, and the directors of the company are offloading their shares simply because they need the money in these hard times.

The problem is, while I want optimism in my directors, if I was a traditional shareholder, I would like to know that salesforce do not have their head in the sand in regards to their financials and have a plan for long term profitability. I would also want this clearly communicated as part the quarterly updates.

As an extreme example, let us say I start a business tomorrow where I sell $10 notes for $9. I imagine my customer base would grow rapidly (like salesforce). I imagine my revenues would also grow rapidly (like salesforce). I imagine my costs would also grow in line with my revenues (like salesforce) but this does not alter the fact that every time I am selling a $10 bill I am making a loss and selling more of them will only increase my loss. Even if I create different accounting measures which more accurately reflect the health of my business as I see it, the fact is I am buying something for $10 and selling it for $9 and, unless I change something, my business will never be sustainable and I will go bankrupt.

I like salesforce as a competitor and I want them to be around for a long time to come. Therefore I do not want them to sell something for $9 which is costing $10 to supply, because it is simply not sustainable.

A Codeless Way To Complete Activities in the Mobile Express Client

2011-08-20T06:56:00.001-07:00

One of the great drawbacks with the Mobile Express client for Dynamics CRM 2011 is how restricted you are when working with activities. Things like completing Appointments, once you have met with a prospect, are not possible with Mobile Express. Hopefully, the new client that Microsoft made mention of at WPC and in the last Statement of Direction will fix this. Until then, here is a nice trick for letting your sales staff complete Appointments, and add how the meeting went, all from within the Mobile Express client.

How Does It Work?

The trick comes from our ability to add Notes to an Appointment and using a workflow to complete the Appointment for us.

Making Appointments Visible in the Mobile Client

Firstly, we will need to be able to see Appointments in the mobile client. Most entities can be made visible in the Mobile Express client by ticking the ‘Mobile Express’ tickbox on the entity detail form.

Once you do this, you will see the entity, along with the others.

Opening an Appointment reveals the limitations inherent to the Mobile Express client. There is no ‘New’ button and no way to edit existing records. The only thing you can do is add a Note.

and therein lies our ‘backdoor’. By constructing a specific workflow, we can complete our Appointment and add details on our meeting.

The Workflow

Here it is:

The process runs on Notes on their creation. It checks the title of the Note and if it equals ‘COMPLETE’ it copies the description of the Note onto the Appointment and sets the Appointment status to Completed.

What Happens?

The upshot is if our travelling salesman adds a Note to an Appointment with the title ‘COMPLETE’ and puts in some text in the description box,

Our meeting will automatically close out with the text added.

Sorry about the unavailable warning. I ran a test Appointment first before writing the blog to make sure it would work. You generally will not see this.

Conclusions

There you have it. A relatively simple workflow which makes the Mobile Express client a little more practical. I have used the Appointment entity here but the same trick should work with pretty much any other activity type. Also note that, generally, the title field is automatically populated by CRM when you create Notes through the full client so it is unlikely that a non-mobile user will inadvertently close out an activity.

Enjoy.

Changing the Lookup Reference When Importing Related Data

2011-08-13T08:09:00.001-07:00

This is a handy new feature for the import wizard where matching off the name of a parent is not sufficient to link records you are importing to other records in CRM, such as where the primary name of the parent record is not unique. We used to be able to do this with the old server-side migration manager in v4 but not in the v4 import wizard.

Step 1: Getting a Template For Our Import

A really nice feature of Dynamics CRM 2011 is the ability to generate templates for all the CRM entities straight from the client. To do this, click the drop-down arrow on the Import button in the ribbon for the entity you want to import records for.

This generates an Excel-compatible XML file which has nice features like drop-downs for the pick list fields you need to fill in and tooltips to let you know the kind of information that needs to go into a field.

You will notice in the above image of the Contact import sheet that I have set the Parent Customer to ‘12345’. This is the Account Number for my parent customer, not their name, as would be traditionally used.

Setting the Lookup in the Import Wizard

Importing the data into CRM is very easy with the Dynamics CRM 2011 Import Wizard but, by default, the wizard will try to link our Contact to an Account with the name, ‘12345’, not the Account Number ‘12345’.

Therefore we have to adjust our mapping so it does not match on the Account Name but the Account Number. To do this we run the Import Wizard as usual by clicking the ‘Import Data’ button on the ribbon but when we get to the ‘Review Mapping Summary’ screen we click ‘Edit’.

Skip setting the entity you are writing the records to and click ‘Next’. This will bring you to the mapping screen where we link the columns in our data source to fields in CRM. In our case we are interested in the ‘Parent Customer’ field.

The magnifying glass means this is a lookup field and by clicking on the magnifying glass we can set the matching fields.

The Parent Customer field is an interesting one because it can point to either an Account or Contact. In our case we are only interested in modifying the Account referred field to be the Account Number. We modify it by clicking on the magnifying glass and setting Account fields to match on. In our case we might also untick the Contact as an option for the Parent Customer as we will only bringing in Contacts with a Parent Account.

The good news is now when we import everything goes to plan.

Enjoy.

A Codeless Address Finder Using Filtered Lookups

2011-08-07T05:28:00.001-07:00

A bit of a mouthful of a title but, basically, I am going to show how to set up a codeless set of dynamic picklists (now called option sets) by ignoring option sets and using lookups, which can now be filtered, as a standard feature in CRM 2011.

My example will be an address finder. In this case we will enter a country and this will then restrict the states. This will then restrict the postcodes (zipcodes for our American friends) we can select and then this will restrict the towns and cities we can select.

First Step: Get Some Data

For this example, I am going to use Australian postcodes, but it will work with any postcodes. Australian postcodes are available here and US zipcodes are available here. I cannot find a decent list of UK postcodes so, if you know of one, please add a comment.

The Structure

We will create four new entities:

Country: We will use the name field to store the name of the country
State: We will use the name field for the state and create a lookup to country
Postcode (or Zipcode): We will use the name field to store the code and create a lookup field to state
City: We will use the name field to store the name of the city and have a lookup field to the postcode entity

I will also add lookup fields to these in a new section on the Account record.

The results are something like this.

The Country record:

The State record:

The Postcode record:

The City record:

and finally the lookups on the Account record:

Getting Data Into the System

Using the downloaded CSV record, we adjust the data so that we have four columns in each file:

Postcode
City
State
Country

Given we are only dealing with Australia, I added the country record by hand. For the other entities, we can download templates by going to Settings-Data Management-Templates For Data Import. The templates that are downloaded are XML files but they are completely compatible with Excel.

Populate the Postcode.xml, City.xml and State.xml files using the data from the source file. You will have to eliminate the duplicates. Excel 2010 has a ‘Remove Duplicates’ function in the Data tab of its ribbon to clean up the data.

If the xml file is over 8M in size, it will not import. This happened to me so I saved them all as CSVs and all was good. I also noticed that the files had a bunch of extra empty lines at the end of them, where the duplicates had been removed (nice work Excel!). I opened up each file in notepad and stripped out the extra commas.

Now combine the three xml files into one zip file (highlight them, right click and Send To Zip File)

Go to Settings and click ‘Import Data’ in the ribbon. It should just work. In my case the postcode file did not automap but once I mapped the fields for it, within the import wizard, I was back on track. Here are my results.

You will notice that 275 records failed. This confused me but, with a little investigation, it turns out that there are some postcodes in Australia that go across multiple states. Therefore, when I imported the cities and tried to link it to one of these postcodes, there were two records in the system to link to for the two states the postcode traversed. Given the blog is more about filtered lookups than about importing data, I will live with the 2% fail rate.

Creating the Filtered Lookups/Dynamic Picklist

If we ran with our system now, the lookups on the Account record would have no knowledge of each other. I would have to trawl through all the cities in the database to link to the right one. This is where the new filtered lookup feature comes into play. To set up the filtered lookup, go to the Account form, select the State field and click ‘Change Properties’ in the ribbon. Down the bottom of the default tab are the filtered lookup settings.

We want to configure the ‘Related Records Filtering’ because we are matching the Country that the Account is associated to and the Country that the State is associated to. I untick the user’s ability to turn off the filter and turn off the search box.

The result is a list of states just for the country I have selected on the Account record.

For those of you outside of Australia, these are the states and territories of Australia. I rinse and repeat for the Postcode and City

The result is every time I click a lookup, as long the lookup above is filled in, the list will be appropriately adjusted, just like a dynamic picklist (dynamic option set). In the case of the postcode lookup, there is probably limited value (in the database, Australia has eight state values and almost 3,000 postcodes and we have no good concept of ‘county’ like the USA) but the solution shows its value in the city lookup.

Because I have already set the postcode to ‘2089’, CRM knows I must be in one of the three cities in this area.

Conclusions and Takeaways

If you have a nice taxonomy of values and need to dynamically adjust one as you set the value of another, this is not a bad way to do it. One thing to note though is that the solution does not enforce consistency. What I mean by this is, in the above picture, we could go back to country and select ‘USA’, even though the rest of the data are for Australia.

Also, (and this one is more for Microsoft on the off-chance they read this) what would be really great is, as well as the ability to use a common entity to filter the lookup, the use of a global option set. However, at this time, we only have the option of a common linked entity.

Finally, for this specific example, we are replacing the default address fields on the form with new lookup fields. If you are using default reports or have legacy reports which reference the system address fields, you will either need to adjust these reports or keep the system fields in sync via a workflow or plugin.

Enjoy.

Gartner Trajectories of CRM Solutions

2011-07-22T18:22:00.001-07:00

Back in April this year I did the ‘Forrester Trajectories of CRM Solutions’ which examined past Forrester reports for CRM in the mid-market and enterprise markets. At the time I struggled to find the Gartner equivalents. With the recent release of Gartner’s Magic Quadrant Report for Sales Force Automation (http://www.crm-guidebooks.com/2011/07/gartner-magic-quadrant-sales-force-automation-july-2011/) I thought I would see if, with the combined power of Google and Bing, I could turn up the quadrants this time around.

In fact I found the past five years of quadrants. Here they are:

To Those That Have Fallen, We Salute You

Just like the Oscars I would like to take a moment to remember those products that did not make the 2011 Magic Quadrant. Since 2010 we have lost (cue sentimental piano music…):

Cegedim Dendrite (although 2010 was the only year they made an appearance)
FrontRange Solutions (GoldMine): located in the ‘niche players’ in the previous four years, they are no longer on the quadrant
Maximizer Software: another niche player that is no longer on the Gartner radar
Landslide: A ‘visionary’ that had slipped into ‘niche’ last year and unfortunately has fallen off the chart this year

In previous years we also lost off the Gartner quadrant:

Infor: last seen as a niche player in 2008
Consona: made a once-only appearance in 2008
Saratoga Systems: acquired by CDC in 2007, it fell off the radar in 2008
Entellium: the company filed for bankruptcy in 2009, bought out by Intuit
RightNow Technologies: last seen on the Gartner quadrant in 2007

New Contenders

The only new players to make the quadrant are Microsoft Dynamics CRM Online (the online version of the incumbent on-premise solution) and Zoho (http://www.zoho.com). Zoho is an online applications player based out of India (think of them as a budget Google apps). I have been watching Zoho for a while and, if you are in the market for a basic sales force automation solution, and want other applications like invoicing, simple accounting etc. it is worth looking at. A well deserved addition to the quadrant.

Overall Trends

In the Forrester trajectory post I observed a general trend towards the top right, suggesting all products were improving. This is not as obvious in the Gartner trajectories but what can be seen is a consolidation of products. Counting the number of products in the quadrant over the years we have:

2007: 20
2008: 16
2009: 14
2010: 15
2011: 13

This can also be seen in the number of companies in the quadrant:

2007: 13
2008: 13
2009: 11
2010: 12
2011: 9

In both cases the market has shrunk, in terms of participants, by about 1/3.

The movement of CRM products to the cloud will only, in my opinion, speed this consolidation up. The fact is, for small and medium-sized businesses, with minimal internal IT infrastructure, a cloud CRM offering is very compelling and very affordable. While there will likely always be a market for on-premise deployments (for example in regions with unreliable internet connections) the option of the cloud is becoming more and more acceptable for many organisations. Companies which choose not to offer cloud versions of their products will become more specialised, niche players or fade away.

