Jukka Niiranen

What’s the best part about getting a brand new computer? The joys of installing all the apps you need? Copying your files from your old computer? Re-entering login information to websites you had cached your credentials for in the old computer? Probably not any of these. I’d say it’s without a doubt the utterly amazing speed of the new computer compared to the old one. “Wow, this thing is FAST!”

A few months roll by and you’ve already gotten over the initial wow effect. At around one year later, you’re probably already cursing at the same computer for taking such long pauses in between tasks. “God, this thing is soooo sloooow. Should I start looking for a new computer already, even though this one is like, what, only a year old?” Many of us have gone through this cycle already so many times that we’ve come to expect it to be the norm. Some bite the bullet, completely wipe their existing hard drive and re-install Windows on their old machines once a year. Others try to clean up things on their registry, remove installed apps, defragment their hard drives and so on, until they give up and just buy a new computer. Which, initially, will again give the huge rush of “Wow! Fast!”, for that brief moment in time.

Everyday agony at the office

I had been using a Fujitsu Lifebook S760 at work for 1.5 years and was starting to feel desperate. My ability to perform everyday tasks with the tools I had were severely hindered by the piss poor performance that my PC was delivering. Not only was the time needed for booting up the machine growing beyond 15 minutes, but normal operations like opening, saving and closing Office documents simply seemed too challenging for the Lifebook to handle in a smooth enough manner. I was constantly reminded of the performance issues while working on the computer, paying attention to the machine’s struggle, which had an adverse effect on my own performance as a knowledge worker who needs to juggle multiple pieces of information on the screen to get the job done.

I’ll be the first to admit that I had installed & removed a high number of applications during the course of the past year, which had inevitably left a mark on the system. However, I had also performed every trick I know in order to make sure the operating system and the hardware were optimized for their job. I had of course regularly run apps like CCleaner & JetClean, removed unnecessary services from system start-up, re-arranged my hard drive, disabled Aero etc. Still, my 20 years of experience with PC’s were of little use in making the situation any better.

Old PC vs. “new” PC

Luckily I got hold of a spare laptop at our office that was identical to the one I had, but it had a lot less mileage on it. I created a user profile for myself, configured the basic Microsoft apps & Online Services login and installed the latest updates. Although it was far from a brand spanking new device with that “Wow!” factor, the difference was huge. Since you rarely have two identical pieces of hardware available side by side, I decided to do a little speed test. The challenge was this: from a cold boot, log in to Windows, launch Microsoft Outlook, write an email to yourself (single character subject & body) and receive the same email in your inbox.

First, let’s compare the time from pressing the power button to getting a Windows domain login screen (over corporate WiFi): old PC 2:12 / new PC 0:57. Alright, we’ve already saved over 50% of our time so far. Now comes the more challenging part of loading all Windows services, authenticating to Exchange Online and getting the Outlook UI into a responsive state that allows us to write and read emails. The final results (time from the power button): old PC 12:00 / new PC 5:40. The same difference held through until the end, I was able to perform the same simple task in less than half the time it would have taken on my old laptop. Meaning, in theory, I could get twice as much done while at the office.

Is that the best we can do?

The fact that a PC with less clutter in its user profile and registry was faster in such a test is no surprise, of course. I was personally surprised that the performance of a semi-new work laptop was still so poor when you measure every second. Granted I had not exactly optimized the spare machine much before clocking the times, but still. Waiting for five minutes to accomplish a computing related task feels absurd. In this day and age, who’s got an attention span that long anymore?

I decided to try the same challenge on my 4 month old home PC, equipped with a solid state drive. Hard drives have now long been the most influential component in terms of improving the performance of your computer, assuming you’ve got a decent level of CPU power and memory available. To make the scenario even more interesting, I skipped launching a desktop app like Outlook and just used Chrome to access Gmail (since who runs Outlook at home anyway?). With the help of an SSD and cloud based apps, the time from boot to login was 0:20, with the email was sent & received by the time the clock hit 0:50. That’s one sixth (1/6) of what the newer office laptop was able to perform with its old fashioned spinning HDD and a desktop email client app. Compared to the older laptop setup, the process at home took only 7% of the time. Talk about a productivity boost! And on my free time, too!

Go faster, leave it on

Ok, so you may be questioning why I’m so keen on measuring the time it takes from a cold boot to running an app. Couldn’t I just put the PC on sleep mode instead? I could, but the reality is that both the old and the new work laptop give me an error 4 times out of 5 when trying to resume operation after the sleep mode, so in fact that would be even slower than a cold boot. Hibernation is of course an option and that’s what I use whenever I need to move from point A to point B with the laptop. However, getting into hibernation always takes at least 2 minutes and resuming from it results in an agonizing period of lousy app response times when the Lifebook is trying to regain consciousness after it has been woken up. Therefore, sleep or hibernation on a Windows laptop is not the solution, it’s just a new type of problem.

The only answer to the curse of slow tech seems to be to never turn off your devices. Now, what’s particularly great about this answer is that we’re already surrounded by computers that are always on & always connected. The only thing is that we don’t call them computers, instead we label them as “smartphones” or “tablets”. In many ways, they are far better computers than any of my actual computers.

If I perform the same speed test of sending an email to myself on my iPad, Windows Phone 7 or Anrdoid device, I won’t start from a powered-off mode since that simply isn’t how I ever interact with them. They’re always on, so I simply click a button and enter an unlock code, swipe a pattern, or even just let the phone recognize my face with its front facing camera, and voilà, it’s ready! The mail app will be exactly as responsive no matter when I click its icon, and the data connection will be ready for transmission, as these things are designed to keep hold of the WiFi or cellular network as hard as they can with their tiny internal antennas.

From slow tech to invisible tech

There’s a reason why corporations are starting to equip their employees with iPads. It’s not because they look cool or have the nicest user interfaces for Facebook & Twitter. It’s because they really, truly make information accessible to knowledge workers anywhere, anytime, with the least possible amount of friction. Instead of being a barrier between the user and the information, like traditional office technology, they are almost entirely transparent gateways to the information that get out of the way and give space for the user to think. Not they other way around, which is when the user is waiting for the computer to think.

Sure, we pay a price for the luxury of having our mobile devices work this way. We must sacrifice old benefits like proper multitasking, freely arranged application windows, the freedom to install any software bits, compatibility with legacy software, large screen estate, even the physical feedback from a keyboard & mouse. By spending €600 on a tablet instead of a laptop we ultimately get less computer for the same money. But at the end of the day, that is nothing compared to the price we pay for the curse of slow PC technology. Absolutely nothing. The difference between having the required information and the manipulation tools for it at your disposal whenever you need, compared to the fear of trying to undock a Windows laptop and keep it from not crashing and rebooting while you move from your desk to the meeting room – that is the biggest price difference of all.

The time may not be ready for the whole of humanity to abandon their old computer gear and start celebrating a pure post-PC era. After all, you can’t program a smartphone with a smartphone. There’s a wealth of use cases where you don’t want to replace the sophisticated and accurate input devices we have with a flat piece of touch enabled glass. Sometimes all the CPU, memory and storage capacity is needed locally, as is the number of pixels provided by a multi-monitor setup. Mobility is not everything, every time.

We still need trucks to deliver raw material to the factories and goods to the retail outlets. The thing is, we don’t need trucks for driving to the supermarket to pick up the end product and take it home with us. For that we can use family sedans, sports cars, motorcycles, even public clouds transportation. The information super highway, as it was once called back in the prehistoric era of personal computing, is only now starting to see the type of vehicles that allow us to really make use of its long straight roads and the abundance of lanes. It was never meant to be driven on by the same heavy machinery that were used during its construction phase.

It’s time to replace our trucks with something a bit more fit for the task, don’t you think?

As I’m writing this, the Mobile World Congress 2012 is under way. Being the biggest event of its kind, here’s how the self description reads on their website:

Our industry is redefining “mobile”.  No longer limited only to communications, mobile is now a force transforming our world in an unprecedented way. Mobile connects, entertains, informs and inspires us, ultimately changing how we live and who we are.

Redefining, as in “boring”, by chance? Because that’s how I’ve found myself reacting to all the mobile phone announcements recently.

I was doing a comparison between Nokia Lumia 800 and the new Nokia Lumia 900, to figure out if I wanted to ask my employer to get me one or the other. I opened the specs side by side on my monitor in an attempt to analyse the finer engineering details and come up with a winner. I didn’t. It’s the same phone, the same operating system, the same apps. The only clear difference between the two devices is the size of the screen: 3.7″ vs. 4.3″. And even that little detail is kind of a false victory, as the resolution is the same on both of them, because of Windows Phone. The very same OS I already run on my current Samsung Omnia 7, released over a year ago, but of course updated to the latest Mango version.

