The Future of the Office and the Cloud (What is the Cloud?: Part 2)

This follows on from a post I did about 18 months ago called What is the Cloud? and follows on from an excellent discussion I had on the weekend with a good friend of mine who works at VMWare. Back in the “What is the Cloud?” post I described how a computer works and then used this as a model for describing the various modes in which cloud computing is used i.e. IaaS, PaaS and SaaS.

The Debate

The debate had on the weekend was concerning Bring Your Own Device (BYOD). This is the idea that employees want to bring their own technology to work rather than use the company’s. There is no doubt this is an emergent trend and, in the case of mobile phones, I would suggest the battle has ended. In my case, while I often will be issued a corporate mobile phone, I generally forward it to my personal phone and just use this. It is very difficult to enforce against a BYOD trend in the case of phones when it is so easy to forward phone calls.

However, in the case of the work device e.g. PC/laptop, various models are still in play in the workforce.

Workplace Models for Work Devices

In my experience with organisations, I see three models at play:

• Traditional: Work Device = corporate owned
• BYOD: Work Device = employee-owned
• Dumb Terminal: No device (Screen, keyboard and mouse with all application and data provided remotely)

In the case of the first two, certainly at NEC, we operate in a hybrid mode i.e. some people use NEC’s devices and others bring their own.

Forces at Play

People Are Caring Less About Where Their Data Are (Storage Indifference)

For me, I want all my data in the cloud (see Moving To The Cloud Parts 1, 2 and 3). Back in the old days I had to do regular backups (never happened) and if I needed to access information outside of the home, I was hamstrung. While I still maintain you lose control by moving to the cloud, the benefits, for most, outweigh the costs in my opinion.

Organisations are still concerned by going ‘all in’ with the cloud because of security and uptime concerns but I believe these concerns will diminish over time.

The Internet is Getting Faster

In Australia, and other countries, the old copper lines originally installed for phone calls and adopted for data, are being replaced by fibre optic lines. Fibre optic can transmit data at crazy-fast speeds relative to copper line technology with other advantages such as less loss of signal (ideal for Australia given the size of the place).

Companies Want to Secure Their IP

Whatever model is employed in the future, the intellectual property of the organisation must be protected. There is no doubt employees are influencing the direction of IT policy but governance must be maintained.

Companies Want to Reduce IT Support and Maintenance Costs

If there is a model which means companies spend less with negligible disadvantage, this is a model they will adopt. Nothing can resist the forces of economics.

Employees Getting Frustrated With Stuff Not Theirs

Employees want to work with their ‘stuff’. They can fix it quickly without going to IT support and they know where everything is. For power users, their equipment may also be more powerful than what is provided by the organisation so using their technology reduces frustration and potentially increases productivity.

Consideration of the Models in Light of the Forces

Traditional

Of the five forces, the main forces which impact the traditional model are the last two. Economically, the BYOD and dumb terminal models have the potential to be cheaper from a maintenance perspective. From a user’s perspective, there is a misalignment between the devices delivered by IT and the needs and wants of the user. Often a user’s home device does a better job of meeting their requirements.

BYOD

The last three forces impact the BYOD model. One of the big worries with BYOD is the security of information held on the user’s device. However, using remote desktop technology (in some ways turning the user’s device into a dumb terminal) can remove these problems. BYOD also reduces support costs as long as a policy of “user device – user problem” can be enforced. Effectively the cost of support is off-loaded from the organisation to the employee. Finally, any frustration of having to use a corporate device are removed in BYOD leading to happier and more productive employees. Forrester studies back up the notion that users are more productive in a BYOD model.

Dumb Terminal

The only real difference, in regards to the forces, from an organisation’s perspective between this model and BYOD is a dumb terminal is not the user’s own device. However, assuming all applications are available for the user and their performance is not hindered I cannot see why this model would not be acceptable to the average user.

The Short Term Winner

Based on the above, I think the short term winner will be BYOD although it will be a slow move. The adoption of ‘security wrapper’ technologies to make CIOs and IT managers more comfortable about third party configured environments coming onto the network will not happen overnight.

While users want the right to use their stuff, I am not convinced they are willing to accept the responsibility of managing their own device. The application of “user device – user problem” policies, without any form of compensation, will be resisted, especially at organisations with employees who must use computers but who are not power users. Being forced to source a machine for work use and pay for support is not something that all employees will delight in.