Also, the barriers are high for new offerings. The combination of low price (and therefore low relative annual turnover) combined with the feature-rich nature of the incumbent products make it very difficult for a new contender to invest on building a competitive product knowing their return on investment will take a significant amount of time.

The future is likely to be dominated by cloud and cloud/on-premise offerings by a small collection of players already in the market.

Individual Product Movements

The products in the Gartner quadrant appear to be a lot more stable than their Forrester counterparts. Significant movements are:

Microsoft Dynamics CRM has migrated from a ‘challenger’ to a ‘leader’
Oracle CRM On Demand has moved from a ‘visionary’ to a ‘leader’
SAP has moved from a ‘niche’ to a ‘challenger’

The good news here is nothing appears to be moving backwards; two major players are now considered leaders in the industry and another is potentially improving. The stagnation of Oracle and the rise of the some of the niche players, such as SugarCRM, Pivotal and SageCRM, seen in the Forrester reports, is not seen in the Gartner reports.

Conclusions

Reviewing the Gartner reports it appears the sales force automation market is consolidating, probably due to the move to the cloud; a trend that will likely continue. While difficult for new contenders to enter the market, Zoho has made an appearance and it will be interesting to see how they fare in future reports.

The one consistency between the two sets of reports is the rise of Microsoft Dynamics CRM. While Forrester considers Microsoft Dynamics CRM the market leader, Gartner still sees salesforce.com as the player to beat. The battle between these two giants is great for consumers as both will work harder to produce the dominant product. It is a great time to be in the CRM industry and I eagerly await future Forrester and Gartner reports to see how the battle plays out.

Erin Brockovich, Social CRM and Why Chatter is Not a Social Tool

2011-07-16T05:41:00.001-07:00

As there is buzz about the cloud (http://leontribe.blogspot.com/2011/07/what-is-cloud.html) there is also a buzz about something called Social CRM. A prevailing wisdom has it that for CRM to be social, you just need to add a tool that looks like Facebook or Twitter. To put it simply, this is a nonsense or, at least, not the complete story.

System vs Philosophy

One of my first blog posts talked about what is CRM (http://leontribe.blogspot.com/2009/01/what-is-crm.html). In essence, I suggested there are two sides to the CRM coin: CRM as a philosophy and CRM as a system. I also suggested that CRM systems do not have to be implemented to anticipate customer need and manage the customer relationship. The idea of an ‘xRM’ system means any number of business processes can be managed through a CRM system.

The same applies to this idea of Social CRM. The philosophy of Social CRM is best explained by a text such as the Cluetrain Manifesto (http://leontribe.blogspot.com/2009/03/all-aboard-cluetrain-its-been-waiting.html). The idea is by engaging with clients in ‘real’ conversations, rather than crafting marketing messages, clients will respond more favourably and, ideally be loyal and buy more. Chris Brogan describes it pretty well (http://www.crm-guidebooks.com/2011/04/social-mediasocial-crm-still-about-people/) and Dr. Graham Hill also summarises the concept of ‘value through engagement’ (http://www.mycustomer.com/topic/social-crm/service-dominant-logic-and-social-crm/125536).

Because it is difficult to go to every client’s house for a ‘cup of tea and a chat’, to assist in engaging clients, systems can be introduced which open channels for two-way conversation. Traditionally CRM system have been focussed on pushing out a message, rather than engaging in a conversation. Social CRM systems seek to remedy this deficit. I explored this topic in my ‘Push and Pull’ post (http://leontribe.blogspot.com/2009/02/push-and-pull-marketing-crm-and-social.html).

Do We Need Systems for Social CRM?

Just as we can engage in a CRM philosophy without a CRM IT system, we can engage in Social CRM without a Social CRM IT system. A great example of this is seen in the movie ‘Erin Brockovich’ (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Erin_Brockovich_(film)). Erin hates lawyers and is not one for process. However, she cares deeply about the people of Hinkley and their plight resulting from contaminated ground water. By engaging the town’s people in a direct, meaningful way she achieves what the lawyers fail to do, obtaining the signatures required to ensure the people get the money they deserve. While the lawyers’ formal, less intimate engagement had caused mistrust and confusion, Erin’s approach gained the trust of the people and made them feel that they were doing the right thing by engaging with her.

However, the movie also illustrates the importance of a systemised approach. When Erin is sick, much of the information, such as contact information, has to be re-obtained by the impersonal lawyers as the only place the information resides is in Erin’s head. With a CRM system in place, this information could be held centrally. The lawyers could get access to the information they need to do their job and Erin could keep them away from the clients.

Do We Need Chatter or Yammer to have a Social CRM System?

Again, not at all. Despite what the doomsayers suggest, e-mail is still an excellent tool for direct communication and is thriving (http://leontribe.blogspot.com/2011/06/is-e-mail-dead-and-is-communication.html). These new ‘collaboration tools’ ultimately allow organisations to use different channels for different kinds of conversation. Interestingly, my own conversations with users of programs like Chatter suggest that, while these kinds of tools do assist in engaging in meaningful conversations with clients, it is not for the reasons you would think. The reason these systems help organisations be more social is because these tools funnel indirect communication away from e-mail. E-mail, along with the telephone, SMS and face-to-face meetings then become the primary channels for direct, meaningful engagement with clients, while the ‘collaboration tool’ is used for general, non-specific impersonal communications (memos), crowdsourcing requests and high-level catching up with distant connections (status updates). In other words, non-essential indirect communication is funnelled through the collaboration tool, letting e-mail be more effective as a one-on-one communication and engagement tool.

Paul Adams, a former researcher at Google, who now works at Facebook has published a slideshow of his research into social networks and how online social tools do not always do a good job of mapping how we interact in the real world (http://www.slideshare.net/padday/the-real-life-social-network-v2). At slide 122, he makes the following statement “Online social networks make it easier to reconnect and catch up with weak ties”. Status updates give us an easy way to see what people are up to. A few slides later he describes online social networks as a “powerful route when sourcing new information”.

What online social networks do NOT do is convert temporary ties (people we interact with only once) to weak ties or weak ties into strong ties. If they did, they would be a truly social tool in the Cluetrain sense. This ‘social conversion’ happens through other channels such as meetings, phone calls and, to a lesser extent, e-mails. This is reinforced on slide 142.

This idea that e-mail is reserved for strong, authentic connections is also corroborated on slide 144 where Paul says “Many people use e-mail for very private exchanges…Some young adults use e-mail to communicate with their strongest ties because their (online) social network is overloaded with information.”

The 224 slides are definitely worth browsing as he goes on to talk about how real social networks influence buying habits and how people behave differently on online social networks than in real life interactions.

I understand it may be controversial to suggest a tool like Chatter is not social, but I strongly believe Erin would not have had as much success ‘friending’ Hinkley on Facebook and posting to their wall as she did directly speak directly to the individuals. Chatter would have been great, however, if she was looking for someone in Masry’s law firm who knew something about Hexavalent Chromium or worked on groundwater contamination cases. Chatter aids collaboration but this is not the same as aiding a meaningful two-way conversation. The statistics on the Chatter site confirm this (https://www.chatter.com/why/). The improvements are in areas of collaboration and productivity, but not in areas of client engagement and loyalty.

Conclusions

The philosophy of social CRM is that customer-centric selling can be improved through active and direct engagement with customers. Systems can be put in place to support this. The specific system will depend on the channel in which we intend to engage with the customer. However, if a business implements social tools with no clear vision of their purpose they are wasting their time.

Collaboration tools provide an online channel to engage with others. However, collaboration tools are not synonymous with the concept of a meaningful conversation with a customer or colleague; they simply allow us to share information. The research supports the notion that other channels, such as face to face meetings and e-mails, are still the preferred choice to maintaining strong connections in our networks. To put it another way, if you want to collaborate with people use a tool like SharePoint, Yammer or Chatter; if you want to forge a relationship, pick up the phone or, failing this, send them an e-mail.

What is the Cloud?

2011-07-03T00:47:00.001-07:00

There is a lot of noise about this thing called the cloud and while many people have a basic understanding that it has something to do with running software on the internet I thought it was about time to throw my hat into the ring to try and clear this up.

Starting With The Basics: How Does a PC Work?

Let us cast our mind back to an ancient time when there was no internet. If you wanted to run software, it required your own computer and it went something like this:

Let’s start from the bottom and work our way up. A computer has a thing called BIOS. This is the program that starts up when the computer is started. It is hard-wired into the mother board (the big flat circuit board inside your computer) and its job is to start the various bits on the motherboard up and to get the operating system going.

The operating system is, ultimately, software but very special software. The operating system is the gateway between the stuff on the motherboard and the software running on the computer. In this sense it is a platform that all other programs run on.

Software is simply computer programs that run on a computer. Therefore anyone that says ‘no software’ (you know who you are) is talking nonsense because even if a program is running on a server in Singapore and the results are being displayed on a monitor in Boise, Idaho it is still software. Anyone who tells you something different is trying to sell you something.

The hard drive is where all data sits. This includes software, data, music and anything else encoded into 1’s and 0’s.

When a program is run, it is copied into memory and the CPU (which actually does everything by coordinating all the other bits) works with it there. The reason it makes a copy is that memory is faster to read and write to. The reason we don’t abandon the hard drive and make the whole computer memory is cost. This being said, back in the early days of home computers, things like the Commodore 64 or Sinclair Spectrum 48k had no hard drive, just memory (64 kilobytes and 48 kilobytes respectively).

Eventually, when the software does something, it needs to tell the user about it and this is where the screen comes in.

As a disclaimer, I am not an IT graduate, I am a physics graduate that got into IT. Therefore this model may not be completely accurate. However, it has been my working model for the last 25 years and works wonderfully for this article.

Thanks For The History Lesson. What Does This Have To Do With The Cloud?

The thing is, if you understand how a computer works, it is easy to understand the cloud because all the cloud does is replace bits from the computer and use bits somewhere else in the world. Generally speaking, the more you use someone else’s bits, the less control you have on what those bits are. This will become evident as we get into the explanation.

Let us look at some of those cloud terms:

Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS)

This is where we want to run our software on someone else’s machines and they get to say what those machines are. In theory we could hold the software (including the operating system) on our computer and have someone else’s machines read it across the internet but this would be quite slow. So while we are really just using someone else’s hard drive, CPU and memory, we generally also load an operating system and software on the other person’s hard dive for quick access by their CPU and memory. An example of IaaS is Rackspace (http://www.rackspace.com). Rackspace also offer to provide one of a selection of operating systems. Although this could construe as Platform as a Service (see below) because the choice is with us and not them on the operating system, it is still considered IaaS.

If we are just looking to use someone else’s hard drive, this also sits under IaaS and an example of this is Amazon S3 (http://aws.amazon.com/s3/).

Platform as a Service (PaaS)

If we do not get to choose the operating system, this is PaaS. A good example of this is Azure (http://www.microsoft.com/windowsazure/). Here we use someone else’s hard drive, CPU, memory and operating system. We can load whatever software we like onto it and even have it read software sitting on our hard drive if we like. We could also have it read someone else’s hard drive, like Amazon S3. The recent iCloud service by Apple appears to be doing precisely this (http://www.neowin.net/news/icloud-uses-amazon-web-services-and-windows-azure-for-now).

Software as a Service (SaaS)

This is where we get no say on anything other than the specifications of our screen. Someone else chooses the servers, the operating system and the specific software that runs on them. Examples include Hotmail, salesforce.com, Miniclip flash games and Google apps.

What is nice about SaaS is that we do not need to worry about our computing power to get the software to run; it is someone else’s concern. In theory, I could dust off my old Sinclair Spectrum 48k and run a Saas application, which normally takes four or five modern servers to run locally (or on-premise as they now say). All my Speccy has to do is coordinate the information coming from the application, via the internet, and display it on my monitor or, in the case of the Spectrum, my television. In reality this would not quite work as the Sinclair Spectrum has no way of talking to the internet. The best it could muster in its day was chatting to cassettes. However, the principle is sound.