Yes, a significant factor in why the device releases nowadays have become so boring is that hardware makes so little difference anymore. The operating system and the applications continue to marginalize the importance of their host devices. Sure, the build quality of a mobile phone still has to be decent, the screen needs to be good enough and the battery life should be at least one day (well, it is never enough on modern smartphones). Beyond that, I’m having a hard time getting excited about physical attributes in mobile devices anymore.

There was a time when each and every round of releases in the world of mobile phones introduced new features that got me thinking “oh yes, that’s something my next phone needs to have”. Now I feel just as much excitement towards the new round of Nokia/Samsung/HTC devices as the sneak preview of the Dell/HP/Lenovo spring line-up of laptops. The manufacturers are now in the role of just a hygiene factor, rather than the driver. The experience on any Windows 7 laptop is going to be fairly identical (for the first few months, until your PC grinds to a halt like they always do). The real differentiator is not a new model from HP with a shinier display – it’s Windows 8. Similarly, in the world of Microsoft-based mobile devices, we’re unlikely to get much surprises or deviation from the release roadmap pointing towards Windows Phone 8. Predictable, reliable, compatible and oh so boring.

Yet that doesn’t stop people from buying smartphones. By the looks of these numbers, people hardly make babies anymore, but they sure like to shop around for mobile devices. Everyone and their dog has an iPhone these days. Granted, most of them don’t do much else non-phone use with it but read their Facebook newsfeed, but a global smartphone population in the hundreds of millions will ensure that even niche apps and social networks can carve out a decent market for themselves in the long tail.

In MWC 2012 we saw Samsung release a mobile phone with a built-in projector. Nokia, on the other hand, released a phone with a ridiculous 41 megapixel camera, just so they could do away with having a physical zoom. Isn’t that the kind of innovation to really get excited about? Well – not really. If you buy a Samsung Galaxy Beam, you can expect a battery life of 10 minutes for projecting your slides in the meeting, after that you’ve got a brick in your hand where your phone used to be. If you go for a Nokia 808 PureView, you’ll be stuck with a burning platform inside your smartphone, also known as the Symbian OS, which is known for making simple things as sharing photos without cables a nightmare. How many would be comfortable with compromises like these?

Neither of these revolutionary devices are able to challenge for the nr. 1 position in your pocket. You wouldn’t replace your iPhone 4S with them, now would you? That’s OK, because they’re not meant to do that anyway. You see, you don’t get to 4.8 billion handsets in the world without selling a few second devices to the 4.0 billion mobile phone owners.

Remember when you only had one TV in your house? Or just a single computer for the whole family to use? While there’s a significant population out there who’s already been carrying more than one cell phone in their pockets for years, the main driver behind this has always been telecommunication. Cheap calls to specific networks, optimizing your SMS plans etc. Well, that particular driver is about to go southbound as the whole telco business may have well peaked. As Microsoft continues to bake in services like Skype and GroupMe (both which it owns, btw) into its mobile platform, and as Apple engineers keep dreaming of the SIM-less iPhone, it’s certainly looking like software is about to eat the world of mobile business, like it’s already done elsewhere.

What this means is that mobile phones will become capable of everything and everything will be able to perform many of the tasks we use mobile phones for today. Do we really care if it’s a pico projector running on Android OS, or an Android mobile phone carrying a pico projector? If you want your camera to have better connectivity for sharing images onto your other devices and into social networks, why not just start building the solution from a platform that already does the sharing part and just add a killer camera? Why build a universal remote control for home entertainment devices on the old infrared concept, when your smartphone gives you a great touch UI, has WiFi connectivity and so do many of the other gadgets you want to control with it.

Perhaps the industry is being “redefined” after all. It simply doesn’t take the same old form of an upgrade cycle for your one and only phone. As Tomi Ahonen puts it, the mantra of the perfect device is over. With tablets, e-readers, ultrabooks and smartphones surrounding our everyday lives, now its time for us to optimize for the perfect device for the particular occasion. Which means we’ll get to do much more casual gadget shopping and spend less time waiting for the next Jesusphone to be announced.

Yesterday I bought my first desktop PC since around 2005. I felt really nostalgic clearing up space under the desk to fit the black box, and also to notice that they still make computers without built-in WiFi adapters in the year 2012. Oh well, I bought it purely to get a piece of that SSD magic – and boy, is it fast! I can barely see a difference between installing a local app or opening a web app.

Anyway, back in the late 90′s when we all were buying those beige boxes and living the golden era of Wintel, would you have ever thought that Apple could make a comeback and overthrow the PC market? Well, they have now done just that. iPads are outselling desktop PCs and are now equal to 17% of the PC market.

Of course there are still more Windows based computers sold than Macs or iPads combined. The thing is, Wintel was never really the king of the mobile computing era, which started when we replaced desktop PCs with laptops. Sure, you could carry around an XP equipped machine in your backpack and boot it up whenever you had some half an hour to invest in nursing your PC on and off, connect it to the network, balance with the battery life and all that.

At the end of the day, what you had was a portable desktop PC, not a true mobile computer. We had to wait for the iPad to reach a point where computers are just like magazines in our bags or on the kitchen table. You don’t manage a magazine, and similarly you don’t have to think about the iPad when you pick it up. It’s ready for you, it stays in the background as much as it can, and 90% of the time it delivers you all the computing power you need for the occasion.

It’s not just the hardware, of course, but the whole Wintel^3 experience that Apple can deliver because it can design everything but the last mile of UX (the app). Why is it that when you buy a laptop PC from Acer, Sony or whoever, the first thing you want to do is get rid of all the crapware applications that came bundled with the machine? How can it be that when a single company gets to choose what to include in the end product, the result in the PC world is pure garbage? Seriously, no one ever chose the Sony laptop over the Acer one because of the software that came with the Vaio. In a Wintel world the only true difference the manufacture was able to promote was the physical design of their physical product, since all the software available for PC’s was the same anyway.

Hmm, come to think of it, didn’t Nokia just release their first quarterly results as a Windows Phone device manufacturer? Yes, they did, and reports indicate that they’ve sold over 1 million Windows Phone devices. That’s not a bad start, considering the phones are not even available in their home market Finland yet, let alone many other significant markets, like the US. Sure, the smartphone sales are dramatically down from one year ago, but that’s not really relevant, since Symbian always was a burning platform anyway.

I’m sure the numbers will improve as a result of Nokia+Microsoft joint effort in pushing their 3rd ecosystem to the market, especially the enterprise market. It’s not as significant anymore as it used to be, thanks to the BYO trend of employees choosing their own iPhones over corporate RIM’s or whatever. It may not be the market that sets any trends, but it’s a world where no one can really challenge Microsoft when it comes to luring in the IT departments. No one loves Microsoft there either, but it’s better the devil you know, and the devil that knows you.

Where does that leave Nokia then? Isn’t this the Wintel story playing all over again on mobile phones? Well, yes, it is. Sorry. The best Nokia can hope to achieve is that the Lumias become the Vaios of the new mobile computing era. Given how Windows 8 is heading towards the Windows Phone 7 model in terms of UI and app distribution, it’s actually not very outlandish at all to assume that Nokia will soon be competing head on with Vaio laptops. Give me one reason why they wouldn’t? Of course we won’t be calling them laptops anymore, since that’s the label for portable desktop PC’s. They will be called tablets, slates or whatever combination of letters the biggest marketing departments in the world can come up with.

In the 80′s we had Nokia PC’s, called MikroMikko, being a clone of the IBM PC, running Microsoft DOS. In the 2010′s we’ll see Nokia mobile computers, called Lumia, being a clone of the Apple iPad, running Microsoft Windows 8 / Windows Phone 8, depending on the form factor. History comes full circle, only to repeat again.

The inevitable launch of Google’s new personalized search has stirred up a lot of discussion on how Google broke the Internet, made its search engine inferior to Bing, screwed over Twitter etc. Wow, were there people in the tech industry that didn’t know this was coming?

Perhaps these have been the same people who’ve declared Google+ a failure over and over again. Even the fastest growing social network is not enough in a world that has Facebook. And even if there would be tens of millions of registered users for the service already after a few months, at least they weren’t using this “ghost town” of a network (see the discussion around #aavekaupunki in Finnish). Yeah, it can only be a failed attempt from the Mountain View engineers to build a Facebook clone, since that is the gold standard of social networking that every other contender must be evaluated against.

To all those people surprised about the launch of Google “Search Plus Your World” with integration to Google+ profiles, circles and posts, I’d like to present the following question: did you think for a moment that Google was not going to leverage it’s core competence (search) in the social network it was building? Vice versa, was it not blatantly obvious right from the start that the company would utilize this new social data source it has unlimited access to (G+) for improving the relevancy of search results?

Ok, enough of the “my network is better than your network” wars. For the end user there’s precious little significance in which US based company is luring in the biggest number of status updates per second. What we ultimately want is for the creation, sharing, discovery and consumption of relevant information to be as convenient as possible, so the question is: what can I get out of a social search engine that wasn’t possible before?