The force that will drive BYOD is the economic one: the belief by organisations that it will save them money. I am not convinced by the simplistic purchase saving arguments. Depreciation takes care of those. However, if employees are taking care of the maintenance of their device and there is little disadvantage to the organisation in delivering applications to the devices, there should be savings in that area.

Why The Cloud Changes Everything

Let us now project to a future of fibre where the internet is crazy-fast and ubiquitous (at least 10 years away for Australia). Consumers and many organisations are comfortable storing their data and sourcing their applications from the cloud. Perhaps we no longer have the equivalent of our desktop/app page running locally but run it from the cloud as well. Think of a Chromebook, without the problems or a PC running an equivalent of Cloud. Is BYOD still the winner?

In this world, the device is irrelevant. If I am accessing everything from the cloud, including the equivalent of my desktop/app page, as long as I have a device which connects to the internet everything just works.

In this world the Dumb Terminal/No Device model is the winner as it ticks all the boxes and offers little disadvantage to any party.

• Force 1: Everything is in the cloud so as long as I have a connected device, my world is at my fingertips (or eyes) and it all just works.
• Force 2: The speed of the internet is such that applications are delivered without issue and because they are running in the cloud local device specifications are irrelevant
• Force 3: Future cloud security is sufficiently smart that it is no longer feared in the same way encrypted hard drives remove the fear of laptop loss today
• Force 4: I provide a set of dumb terminals to access the corporate cloud applications and data. Terminals specifications are irrelevant as everything is running from the cloud and maintenance is minimal
• Force 5: Employees no longer care about using their device because all devices, from a data and application access perspective, are equal in this world.

Conclusions

The cloud is where the information will live, but not yet. Attitudes and technology need to catch up first. While that is happening people will carry their data with them and their own devices. When they go to work they may be asked to use other devices connected to other sources of data and be asked not let the two connect. Given our personal and working lives are mingling through tools like social media this will slowly erode as people get frustrated with the artificial barriers.

As attitudes change and technology removes the excuses, our lives and our actions will be recorded on a server ‘somewhere else’ via the internet. This applies to individuals and organisations. While we will have ‘home devices’, ‘mobile devices’ and ‘work devices’ and the form factors may change to suit the need, their basic function will be identical; to attach to the internet where we do stuff and record stuff. The world will be a giant dumb terminal plugged into a cloud of applications and information. Of course, making predictions ten years hence is the actions of a madman, but I am excited to see where the rollercoaster takes us.

Creating a Strategic Plan

A few weeks ago my boss asked me to put together a twelve-month plan for the CRM team. He wanted me to identify things like:

• Areas where the CRM team are weak and strong
• Ways to align the CRM team to the values of the business
• Opportunities in the market to pursue

If you are given this task and never done a strategic plan before it can seem gargantuan but with a few tools, you can put together a plan like an MBA graduate without too much stress.

The Mantra of the Strategy Plan

Any kind of strategic roadmap-type plan seeks to address three questions:

• Where are we now?
• Where do we want to be?
• How do we get there?

I generally add these headings in the document and tackle them one at a time.

Where Are We Now?

I break this up into the external analysis (what is happening outside of the organisation) and the internal analysis (what is happening within the organisation). In the case of being a reseller, I also consider the external and internal analysis of the product i.e. for Dynamics CRM, what external factors are affecting the product and what factors within Microsoft are driving the product.

For the external analysis there is the very useful PESTEL analysis (or one of its variants). PESTEL stands for:

• Political: Government policy affecting operations/product
• Economic: Economic factors affecting operations/product
• Social: Cultural aspects affecting operations/product
• Technological: Technology changes affecting operations/product
• Environmental: Climate and weather factors affecting operations/product
• Legal: Laws affecting operations/product

I generally brainstorm anything that comes to mind that may have a bearing on business in the next five years. For example, whether businesses are moving to the cloud or not is a technological factor that could affect operations.

Once you have the PESTEL analysis laid out, you may also want to consider aspects such as the strengths and weaknesses of your competitors or, in the case of a product, the strengths and weaknesses of competitive products.

When all the external factors are documented, it is time to consider the internal factors which affect operations. For example, it may be the strengths and weaknesses of the CRM team or the values of the business which the CRM team are expected to follow. Perhaps it is the industries the CRM team have worked in and how a strong vertical presence may be an advantage in winning new work.