Conclusion

There is a lot of noise out there about this cloud thing but it really boils down to one simple concept: if you are happy to give up some control to a provider you trust, you can get great technical services with less headache and probably at a lower cost. If this sounds tempting, it is then a case of working out how far you want to go with it. There is no doubt that as these services become more reliable and more feature-rich businesses will take them up more and more, willing to gain an economic edge on rivals in exchange for losing a little control of their IT infrastructure.

Is E-mail Dead And Is Communication Becoming Social?

2011-06-24T22:04:00.001-07:00

This article is again inspired by my clandestine visit to CloudForce last month (http://twitpic.com/4wh1cq). One of the claims in the keynote, which I tweeted at the time, was that social channels are now more popular than e-mail. I found this to be an incredible claim, obviously said to justify Chatter, and I vowed to dig deeper. I attempt to synthesize a lot of information here so the article is quite large. For those of you that want to cut to the chase, feel free to jump to the Conclusions section.

So Where Does This Claim Come From?

The claim seems to come from a Nielsen study from two years ago titled “Global Faces and Networked Places” (http://blog.nielsen.com/nielsenwire/wp-content/uploads/2009/03/nielsen_globalfaces_mar09.pdf). The report talks about how consumers are becoming more social and talks at aspects I mention in my Cluetrain post from the same time (http://leontribe.blogspot.com/2009/03/all-aboard-cluetrain-its-been-waiting.html). The purpose of the study is to justify why advertisers should consider social channels. It is in this context that the claim of popularity is made.

Here is the key table:

‘Global Active Reach’ is not clearly defined but seems to mean the browsing internet population (and possibly relates to the percentage of time they spend online and what they do with that time). It is also not clear how they derived these numbers. The definition of ‘Member Communities’ is vague but is said to incorporate “social networks and blogging sites”. So, in essence, the study says that in 2009 more people on the internet accessed social networks and blogs than an online e-mail account. A little surprising but not outrageous.

The study then goes to talk about time online saying people online, in 2009, spent one in every eleven minutes looking at Member Communities. The study does not directly compare relative time spent between Member Communities and e-mail.

Do Other Studies Talk About Time Spent On Internet Activities?

Absolutely. Here is one from February this year (http://www.comscore.com/Press_Events/Presentations_Whitepapers/2011/2010_US_Digital_Year_in_Review).

This one says people are spending more time on Facebook than other places.

It also says that people are spending more time online looking at social networking sites than looking at their e-mail (in agreement with Nielsen).

It also says the youth are specifically spending less time online checking e-mail.

It also mentions 12% of internet time in 2010 was spent on social networking sites, that is, one in every eight minutes (as a comparison to the previous Nielsen statistic of one in every eleven minutes in 2009)

Nielsen also brought out a nice chart showing where all US internet time was devoted in 2010 (http://blog.nielsen.com/nielsenwire/online_mobile/what-americans-do-online-social-media-and-games-dominate-activity/)

This clearly states that almost three times as much time is spent online looking at social networks and blogs compared to e-mails.

Does This Mean People Are Abandoning E-mail?

No, although sensationalist articles suggest it is the case (http://www.digitaltrends.com/computing/polls-show-e-mail-popularity-waning-facebook-messages-ready-to-fill-in/). Let us be very specific here. The comScore report (and the Nielsen reports) are talking about time spent online. People are spending more of their online time looking at Facebook. People are spending less of their online time looking at web e-mail sites.

The same comScore report talks about smartphone use and has this graph.

Nielsen also have a graph talking about US mobile internet use time.

The thing to notice here is that using a phone to access email is more popular than accessing social networking or blogs and it is growing (http://pewinternet.org/~/media//Files/Reports/2010/PIP_Mobile_Access_2010.pdf). There is about four times as much time checking e-mails through a mobile internet device than checking social networks and blogs.

My guess is people are abandoning reading their e-mails through a web site and using things like their phone instead.

An alternative explanation is people are spending more hours online and of these extra hours, more is spent browsing social networking sites. Therefore, as a percentage, e-mail browsing is down but as a raw number it may be untouched. However, this suggests this is probably not the case (http://news.cnet.com/8301-1023_3-10297935-93.html)

So How Many People Are Using E-mail And Social Networking Sites?

If we were not careful, looking at these studies, it would be easy to assume that more people have social networking accounts than e-mail accounts. The Radicati Group report from 2010 (http://www.radicati.com/?p=5290, https://community.dynamics.com/product/crm/crmnontechnical/b/crmsoftwareblog/archive/2011/05/12/the-death-of-email-has-been-greatly-exaggerated.aspx) sets the record straight.

Despite a lot of people reading Facebook walls, there are still almost three times the number of people with e-mail accounts. The same report also compares the number of e-mail and social networking accounts but this needs to be treated carefully because it is likely an individual has , in my opinion, many more social networking accounts than e-mail accounts.

The Pew Research Center (http://www.pewinternet.org/Static-Pages/Trend-Data/Online-Activites-Total.aspx) regularly survey the US population to see what they are doing online and have been doing so for over ten years. According to Pew, 79% of the US population are now online. Here are some of the questions they ask. Obviously the second two are specifically for those in the survey on the internet (the second ‘n value’).

It is clear from this that the percentage of the US population accessing the internet over the last ten years has increased but has possibly reached a plateau at around 75-80% of the population. E-mail use has been constant for the online US population over the last ten years at around 90-95% and social networking sites are rapidly becoming very popular, currently sitting at around 61%.

This appears to be in conflict with the Nielsen data which suggests e-mail use is much less and social network use is much more but, again, we must remember Nielsen talks about time while this talks about the actual population. Combining the two we can say that while more people use e-mail, when they are online they spend more time checking for status updates than looking at their inbox. Another thing to note here is the Pew survey is less specific about the channel in which things are done. There is no clear distinction between reading an e-mail via a computer and doing it via a smart phone.

Is There a Place For Social Business Tools?

Being Generation X, I remember a time before e-mail and explaining to my peers in the early nineties what e-mail was and how it would fundamentally change the way people communicate (“it is like sending a letter, but instant”). There is no doubt e-mail has provided massive benefit in terms of communication and collaboration which, in turn, has led to gains in business productivity. However, e-mail does have limitations. Wikipedia has a good list (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/E-mail#Problems). A couple of the issues, specifically regarding collaboration, are:

Attachment size (Anything larger than a few megs is problematic. Attachment size has not scaled with Moore’s Law)
Information overload (being bombarded with too many e-mail and, more importantly, not having tools to effectively manage them)

As for attachment size, the best option here, in my opinion, would be to abandon e-mail attachments altogether and seamlessly integrate an online collaboration tool, such as SharePoint, into the mix. Rather than attach, you simply provide a link to the document which sits somewhere in the cloud. People can then go there, view the file, collaborate on it etc. Security can be centralised to control distribution, there is versioning and the attachment size issue goes away.

There is no doubt that a tool like Chatter or Yammer can help reduce the volume of e-mail and allow general communication to be ‘posted to the board’ rather than ‘spammed’. However, it needs to be clear that this does not actually reduce the overload but rather puts it somewhere where we can ignore it until we have time to address it (talking to friends who work at salesforce, this is exactly what happens with Chatter). It also needs to be clear that using ‘the feed’ is only appropriate for certain forms of communication while others are appropriate for the inbox.

Moreover, given the social experience, I predict that these collaboration tools will not reduce the total volume of communication but increase it. One of the common complaints of tools like Twitter and Facebook is the limited value in some of the communication. Because of the low barrier to message, it is always tempting to tweet something one simply could not be bothered e-mailing. What was once the domain of the water cooler will now find itself on someone’s ‘Wall’ for everyone to see and contribute to.

In terms of my own experience, being an MVP means I am on quite a number of e-mail lists, forums, blog subscriptions etc. I also tend to funnel all communication through to Outlook, which means it comes in as an e-mail or RSS feed. The volume is massive. However, through the use of Outlook rules to ‘park’ non-vital information, I almost manage to keep on top of it. While this works for me, I can see the value in an alternative channel for general, non-specific communication. Ideally, the application where one consumes e-mail would be the same as the one where one consumes ‘the feed’. Nothing kills productivity faster than constantly jumping back and forth between applications. This person also agrees (http://www.informationweek.com/news/global-cio/interviews/229900080) and sees something like Outlook as the ‘one true application’. Outlook has started down this path with the social integration in Outlook 2010 but it would need to look a lot more like the social integration with Instant Messenger before it could address the issues mentioned here.

Conclusions

In summary:

When people are online they spend more time checking people’s status updates than their inbox
When people are on mobile internet devices, such as smart phones, they spend more time in their inbox than checking status updates
Of the people on the internet, in the USA, between 90-95% of them use e-mail while only 60-65% of them use social networking sites (although popularity of social networking sites is rapidly increasing)
E-mail has problems such as large volumes of messages and a restricted ability to allow collaboration on large documents. Alternative collaboration tools can address these issues.
Be very careful with online claims, especially ones predicting the demise of an incumbent and those claims where the person making the prediction has a vested interest. These days, with a bit of effort, it is relatively easy to verify the claims and understand the assumptions behind them. Just because someone spends ten minutes on Facebook and two minutes checking their inbox does not mean one has more intrinsic value or ‘popularity’ than the other.
E-mail is not dead and will be around for a long time to come (in fact from what I can tell e-mail volumes are increasing over time, not decreasing http://www.radicati.com/?p=3237). What will change are the options for communicating with people. Just as e-mail gives us the opportunity to reach people in ways which were more difficult with a telephone, so too social collaboration gives us the opportunity to work and communicate with people in ways which are difficult with e-mail.

A Slightly More Elegant Codeless Universal Search For Dynamics CRM

2011-06-21T22:02:00.001-07:00

This is a follow-up to the Codeless Universal Search post I did a week or so ago (http://leontribe.blogspot.com/2011/06/codeless-universal-search-for-dynamics.html). Fellow Dynamics CRM MVP George Doubinski suggested using a custom activity entity and make use of the activity ‘Regarding’ field which can link to any normal record. The advantage being we no longer need one column per search entity in the results. The good news is it works.

What Does It Look Like?

How Does It Work?

To this entity we add 1:N relationships to the entities we want to search on and a keywords field, as before, to populate with the things we want to search on.

The workflows work the same as before, except we populate the regarding field on the new entity record.

The final step, as before, is adding the keywords field to the find Fields of the Quick Search.

This should work for any entity we can associate activities to.

Making It A Standalone Search Box

Something you can also do to either the original version or this one is make it a shortcut outside of CRM which you can have as a favourite in Internet Explorer or a shortcut on your desktop.

To do this, firstly browse to the default view for the new entity.

You will see at the top you can ‘Copy a Link’. If you select the little black triangle next to this, it lets you copy a web link to this view. I was getting an error when I tried this online so if it fails use the ‘E-mail a Link’ instead and copy just the web address part. Open up a blank web page, copy in the link to see if it works and if it does add it to your favourites.

Enjoy.

A Codeless Universal Search For Dynamics CRM

2011-06-08T00:58:00.001-07:00

About a month ago I gate crashed Cloudforce, the Salesforce promotional roadshow. When I was not on their booths showing off Dynamics CRM (http://twitpic.com/4wh1cq) I was attending sessions seeing what they had to offer. One feature which made me jealous was their universal search. For quite a while now Dynamics CRM users have been asking for the ability to search across multiple records at once but short of getting SharePoint into the mix, buying an add-on or coding a solution it is not possible.

This got me thinking whether it would be possible to create a universal search using what we have available through codeless configuration. It turns out it is possible and actually reasonably usable. Moreover, while the solution is built on CRM 2011, I can see no reason why you could not build the same thing in CRM 4.

What Does It Look Like?

Here is the end result:

You type into the quick search the string you want to search on and the results come back. In this case I was looking for Yvonne and got two hits; a lead and a contact. From the results I can now click through to the records.

How Does It Work?

The first step in putting this together is to create a new entity called ‘Universal Search’.