Yesterday I came across a brilliant presentation from Jeff Atwood (behind Coding Horror and more notably Stack Overflow), which contained this quote from Clay Shirky:

Work is when your boss tells you to do something, you do it, and you get paid.

work is motivated by inherent interest and generally unpaid.

It was late Sunday evening and I had happily spent a good number of hours reading work related articles on my free time and loving every moment of it. The though of the looming Monday morning and returning back to mundane Work tasks made the concept strike a nerve and I decided I wanted to post it on a social network, as people generally do nowadays in such situations. I went googling for the source of the quote, to get a link that would be shareable (yes, it is a word). This is what I received:

It turns out I had actually already posted an article referencing the very same speech 11 months ago, only I didn’t have any recollection of it. It was on my Posterous “blog” that I’ve used mainly as a public noteboard of interesting articles I come across regarding knowledge work. Due to the ultimate simplicity of Posterous, it’s very quick to compose an email with quotes, images & links, send it to the Posterous email address  and see it turn into a blog post, which is why you don’t need to spend much time thinking about the topic itself. A noteboard is only useful if you know to go and read its content, which is what I didn’t know. But Google did.

Ok, the result in the example is most likely taken from a tweet rather than a Google+ post, since that didn’t exist last February yet. The point is not really about Google+ itself, rather it serves as yet another reminder that the web knows you better than you do. Instead of being frightened of the privacy implications, what I would recommend everyone to do is to make the most of it – exploit the intelligence of the machine that we’ve all helped to build.

Related artists. Who to follow. Recommendations based on your browsing history. The Web has to be working for us, not the other way around.

— Jukka Niiranen (@jukkan) January 5, 2012

For example: in a world of personalized search, is there any longer a need for social bookmarking á la Delicious? Why should I bother saving links into my own list on a separate point solution like Delicious, when I might as well share the link to my followers/circles/friends/whatever and trust that the system will bring it up if I ever need it again? Trying to come up with descriptive tags for links all on my own seems like a futile attempt compared to the power that the networked online society can have on building relevancy for the shared content.

To continue on the thoughts expressed by Shirky, sharing is work, but not Work, as it feels inherently like the right thing to do and requires effort, yet you don’t get paid for it. “Big Work drives the economy, little work drives the Internet.” It took around 100 million hours to create all of the content on Wikipedia, but thanks to the evolutionary nature of social technology and the network effect, the next Wikipedia will most likely take only a fraction of those hours. It has to, and we really shouldn’t settle for anything less. It is therefore imperative that the tools being built by companies operating in the realm of IT, be it the Google Goliaths or the start-up Davids, strive to make the most of what the collective little work of the online population has already built, because that is the best way to foster motivation of workers (with a lowercase w). This motivation, in turn, will be more and more in demand as the human civilization is facing problems that its capitalist system is not very good at solving. The little work can go a long way.

As what comes to the search engine business that built Google / Google built (any which way you want to look at it), we’ve already seen signs that indexed search has peaked. The way we used to search for content is on the decline, and if Google would be sticking to what they do best now, fighting against the next big thing, they would be standing on the deck of a sinking ship. You could well blame them of being hopelessly late to the game of social, but based on what I’ve seen from them during the past year, I wouldn’t count them out just yet. The reason is, I believe we don’t yet have nearly enough tools for social technology to make us as smart as we could be.

Right now we have the infrastructure  in place for networking with people and sharing content. That’s a good start and it’s been a big enough revolution on its own to fuel the stellar rise of services like Facebook and Twitter. However, if we’d just continue on the same path of ever increasing tweet counts, would we end up becoming increasingly smart or rather end up in the lunatic asylum? If we look at the content search functionality offered by Twitter (basic keyword search on less than a week’s worth of data) or Facebook (absolutely none!), it’s easy to see that the game has only just begun on developing content relevance and discovery algorithms that deliver real added value over simply consuming an ever growing feed of data. While social media has brought us new strategies to overcome information overload through relying on recommendations and content sharing  by people we know/trust, this won’t scale indefinitely, and it is in fact quickly contributing to the very problem it once promised to solve.

In order for us to keep getting smarter through social networks, the filters available to us will need to get smarter first. The question is: can Google produce the missing UI needed for harnessing the true power of social networks? And if not Google, then who?

I’ve got a Windows Phone 7 device that refuses to send/receive SMS’s. I’ve got an Android device that refuses to stay awake, thus not allowing me to receive phone calls. I’ve got an iOS device designed for consuming web content that refuses to stay connected to any WiFi network. Now isn’t today’s mobile technology just grand?

Don’t get me wrong, these are all wonderful toys and I love having shiny gadgets as much as the next geek. However, as their capabilities increase, so does they time I spend maintaining the gadgets and their applications. Configuring settings, hard resets, custom ROMs, googling for answers to problems that also other users have. Back in the days of hardware centric consumer electronics it used to be possible fix problems with spare parts, but when the value of the electronics is increasingly built out of bits, there’s often precious little that a repair shop could do to fix that bit for you.

With more joy comes more pain. You gain new ways to be connected with people, yet you loose something that you used to take for granted, such as phone calls and text messaging reliability. The devices get cheaper every day, which means there’s more features for the buck, like it or not. Very quickly even the entry level mobiles will have the features that a top of the line iPhone introduced a couple of years ago. The feature list will extend infinitely, but the user experience can degrade just as fast. Our future handheld devices will do a million things, cost next to zero euros, yet they may still leave the user less satisfied.

Life used to be so good

Never thought I’d say this out loud, but I’ve actually started to consider if I should grab a Symbian phone while Nokia is still manufacturing those. You know, in a “one more for the road”, “here’s to the good times” kind of way. Then again, we all know what Symbian has become, so if I really would want to have a simple, working mobile phone for oldskool communication like phone calls and SMS (even the occasional MMS, heaven forbid), I’d need to aim for an S40 feature phone instead. Something that hasn’t been destroyed by Nokia’s futile attempts to catch the iPhone wave. The wave, which, you could say, is one reason behing the troubles that more and more people are facing with their “devices previously known as mobile phones”.

And that’s where the troubles begin. I’ve lost my ability to be a feature phone user. Here’s a few reasons that come to my mind:

Input method. I haven’t used a non-QWERTY keypad for typing messages since 2005. Looking back at my handset history, using the numeric keypad was a period of roughly 9 years, and it’s now been 6 years since the end of it. I’m not getting any younger, so I’m assuming I have already lost the capability of typing with the traditional feature phone keypad. I also never adopted T9 for real, so it would be just as ackward for me.

Contacts. All my contact information on friends, co-workers, customers and online acquaintances lives in the cloud. When I install a new device, the data flows from Gmail, Facebook, Exchange Online, Twitter etc. The days of moving data around on a SIM card have truly passed. A feature phone without a cloud connection would be a silo that simply couldn’t be maintained. No way do I plan to install any more crapware like PC/Ovi Suite, Kies or something like that for data synchronization. No cables, please, these are wirelessly networked devices.

Operators. I’ve got in total 4 SIM cards at my disposal that each have unlimited mobile data plans. 2 from my employer, 2 of my own. If I would transfer my primary phone number to a feature phone, I’d be effectively closing down one 3G data pipe that is being paid for.

The legacy of the GSM revolution

The fact that certain communication methods we still use in our modern society are tied into physical SIM cards is in a way one root cause for these dilemmas. If you try to call me and one of my devices just happens to be unavailable at that time (battery is out, network is down, device is rebooting, forgot it in the other room etc.), why couldn’t I pick up the call from some other device? If you send an SMS to me and pay a few eurocents for the privilege, why am I more limited in the choice of how and where I can receive the message and reply back to you? Emails, tweets or even FB messages are available to me anywhere I am 24/7, and their cost per transaction is zero cents. Which leads me to ask the question: is the problem really the lack of GSM like reliability with today’s mobile devices, or are we again trying to solve a problem that we should no longer have?

Nostalgia can be a fun pastime and it also serves as a tool to give us human beings perspective on where we’ve come from and where we are right now. When used in the right way, it also enables us to analyse where we will be in the future. Use it the wrong way and you’ll just end up living in the past, hoping and waiting for the train to turn on its tracks, all the while it’s getting further and further away from you. Instead of just sitting at the train station, cursing the way how the world is these days, maybe I’ll need to focus on picturing in my mind where the train is heading right now.

You see, there will become a day when you can’t reach me from a phone number any longer. In fact, the technology surrounding me today is already doing its fair share to make sure the day is getting closer and closer, even if I’m not personally asking for it to do that. It presents me a compelling, alternative method of communication and asks me with its calm voice “would you like to try this instead, or should we go back to the old way and forget about these new possibilities? It’s you’re choice, I’m here to serve you either way.” And of course we won’t stick to the old, because our curiosity will always eventually trump our resistance to change. It was a tough call for many folks to give up their land line telephones, but still it was only a matter of time. I expect we’ll see similar phenomena also in the future.