Where Do We Want To Be?

If your bosses are communicating a clear vision of where they expect the business to be and when, this is where this feeds in. If not, you can derive some potential directions using a SWOT analysis.

SWOT stands for:

• Strengths
• Weaknesses
• Opportunities
• Threats

Again, these are broadly considered internal (strengths and weaknesses) and external (opportunities and threats). We now feed the PESTEL factors into this and, to find a path for the future, we try to match up strengths and opportunities and weaknesses and threats. Directions will present themselves as ways to exploit opportunities using our strengths or mitigating threats by reducing weaknesses.

For example, let us say from our external analysis we know that none of our competitors have a Business Intelligence (BI) practice and from our internal analysis we know we do. Our strength in BI now presents a market opportunity if, for example, the market is interested in BI tools for their CRM system. We are uniquely positioned to serve this need.

For those factors which do not provide an insight into a potential direction, we can remove these from the document.

In my case I derived about half a dozen Strength-Opportunity pairs and half a dozen Weakness-Threat pairs. Using the direction provided by my boss I filtered these down to directions aligned to the larger goals of the business.

How Do We Get There?

The final step is putting together some meaningful actions to head in the right direction. I generally set for each ‘direction’ a 0-12 month action (broken into four quarters), a 1-5 year ‘action’ and a 5 year plus ‘action’. Obviously each action feeds into the action for the next timeframe. So, in the case of the BI opportunity, out first four quarters might be:

• Quarter 1: Liaise with the BI team to see if they are keen for a joint venture
• Quarter 2: Put together a cross-function team to develop a trial offering
• Quarter 3: Offer the trial to existing clients as a free product on condition of regular feedback and thoughts
• Quarter 4: Incorporate initial feedback into the offering and liaise with marketing to promote it

This then feeds into our 1-5 year action which might be “having a market-ready BI offering for Dynamics CRM”.

Our 5 year action may be “be the market leader in BI for CRM”.

Conclusions

Obviously not my usual blog topic but if you need to put something together to give you a bit of direction on where to head either at work or maybe even for yourself, this might give you a few ideas on how to approach it. My advice is start with the PESTEL and you will soon find the rest falls into place. Good luck.

A Couple of Form Security Tricks

Forms have come a long way in CRM 2011 and here are a couple of tricks I use a fair amount.

Hiding Locked Fields

Some forms have fields which simply cannot be taken off the form. A good example is the Account Name field on the Account entity.

While we can stop the field from being compulsory, by going to the field settings, we cannot remove the padlock indicating it is locked to the form (and any other forms we create from this one).

The solution is we hide the field in a hidden section. If we create a new section on the form, we can set its properties to be not Visible by default:

All we then do is drag our locked field to this hidden section and we no longer see it on the form.

Please note: If you put a compulsory field in a hidden section and try to save the record it will automatically expose the hidden section so you must make the field not compulsory for this to work (or autopopulate it via jscript OnSave). Also, as in my example, if you are hiding the default name attribute, populate it by using either a jscript or workflow because, otherwise, any child record will show a blank lookup reference, which can be confusing for users.

Dodging Compulsory Fields

Let us say you have a two-step process for handling cases. The call center team receive the emails, quickly reply to the simple queries and convert the trickier ones to Cases for the resolution team. The resolution team then get into the details of the Case and resolve it. It is conceivable that the call center team will not need to know as much detail as the resolution team and, being a team which is dealing with high volumes of queries, simply do not have the time to get bogged down into finding out the important information. It makes more sense for the resolution team to find this information out as part of their investigation.

In version 4, this meant we had a problem. If there are key fields on a Case form needed for things like business reporting, assuming they are compulsory, they must be filled out when the Case is created. Even today, many consultants will tell you to get around the problem we either relax the compulsory nature of the fields or write some tricky jscript to check the role of the user and tweak the fields dynamically.

With 2011 there is a little known alternative approach using forms. As you may know we can create multiple forms for a given entity and assign them to different security roles. We can even create roles with no actual security rights but use them as a way of giving forms to users.

In our case, let us create two forms: one for the call center users and one for the resolution team. We will take the detailed form with all our compulsory fields on it and ‘Save As’ to act as a template for our call center version. The problem comes when we try to remove the compulsory fields; the computer says ‘no’.