I left the ‘Connections’ tick box ticked but it does not need to be. Similarly, Duplicate Detection can be turned off.

You will now need to create a 1:N and N:1 relationship to each entity you want to search on.

The thing to notice here is I have turned off the Display Option for ‘Navigation Pane Item for Primary Entity’. Doing this for both the 1:N and N:1 relationship results in the creation of a pseudo 1:1 relationship between the Universal Search entity and, in this case, the Account entity. On the form you will be able to look up the other entity but there will be nothing on the side to indicate a relationship.

Here is the Lead record for Yvonne to give you the idea.

Now we have the structure in place we need to add some workflows.

The Workflows

The first workflow creates a universal search record every time an Account is created (or whichever entity you want to search on).

In the universal search record we populate the Name, the keywords field (a new multiple lines of text field to hold the key words we will search on) with the Account values of interest e.g. Account Name, Account Number and we add a link back to the Account.

In the second step of the workflow we then update the Account to link back to the Universal Search record through its lookup.

To reference the record you have created in the previous step, you drop down the ‘Look For’ in the Form Assistant, as in the diagram.

In this case I have added the Universal Search lookup field to the Account form but this is not necessary as workflow allows you to populate fields which are not on the form (you just scroll down the form to the Additional Fields area).

The second workflow updates the Universal Search record if details on the Account change.

In this case we trigger off of a change in the key fields on the Account (Account Name, Account Number). we then update the Universal Search with the new information.

You may have noticed that both workflows are marked as on-demand. In the case of the first workflow, this is needed if you have old records which you want to create Universal Search entries for. In the case of the second workflow, this is necessary if you change the fields you want it to search on as you then have to run it across all the records in the system to update the keywords that will be picked up. Incidentally, if you do adjust the fields you are searching on, remember to reflect this in three places; the create step of the first workflow, the trigger fields in the second workflow and the update fields in the second workflow.

Performing The Search

Once you have performed these steps for all the entities you wish to search on, all you need to do is adjust the Quick Find view of the Universal Search to include the keyword field as a Find Field and add the lookups to the entities you are searching on to the View Fields and you are ready to go. You can add any CRM entity which allows workflows to be run against them and which can be part of a 1:N and N:1 relationship.

Conclusions

As with other codeless solutions, the result is a little clunky but very usable. Probably the biggest downside with this one is the back end maintenance. If you implement this after the records have been created, you will need to run the first workflow against all the old records in the system. Also, if you change you mind about the fields you are searching on, you need to adjust the workflows in three places and run the second workflow against all relevant records. In a database with a large amount of records, this may be inconvenient.

On the plus side, this works in 2011 (and probably v4), is codeless and can be set up in an hour or two. I guarantee that a coded solution cannot get near that kind of turnaround.

Enjoy.

Running the Dynamics CRM VPC on Windows 7

2011-06-04T11:26:00.001-07:00

Microsoft have now released a VPC demo image for Dynamics CRM 2011

https://mbs.microsoft.com/Cms/Templates/document/General.aspx?NRMODE=Published&NRNODEGUID={060C9677-229D-49E1-9F00-95E56D9F1657}&NRORIGINALURL=/partnersource/deployment/methodology/vpc/MSD_CRM2011VirtualMachine&NRCACHEHINT=Guest&wa=wsignin1.0

A nice set of two virtual machines; one running Dynamics CRM and the other running Exchange.

The Problem

The problem is Dynamics CRM 2011 only runs on 64 bit servers. Therefore the VPC image is 64 bit. The only software Microsoft provides to run 64 bit VPC images on is Hyper-V. Hyper-V only runs on Windows Server 2008, which is also 64 bit. Therefore, if we are to embrace all things Microsoft, and want to run the demo on a laptop, we need to install Windows Server 2008 on our laptop.

Unfortunately Windows Server 2008 was not built to be run on laptops. It has no concept of things like hibernation and power management. No one says ‘I am so glad I installed Windows Server 2008 on my laptop’. So what is the solution?

The Solution

While Microsoft provides no software to run 64 bit VPC images on a laptop operating system like Windows 7, Sun Microsystems does. VirtualBox (http://www.virtualbox.org) runs on Windows 7 and plays nicely with Microsoft VPC 64 bit images.

So, the first step is downloading and installing VirtualBox. The latest version, at the time of writing is 4.0.8. Download the installer and hit ‘Next’, ‘Yes’ and ‘Install’ a lot.

Now that you have installed VirtualBox we need to run it and add our downloaded VPC image to it. To do this we click the ‘New’ button.

The wizard will guide you through adding the VPC image. Set up VirtualBox to run the image as a Windows Server 2008 64 bit

Next you will need to assign memory. The guide suggests 4G RAM but I only have 2G RAM to spare.

Please note: In the end I had to set this to over 2000 MB to avoid the guest blue screening due to running out of memory.

Next you will want to use an existing disk. Browse to the disk you have extracted from the Microsoft demo download.

After this you click ‘Finish’.

If you try to start the image at this point you will see the Blue Screen of Death about five seconds into booting. First we must click on ‘Storage’, remove the SATA hard drive and add it back as an IDE drive. It should look like this when you are done.

Click OK and start up the machine. Many popup boxes appear but once you wade through them it should kick into operation.

Fixing The Memory

The biggest problem you will have, if you are running the image on a host machine with 4G RAM, is the lack of memory available to the guest. To be honest, if you are going to be performing extended demos with this image you will need a machine with at least 8G RAM. However, if you don’t have this option, here is a quick bit of memory optimization. That cheeky SQL Server is grabbing as much as possible. In fact, on my work machine, SQL was chewing through 600M RAM when I ran this image. To fix the situation we need to run SQL Server Management Studio.

Once logged in, we can adjust the memory management of our SQL Server.

Going to the Memory area we see that SQL Server can grab up to 640M RAM from the machine. Given our limitations, we can set this to something more palatable, say 500M RAM, giving the guest just that little more to run. The downside of this is SQL Server may be a little slower in responding to database requests or may timeout. However, given the VPC image will not run in our case without a little extra memory, throttling is the lesser of two evils.

Another option to gain a little extra memory is to see how much idle memory the host has (via task manager). Leaving yourself a buffer of, say 200M RAM, if the host is not close to maximum you can boost the memory allocated to the guest.

Hopefully these little tricks will get it working on your machine.

Good luck.

Review of the Latest Dynamics CRM Statement of Direction (May 2011)

2011-05-21T16:16:00.001-07:00

A week or so ago the latest Dynamics CRM Statement of Direction was released. While there have already been a few reviews of it done I thought I would add my voice to the piece and highlight the parts that jumped out.

If you are interested in reading the full thing, you can access it here:

http://blogs.msdn.com/b/crm/archive/2011/05/12/statement-of-direction-for-microsoft-dynamics-crm-2011.aspx

The first thing that struck me was the style of the document is quite different compared to, say, the September 2010 Statement of Direction (http://leontribe.blogspot.com/2010/11/dynamics-crm-statement-of-direction.html). While the September 2010 document was more of a white paper in its appearance, this one is definitely the product of marketing. This is not to say the content is not technical or specific (some commitments are very specific), but that the look and feel has been more carefully crafted than previous versions.

Ecosystems

The first part of the document trumpets the success of Dynamics CRM 2011 (and why not?) and then mentions a key phrase in reference to what Dynamics CRM enables organisations to do, specifically “encourage connections across an entire ecosystem of suppliers, partners and customers”. In this context ‘ecosystem’ is equivalent to the old ‘supply chain’ of operations management. It is a term I have been hearing a lot lately. It is usually mention in the context of mobile phone ‘ecosystems’ referring to the phone OS company, the mobile phone maker, the telco, the app developers and all the pieces that connect them. I am not sure whether this is Microsoft’s market-speak or a general consensus in the industry that the chains of the past are now looking more like chainmail mesh. I believe it is a term that is going to be used a lot more in the future as organisations look to leverage more than just the consumer to sell their products and services.

“Better Together”

This is also mentioned a bit further on in the context of the philosophies driving development. In the old days we would refer to this as ‘the stack’, that is, the use of Microsoft technologies together with a view of having them compliment each other and work together. This, in turn, has led to the situation where customers openly refer to themselves as ‘Microsoft Shops’. Products no longer stack, they are simply better together apparently

Power of Choice

Microsoft are clear that they continue to differentiate between the software and where it is housed and will continue to support this differentiation. If you want to implement Dynamics CRM on your own servers (on-premise), Microsoft will continue to support this. Similarly for a third party’s servers (private cloud) or Microsoft’s data centres (cloud/SaaS). This obviously differs to, say, salesforce.com where the software and implementation choice are combined into the concept of the ‘true cloud’ when the software is run on their servers. All other implementation choices being considered the ‘false cloud’ (private cloud) or ‘software’ (on-premise). Given Dynamics CRM can be deployed any way a customer wants, the salesforce.com definition of software is a nonsense, but I digress.

The Disclaimer

Before launching into the trends driving their thinking and the more juicier, technical specifics, the document provides a disclaimer that essentially says, anything that came before it is false and this is the only true reflection of the vision Microsoft has for Dynamics CRM. Given the next Statement of Direction will likely have a similar disclaimer, a cynical person would suggest anything said in this document is only good for the next six months. The more optimistic of us would like to think the strategic thinkers of Microsoft are not so fickle and while elements may be tweaked the broad direction will remain unchanged.

Trend 1: Social Collaboration and Engagement

The document acknowledges the world of business is looking to be more social but is a little confused on how to do it. In terms of Dynamics CRM, the document is very specific. Dynamics CRM will be integrated more tightly with SharePoint, Lync (the new Office Communication Server) and Office to facilitate social collaboration with customers. They cite specific functionality such as micro-blogging (think Twitter or Facebook status updates), business activity feeds (think the Facebook wall) and social intelligence (think socialmention.com). This, again, smells of the OfficeTalk (http://www.officelabs.com/projects/officetalk/Pages/default.asp) skunkworks project I have mentioned before.

I have talked about the collaborative features of ‘the stack’ in the past (http://leontribe.blogspot.com/2011/01/what-is-this-chatter-about-social.html, http://leontribe.blogspot.com/2011/01/fun-salesforce-becomes-fud-salesforce.html). It seems Microsoft is intent on developing significant enhancements in this area, presumably to develop a product akin in functionality to salesforce.com’s Chatter or Yammer. This is great news. For all the things that can be said about Microsoft it cannot be denied that they know a good idea when they see it.

Trend 2: Deriving Rapid Value From Business Applications

This one is a little vague or, at least, I cannot tease out too many nuggets from it. They talk about

Sales and marketing insights and the creation of proposals and presentations. These are areas in Dynamics CRM where there is functionality but room for improvement. Perhaps they are looking to develop Zap-like functionality combining BI with proposal generation (http://zaptechnology.com.au/).
Improved service management through areas such as better service planning and multi-channel engagement. Again, Dynamics CRM has some functionality in this area but there is always room for improvement. Service planning in Dynamics CRM has not really been touched since it made an appearance back in version 3.0 so perhaps this is getting a makeover. The talk of social collaboration certainly dovetails into the idea of incorporating social media channels into customer service.
Enhanced evaluation and provisioning of solutions from the marketplace. Given the marketplace is, at this stage, an advertising platform for the add-on solutions available but not strictly a delivery mechanism for such solutions, I expect this will change in the near future.
Reduced effort to deploy. This is an unusual one as they talk about making it easier to tailor Dynamics CRM. Microsoft obviously have something in mind here but I do not know what it is. Perhaps the delivery mechanism for the marketplace will also lend itself to easier configuration of Dynamics CRM
Emphasis on business adoption. This one is a bit of marketing but says nothing in terms of what is coming up

Trend 3: Optimizing Business Decision-Making

Here they give a bit more detail on the BI tools they are looking to deliver. Specifically, the ability for users to create business reports and analysis, data visualisation (which is already pretty good in Dynamics CRM 2011) and data analysis capabilities for trend analysis. This, again, sounds similar to the Zap solution.