We’ll move on from “connecting people” to “connected people”. In the “connecting people” era, it used to be the technology between two people that allowed them to reach out their hands and establish the connection and communicate with one another. In the world of “connected people”, the technology has already drawn people to gather around its virtual bonfire, which is where all the communication takes place. You don’t have to be online all the time, but the connection doesn’t disappear even when someone steps offline – the flame keeps on burning. Our devices enable us to be present at the bonfire whenever we want, at different levels of intensity (active speaker, casual attendee, passive consumer) that suit our current status in the physical world. Whereas the GSM technology included text based communication only as a side product (almost an accidental invention), the “connected people” will use text as the primary and persistent for of communication, supplemented by voice and video when appropriate. Finally, the transformation will not take place as a result of the new communication services and products that the major telecom industry players have been trying to design and sell to big corporations for use in their operative business. Just like with GSM, it will ultimately be the consumer adoption of new social networks and communication tools that makes the transition from old to new a reality.

So, I’m sorry to break this to you, but there is no way back to the golden days of GSM. Having said that, I still wouldn’t mind if the product engineers and FOSS fighters working on smartphone platforms would still reserve a decent fraction of their time on providing reliable applications for supporting legacy protocols such as telephone calls and SMS. As we can learn from the story of Microsoft Windows (1.0 to 7), there’s still a tangible business value in being able to support your own legacy. And most importantly: it can be done.

Last week I wrote a post on how the iPad’s and iTunes’ dependency on USB-cable based content synchronization is undermining Apple’s post-PC agenda. This week in WWDC 2011, Steve Jobs took the stage to announce upcoming features to iOS5, including the iCloud service. Does this mean Apple is compatible with the cloud era requirements? Yes and no.

Yes – in the sense that we will finally see the chord being cut on iOS device activation and operating system updates. Over The Air (OTA) updates will finally arrive, three years after the feature was available on Android. Well, at least they’re on the right track, making the 5th generation iPhone purchase experience more in line with the overall UX that Apple traditionally excels in. Wi-Fi sync of iTunes library content to iOS devices will certainly be helpful for people who are actually managing content with iTunes.

No – because the biggest announcement from WWDC was aimed at solving the wrong problem: synchronizing files between devices. I’m of course talking about the seemingly wonderful service that iCloud will provide to millions of Apple customers living in the content management hell brought to them by previous Apple innovations. When acquiring digital content from iTunes store is made so convenient, you can easily end up in possession of a lot more digital content than you had before. Now, to make sure you continue to purchase content from iTunes store, it’s only natural that the store keeper will feel the need to make managing this content easier. Enter Apple iCloud, priced at $25 per year, which promises to remove the burden of moving files back and forth between different storage locations. iCloud will match your iTunes library content and make it downloadable (notice: not streamable) to any device registered to your Apple ID. Hurrah, problem solved! Or is it?

Here’s the thing: we don’t need a better way to synchronize music files, we need a way to remove files altogether. I don’t want to own bits if I don’t have to. Ever since I signed up for a Spotify subscription, the real need for me to manage digital music files locally on my gadgets has in practice already been removed. That’s because Spotify is not a store like iTunes, it’s a service. Anyone familiar with the cloud computing concept will probably know the term SaaS, software as a service. What this means is that you no longer purchase a copy of the installation media or bits for a software application, rather you subscribe to a service that delivers the application to you (most often through a browser). Subscription based services for music delivery, such as Rdio and Spotify, have already brought the SaaS revolution into our PC’s, smartphones and iPods. Why purchase music as bits if you can get them as a service?

In the business IT lingo people are talking about public cloud, hybrid cloud and private cloud. Basically the first one is a “real” cloud service like Gmail or a private business application built on a publicly available cloud platform like Windows Azure. The last one is used when trying to operate with many of the principles of the cloud, while still remaining in possession of your own servers and application instances, perhaps located in an external data center. Hybrid… well, let’s not go there. A label that some people have cast on the private cloud option is “false cloud“. I think this also fits with what Apple has introduced to the world as their version of the cloud. It initially looks like a cloud service for music (“all your music available anywhere!”), but in reality it’s a cloud service for files (“…just the music you already had somewhere”). Blah.

iCloud will no doubt become a success. Knowing Apple’s track record in delivering excellent usability, it may well turn out to be a killer product for cloud adoption among consumers. I can imagine it becoming “Dropbox^2″ in its ability to solve day-to-day file synchronization problems, which is surely great news. What the iCloud will not do is make the iTunes paradigm relevant again, for those customers who’ve already left their bits behind. In my eyes, Apple has become a victim of its past success in selling both the hardware for media consumption as well as the content. Evolution over revolution is a safe bet to make when you’re riding on the top of the evolution wave. iCloud could have been Apple’s revolution, but now it looks like the revolution may take place elsewhere.

We have great gadgets with state of the art wireless connectivity technologies around us, in our pockets, on the office desk or on the bedroom drawer. Everything is network enabled these days, be it your TV, printer, eBook reader, USB drive, game console or almost any device with a screen and buttons. That’s the way it should be and that’s how it increasingly will be.

Why is it then that we’re still required to plug in a variety of USB cables into some of these devices? Not for charging it with electricity, but for loading it up with bits. If I’m able to consume much of the bits already through the wireless network connection that hooks me up with the great big data cloud of the Internet, then how can there be another category of bits that must still travel through the cable?

Let me illustrate the issue through two recent experiences I’ve had, one sponsored by Apple and the other by Nokia.

Case iPad 2 and iTunes

I recently decided it was finally time for me to give up on trying to steer clear from Apple products. The tablets are not just a new revision of the mini-PC/netbook boom from three years ago, I believe there’s much more to them. If the netbooks were about squeezing the familiar PC experience into a more portable form factor with a lower price tag, the tablets are aiming to bring us the smartphone experience of iOS and Android on a not-so-miniature device that gives better room for content presentation and user interface design. You could say it’s a case of less vs. more, which tends to trigger the primitive human reaction of “more is better”. I was so impressed with what my 4.3″ Android smartphone was capable of delivering compared to my previous 3.2″ gadget with the same OS + applications that I wanted to see what happens when you keep adding up more hardware goodness in a similar environment.

In an ideal world I would have preferred to purchase an Android tablet, as there are several reasons why I believe it will eventually become the leading platform for tablet computers and applications. However, the future is not here yet, as we’re pretty much lacking both the Android tablet computers and applications right now. Devices like the Samsung Galaxy Tab with pre-Honeycomb/3.0 version of the Android OS are not true tablets in my opinion. Also the current Android applications designed for a typical 3.5″ smartphone screen probably wouldn’t deliver the “more” effect I’m after. There’s no way around it, iPad rules for the time being. With the recent launch of v2 it was also easier to justify why now is a convenient time to invest in new hardware.

I won’t bore you with a general iPad 2 review here, I’ll just state that it totally rocks your socks off. Now, the one thing that doesn’t rock one single chord is the fact that you need to plug the device into a PC/Mac equipped with iTunes just to turn it on. In a way I understand the need for the iPad activation as a part of the bigger picture that includes the App Store, credit card billing, DRM and all that jazz. A necessary evil if you are stepping into the light /dark side (depending on one’s point of view) of the Apple empire. However, there’s some big irony in the whole post-PC era gospel preached by Steve Jobs when the product that should lead us into this era starts its life with a navel cord attached to a PC.

It’s no secret that I hate the iTunes application and what it has become. If I only had to use it as an occasional maintenance dock for the iPad OS updates and user identity verification, I might be able to live with this handicap. Unfortunately that’s not quite the end of the story. After having hooked up my iPad into all the usual web services like Facebook, Twitter, Gmail, Google Reader etc. (which inspired this tweet), I wanted to see how this thing works on consuming some less dynamics content, meaning books. I have a Kindle 3 and love the experience when used in conjuction with Amazon’s book store account, but not all of my eBooks are Kindle optimized. Some things just work better in PDF and especially in color, so the beautiful iPad screen should really shine with this type of content.

What I would like to see for the iPad is a similar service as Amazon has, where you can email PDF’s to Amazon and they’ll optimize it for you and deliver the book into your Kindle, wirelessly through a WiFi connection. Ok, email may not be an elegant choice of technology, but the process flows very smoothly for the user. When I wanted to achieve the same end result for the iPad, I was initially completely lost on what I should do. I had downloaded the iBooks application from the App Store and it did have a Store button allowing for book purchases (but of course not for us Finns, as there’s nothing on sale in the local iTunes book store, except freely available books). How was I supposed to get my own content into the library?

I hooked up the iPad into its navel cord again and launched iTunes. Since you can’t just copy files on an iPad, like you would for any other USB-enabled device with internal memory, there had to be a way here to get the PDFs flowing into the iPad. I didn’t see any menu item related to books or PDFs, the only synchronizable content appeared to be the usual iTunes bits for music, video etc. Finally after rubbing my head for a while and clicking around the menus, I figured it out: I had to perform the “add files to a library” process on my PC’s iTunes instance. Selecting PDF’s brough up a new category called “books” in the library, which also then became available as a syncrhonizable category for the iPad when the device is plugged in with the cable. A few more clicks, then performing a synchronization operation for the very first time (since my music and photos are already online in Spotify or Picasa Web Albums) and eventually the content appeared inside the iBooks app.