To get around this, we do a bit of a supported hack/workaround. We go to the field in question, make it non-compulsory, come back to the form, remove it and then make the field compulsory again (you will probably need to publish the changes between these steps as well).

The net result is we have a form with a bunch of compulsory fields missing from it. What is great is the form does not complain when the call center staff use it and hit the save button; it seems saving only checks the fields on the form in visible and hidden sections but not the fields off the form. This means the call center can create the seedling of a Case, assign it to the resolution team and, because the resolution team only have access to their detailed version of the form, they are forced to fill in the rest of the compulsory fields. No code needed and no compromise to what the business needs to capture.

Conclusions

If you are looking at form design and working with forms for entities like Cases or Products, you may have come across the kinds of problems mentioned above. With any luck these tips might save you some angst and code writing, enjoy

CRM: Culinary Recipe Management and Socialisation

In the spirit of my CRM Adventure Game and CRM Hangman I now present using CRM as a recipe database. This is a pre-cursor to my ultimate dream of creating a CRM cocktail database.

There is not much of a lesson here (although I do propose a very practical business use for this a little later on) other than it is something I wanted to do to show the flexibility of the platform (and because I am now doing the cooking in the house and wanted a way to ask “If I have ingredient ‘x’, what can I cook”). As usual, everything I have done here I have done without code and all up has only taken a few hours at the keyboard while watching TV.

The Structure

Pretty simple stuff, although I will likely extend it as time goes on.

Essentially, we have a recipe with ingredients. These ingredients are basically a food item with a measure e.g. 1 teaspoon of vanilla essence. A recipe also has equipment used to make it.

The Screens: Recipe

Not much to report here. I added the grids to the form to make data entry easier and at the bottom I added a multi-line text box to store the instructions.

The Screens: Ingredients

The complication here is I did not need the default text attribute. To get around this I added a new section, made it hidden by default, made the default field non-compulsory and set up a workflow to populate it when the record is created or when the Measure or Food Item fields change.

“To Serve” marks if the ingredient is a garnish or not a key component of the recipe.

The Screens: Food Items and Equipment

Again, simple stuff.

Reporting

One thing, which is always a hassle when putting together recipes is the shopping. Thanks to the Reporting Wizard, I can now select the recipes I am cooking for the week and generate a list of ingredients to check against the pantry and work out what I need.

I added in the Serves column because different recipes serve different numbers of people. I could have scaled the recipes to a common unit or split out the numerical component of the Measure field and done something clever by feeding it the number of people I am cooking for and scaling the values with code but this requires effort so I have left it as an exercise for the keen. For now, to use as a list to check what I need, it does the job.

Using Mobile Express, I can also access all of my recipes on my IFD-enabled or Online version of CRM anywhere. Very useful for clarifying whether a recipe needed dried or fresh herbs, for example.

Other Ideas

Other things I have thought of but not implemented are:

• Adding Calorie information to the Food Items (and then bringing this down to the Ingredients and rolling it up to the Recipe to get the total Calories in the meal)
• Linking Food Items to each other to record substitutes (or possibly using Connections)
• Adding matching wines to the recipes
• Incorporating Food Pairing to create completely new recipes

Using CRM For Socialisation

While this and the two games I previously put together are a bit of fun, there is a way you could use this for business in fostering a collaborative culture. The recipe configurations could easily be incorporated into a production CRM system. Why would you do this? To bring people together. A recipe database is something people can contribute to for the fun of it and give them an opportunity to discuss cooking tips in the office.

The rule could be all new starters must add a recipe to CRM. This gives them an opportunity to learn the system as well as letting others in the team know a little bit about them. Maybe it could form the basis of an office cook-off.

Alternatively, perhaps your team are keen gamers or movie buffs. If so, why not add a review section to the CRM system. Maybe you want to add a swap-meet section so people can sell old items through the corporate CRM system and deliver them through internal mail in the name of bringing people together.

Conclusions

The Dynamics CRM platform is very flexible and allows us to store organised information for practically any purpose with little, if any, coding. While a recipe database may not the obvious choice for an enterprise CRM system, it is easy to implement and provides a reason for people to come together through something other than the daily grind. However, if recipes are not your thing, try something else. The only limit is your imagination and the courage to do something different for the greater good.