Trend 4: Consumerization of Business Applications

To translate, in this case, they mean making the software accessible, regardless of the device being used and whether the user is offline or online. Out of the box mobility has always been limited. There is the mobile express component but this does not have the full functionality of the standard clients.

This section is very interesting. Firstly they talk about the devices they want Dynamics CRM to be compatible with:

PC
Laptop
Tablet
Phone

They then get into specifics of the functionality they are looking to achieve:

functions of the product will adjust based on where the product is being accessed (in the office, on the road etc.)
cross device compatibility e.g. iPad, Android slates, PC tablets etc.
MULTI-BROWSER SUPPORT!!! By using HTML5, Microsoft are planning to create a rich client that will work practically anywhere. This is great. For those of you that follow my tweets (http://www.twitter.com/leontribe) you may remember I promised to harass Microsoft to the ends of the Earth until they had a Safari-compatible browser if I made the top 100 Most Influential Dynamics People list. I made #97 (http://www.dynamicsworld.co.uk/top-100/) and it looks like our Apple-shop friends will soon be able to easily access the product. Nice work Microsoft.

Trend 5: Extended Solution Opportunities and Ecosystems

This section talks about how Microsoft are looking to streamline the supply chain (ecosystem). Other than improving the Marketplace experience, specifics are limited. What was interesting was their statement that they are looking to enable enterprise organisations to get CRM Online. Microsoft are clearly stating they consider this a product appropriate for larger organisations (which they have done for a while but not always as directly as this). Using their tried and true strategy they are stretching up; starting with a product for the small to medium market and now playing with large companies in the cloud.

Moving to a Rapid Release Model

This is a big deal. On premise releases used to come out every two or three years. Now that CRM Online and CRM 2011 have the same code base, this is no longer practical. Therefore CRM 2011 has shortened their cycle to ONCE EVERY SIX MONTHS. The upshot of this is we will no longer see the ‘big bang’ of additional functionality we saw, for example, going from CRM 4.0 to CRM 2011. However, it will mean a constant stream of additional capabilities coming into the product.

On top of the twice-yearly updates, Microsoft will also be providing optional add-ons via the Marketplace. My guess is this is the new version of the old accelerators but, hopefully, more complete. The accelerators were great but they were, almost without exception, ‘a good start’. These add-ons sound more like complete solutions. An example might be CRM-Online fax service integration. Useful, but not for everyone.

I have my concerns about this massive shift in the release cycle given it is such a significant change. I am also concerned the ‘fixed-costs’ of putting out a release will mean time for actual innovation will be compromised, limiting the value delivered with each release. Time will tell.

Conclusions

Despite the polished veneer of the paper, this is, in my opinion, the most comprehensive and specific Statement of Direction to date. While some of the things in the paper were mentioned at the recent MVP summit, many were not and you, in reading it, are hearing a lot of this at the same time as us NDA-covered MVPs. I think it is fair to say that everything we learned at Summit, you now know via this Statement of Direction. These really are exciting times, especially for consumers.

The parts I am personally excited about are the social collaboration tools, the multi-form factor support and the multi-browser support. If you want to make a Microsoft Dynamics CRM partner shuffle nervously, ask them about running Dynamics CRM on an Apple computer. This will soon be a thing of the past.

If Microsoft get all of this right, it will be huge. If they get it wrong it will be disastrous. Given there is not much choice being otherwise, I am optimistic

Dealing With Two Surnames

2011-05-09T16:38:00.001-07:00

Quieres este articulo en Castellano? Aqui lo es:
http://www.elblogdedynamicscrm.com/post/2011/05/10/Trabajando-con-dos-apellidos.aspx

While uncommon in English-speaking countries, people from Spanish-speaking countries often have two surnames; one from each parent. As my wife is Peruvian in heritage, we have followed this tradition and therefore the surname of my children is ‘Tribe Aviles’. Both children will hand ‘Tribe’ down to their children.

On casual occasions the father’s surname is used but for more formal situations, both are used. For example, in an e-mail my son would sign ‘Orlando Tribe’ but on his passport it reads ‘Orlando Tribe Aviles’.

One obvious consequence of this is the usual security question of ‘mother’s maiden name’ is useless in Spanish-speaking countries as it is in their full name. A more subtle consequence comes from trying to store this in Dynamics CRM.

What We Have To Work With

This is the default appearance of the Contact form in Dynamics CRM.

We have a ‘First Name’ field, a ‘Middle Name’ field and a ‘Last Name’ field. We have no additional ‘Mother’s Maiden Name’ field.

Method 1: Using The Last Name For Both Names

In this case, as shown in the above screenshot, I have populated the Last Name field with both names. The Contact’s name populates correctly at the top of the form and if we set the full name convention to be ‘Last Name, First Name’, it will appear as “Tribe Aviles, Orlando” which makes sense. The problem with this approach is if I need to send an informal e-mail or message to Orlando, I cannot address him as ‘Orlando Tribe’ but must use the formal version.

Method 2: Using The Middle Name Field To Store The First Surname

After a bit of internet research, it appears this is common practice in the USA but causes a number of problems. The first one is the full name will not populate correctly and needs to be adjusted (Settings-Administration-System Settings). However, in a database where there are people with ‘true’ middle names it becomes confusing which are surnames and which are middle names. This will become impractical if we need to send out informal letters where we would need to use <First Name> <Middle Name> for people with a Spanish name and <First Name> <Last Name> for those with an English Name. We have similar problems if we need to send out a formal letter.

Method 3: Adding a New Field For The Mother’s Last Name

This one is not a bad compromise. We can send out formal and informal communication without too much difficulty. The only downside is the Full Name shows the informal format, not the formal one. also, you will need to add the Mother’s Last Name field to the searchable fields for Contact.

Method 4: Adding Fields For The Two Surnames And Combining Into The Last Name

Given I am in Australia and not South America or Spain I thought I would ask someone who is affected by this every day, fellow CRM MVP Jimmy Larrauri. He has a solution which works well for him; he adds two additional fields to CRM for the two surnames and then uses jscript to combine these into the Last Name field.

This provides all the advantages of the first method with the benefit of being able to use either of the two surnames, as desired. If jscript seems like too much hard work, you could also relax the Last Name from being compulsory and then use a workflow to populate the Last Name field, after saving the Contact record.

Conclusions

If you are working with Spanish speaking customers you may need to accommodate their needs when storing names, such as the capture of two last names. As with all design considerations, there are a number of different ways to achieve a similar outcome. The key is in understanding what information is to be stored and how it is going to be used. When this is understood, the best method can be chosen to meet the needs of the customer.

Salesforce Financials Revisited

2011-05-04T18:43:00.001-07:00

It has been over two years since I looked at the financials of salesforce.com so I thought is was well overdue. To recap on previous analysis here are the links:

http://leontribe.blogspot.com/2008/09/valuing-salesforcecom-and-its.html

http://leontribe.blogspot.com/2009/02/salesforcecom-revisited-still.html

In September 2008 the price of salesforce (CRM) was $58.00 and the price of Microsoft (MSFT) was $27.34

In February 2009 the price of salesforce was $28.00 and the price of Microsoft was $16.15

As of today (4 May 2011) salesforce is $133.66 and the price of Microsoft is $25.81

I make no bones about the fact that my opinion is that the share price of salesforce is expensive for what it is. However, as can be seen, the market disagrees with me and that is why I am in IT and not retired on a luxury yacht sailing around the Bahamas. This is also why you should get financial advice from a licensed professional and not necessarily listen to the opinions of a CRM consultant. To be fair I am not the only one who is pessimistic on the prosperity of salesforce’ share price (http://seekingalpha.com/article/264023-how-salesforce-com-could-get-crushed-this-quarter, http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424052748704150604576166280156761902.html#articleTabs%3Darticle)

That being said, how are the fundamentals of the business going?

Subscription Numbers

I recently came across a little treasure known as the detailed salesforce financials (http://bit.ly/fJyolc). The last page has all the subscription numbers ever released by salesforce, including confirmation that the number of users (subscribers) has not been released since the end of 2007 (at least not to an accuracy greater than to the nearest million).

After a bit of digging, the conclusion I have come up with is this is no longer released because it covers all of salesforce’s products e.g. Chatter, force.com, Sales Cloud, Service Cloud etc. Therefore a strict comparison of numbers against, say, the subscriber numbers of Dynamics CRM is not valid as it is one Microsoft product versus the entire suite of salesforce products. To make the comparison meaningful, we need to assume that the majority of the subscriptions salesforce has is with the sales product, which may not be true.

One interesting note to be made is that if we look at the subscription and support revenue per subscriber and customer a clear trend emerges. That is, while the number of people at a customer site using salesforce products is increasing, the revenue from each one is, on average, decreasing and the overall result is the revenue from each customer is relatively flat.

Quarter	Customers	Subscribers	Average Customer Size	Revenue	Revenue Per Subscriber	Revenue Per Customer
Q2 FY08	35,300	800,000	22.7	$159,998	$200	$4,500
Q4 FY08	41,000	1,100,000	26.8	$196,517	$179	$4,800
Q4 FY09	55,400	1,500,000	27.1	$266,110	$177	$4,800
Q3 FY10	67,900	2,000,000	29.5	$306,870	$153	$4,500
Q4 FY11	92,300	3,000,000	32.5	$428,534	$143	$4,600

This would support the hypothesis that salesforce customers are bringing additional staff on to salesforce products but onto products with a smaller monthly price tag e.g. Chatter. If salesforce ever release subscription numbers for individual products we will have a better idea if this hypothesis is valid. The alternative hypothesis is that customers are downgrading their services i.e. moving from Sales Cloud Professional down to Sales Cloud Group, which I think would be unlikely.

Looking at the last two lines is interesting. In Q3 FY10, the average customer had 30 staff each spending $153 per user per quarter. In Q4 FY11, they added 3 subscribers but the average went down to $143 per user per quarter. This is consistent with simply adding three paying Chatter subscribers to the average customer and the same mix being true for new customers. To put it another way: the growth in the last twelve months can be explained simply by the upsell of Chatter subscriptions and the signing up of new customers. The model suggests that there has been minimal upsell of additional Sales/Service Cloud subscriptions to existing clients. It also suggests around 25% of the million additional subscribers between Q3 FY10 and Q4 FY11 are Chatter subscribers.

For a comparison of how these numbers compare to Dynamics CRM, check out my upcoming presentation at Decisions Spring 2011. click here to register:

P/E Ratio

The P/E Ratio, at a given point in time indicates the number of years a share will earn back its price. Historically, if you held salesforce shares it would be your children, grandchildren or their descendants that would see the doubling or your investment. In 2008 the P/E ratio was 200 according to MSN Money. In 2009 this improved to 100. Today, according to MSN money, the P/E ration is 280.

So if nothing changes, it will take 280 years for a share buyer to get back the price in dividends or asset accumulation. Something has to change i.e. the ‘P’ or the ‘E’. ‘P’ is the price. for the ratio to come down to a ‘normal’ level, this would have to crash to about 1/20 of its current value i.e. $6-7 . The other option is a dramatic increase in ‘E’, the earnings (or profits). For comparison, the P/E of Microsoft is 10.

Revenue Growth

From 2005-2009, there was a clear pattern in the revenue growth of salesforce. This pattern being a deceleration in the growth (84%, 76%, 60%, 51%, 44% revenue growth respectively) of around 10% reduction in growth per year. In 2010, the revenue growth dropped more sharply to 21% but recovered to maintain the pattern in 2011 with a growth rate of 27%. It will be interesting to see if the growth rate drops below 20% in January next year.

Not surprisingly Microsoft’s revenue growth rate is much smaller than salesforce’s and in fact was negative in FY2010.

Margins

Salesforce has been dogged by small profit margins for years. Between 2005-2009 the profit margins were 4%, 5%, 9%, 3%, 6%, 8%. Salesforce managed to break into double-digits in 2010 with a margin of 11% but has dropped back again to 6% in 2011.

As a comparison, margins at Microsoft have sat around the 30-40% range for over five years.