Does this process make sense on a device that has both WiFi and 3G always-on internet connection (which often doesn’t work, by the way)? Like hell it does. The tablet computers are essentially big windows into the cloud of content that the web has to offer for us. They are not media players like the early iPods, where you transfer bits from your home media banks into a mobile device. That was the world ten years ago, why must the shadow of iPod and iTunes still haunt the iPad? At a bare minimum, the content synchronization should be something you can perform wirelessly instead through the USB port, but ultimately iTunes as we know it has to be removed from the process completely.

When we look at the competition ahead, Google doesn’t have any legacy comparable to iTunes, which is why the Android devices are much better prepared for the post-PC era with no strings (cables) attached. For the average tech consumer it may not feel like such a huge drag, and I’m sure Mac/iPod users don’t pay much attention to it at all. Nevertheless, the behaviour patterns everyone is learning from more recent services like Dropbox or Spotify will make Apple’s inconvenient truth gradually ever more visible to their customers.

Case Nokia C7, Symbian^3 and Ovi Suite

Speaking of Dropbox, after initial scepticism of the service’s alleged greatness, I’ve grown to love its beauty of simplicity and ubiquity. The service runs on my home PC, work PC, Android phone and iOS tablet, quietly taking care of small but important tasks such as making sure my KeePass database of usernames and passwords is always available wherever I go. The ability of Dropbox to deliver a dead simple way for masking the file transfer and synchronization complexity into a simple folder that’s available across devices makes it the perfect service for “normal” people who are not interested in the geeky side of technology and gadgets. It just works.

My dad recently bought a new mobile phone, a Nokia C7. I didn’t have the heart to try and convert him into an Android user, as the leap from traditional “dumbphones” built for phone calls, into a full-blown portable computer like the modern smartphones, might have been too long. If SMS is only just becoming a routine for you, it’s maybe best that your first smartphone resembles a mobile phone that’s familiar to you. That’s pretty much what Nokia offers. The C7 has a decent touch screen and a Symbian^3 OS with a few bits and pieces of what iOS, Android and WP7 (why not start including it in the list now) are made of, but at the end of the day an average user might easily mistake it for an S40 mobile. Sometimes this is not such a bad thing at all, we must keep this in mind.

The big screen and the capable camera make the C7 a nice gadget for shooting photos. Nokia has always been great at hardware and if I’d have to find a way to regularly get high quality photos captured with an Internet enabled device, I’d probably turn to Nokia’s product catalog, just due to their reputation on camera performance compared to the many lame efforts of Asian smartphone manufacturers. Based on this reputation, I had assumed that the process of taking photos and performing actions on them in Symbian^3 would at least be on par with Android. Surely many members of the product marketing team must have been faced with the situation of having to demonstrate the camera functionality of Nokia products, just to draw the attention away from anything related to browsing web content or other weak spots of Symbian. Well, from my experience with C7, I now think they’ve never bothered to proceed beyond snapping a photo with the device. You know, like, sharing it with some other device or application.

On an Android device, I can click on any picture to bring up the Share menu, which presents all the applications installed on the device that have the ability to integrate with the camera/gallery. Dropbox is my favorite method for moving pictures into an archive, but Facebook sharing and all other social applications are also very potential candidates for the next action I have in mind after taking a photo. If I install new apps, the menu gets appended with them. No need to spend any time wondering what to do, it all just works right in the context.

What are the options on a C7? Well, you can of course 1) send an MMS (do people still use those?), 2) attach it to an email or 3) send it via Bluetooth. All of these options probably would have felt useful five years ago, but as of today they all just scream legacy to me. Ok, perhaps the problem is just that the stock C7 doesn’t come with all the necessary apps, so lets go and login to Ovi Store. I’d imagine a search term like “photo sharing” would shed some light on the best way to proceed. No, nothing useful here. Since none of the top mobile app brands from the world of iOS and Android are available on the Symbian platform, even a geek like me finds himself having another one of those “iTunes moments” where the familiar logic of solving a problem doesn’t seem to work.

Sugarsync is the closest thing to Dropbox on Symbian, so let’s install that one. I get the PC application installed, even though the folder configuration is not nearly as intuitive as Dropbox. I manage to download the mobile app from Ovi Store and seemingly also connect the C7 to the same user account as the PC. The folder structure looks different from this angle, there’s some bizarre “briefcase” concept blocking my view etc. but it looks like this could in theory work for photo sharing. Except that when I start the process from capturing a new photo and wanting to move it to Sugarsync’s folder, I cannot figure out any sensible way to complete this task. The share menu is of course not updated as it would be on an Android. There is no easy navigation path between the photo gallery, the file system and the sharing application. Unless you want to work with memorizing and moving cryptic Pic123456.jpg files inside file explorer, there’s no solution. It just doesn’t work.

I refuse to give up and try another cloud based content syncrhonization application (forgot the name already). Usability is even worse on this one and I’m actually not even able to complete the pairing process of the PC and the phone, because I started by creating the user accoung in a different device than what the online registration wizard assumes. Well, I’m 100% sure that this is not a big loss. At the end of the day, I register a Gmail account for my father and just instruct him to email the photos from his brand new smartphone as attachments to his own address. I feel completely defeated for having to suggest such a lame process. My foolish cloud dreams have been shattered once again.

Of course there is a way to perform content transfer between the Nokia C7 and a PC. The answer is Ovi Suite. You need to install this Nokia’s equivalent of iTunes onto your computer, then plug in your shiny new mobile device with a USB navel ch… cable into your computer and perform a synchronization of the gallery items. To add insult to injury, the micro-USB cable supplied with C7 is about 10cm long. Sure, you could start playing with Bluetooth device paring and all that, but that’s another experience I want to spare my old man from. Also, unlike with Apple hardware, you’re actually allowed to mount the phone directly as a USB drive (well, I assume you are, didn’t try it with C7), but that is all still cable games.

Nokia even offers an advanced USB On-the-go feature, which lets you connect other devices or mass media directly on the Nokia phone which acts as the master device. Great, but what’s really your fetish with those cables? You’ve already given up on producing rubber boots, isn’t it time to give up the rubber cables next?

“Quit whining and plug it in!”

You may consider me a spoilt geek who has nothing better to do with his time and gadgets than to complain about what features they are lacking. Fine, maybe that’s also true, but here’s the underlying motivation why I write posts like this: when I observe how the world is changing slowly but surely towards a particular direction, it allows me to also spot those little pieces of the world that are standing still, i.e. getting left behind. Those little things represent potential disruptions to traditional businesses and business models, which to me are a very intriquing topic. As they say, shift happens.

Here’s how the world looks from my eyes today:

See? It’s all in the cloud already – today. The devices are connected to the cloud, the content is mostly in the cloud, also the people have arrived in there thanks to the social media breakthrough. What’s the one thing that doesn’t belong there? Yep, correctomundo, you guessed it right.

We’re approaching the post-PC era, according to many sources. If we switch our focus away from the icon of the phenomena (iPad), what this basically means is that the traditional personal computer is losing its status as the default device for all data processing and information management tasks that we perform as either employees at work or free individuals at home. Instead we’re increasingly turning to mobile devices that are always with us, always on and always connected.

Nowhere else is mobility more central than when travelling abroad, away from your familiar services and surroundings. It would therefore be perfectly natural to assume that the traveller segment would be the one that mobile service providers would be actively looking to cater for. Yet the reality is completely the opposite: mobile operators are making sure that no sane person uses mobile data while travelling abroad, thanks to the ridiculous prices of data roaming.

Going on the road? Let’s burn the books & switch off

Last week I was travelling in Macedonia, a potential candidate for becoming an EU member. An exotic location to some extent, as I hadn’t been to any of the former Yugoslavia countries, but at the same time not too distant from the average central European culture. Skopje, their capital city, is not exactly on the top 20 list of cities for tourists to visit, so there wasn’t any paper guidebooks available to take with me. I did download the Skopje In Your Pocket guidebook into my Kindle, but the painful rendering of PDF magazines on the small black & white ePaper screen meant I hardly opened the document. Instead I decided to try and rely on content that I could use on my HTC Desire HD.

The price for mobile data use in Macedonia was according to my Finnish operator’s (DNA) pages a bit over 10 euros per megabyte. Ok, so the first thing to do before boarding the plane was to disable all APN information to make sure that zero bytes would be transferred over the mobile operators’ networks. Hey, what else is new?

A key criteria in selecting our hotel in Skopje had been the availability and visitor ratings on free WiFi connectivity. Even if there was to be no hotspots discovered while out on the town, at least the hotel would serve as a home base for downloading information on sights to see and pubs to visit. In preparation for the times without a network, I had installed the Maps(-) app from Androind Market and downloaded offline Google maps data of the city.