Salesforce Third Quarter Results for 2012

Another quarter and despite it, again, being represented as a solid result, the fundamentals have deteriorated. As usual, I stick mainly to GAAP (Generally Accepted Accounting Principles) results which Salesforce presents to the Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) rather than the non-standard results presented by Salesforce to the public. There will be one significant exception for this quarter which is a $149 million tax offset but we will get to that in a bit.

Earnings Call Buzzword Bingo

As we did last quarter, let us see what is on the minds on Benioff and Smith this quarter.

This Quarter’s Keywords (total words: 3000)	Last Quarter’s Keywords (total words: 3200)	Last Year’s Keywords (total words: 3400)
revenue (38 times)	revenue (39 times)	revenue (31 times)
cloud (20 times)	social (21 times)	social (23 times)
growth (17 times)	cloud (20 times)	cloud (15 times)
customers (13 times)	growth (19 times)	growth (14 times)
social (13 times)	cash (17 times)	enterprise (13 times)
marketing (10 times)	operating (17 times)	sales (12 times)
service (9 times)	service (15 times)	customers (9 times)
cash (9 times)	enterprise (10 times)	chatter (8 times)
sales (9 times)	customers (9 times)	expense (8 times)
customer (8 times)	dreamforce (9 times)	heroku (7 times)
enterprise (7 times)	marketing (8 times)	subscribers (6 times)
mobile (7 times)	sales (8 times)	service (6 times)

Key phrases (two words or more) for this quarter included:

• deferred revenue (14 times)
• cash flow (9 times)
• revenue growth (6 times)

It is fair to say revenue and growth are the focus for the CEO and CFO, as they always have been. As usual other key financial measures, such as profitability did not rate. However indirectly, as we will see further on, Salesforce have clearly communicated what they consider their future prospects for profitability are.

New Topics

The only new topic on the list is ‘mobile’; a hot topic in CRM as people move beyond the laptop/PC.

Topics in Decline

As was the case last quarter, mentions of social are down about one half from last year. I speculated last time this was due to the backlash against 'Salesforce using the term ‘social enterprise’. Given that phrase was not said once this time around, in keeping with Benioff’s commitment to abandon the expression, this could be the reason.

Topics on the Rise

There is a focus on marketing, whereas this was not mentioned a year ago and is in keeping with their acquisitions of Radian6 and Buddy Media.

The Big Write-off

Before I get into the financials, there is something that must be addressed. If you look at the numbers, you will see Salesforce has put aside $157m for taxes (a number well outside of historical norms) and this has led to a quarterly loss of $220m and a financial year to date loss of about a quarter of a billion dollars. Given last year’s loss was $11m, there is something clearly out of the ordinary here.

This is how CFO Graham Smith described it:

“Our GAAP results this quarter include the impact of a onetime, noncash charge of $149 million to establish a valuation allowance against our federal and state deferred tax assets.”

“Deferred tax assets on the balance sheet represent the value of tax deductions and credits to offset future tax liabilities. These assets include net operating loss carry-forwards, R&D credits and book/tax timing differences, such as accrued liabilities. U.S. GAAP requires companies to regularly assess the realizability of deferred tax assets by evaluating certain criteria. These criteria include whether the company has a cumulative 3-year historical pre-tax GAAP loss, as well as the timing and likelihood of near-term GAAP profitability.

After performing this analysis in Q3, we determined that a valuation allowance was required as near-term realization of these assets is unlikely. But just to be clear, our deferred tax assets have expiry dates many years into the future. And so we do anticipate being able to use these assets at some point to offset perspective tax liabilities.”

If you are like me, you did not understand a word of it. The best article I can find on deferred tax assets is this one from the Motley Fool. This is my interpretation of the situation. If you make a loss as a company you get a tax credit with the idea being that when you finally make a profit, you can offset the tax you would normally pay with this credit. On the accounting books this tax credit is carried as an asset because, in some ways, it can be thought of as a bag of money standing by to use to pay taxes in the future.

However, what if a company never makes a profit? In this case the asset will never be realised i.e. the credit will never be used and having it on the books is misrepresenting the true value of the organisation. To keep the asset value of a company accurate, the government has put in place certain ‘triggers’ which mean a company must assess the likelihood that such an asset will be used, if one of these triggers goes off. In the case of Salesforce, the trigger was making a net loss over the past three years. Yes, despite all this awesome growth, Salesforce has lost more money than it has made over the last three years.