Sustainable Growth Rate

This is the rate at which a company can grow its revenues without borrowing or issuing shares. This currently sits at 9%, well below their revenue growth rate of 27% meaning more borrowing or share issuing is on the cards.

Microsoft’s sustainable growth rate is, according to my calculations, around 23%, well below their current revenue growth rate of 7%.

Conclusions

Salesforce still has strong customer growth and subscriber growth but it is maintained through the collection of new customers and the upsell of low-value products. Obtaining new customers is an expensive exercise, compared to upselling existing customers and, with margins as low as they are, it may be time for salesforce to shift gears in this regard. It is true they appear to be upselling products like Chatter but really they should be looking to transition customers to the high-end Sales and Service cloud products. The numbers suggest this is not yet happening.

It terms of the P/E ratio it is the same old story. Conventional wisdom would suggest the P/E ratio is very high, meaning the market is very optimistic for the future of the product. It is not clear to me how the earnings are going to grow to such a level as to justify this optimism.

Revenue growth is, and always has been strong but is slowing. However, the growth is still larger than what the business can support meaning it will continue to raise debt and shares for at least a couple of years or until the banks and investors politely decline the opportunity.

My prediction is, with the strong push from Dynamics CRM in terms of pricing and incentive deals, the next quarter’s announcement on May 20 will show an impact on growth. This will frighten the market and we will again see the shares dip below $100. However, do not see this as advice. Benjamin Graham, the man that taught Warren Buffett everything he knows famously said “"In the short run the market is a voting machine. In the long run it's a weighing machine." What Benjamin did not tell us is how long a short run is. Based on the last four years, longer than I expected.

The Decade of CRM Stagnation at Sage

2011-04-23T19:02:00.001-07:00

My blog this week is prompted by a claim I saw in a private group. The author, Jason Carter, suggested that, effectively, Sage had done nothing to grow the ACT! and SalesLogix businesses since acquiring the products about ten years ago. This sounded incredulous so I thought I would look at the numbers.

Interact Commerce in the Year 2000

Interact had two flagship products: ACT! (a contact management solution) and its big brother SalesLogix (a small to medium-sized CRM solution). The dot-com bubble was about to burst (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dot-com_bubble) and a review of their annual report at the time confirms things were troubled. For those of you that want to comb through the details, here is the link (http://www.sec.gov/Archives/edgar/data/1027108/000095015301500160/p64748e10-k.htm). Here are some of the highlights:

Revenues: $108m (2000), $36m (1999), $16m (1998)
Total Operating Expenses: $126m (2000), $35m (1999), $18m (1998)
Net Loss: $57m (2000), $8m (1999), $7m (1998)
Cash used in operating activities: $17m (2000), $3m (1999), $5m (1998)
Research and Development: $25m (2000), $7m (1999), $4m (1998) (let’s say about 20-25% of revenue)

In 1999 and 1998 Interact had issued stock and borrowed money to keep the cash flowing in. In 2000 they did not do this and burned through $49m in cash.

So while revenues were indeed increasing at an incredible rate (two-fold between 1998 and 1999 and three-fold between 1999 and 2000), operating expenses were in lock-step and profits were nowhere to be seen. Similarly, the business was failing to generate cash from sales and was propping things up through shares and debt.

Sage in the Year 2010

Sage acquired Interact Commerce in 2001. Along with the acquisition of ACCPAC CRM in 2004, ACT! and SalesLogix make up the stable of CRM offerings in the Sage product mix.

Reviewing Sage’s latest annual report we discover that 4% of Sage’s revenue came from their CRM products (http://ar2010.sage.com/whatwedo.asp)

Diving into the numbers (http://ar2010.sage.com/Consolidated-income-statement.asp) we discover that the revenue for 2010 was 1,435.0 million pounds. Taking an exchange rate of 1.6 pounds to one US dollar (the rate around the end of 2010), this translates to around $2,300m in total revenue. 4% of this is about $92m.

So the revenue for the CRM products has gone from around $110m to $90m in ten years i.e. it has not changed significantly and may have actually shrunk. Also note this also includes the, assumed, additional profits of Sage CRM (ACCPAC CRM).

The big difference in the two financial reports is in their health. Although the Sage annual report only talks about the business as a whole, not just the CRM component, Sage is profitable and generating healthy cash flows i.e. they are generating cash from their operations.

Research has also suffered in the name of a healthier bottom line. According to the full annual report, Sage spent a total of 158.9 million pounds on research and development. This is around 11% of revenue, about half what Interact felt they had to invest, as a percentage of revenue, to stay on top.

The Current Popularity of Sage’s CRM products

Back in July of last year, I used Google Trends to see how Dynamics CRM is travelling relative to Salesforce (http://leontribe.blogspot.com/2010/07/using-google-trends-to-predict-crm.html). As an aside, if you want to see an up to date and expanded version of my Salesforce vs Dynamics CRM blog, I will be presenting precisely this at the upcoming Decisions Spring 2011 (http://decisions.msdynamicsworld.com/session/microsoft-dynamics-crm-vs-salesforce-main-event).

We can now use the same technique to review the popularity of the Sage suite of products relative to, say Dynamics CRM.

Using Dynamics CRM as a comparison, it is clear that the Sage CRM products are not generating as much interest as Dynamics CRM. Also, it is amazing how far ACT! has dropped since seven years ago.

Conclusions

Sage has not grown their CRM business and has remained effectively stagnant for the last ten years. Moreover, they have cut back research dollars, relative to revenue. In its time, SalesLogix was at the top of the mid-market CRM players. So much so that when Dynamics CRM was first released, the ROI tools provided to Microsoft partners mentioned only two CRM products: Dynamics CRM and SalesLogix. Back in 2003-2004, SalesLogix was to Dynamics CRM what salesforce.com is today.

What is not clear is whether Sage’s stagnation is due to transforming the financials to health or plain old neglect. Either way, products such as Dynamics CRM have now taken the place in people’s minds when they think of CRM and, given the lack of investment in research it is difficult to see how Sage can recover from this position to regain former glory.

Forrester Trajectories of CRM Solutions

2011-04-15T06:07:00.001-07:00

I was watching Hans Rosling the other day do what he does best with his gapminder software. That is, dispelling myths and making volumes of data speak volumes through visualisation. If you don’t know Hans, here is an example of him at work.

Hans Rosling and gapminder

It occurred to me that the little dancing circles were not dissimilar to the Gartner quadrant and Forrester Wave pictures those of us in the IT game are used to. I figured that while I did not have a few hundred years of data, even with a few years of information I may be able to extract some interesting conclusions.

If you are interested in seeing the research, a good place to begin is the Microsoft Analyst Relations Reports. Here you will find a host of white papers and reports. Obviously, Microsoft are unlikely to link to reports which paint their products in a poor light so feel free to use your favourite search engine to supplement.

While Gartner reports were a little light on the ground, I did manage to find a good selection of Forrester Wave reports for CRM suites in the mid-market and enterprise-market on the Microsoft page and supplemented this with another I found online (http://www.ibizinitiatives.com/ForresterCRMStudy.pdf)

Mid-market Velocities

These three graphs are for 2007, 2008 and 2010 respectively. The size of the circle, if I am reading the paper correctly, is a rough measure of market share and the company’s dedicated team size to the space.

The first thing I notice is the migration to the top right corner; the leaders area. Overall, solutions are generally improving.

In terms of individual products, let’s look at some of the more interesting ones.

Solution	Observations
Oracle Siebel CRM Professional	This one appears to be slipping. The product to be envied in 2007-2008, they are now truly out of the Leader section, falling back to Strong Performers. Strangely, they appear to have a stronger market presence now than in the past.
salesforce.com	The ‘cloud Siebel’ continues to improve their product and appears to have increased their market presence in recent years
Microsoft Dynamics CRM	Like salesforce.com, Dynamics CRM continues to advance towards the top right corner, it has increased its market presence and is now the leader on the chart.
Netsuite	Although the movement is not huge, it does appear to be moving in the wrong direction.
Sage Saleslogix	Appears to be advancing through the Strong Performers but is yet to make a Leaders position
CDC Software’s Pivotal	Despite not featuring in the 2008 chart, they have rocketed from a Contender position through to Leader.
SugarCRM	Another little battler. The have moved through to a Leader position and have improved their market presence
Sage CRM	Also increasing market presence and is just in the Leader position
FrontRange’s Goldmine	Their market presence has gone from one of the two dominant players to one of the smallest in a span on three years.
Maximizer	Goldmine’s fortunes are contrasted against the other ‘big player’ in 2007, Maximizer. Maximizer has maintained its market presence and is also now in a Leader position

Enterprise Velocities

For the Forrester Wave reports, I could only find reports for 2008 and 2010

However, there are still things to observe. For example, it appears that a lot more of the, traditionally, smaller market players are now stretching into the enterprise.

As for individual products, there are also some things of note.

Solution	Observations
Oracle Siebel CRM	The traditional ‘900-pound gorilla’ in the market, their strategy appears to be slipping and other players stretch up from the mid-market. They have lost their dominant position but remain a Leader.
SAP CRM	Suffering a similar fate to Oracle Siebel CRM, SAP also has the indignity of reducing its market presence.
Microsoft	Creeping up, they have now taken the dominant Leader position in the market
salesforce.com	Similar to Dynamics CRM, salesforce.com appears to also be sliding in front of Oracle Siebel CRM and SAP CRM
Oracle Peoplesoft CRM	Loss of market presence and also appears to be moving in the wrong direction, albeit slowly.
Oracle E-Business Suite CRM	Also losing presence and moving in the wrong direction.

Conclusions

For those of us that remember Mosaic, MySpace and WordPerfect, we know that today’s darling is tomorrow’s forgotten software. There are some clear trends here:

Oracle cannot seem to do anything right. Their products, which they have many, are either stagnating or going backwards, relative to their competitors
salesforce.com and Microsoft Dynamics CRM are edging out the competition in both the mid-market and enterprise
Players such as CDC Software’s Pivotal, SugarCRM and Sage CRM should be watched, given their trajectory

As other Wave reports come out I will update the research.

Disclaimer: As well as working extensively with Dynamics CRM, the company I work for, Praxa, is owned by the same company as CDC software.

The Merry War for IT Control: IT Strategy, Office Functionality and the Cloud

2011-04-02T07:21:00.001-07:00

There is a war raging in every organisation. This war is described in popular culture in television programs such as “The IT Crowd” and in comic strips such as Dilbert. If there had been computers in Shakespeare’s time, he would also speak of the ‘tussle betwixt the guardians of IT and the gentlefolk of the office’.

The Winter of Our Discontent

The battle I speak of is the tension between controlling the systems which an office uses and providing enough functionality such that the job required can get done. There are many fronts on which this war is being raged. IT have long held the territory of ‘network access’, and rightly so, but the lines on the map are constantly moving. The new trend of bringing your own laptop will inevitably cause IT departments to lose some ground and the lands of ‘social networking’ are still very much in dispute.

Misery Acquaints a Man With Strange Bedfellows

Often the tools provided by IT are simply insufficient for office workers to do the job required of them. Whether it is an enterprise system which is designed such that one size fits all but does not, or it is simply the case that IT do not have a clear picture of the needs of the business, often users look elsewhere. Historically this has meant a proliferation of what Matt Johnson calls micro-IT. This ‘jury rigging’ often involves readily available, yet powerful, tools such as Excel and Access.

For Sweetest Things Turn Sourest By Their Deeds; Lilies That Fester Smell Far Worse Than Weeds

For those of us in consulting, we have all heard of large, household name organisations who literally run with thousands of bespoke Excel spread sheets, decentralised, unmanaged and whose inner workings are unfathomable. While it seems like a good idea at the time, as requirements and technology moves on, these barrier-removers become barriers in themselves. Inevitably they have to be deconstructed, rebuilt and often centralised so the pattern does not repeat again. However, the underlying problem remains. The same evolution that reveals the sin, opens up the possibility for further transgressions.