Fortunately it was not too difficult to discover open, free WiFi networks while walking in the center of Skopje. Cafes and shopping centers tended to frequently have a network of decent quality. Outdoor signs of a free T-Mobile hotspot being available to the customers made selecting the restaurants quite a bit easier.

(Non-)Economics of data roaming

During the 3 day visit I ranked up in total 300 MB of data transfer over WiFi. While I did frequently perform Google searches, check into Foursquare (and of course Untappd while going round the pubs!), browse FB/Twitter streams etc., none of the use was particularly data intensive. No video or audio transmitter, just your everyday transactions with applications that have become a part of my daily routine.

How much would have all this mobile data connectivity cost if I had stayed APN enabled and used the 3G network provided by the local telecom operator? Over 3000 euros. Wow. That’s ten times more than what I paid for the flights and hotel altogether. I could have travelled around the world with that money.

How much did I end up paying for the mobile data connectivity while travelling in Macedonia? Zero euros. That’s right, the local economy received more of my money through bubblegum purchases than through offering me telecommunications services.

How much value did I receive from having a mobile device with Internet connection available to me during my travels? Quite a lot, and I expect that value only to increase in the future when the apps and databases available become even more useful. Would I have been willing to pay something for the convenience of not having to hunt for hotspots and just rely on an always-on 3G data connection. Of course I would have!

So, what was your business again?

Call it what you want and reason it how ever which way you like, but in my eyes the continuing state of data roaming pricing in Europe (and of course globally in most places) deserves to be labeled as pure insanity. Insanity particularly therefore that the operators are continuing to do the same thing (preserving an ancient “per MB” pricing model) and expect different results (more revenue from mobile application users).

When debating over the right price point for mobile data plans, the operators all around the world are nowadays trying to claim they can’t offer “all you can eat” pricing anymore due to the increase of smartphones and the lack of 3G/4G network capacity. While there may be a hint of truth in that, it’s important to remember this doesn’t in any way justify the exorbitant pricing of data roaming. Foreign users are at any given time and location going to represent only a fraction of the total user volume for an operator. All the investments needed are in the billing systems and agreements between operators.

The real leasson from this sad situation is that in order to make money through service innovations you don’t necessarily need any new technology. The technology for providing effortless mobile Internet connectivity to tourists has already been built and paid for. Nothing is missing, except offering the service in the form of a feasible product. At the same time, the Internet (as a conscious entity, in the vain of Skynet, Google et al) is working its way around this lack of operator products by making it increasingly easy for local entrepreneurs to punch holes into this firewall by setting up open WiFi hotspots. These holes provide connections to the backbone network of mostly the very same operators and allow the tasty app juice of our post-PC era cloud applications to flow into the mobile devices of vigilant vistors.

Everywhere you go, the cloud follows

Ok, so you may not always have high quality connection to the web, meaning you can’t rely on it to be always there to answer your questions, but the same goes for 3G connections as well. GPRS is in many ways equal to “no connection”, at least when you consume on average 100 MB of data per day. Once you do have a working connection, the big clouds are all there for you to reach into, with their unlimited and ever evolving means of communication and information discovery.

It’s good to note that not even the ancient technology of SMS was reliable enough to be transmitted between Finland and Macedonia, as many messages were delayed or remained missing. At the same time, whenever I had access to Gmail or Facebook I was able to utilize their full feature set as if I had been sitting at home, typing on my laptop. In short, there wasn’t anything that I wanted to do but was unable to do when equipped with my Android smartphone instead of lugging around a mini-PC.

Feel free to disagree, but to me that is a sure sign of the coming post-PC era where both the traditional telecom operator services such as phone calls & text messages as well as traditional keyboard + mouse + monitor + CD-ROM computing paradigms are in danger of slowly becoming extinct. I won’t be living without a “PC” or leave home without a “phone”, but I’ll care less and less about services built specifically around those old conceptual silos. I will just replace them with “everything”, which means anyone can provide services for them.

Waisting more of our time while connected

As a final note, during the trip I was once again reminded of the fact that Google couldn’t make social applications if its life depended on it (and pretty soon it does). Mr. Scobleizer wrote a great post on the topic of how the best applications are the ones that enable us to waste our time more efficiently. That’s exactly the kinds of mobile apps that you need while travelling in a foreign country.

Google Places turned out to be in practice almost useless, while Foursquare actually provided quite satisfactory results most of the time. Particularly the new Explore tab in their mobile application provided a convenient stream of relevant information to a visitor in a foreign country. If only the Macedonian people would have submitted their comments in English, since the local cyrillic alphabet makes it impossible to even make guesses about what the text might mean…

Februrary 11th 2011 was a big day for two countries: Finland and Egypt. I won’t touch the latter one, there are better places to speculate on was it social media or the people of Egypt who made it all happen. Instead I’ll write down a few thoughts about the newly announced marriage of Nokia and Microsoft.

We all knew it was coming, but someone had to say it

Last July I wrote a blog post on how the world will end for Nokia. At that time I was deeply frustrated with the mainstream media reporting on how the brand new Nokia N8 and the updated operating system Symbian^3 were going to start Nokia’s big fight to reclaim the position they had lost to Apple and all the Android manufacturers. Such claims were totally detached from the reality of what was happening in the mobile marketplace of 2010 and I’m sure not even most the Nokia personnel believed in them anymore.

A growing crowd of people were joining the cult of Apple, some of them skipping right to the end conclusion that iPhone was simply better and Nokia was therefore screwed – period. A much more telling sign was, however, that the ecosystem around Symbian application development was not only facing problems in growing its presence in the US markets – it was in fact dying altogether. Long time advocates of Symbian were throwing in the towel, because they couldn’t live with the huge gap between Nokia hype and lack of results delivered. Symbian and Nokia had become an embarrassment that no one wanted to associate themselves with anymore (in other words, an epic fail).

What I believed Nokia had to do was to admit their failure instead of trying to cover it up while attempting to build a replacement in the form of MeeGo. My concluding comment at that time was:

We don’t need an N8 from Nokia, or Symbian^4, or statements from Anssi Vanjoki about the company’s passion to reclaim smartphone leadership – we need a hard reset, and we need it yesterday.

That was what we have now finally received, first in the form of the burning platform memo from Stephen Elop and a few days later in the announcement of adopting Windows Phone as the primary smartphone platform for Nokia future devices. All of this had of course started already in September with the naming of a new Nokia CEO, when the Finnish Olli-Pekka Kallasvuo (a long term member of Nokia’s former management “dream team”) was replaced not by another Finn like Vanjoki but with a man from Microsoft. Makes perfect sense, since it’s a lot easier to admit failure when you haven’t been the one causing it.

If you look at where Windows Phone 7 is coming from, you’ll see that also Microsoft went through a similar phase earlier on. They realized that the existing Windows Mobile platform foundation was simply not good enough to build on anymore, so Microsoft made a brave move to re-design WP7 from scratch, which meant they gave up on backward compatibility and a big catalogue of existing Windows Mobile apps while at it. Thanks to this earlier reset they were now able to get the largest mobile phone manufacturer in the world to commit to their platform. Think about that for a while: everyone fails sooner or later, but the winners will be those who are the quickest in admitting failure.

Symbian no longer exists (but would you like to buy one anyway?)

When I switched jobs in December (not related to mobile industry at all, BTW), I was presented with the dreaded question “which Nokia E-series phone would you like to have?“. Having lived without a Nokia phone for years, the thought of returning back to the non-touch S60 world was simply unbearable and literally made me feel sick in the stomach. There was absolutely nothing in the Nokia business phone catalogue that I wanted to carry in my pocket. To buy off some time, I asked if I could wait for the Nokia E7 release that was just around the corner. My employer agreed and I just continued using my personal Samsung device, powered by Android.

As it ever so often happens with Nokia product launches, E7 got delayed into Q1/2011. I ended up upgrading my personal Android device to HTC Desire HD (words cannot describe how much this thing rocks, but that’s another story). On Monday, February 7th, Nokia E7 finally started shipping in limited quantities to the Finnish resellers. The company representatives were calling it “the most important model this year” in terms of sales expectations. On friday, February 11th, the device was as good as dead. Why? Because Nokia pulled the plug on Symbian, as illustrated on the following slide.

Regardless of this fact, Nokia is still expecting to sell 150 million Symbian devices before the game is over. Hmmm… okay… and how exactly do you plan to trick people into buying them? If you’re shopping for cars, it’s perfectly justified to buy a 2011 model that you know is going to be soon superseded with a 2012 model. Typically you get a sweet deal with accessories, plus there’s unlikely to be too many “bugs” and product recalls for a proven model.