Salesforce has reviewed the likelihood that they will use this asset i.e. make a profit and determined that $149m of this tax credit will never be realised. This can also be seen in the balance sheet where ‘Deferred Income Taxes’ has gone from $165m down to $21m.

So to make this clear, when Graham says “near-term realization of these assets is unlikely” he is saying “we are not going to make a profit any time soon”. He then makes the plea that at “some point” they will use it but, frankly, if there was a reasonable prospect of using them, they would not take them out of their assets. You can stretch your optimism in an earnings call but the government require you to be practical.

Ultimately though this is a write-down and does not reflect their current business operations (more their future prospect of making a profit) and so I have removed the expense from my financial calculations below. We will see, even with this item eliminated, things are not rosy when we look beyond revenue growth.

Revenues and Costs

Green is cost growth year-on-year and red is revenue growth year-on-year. As Benioff mentioned, year-on-year revenue growth came in around 35%. What he did not mention was that to achieve this, they had to grow expenses by 42%. This is disappointing. In the previous four quarters they had successfully tempered cost growth and brought it back to the same rate as revenues. Unfortunately, it seems to be impossible for Salesforce to reduce the rate of growth of costs to below that of their revenue and therefore head towards profitability. We can see why they needed to write down their deferred tax asset.

In terms of absolute numbers, the only notable change is the larger loss. Excluding the write-off, the loss to the business for this quarter was $70m. This is a larger loss than the previous five quarter losses combined. The largest profit made by Salesforce in a quarter was $21m this time two years ago (and also back in 2009). So this quarter’s loss is more than three times the largest profit ever made in a quarter.

Margin

Some of you may remember my log scale graph from last year. While the shape is similar, the difference here is this is not a log scale. nothing is being stretched here. The fact of the matter is, even with the massive $149m write-off removed, margins are plummeting, down to –9% this quarter. In other words, for every dollar they spend on generating a sale, they return around 91c. we are now at a point where Salesforce is selling $10 notes for $9.

Staff Numbers

Marc mentioned that staff numbers were up 34% from this time last year, which is true. What he did not mention was this is the slowest rate of staff growth in two years. Around 40-50% year-on-year growth has been the norm for the last year or so. In other works, staff growth appears to be tailing off.

Conclusions

Despite a deterioration in profitability, this has not deterred Benioff on his focus on revenue growth at all costs, literally. My hope last quarter was that Salesforce would return to profitability but this is unlikely to be the case any time soon. This deterioration of position is confirmed in the declaration of the CFO that Salesforce will not be making a profit in the near future and the subsequent revaluation of their ‘tax credit’ asset.

As usual I hope Salesforce can turn things around as competition is a good thing. If not they will continue to bleed money and dig themselves a hole that it will become increasingly harder to get out of.

A Stellar Roadmap for Dynamics CRM?

The past six months have not been the steadiest of courses for Microsoft and their CRM product. Microsoft announced grand and exciting plans, as discussed last month. Dynamics CRM partners and MVPs were frothy at the mouth with the new things coming and many could not believe Microsoft had transitioned from their traditional three-year cadence to a six-monthly one and still managed to deliver such bounty.

As it turned out it was too good to be true and at the eleventh hour Microsoft pulled some of the more exciting features delaying them for six months.

After regrouping, Microsoft have released their new and improved roadmap for the upcoming December 2012 Service Update (called ‘Polaris’) and the one after this to come mid-year 2013 (called ‘Orion). I thought it would be a good time to see what they have planned for these two releases.

The November 2012 Statement of Direction

If you want to read the latest roadmap and read about Polaris, you can do it here. There is even a promotional video showing Microsoft’s Dynamics CRM / Windows 8 vision. These are my take-outs from the Statement of Direction.

The Charter

To make it absolutely clear that Microsoft has a set of guiding values and principles, they called out their CRM ‘Charter’.

I personally like it. There is nothing concrete here e.g. when specific functionality will be delivered and this is as it should be. These are simply the values which Microsoft are calling out as their criteria for including or excluding features in the product.

For example, the ‘Ubiquitous’ values make it clear that Microsoft will not go down a path of ‘lock in’ with Internet Explorer or design CRM to only work with a keyboard. If the use of Kinect as an interface becomes popular, this value also embraces that as a choice. If the business world starts using RaspberryPi devices, Microsoft has a clear charter to build CRM for these as well.