The Undiscovered Country From Whose Bourn No Traveler Returns

A new weapon has now entered the field of combat; the cloud. The ability to run significant parts of a business’ IT function with little more than a web browser is a revolution and the ultimate equaliser on the battlefield. The ability to go to the web, provide a credit card number and access, for example, an enterprise-ready CRM system means the traditional gatekeepers of technology are completely bypassed. In terms of what percentage of users will bypass the IT department in the future and go direct to the cloud, the jury is still out. Industry analysts say up to 50% and that it will increase over time. Brad Wilson, GM of Microsoft Dynamics CRM, is more conservative suggesting 10%. I agree with Brad on this one, assuming IT arm themselves with the same weapons and get a better appreciation of their role in business.

Every Subject's Duty is the King's; But Every Subject's Soul is His Own

Every employee in an organization has one master; the strategic direction guiding the business. This is true for both the office workers and the IT department. How well this strategy is articulated and how well it is translated into action determines everything else. The IT department, on a tactical level, is there to ensure the smooth running of the technology in the business. Often this manifests itself as keeping a tight control on the systems provided to the office workers. While a little less control could allow users to do their job more efficiently or effectively, it also opens the systems up to more risk of failure. When an IT department has scarce resources and is punished when systems go down, a policy of tight control is a logical one.

The office workers are there to do their job as effectively as possible. If the worker is in sales, traditionally they will be motivated financially to bring in sales to maximise revenue. This is where I often see the weapon of the cloud employed first. If a CRM system will allow a salesperson to handle ten times as many leads and bring in ten times as much revenue, it soon becomes a numbers game as to whether they should pull out their own credit card and go to the cloud.

While, historically, flanking the enemy and establishing your own IT systems required an Excel or Access guru in the office, this is no longer the case. Cloud applications, such as Dynamics CRM, are very easy to use (given they work like Outlook) and can be configured with no code. In terms of support, online forums also reduce the relevance of IT as the internet has an answer for everything and, when it does not, you ask and a friendly MVP or product evangelist steps up and gives you everything you need. In my experience on the online forums, if I do not get to a question within 24 hours, someone else will have already provided an answer. In terms of the internal equivalent, in one case, one of my customer’s (also a household name) IT department literally took six weeks to provision and set up a new laptop for one of its workers. When considering this level of internal service, it makes sense to go elsewhere.

All Things Are Ready, If Our Minds Be So

The fundamental problem is that, in many organisations, IT is not managed as a vital, strategic component to a business but simply seen as administration. While tactically, the IT department may be there to ensure the smooth day-to-day running of the business’ technology, strategically they must ensure the systems in place allow the workers to do the job the business needs them to do. If the users are building Excel spread sheets or employing SaaS systems to control vital aspects of the business, IT needs to know about it and, rather than accept it, they should see it as a direct criticism that they are not doing their job effectively and act immediately. If staff needed to bring their own chairs and desks to work, this would be seen as a failing of Human Resources and addressed immediately. The same it true for IT.

From a business perspective, just as the sales and marketing departments are given incentives to align them to the needs of the business, so too should the IT department be given incentives beyond ‘make sure stuff does not break’. What the incentives are will depend on the business and their needs. However, if the workers are bypassing IT and obtaining significant technological functionality without them, this clearly indicates that IT is strategically irrelevant; a matter that needs to be addressed for the overall health of the business.

Conclusions

It is understandable that IT fear giving their users too much control and it is also understandable that IT departments fear becoming irrelevant at the hands of cloud SaaS offerings. However, if all IT is there for is to provision Active Directory and Exchange accounts, configure laptops and maintain servers, they have already lost the battle. The resolution of this war, as is often the case, is through diplomacy. Both sides need to understand each other through communication and IT need to gain a better understanding of their role within the larger business context.

The best case I have seen of this kind of strategy is with the IT services group for a large government body. In this case they use Dynamics CRM on-premise. However, the implementation is irrelevant, it is how the system is used that is important. The group has recognised that each government department has very different needs and, even within a department, different systems are needed to handle different processes.

Each time a new process is discovered, which is inefficient and relying on paper processes or bespoke systems, a new organization (for those not in the Dynamics CRM world, think of this as a new CRM database) is provisioned in CRM and the system configured to meet the needs of the business. This is the best of all worlds. The users get the system they need to do their job effectively, IT maintain control but, more importantly, they have the opportunity to see the bigger picture. If another area of the business has similar needs to an existing CRM system in place, lessons learned can guide the new system and the design and code can be reused, rather than reinvented.

The cloud is an excellent weapon but it, and all applications in general, should be wielded by IT for the benefit of the users and the business as a whole. Only if all the tools of technology provision are managed centrally can they be aligned with each other and to the goals of the business; true strategic IT.

The Poll is Back. Vote Frequently, Vote Often and Vote For Me ;)

2011-03-28T04:56:00.001-07:00

After going offline due to script abuse, the poll is back. Vote frequently, vote often and vote for me ;)

VOTE

Five-Minute Integration Between Dynamics CRM and LinkedIn

2011-03-20T23:52:00.001-07:00

I recently had a client ask about integration between Dynamics CRM and LinkedIn. If you are not familiar with LinkedIn (http://www.linkedin.com ) it is ‘Facebook for business contacts’. Digging around I found this excellent post by fellow CRM MVP and all-round decent bloke Matt Wittemann.

http://community.dynamics.com/roletailored/customerservice/b/cscrmblog/archive/2008/07/16/linkedin-to-microsoft-dynamics-crm.aspx

The problem was this post was almost three years old and designed for version 4.0. Would it work with CRM 2011? The great news is not only does it work for CRM 2011, it is so much easier than it was for CRM 4.0.

How To Set Up The Integration

The first thing you need to do is take Matt’s html code and save it to an html file (I just pasted it into Notepad and did a ‘Save As…’).

Now we go to CRM and go to Settings-Customizations-Customize The System-Web Resources and click the new button.

We give our web resource a name and specify the type as Web Page. Browse to the location where you saved your html file, select it and hit the save button.

Now go to the Lead entity forms area (Settings-Customizations-Customize The Solution-Entities-Lead-Forms) and add the web resource to the Main Form. to do this open up the Main Form and click the Insert tab then select Web Resource.

Save, Publish and you are done!

The end result should be a window on the Lead form which, when you change the Lead record’s company, adjusts the LinkedIn window to show you who you know that works there and a link to show everyone else that works there that you may have access to. You may see a warning message about mixed content. This is because in CRM Online we use a secure html connection (https) but the script is using plain old http. Hopefully someone more adept than me will read this blog and comment how to get rid of this minor inconvenience.

So there it is, no code, no messing about with ISV folders and a solution that works on premise or in the cloud (in this case I used the Lost In Redmond 30-day cloud trial system I had used in my previous blog post).

I Made The Nomination Cut! Now Its Time to Vote

2011-03-16T02:57:00.001-07:00

Thank you for all of you that clicked the link and e-mailed. I made the nomination cut! Now its voting time. Here is the link.

ZAPHOD SAYS "VOTE FOR LEON"

Click on it, tick my name and click the vote button. Every time someone votes for me an angel gets its wings ;)

Interactive Fiction Games On The Ultimate Development Platform: Dynamics CRM 2011

2011-03-15T05:15:00.001-07:00

OK so I may be exaggerating a little about Dynamics CRM being the ultimate development platform but for those that recall my ‘hangman’ blog:

http://leontribe.blogspot.com/2010/10/world-first-exclusive-dynamics-crm-2011.html

I set a challenge for the readers to use dialogs to create an Infocom-like game (we used to call them ‘Adventure Games’ in the UK). Apparently the Wikipedia name for them is Interactive Fiction. For those too young to remember these gems, this was in the days when computers had a keyboard, no mouse and no graphics. The screen (possibly green or yellow) would describe your situation and you would type in commands. Occasionally you chanced across a command the computer understood and something happened. Part of the fun was discovering the criminally limited vocabulary of the game and the other part was trying to match wits the programmer and solve the game.

Classic titles include the Zork series, ‘The Hulk’, ‘Hitch-Hikers Guide to the Galaxy’, ‘The Hobbit’, ‘Lord of the Rings’ and the less serious ‘Bored of the Rings’.

The last generation of interactive fiction games were probably MUDs, the pre-cursor to MMORPGs.

Given the post was about five months ago I thought it was time to step up and do my homework.

The Result: An Interactive Fiction Game Using Dynamics CRM 2011 Dialogs

It really works. There are actions to perform (Goto, Get, Use, Help and Inventory) and a text box to apply the actions to e.g. Goto 33. As the protagonist you move around the Microsoft Campus at Redmond (well five buildings of it) trying to find a way back to civilisation (or, in this case, Seattle).

The Entity Structure

The game has two entities: players and locations. Locations are, as expected, the places you can go in the game.

Player records are the launch pad for the dialog (a dialog has to be run from a record) and stores the current location of the player and their inventory.

The rest is dialogs.

The Dialogs

Each action gets its own dialog (the main reason for this is to give the asynchronous update step a chance to update your player record while you read the text). “Lost in Redmond” is the beginning dialog that launches the game.

Similarly, “End Game” is the end.

The main ‘screen’ is “The Game”.

This displays the current location and requests the user enter an action and an object to apply it to. “Goto” applies to a building number, “Get” and “Use” apply to an physical object in the game and “Inventory” and “Help” do not use an object.

“Help” simply displays a text message on how the game works.

“Inventory” uses the values on the player record, constructs a text string, stores it in a variable on the dialog and then displays it.

This is one use for variables. They allow you to store values and manipulate them via the “Assign Value” step.

The input variables are exclusively for child dialogs. “Goto” uses the input variable to pass through the location object from “The Game” dialog.

“Get” and “Use” also use input variables to work out what they being applied to and what to do.

So When Will This Excellent Game Be Available On Marketplace?

While I have packaged the dialogs and entities into a solution, there is a shortcoming with solutions. This being you cannot add records to a solution so the location records cannot be added in and be auto-installed on applying the solution. I have thought of including an on-demand workflow which could be manually run to create the locations but then there is the complication of linking the new records to the dialogs. Perhaps solutions will be expanded in the future to allow for this functionality.

Until then, if anyone can think of a way to package in the location files, let me know and we will make a fortune packaging text-based adventures to bored CRM users.

Microsoft Dynamics Top 100 Most Influential Dynamics People

2011-03-14T20:01:00.000-07:00

If you consider me influential (and let's face it if you're here there is a fair chance). Feel free to click this link to get me in the running for the top 100 ;)

Software Advice’s Interviews With Brad Wilson

2011-03-11T03:55:00.001-08:00

Lauren Carlson of Software Advice e-mailed me regarding a set of seven videos they had put together with Brad Wilson. She asked if I would be interested in doing a write-up, so here it is.

Brad Wilson is the Microsoft’s GM for Dynamics CRM so understanding where his focus is, gives clues to the future of the product.

The seven, five-minute videos cover the following topics:

Now while the topics do sound juicy, do not expect any ground-breaking exclusive nuggets of gold from Brad. He is seasoned, media-trained and every answer will come back to the key messages that Microsoft want to push e.g. “it is about delivering value, not being the cheapest”. You are not going to hear hard numbers for any of the above topics.

This being said, Brad does give us the following:

His thoughts on how the CRM market has evolved over the last 15 years
Microsoft is bordering on obsessed to getting people using their products via the cloud
How the partner model is undergoing a revolution and where the new opportunities are (hint: partners need to deliver more value than pressing the ‘next’ button on a DVD install)
Brad tells us why Dynamics CRM is not sold in modules but as one big package

The interesting one for me is Microsoft’s focus on getting people to use the cloud. Selling upgrades for on premise software is often criticised as a way of gouging money for arguably little gain. Microsoft being a significant player in this game also receives this criticism. Going to the cloud completely changes this model with the income coming in the form of a monthly per-user fee. Software companies cannot, as some cynics suggest, boost the bottom line by releasing a new ‘version’ if they are in the cloud. The cost of upgrades is effectively built in to the monthly fee so this fee has to be right.

It is interesting times for Microsoft and, while Microsoft are quick to claim they have been providing cloud services for over ten years, there is a difference to providing cloud services and having them as a fundamental part of your revenue stream. Just as with the partners who sell Microsoft’s products, Microsoft is undergoing a revolution and the new opportunities lie very far away from familiar ground.