It’s not going to work quite like that in the mobile industry. Nokia E7 is surely a beautiful piece of hardware design and component engineering, built with the decades of expertise accumulated into Nokia’s organization for producing the best mobile phones out there, delivered through the most efficient logistics chain in the business. Unfortunately it is now merely an empty shell with a “burning platform” inside it. I wish there was a quick way to flash the operating system of E7 from Symbian^3 to Windows Phone 7. But as always, if it was easy, the Chinese would have already done it.

E7 may still be a viable option for the oldskool business crowd who just want a replacement for their existing Nokia Communicator, primarily for phone calls, calendar and email. But if that’s all you wanted, then why did any of the Symbian engineers bother coming to work in the morning for the past 5 years? I hate to be the one breaking this to you, but getting a touch screen device with built-in support for Facebook widgets will not be enough to show you what’s really going on in the ecosystem of today’s mobile applications. You still won’t understand what all the cool kids are doing with their mobiles. You won’t see the business opportunities until your iPhone using competitor shows them to you.

The end is the beginning

If you can’t be one of the cool kids at the school yard, then try and be one of the smart kids instead. You probably won’t gain overnight popularity, but you may end up making a nice living eventually and getting your revenge. While the iPhone is certainly no one hit wonder á la Razr, there is no proof yet that Apple (or Google) would have secured their position as the U2 of mobile phones, forever entitled to sold-out stadium gigs and undivided attention from the media.

Android is aimed almost exclusively at disrupting the dominance of iOS, which means Apple and Google are fighting for the same market position. Sure, their approach is different in many ways (closed system vs. open source, for example) and Android is reaching towards the lower end of the market where iPhones are not even intended to be an option (remember, that’s where Symbian was supposed to go and retire). Windows Phone 7 is in such early phases of its existence that the platform doesn’t yet have a clear identity of its own and it is therefore being typically described through comparison to iOS and Android. This approach is ignoring the key focus areas where WP7 does differ from the established players: business users and .NET developers.

Ask a corporate IT department about which platform they want to be supporting and it’s a case of choosing a lesser evil from iOS or Android. Both of them are prime examples of the consumerization of IT. People like me will no longer tolerate standardized hardware from our employers, we’ll just rather bring our own devices to work. The problem with the cool gadgets that are capturing the attention of geeks and consumers alike is that they have been designed specifically to YOU. You as a single person, who makes the single decision to buy. The needs of a group of people encapsulated inside an organization such as a corporate office are quite different. Security, administration, compatibility and all those boring aspects are actually quite crucial to delivering monetary results beyond personal satisfaction. The mobile platforms of the future will have to be a working compromise between usability and manageability. This is where Microsoft is ahead of Apple or Google, who don’t truly know how to operate in the business segment. Nokia also has some very relevant experience from trying to meet the needs of business users and should therefore be well positioned in formulating a winning strategy to get both the IT managers and the Outlook junkies to ask for  WP7 devices.

Some say Microsoft is a dying consumer brand. There’s a hint of truth in that, since the world of personal computing has been moving away from the traditional PC desktops, into cloud apps provided by the likes of Google, and more personal mobile devices like the iPhones and iPads. Microsoft is clearly a runner-up in both categories. At the same time, they do have an impressive record of charging against Nintendo and Sony with their Xbox 360, which shows they are not planning to become a purely business brand anytime soon. It would also be a mistake to assume that Microsoft is forever stuck on the desktop, as they are building a huge “platform in the cloud” offering as Windows Azure and all the related Online Services brands. Sure, Gmail beat Hotmail with ease, but it doesn’t look like Google Apps would be walking over Microsoft’s cloud-enabled Exchange/SharePoint offering quite yet. Microsoft’s “all in” cloud strategy is going to provide a highly credible portfolio of productivity apps to Nokia’s WP7 devices, certainly much more than they could have ever built on their own or acquired through weak partners like Yahoo.

Like Mr. Scoble put it in his blog post on the Nokia WP7 alliance, “apps are the ONLY thing that matters now”. If that statement holds true, then the producers of those apps are the ones whose interest you need to capture on day one. Yes, you know this one, so sing along with me: “Developers! Developers! Developers!” If Symbian was the most hostile development environment for mobile phones ever invented, then judging by the initial launch strategy of Windows Phone 7, it’s the complete opposite. Not only is Microsoft altogether making massive investments into its developer toolkits, the promise of easy application portability across mobile, desktop, console and browser environments must sound more tempting than learning to develop apps for yet another mobile platform that promises to be something big, one day, maybe. The world is full of .NET developers who Microsoft and Nokia can target to persuade them to extend their applications onto the closest possible mobile platform, which just happens to be WP7.

We all know the facts: Microsoft is not cool, Nokia is not cool. When put together, they will indeed look like a pair of turkeys initially. They will take a fair amount of beating after class from the tech blogger bullies and gangs of Android geeks from all over the globe. Nevertheless, once we get over this initial reaction and start seeing physical results from the partnership, there’s a very real chance that both Microsoft and Nokia will be stronger together than what they could have been on their own, without admitting their past failures.

There is a dark shadow looming behind the partnership, as Microsoft’s previous mobile partners have not really fared all too well after teaming up with Redmond. It may well turn out to be a similar bust for Nokia, only time will tell. Even though it’s clear that Nokia has a lot more at stake in the deal than Microsoft, it’s getting more and more embarrassing for Microsoft not to have a credible presence in mobile devices. While Microsoft has never been too great at new product innovation, they’ve proven time and again their ability to muscle into a maturing market. Let’s see if they mean business this time around.

I sign up to new and interesting social web apps and networks a lot. It’s a strange hobby of mine and I’m not quite sure how I’ve ended up with it. I’ve lost count of how many profiles I’ve created to which service, so I’ve actually discovered forgotten sites by simply googling up my own name. Luckily I don’t usually bother my friends with invitation spam from these services, rather I just like to observe how their general user adoption grows and analyze the design behind a successful service with a sticky user experience if I come across one.

Anyway, I though I’d highlight a few examples of a more recent trend that’s becoming visible in the world of social web. It’s always been about telling the apps what you are doing, thinking or liking, where about and how. Now, after feeding the networks with data about yourself, they are gradually becoming smart enough to tell you what you are like.

Where Do You Go?

Foursquare is not new, but here ‘s a very quick recap: you pull out your mobile phone, launch the app and see what venues are close to you (based on mobile network location data, or GPS for the hifi geeks). You click to check-in to the place you are currently. The end.

Ok, so of course you can also view where your friends have been checking in to. That is, if any of them would be similar gadget geeks like you. I’m pretty sure eventually the location information will become a natural part of the social fabric (waiting for FB Places to arrive here in Finland), but as of now, in reality it isn’t for everyone yet.

What can you get from the location data then? For example, this heatmap of where I’ve been checking in around the city of Helsinki. Sure, I don’t spend all my time with a finger on the check-in button, nor do the public venues available on the service give an accurate view of where I spend my time. Still, it would be foolish to say that the heatmap doesn’t give me insight on the locations that are a part of my ‘graph in the geographic sense. With enough data and the right presentation method, casual transactions can start to accumulate a whole new value added.

Take a trip down Memolane

Pretty much every social app has a timeline view of some kind, similar to the FB wall. It’s sort of a divider between generations of applications, as many of the oldskool software and business applicatios are perfectly happy with asking you the user to punch in more and more data without trying to present it back to the users in any aggregated “what’s been happening lately” view. Another common dilemma is that it’s hard if not impossible to automatically combine data from different applications. That’s how bad life used to be only a few years ago.

Integration in the cloud is as easy as OAuth (open authorization), so in a matter of a few clicks you can be connecting the various dots fragmented around your networks into a single stream of information about yourself. Now all there’s left to do is to put a nice timeline UI on top of the data and you’ve got Memolane. Your tweets, check-ins, FB posts, Last.fm scrobbles and everything else in a chronological order that allows you to travel back in time and reminisce about what you did last summer. Yes, again the web knows what you’ve long since forgotten in your selective human brain.

Get Glue’d to the media around you

Apps on top of apps – that’s the future we’re already living in. Why keep on re-inventing the wheel when you could be focusing on designing the rest of the vehicle instead?

Back when Last.fm launched their audioscrobbler app in 2003 the concept of sharing playlist data right from your WinAmp in real time to a web-based service was very novel. Keep in mind, this was waaaay before social networks made sharing and liking and retweeting something that’s considered an everyday activity. I kept on accumulating information their database on a regular basis, then stopped using them, then returned back to an active user thanks to their integration with Spotify.

The concept of scrobbling remains cool, but in this day & age there are people out there who cannot be satisfied by merely sharing what track they are listening to. Enter GetGlue. What they’ve built is an almost universal system for checking in to things. Books, movies,TV shows, games, gadgets, restaurants etc. By installing an add-on for your browser and browsing one of hundreds of supported sites that GetGlue recognizes as having content items that their database tracks, you’ll see a toolbar at the bottom of the window. The toolbar not only allow you to like/unlike/favorite/saveforlater or share to FB/Twitter, but it also shows who else has been liking the content in question + recommendations of what else you might like, based on the user data similarity.