In terms of exclusion, the ‘Productive’ values make it clear the plan is to bring further integration between Dynamics CRM and ‘the stack’ (other Microsoft products). This means that products like Lync and SharePoint will become more intimately entwined and, while there will be ‘hooks’ available for alternatives, this will not be an area of strong investment.

Investment Areas (Polaris)

Both the Statement of Direction and Release Preview guide talk at the areas of investment for the upcoming releases. These are broken down into:

• Applications (sporting a picture of a Windows Phone with ‘apps’ icons)
• Experiences (showing someone operating their Windows Phone and slate)
• Platforms (showing an oil rig platform. Seriously, what?!?)

The Polaris summary graphic gives the highlights:

Here are some of the major call-outs:

• Applications
• Configurable sales and service processes: Think Solution Selling or at least a Microsoft version of it
• Experiences
• A UX to match the process changes

• Yammer integration: While the Record Wall was nice, now we have a true Chatter contender. Security management will be interesting
• Multi-browser support: IE, Chrome and Firefox on Windows, Firefox and Safari on Macintosh
• iPad support (although they are saying only for the sales process)
• Platform
• Skype built in: I imagine this will be click to call, like the free Skype add-in for Dynamics CRM 2011, but will not pop up boxes for incoming calls. I hope I am proven wrong
• New bulk data API: This means we should be able to get imports at rates higher than 50 records/second. That is fantastic news for projects with big data sets to import
• Custom workflow assemblies for CRM Online: Bringing it in line with On-Premise deployments

Investment Areas (Orion)

Thanks to the CRM User Group (CRMUG) and new CRM MVP recruit Chris Cognetta we have the Orion summary graphic:

Given Chris assures me this has been presented at CRMUG, it should not be in violation of my MVP NDA but, if it is, I am sure Microsoft will let me know and I will take it down.

Interesting items mentioned here are:

• Exchange server synchronisation: This used to be in v1.0/1.2 but was abandoned all those years ago. It looks like it is back
• OWA and MOWA support: So many times I get asked if CRM works with the Outlook Web App (OWA) and have to say no. In six months this may not be the case
• Integrated marketing management: Given Microsoft just acquired MarketingPilot, which appears to be quite a comprehensive little package, this could be what they are referring to here. If so Core Motives, Click Dimensions and Exact Target must be very nervous

Other Stuff Hinted At

Things mentioned in the Statement of Direction but not explicitly called out for the Polaris or Orion release are:

• A new ‘agent desktop experience’ for Service: I am wondering if this is an overhaul of the old Customer Care Accelerator
• Centralised administration for CRM and Office 365: Unfortunately this is unlikely to be case in the short term for Australia due to third line reseller entanglements
• Lync integration: Likely to be similar to the Skype in that is will be call out but not inbound pop-up enabled for CRM (again, happy to be proven wrong)

Conclusions

One thing which interests me is the clear shift from creating a ‘process platform’ to a sales/service tool with configuration capabilities. From a marketing perspective this makes sense as it is much easier to show a tangible sales process than a set of configurable tools to match any work process. Whether the xRM capability of the platform will be compromised by this is yet to be seen.

On a more positive note, to be honest, this is the first time in a while I have confidence that Microsoft have a clear direction dictated internally and not by the competition. Microsoft are defining a clear path, separating them from the competition, rather than saying “Us too!”. Microsoft are not pleading their cloud credentials or trying to tell us how social they are. They are simply stating the values driving them and the features they are bringing to their product to support these values. I applaud the new approach and wait eagerly for Santa Ballmer to deliver his goodies.

50 Shades of CRM: The True Story of the CRM Field Guide

This is the history (and a bit of a book review) of the CRM Field Guide (http://www.crmfieldguide.com). To paraphrase a much greater tome, to tell the story of the book it is best to tell the story of some of the minds behind it.

History

On the 9 December, 2009 George Doubinski, a CRM MVP whose generosity is only matched by his dry Russian wit, wrote:

“Hi MVPs,

I’m probably one of the least qualified people on the subject yet for some inexplicable reasons I’ve been approached by one of the publishers about writing a book about new version of CRM. Writing a book, as some of you will vouch, is a tedious and time-consuming exercise. If you are looking for a return on investment, your time will be better spent flipping burgers. Genuine love of writing,  glory (albeit, a minimal one) and vanity are the only true reasons to even contemplate writing anything.