How Salesforce Can Win the Online Battle

2011-02-28T17:15:00.001-08:00

With the introduction of Dynamics CRM as an online offering on the international stage, Salesforce now has a viable competitor, raiding their territory, who they need to repel. How can Salesforce position themselves such that they have an unassailable position?

Porter’s Generic Strategies for Competitive Advantage

Professor Michael Porter (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Michael_Porter) is a thought leader on competitive strategies for organisations who pioneered the concept of competitive strategy during the eighties. One of Porter’s concepts was that of generic strategies (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Porter_generic_strategies). Here is the obligatory two-by-two matrix.

Essentially, Porter says you can either go for a specific segment of the market or you can try and attract everyone. If you try and attract everyone you can distinguish yourself by having the lowest cost (and therefore the lowest sustainable price) or you can offer something none of your competitors do, such as excellent customer service.

Competitive Advantage in the Car Industry

To understand how the theory works, let us look at the car industry. A good example of a segmentation strategy is the Bugatti Veyron (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bugatti_Veyron). The car is the most expensive modern car in the world and the fastest street-legal production vehicle in the world. There are not many people that can afford the $1.6m price tag, so this is not a broad market play. Also, of those that can afford it, there is a specific market segment interested in fast cars. Arguably, at the other end of the spectrum, is the Tata Nano (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tata_Nano ). This is the most inexpensive car in the world but gives millions of Indians the opportunity to own a car. If the car has mass-appeal, it could be labelled as a cost leadership strategy. If the car has appeal only to a small niche, it is a segmentation strategy.

A more conventional example of a cost leadership strategy would be something like Kia. Kia cars have broad market appeal but are offered at a compelling price, presumably because they are a cost leader. Toyota’s hybrid cars can also be argued as a differentiation strategy. While a little pricier than Kia, they still have broad market appeal and have the unique proposition of using a hybrid engine. Another differentiation Toyota have is their brand and the values associated to it. While Toyota has had their problems, it is still one of the world’s strongest brands (http://issuu.com/interbrand/docs/bgb_report_us_version?viewMode=presentation&mode=embed) and differentiates it from their competitors.

So Where Does Salesforce Fit?

To be competitive, Salesforce needs to find the strategy that fits them and the industry.

Cost leadership: Microsoft has come in with very aggressive pricing. They also claim that they can share the costs of the online version across complimentary technologies such as Office 365 and their on-premise version (http://www.softwareadvice.com/articles/crm/will-microsoft-dynamics-crm-2011-slow-salesforce-microsoft-executive-interview-1022211/). Given Salesforce is triple the price for similar functionality and yet barely makes double-digit profits, I do not believe cost leadership is attainable. Dynamics CRM is owning the cost leadership position.

Differentiation strategy: Salesforce likes to think they have a sustainable differentiation with products like Chatter and their ‘fun’ brand but the key is it must be a differentiation that matters to the customer. Fun is meaningless to the customer. Being ‘social’ has some resonance but when the surface is scratched, there is nothing especially social about Salesforce. Chatter is an internal collaboration tool. Customers cannot access it. Sure it is easy to consume but, with similar products like Sonoma’s Vibe, any differentiation resulting from it is rapidly eroding away. If Salesforce is a Kia, Dynamics CRM needs to be a Tata Nano to justify the price differential. The fact is, Dynamics CRM is not a Nano.

Functional differences are, generally, easily copied. There is the possibility of a complimentary offering to differentiate e.g. superior customer service but this has not yet revealed itself if it is on the cards.

Segmentation strategy: In my opinion this is the best option for Salesforce. Just as Pivotal focuses on medium-large organisations with very complex work process requirements, Salesforce also needs to find its ‘niche’ to justify the premium price. What this niche will be is not obvious.

Conclusions

Microsoft has made it clear that they wish to own the cost leadership position. This leaves one of two options for Salesforce. Differentiate its offering or focus on a specific market segment (or both). Either option is profitable but, if Salesforce believe they can continue to prosper with general appeal and no obvious difference in their service, their territory will be slowly captured until they are removed from the map.

The Seven Ages of Dynamics CRM Reporting

2011-02-18T16:59:00.001-08:00

I have just spent three days locked in a room with a client working out the reports they need to come out of CRM. What I got out of the exercise, other than copious notes and writer’s cramp, was a much richer appreciation of the ways we can report out of CRM.

There are, as far as I can tell, seven different ways we can report out of CRM, all with different strengths and weaknesses. Here they are in rough order of complexity.

1. Advanced Find Views and System Views

If we need to slice and dice our data and list the resulting records, it does not get much better than this. These can be set up for everyone (system views) or users can do it themselves and save the results (advanced find view/personal view). We can browse up to parent records (show me all contacts working for a company in the retail industry) and down into child records (show me all companies with sales opportunities over $50,000).

The big downside is there is no aggregation of data. That is, we cannot ask for the sum or average amount of a money field. For that we need something more powerful. Also, we cannot directly print. To print we need to export to Excel and print from there.

2. Entity Forms

This is a bit of a ‘left field’ kind of report. In the workshops, the client wanted a summary form, similar to the out-of-the-box ‘Account Overview’ report, except for opportunities. Different milestones, during the sales process, needed different summaries of the opportunity. With the multiple form capability of CRM 2011, we can now create different forms for our form-based report and then print them by going to File-Print Preview.

The downside here is that the forms are quite rigid in their formatting and can only show fields from that record (or grids of records from child records). For example, an opportunity form cannot show fields from the client record.

3. Word Merge

In some ways this is the extension of printing a form. The word template allows us add graphics, macros and fields from parent records.

The big disadvantage here is it is really hard to add in child records. It can be done, as evidenced by the out-of-the-box quote report, but it is not a simple process. Also, depending on the complexity, it may be simpler to create a SQL Reporting services (SRS), but more of that later.

4. Dashboards

Brand new to CRM 2011 are dashboards. We can drill through to sub-records, we can change the layout and we can mix and match grids, web pages and graphs, all without a single line of code. For displaying data from multiple sources in CRM the dashboard is an excellent choice.

What is the downside? Printing. I am yet to find a way to print a dashboard short of a screenshot. This is a shame because in so many other ways they are great.

5. Dynamic and Static Excel Worksheets

The next level up from views for tabular reporting, Excel worksheets are one of my favourite reporting tools. Practically any list in CRM can be exported to Excel for further manipulation. We can add formulae, formatting and graphs. We also have the option of a static worksheet (a direct dump of the data) or a dynamic worksheet (this sets up a connection between the spreadsheet and the CRM database such that every time the spreadsheet is opened, the data refreshes with the latest information).

There are not many limitations with Excel spreadsheets and most users have enough Excel knowledge to make them deliver exactly what they are after (or know the office Excel guru who can help them out). The only limitation I can think of is we can only export one entity record set at a time but, for most tabular reports, that should be fine.

6. Dynamic Excel Pivot Tables

If you do not know about Pivot Tables and you work with large sets of data, such as is available in a CRM system, you need to learn. Pivot Tables allow us to look at our data, comparing different fields against each other. I once had a client who did not know about Pivot Tables and tried to create a table like the one above using lookup formulae. It took them hours to get right. Using Pivot Tables, this takes minutes to put together.

In the above, I am looking at the status of various leads compared to when they were entered into the system. In one table it becomes obvious that most leads are still new, most were entered in on 9/2/2011 and most have not yet been qualified.

As with worksheets, these are exported with a dynamic connection back to the database so they refresh every time they open.

Again, if this is the format we are seeking for our reporting, there are not too many disadvantages with Pivot Tables, other than getting used to them and being able to work with only one entity record set.

7. SQL Reporting Services (SRS)

The ‘Rolls Royce’ of CRM reporting, this is a free add-on to SQL Server which integrates with CRM. We can access multiple data sources, display the data in either a tabular or form-based format, add in graphics or practically anything else we want. There are very few limitations with what we can do with SRS reports.

The big limitation is to create an SRS report requires technical knowledge beyond the scope of most users. While there is a report wizard within CRM, this is quite limited in what it can achieve and is only good for tabular reporting.

Summing it up

In the case of my workshop, we decided that most of the client’s requirements could be met with Excel reporting. Even though some of their reports were form-based, the client was happy entering in an ‘opportunity number’ to isolate the record of interest and then having an extra worksheet full of ‘vlookups’. When reviewing reporting, consider this table to see which type of report may be right for you.

	Advanced Find and System Views	Entity Forms	Word Merge	Dashboards	Excel Worksheets	Excel Pivot Tables	SRS Reports
Tabular Format	Yes	No	Generally No	Yes	Yes	Yes	Yes
Form-Based Format	No	Yes	Yes	Generally No	Generally No	No	Yes
Charts	No	No	Generally No	Yes	Yes	Yes	Yes
Images and additional content	No	No	Yes	Yes	Yes	Yes	Yes
Access Parent Record Fields	Yes	No	Yes	Yes	Yes	Yes	Yes
Display Child Records	No	Yes	Generally No	Generally No	No	No	Yes
Multiple Data Sources	No	No	No	Yes	Generally No	No	Yes
Data Aggregation	No	No	Generally No	Yes	Yes	Yes	Yes
Drill-through	Yes	Yes	No	Yes	No	No	Yes
Printable	Yes, indirectly through Excel export	Yes	Yes	No	Yes	Yes	Yes
User Configurable	Yes	Generally No	Yes	Yes	Yes	Yes	Generally No

Hidden Tricks of the Workflow Update Step

2011-02-11T17:11:00.001-08:00

One of the more powerful, yet under-utilised aspects of workflows is the update step. While many administrators know that it can be used to inject a value into a field, what is not commonly known is there are a few hidden functions that can also be used to manipulate the values in the fields, rather than just replace them.

For all fields, we always have the option of ‘Set To’ and ‘Clear’. For text fields, we also have ‘Append With’ and for int, float and money fields we have ‘Increment By’, ‘Decrement By’ and ‘Multiply By’.

To access these functions, we open the update configuration screen, click into the field of interest and drop down the Operator option in the Form Assistant.

For all of these operators, we can apply a dynamic value via the Add button in the Form Assistant or a static value by entering it into the Default value field in the Form Assistant and clicking OK.

If we want to take two values and update a third field, we will need to use two update steps. One to insert one of our values into the result field and the second update step to apply the second value to the value in the result field.

Finally, for those using version 4, you can still do most of these things. The only difference is there is no ‘Append To’ operator in CRM 4. To achieve the same result, you do an update step and set a dynamic value of “{original attribute} {additional text}”.

E-mailing Attachments En-Masse in CRM

2011-02-07T05:14:00.001-08:00

At a pre-sales meeting recently, a client mentioned they deal with foreign students and sometimes need to send all attachments associated to a contact to a government department for reporting purposes e.g. visa records, passport information etc.

This had me stumped because, at the time, I could not think of a simple solution to get around this. Certainly you can add attachments to a contact record but to attach them to an e-mail would require saving each one to the desktop and then attaching them one-by-one to an e-mail (or a bunch of custom code). Even with the new integration to SharePoint in CRM 2011, one would need a custom solution to gather all the documents in the document store and add them to an e-mail.

When I got back to the office I had a flash of inspiration; what about sales literature? A new feature of CRM 2011 is the ability to send all the attachments associated with a sales literature record with one click.

Sure enough, not only can I create a relationship between contacts and sales literature but I can rename sales literature to something more appropriate (Student Documents).

To print, we open up the sales literature record and click the ‘Send as E-mail’ button

Now this solution is not perfect. The two biggest downsides are that you have to retype in contact’s e-mail address once you click the ‘Send as E-mail’ button and I can find no way to rename the ‘Sales Attachments’ label. However, given the potentially expensive alternatives, this provides a lot of bang for minimal buck. As an added bonus, we can use this technique to cluster different kinds of documents for the contact and only print one cluster at a time. Perhaps the clusters are different reporting bodies or perhaps we want to have a set of official documents and a set of internal documents. for each one we simply create a new sales literature (student document) record.