Having considered that, I still think that “MVP Cookbook on Microsoft Dynamics CRM 5” is not such a bad idea. Collection of recipes coming from people who do know their stuff.

I’m sure some of you have already been approached in the past and may have refused the offer of writing a book but a contribution of just one or two chapters is a significantly smaller effort and might just work. So if you believe that it’s not a scheme heading for an absolute disaster, please get in touch with me off the list.

Note that you will have to have access to CRM5 TAP with a signed NDA, of course.

Thanks

George”

Despite many positive responses, essentially nothing happened for about a year. Then on 13 August 2010 when, undeterred by the apathy of his comrades, George wrote:

“If you recall I floated idea for MVP cookbook some time ago after being one of the many approached by the same publisher… A few of you have responded and expressed the interest to participate and believe me, I have not forgot, simply was running inside the hamster wheel for a while. And with 2011 upon us, we probably need to re-group anyway.”

At this point I, and others, jumped on the book bandwagon. I wrote a chapter on workflows and dialogs and others threw in their bits and pieces.

Unfortunately the progress of others was slow and after yet another year all we had was three chapters (including mine) totalling about 150 pages of unedited content. The vision of an MVP-written book on CRM was fading.

By the end of 2011, CRM MVP Donna Edwards made one last-ditch attempt to restart the MVP book engine. Here is an abridged version of her email:

“As most in this email thread are aware, we kicked off a CRM MVP book project about a year ago.  We hit some bumps in the road and stumbled a bit but the good news is we are back on track with a stellar group of contributors.  If you are included in the To: line above, then you agreed to contribute one or more chapters to the CRM MVP book.  What an awesome bunch of individuals and I am thrilled to have each of you onboard!

Below is the list of book sections, chapters and authors.  As you will see, we have a great lineup and I think a good matching skillset for each chapter.  I hope you are all happy with the identified content.  Please contact me if you think we’ve missed something critical or have another chapter you’d like us to consider including.  As it stands now, the book should come in at over 600 pages”.

With Donna and Julie at the whip, not only did 19 CRM MVPs produce a book but it managed to overtake the 600 pages, eventually coming in at 940 pages.

Content

Despite my hideous bias, I think it is fair to say the book is comprehensive in its coverage. Topics include:

• Server/Client installation
• Security setup
• Report development
• Integration
• Configuring CRM and packaging configurations in solutions
• Data management
• User adoption strategies and tips from the trenches

It is also fair to say that, given the broad scope, there are areas where it is shallow in depth. For example, there is little code in the book (however the chapter on solutions is, by any measure, comprehensive). Similarly, my chapter of processes covers the essentials but, in terms of using processes you could write a whole book (and Richard has).

Review

Obviously, given I wrote a chapter, count most of the authors as friends and receive a cut of the sales, it is difficult for me to review the book without some conflict of interest. However, I do believe there is something for everyone. If you or your team need to have a broad range of skills, in regards to Dynamics CRM, this is a great pdf to add to your reader. If, in reading the field guide, you determine there is an area you need to dive deeper, you can select one of the more focussed books in the market.

In terms of the quality of the content, it is difficult to argue against the pedigree of the authors, given they are all CRM MVPs and, moreover, we all got to pick the CRM topic we are passionate about or have strong knowledge of. In my case, I have a passion for processes in CRM, if only because they give me the power to make CRM do things only possible otherwise through code. However, I know precious little about the email router whereas Giorgio had written extensively on the router prior to the book and therefore was in a perfect position to create an informative, quality chapter.

Conclusions

While the book has literally been over 1000 days in the making, I believe the wait has been worthwhile. The book is the distilled wisdom of about 1/3 of the world’s CRM MVPs and from http://www.crmfieldguide.com is only $49.99. It is fair to say even MVPs will learn something from this book (and I intend to).

If you want to try before you buy, I do run the CRM MVP Gospel twitter feed (@CRMMVPGospel) which quotes a line from a random page in the book each week. While the feed may not change your world, it will give you an idea of the subjects covered in the book and who wrote them.

Once you have sampled its wares, head to http://www.crmfieldguide.com and get yourself a copy. I doubt it will be as popular as “50 Shades” but, unlike that novel, the vast amounts you learn from it you can employ in the workplace without fear of permanent injury or scarring.