Sitting home alone on your sofa and watching Dexter doesn’t have to be unsocial time anymore. Reach for your smartphone, launch the GetGlue app and do a check-in. You’ll see who else has checked into the same show, so you can go and spy their profile to see where their remote has taken them next. While at it, why not do a check-in to that bottle of wine you’ve been sipping? Come on, you’ll get badges as a reward as well!

OMG, where’s my privacy?!?

The first reaction from a casual web surfer on all of the new ways in which you can expose yourself to the world will surely be a cry for privacy. Isn’t this the kind of a surveilance society that George Orwell warned us about by writing the 1984? Only it’s worse, since the innocent web surfers have been brainwashed to report back to big brother seemingly on their own free will, just by giving them pictures of digital badges! Someone please stop this insanity!

I’m going to let you in on a little secret that explains why the situation is not quite that grim at all:

The web knows you because we are the web.

Back in the 90′s, the world wide web was born as a network of documents. Today it is a network of people. Small but profound difference. While it is still perfectly possible for anyone to choose to use the web as a big document management system and just passively consume content that is published there by large organizations and media entities, there is an increasing amount of benefits to be gained by being an active participant instead. Once you cross that line, you start to exist in the web. It may be behind a number of aliases and alter egos, or it may be with your real name and identity (probably both). You may exist in different forms and footprints to anonymous surfers, identified users and verified friends or co-workers. Nevertheless, your actions become a small but integrated part of the fabric of web. Just like you’re a tiny little piece of society, still making an impact all the same.

The web knows you’ve clicked. Google knows you’ve searched. Your ISP knows you’ve downloaded, so don’t waste too much energy on worrying about leaving a trail of what you do when using a networked system like the web. A more interesting question to focus on is how much more can you know about yourself with the help of the web and what value could be derived from the data that you and other fellow citizens of the web are capable of feeding into it. As long as the publishing of data is done through a conscious decision and you pay attention to where the line of privacy is set, it’s hardly any more reckless behaviour than using the web in the old document oriented way. Same old channel, just a very different application.

Things used to be simple back in 2005 when I started working with Microsoft Dynamics CRM (known as only Microsoft CRM back then). You pretty much knew that there would be a version update every 2-3 years. In between, there would be a number of hotfixes created to address software bugs, which were packaged as “Update Rollups”. CRM 3.0 received in total three such packages. CRM 4.0 things kicked up a notch as we started getting these Update Rollups (UR) based on a regular schedule, one update every 2 months (until they were put on hold after UR21). CRM 2011 adopted the same UR release schedule, but in addition to that, Microsoft announced that they would adopt a new agile release model.

Exactly one year after the announcement we find ourselves in situation that may seem quite confusing to the casual observer. There are new releases in the horizon on a continuous basis and it’s easy to lose track of what exactly is meant by which update. Well, here’s my shot at explaining what’s going on.

What’s the “R” in R8?

R8 means Release 8. OK, so what are the previous seven versions then? They don’t refer to CRM 1.0, 1.2, 3.0, 4.0 or 2011 (there never was a 2.0, as some of you will remember). This R-based naming policy comes from the CRM Online product, which used to have its own release schedule with no UR’s and a slightly different code base from the on-premises product. The first R was presumably released when CRM Online was announced in April 2008. Things changed when Microsoft Dynamics CRM 2011 was released on January 15th, 2011, after which both the Online and on-premises version have pretty much gone hand in hand.

The “Rx” naming signifies a new functionality release and should never be used to refer to Update Rollup versions. Don’t shorten UR8 to R8, because the two are not the same (even though they are intertwined as we’ll later see). The Update Rollup version numbers always start from 1, so there’s been an Update Rollup 1 for both Dynamics CRM 2011, CRM 4.0 as well as CRM 3.0. Makes googling for information all the more merrier, eh? The Rx releases are a product of the cloud era and until we reach the next era beyond cloud apps, I don’t expect Microsoft to start the numbers from R1 all over again.

What’s the Q2 2012 Service Update?

Since it would have been confusing for on-prem customers to first release Microsoft Dynamics CRM 2011, then follow it up with a “Release 7″ all of a sudden, Microsoft decided to come up with a different naming policy for these new, agile releases. Unfortunately, the naming policy they chose gave us monsters like “Microsoft Dynamics CRM 2011 Q4 2011 Service Update”. Wow, how catchy, and only 50 characters long! As a result of this, what was originally supposed to be just internal jargon became the preferred option for human communication and we learned to know the update as R7. 50 vs. 2 chars, which one would you expect to fly in the age of Twitter? ‘Nuff said.

Most of you must surely be already familiar with the contents of R8, the next release, and if you’re not, here’s a link to the Release Preview Guide. The real catch is in how the promised new features will actually be delivered. The correct answers to this question are:

• In multiple Update Rollup versions
• As solution files
• Through Microsoft hosted, subscription based services or 3rd party licensing
• In other Microsoft products

A, B, C, D – tick ‘em all. This is the reason why there will not be any single place where you can “download R8″.

What will the Update Rollup 9 contain?

The official release announcement of Q2 2012 Service Update will most likely coincide with Update Rollup 9. However, if you study the contents of the Guide, you’ll find features that have already been released before UR9. Rapid View Forms were introduced in March as part of UR7 and re-labelled as Read-Optimized Forms. The same is true for SQL Server 2012 compatibility.

As we know from the previous R7 release, Activity Feeds are delivered as a solution package that you will need to download from the Dynamics Marketplace and configure manually. The Activity Feeds solution is not a part of the “core” Dynamics CRM product. However, there are parts of it that have been built into the platform, which is why at least Update Rollup 5 is required in order to install the solution. Similarly, you will need to get an updated version of the Activity Feeds solution after installing Update Rollup 9, otherwise you won’t see the new features.

A key deliverable of Update Rollup 9 will be the cross-browser compatibility that makes Dynamics CRM available on Chrome, Firefox and Safari. Since this is such a significant change to the platform, Microsoft has been kind enough to grant access to the R8 beta release for anyone who’s willing to follow these steps. Please note that the beta bits available for download cannot be upgraded to the final release of R8, so use them in a test environment only.

Extended browser support is completely separate from the mobile device support promised in R8. While you will be able to run CRM on an iPad Safari browser, the mobile UI demoed by Microsoft in numerous occasions is only available as 1) a subscription service from Microsoft, if you’re running Online or IFD, or 2) a perpetual license to be purchased from CWR Mobility if you intend to host the required service on your own server. Trying to access your Dynamics CRM environment after UR9 installation with an iPhone will most likely just give you the simplified Mobile Express user interface already familiar from the CRM 4.0 days.

Oh, and do note that the Microsoft Dynamics CRM Mobile released for Windows Phone 7 back in Q4 2011 Service Update is a completely separate product, even though it carries exactly the same name as the new offering developed by CWR Mobility and later on re-labelled by Microsoft. Since CWR Mobility didn’t have a Windows Phone client, this mobile app will likely remain on a separate development roadmap from the CWR-based offering.

What’s the role of SQL Server 2012 in all this?

If you haven’t seen the cool drag & drop report designer or the animated bubble chart demo of Power View, take a look at this video:

Wow, wouldn’t that look nice on a Dynamics CRM dashboard! Well, even though Power View is listed as one of the R8 features, there’s a couple things you should know:

• It’s not available in the cloud. Sorry, CRM Online users. Maybe in R9 then?
• CRM dashboards are a different data visualization technique that will remain “as is” for R8, not integrated with Power View.

In addition, if you plan to use SQL Server 2012 for hosting your Dynamics CRM database and Reporting Services, it’s good to know that you can’t achieve this configuration with the RTM bits for Dynamics CRM 2011. Update Rollup 6 has established a new baseline for CRM and you’ll need to download the server installation files from Microsoft Download Center, otherwise you’ll run into the following error while trying to install the Reporting Extensions:

Unable to validate SQL Server Reporting Services Report Server installation. Please check that it is correctly installed on the local machine.

What time is Metro?

Putting things into perspective, Dynamics CRM is a small fish in the tank compared to the big whale that is Windows 8. Since R8 will be out well before Windows 8, there isn’t yet a 100% support provided for the Internet Explorer 10 browser provided with it. Hopefully the remaining issues will be addressed by upcoming UR’s as Windows 8 is nevertheless just around the corner. Presumably we’ll see a proper Metro app for Dynamics CRM once R9 is released later this year. After all, the Windows RT tablets will not be able to run Outlook and we’ll need some solution for activity tracking to and from CRM.

When it comes to Windows Server 8, official support has not been announced. However, that doesn’t mean you couldn’t install Dynamics CRM 2011 Server on a Windows 8. Daniel Cai has done just that and offers a tutorial for anyone wanting to test R8 on the very latest Microsoft products available.

Soon the R8 update of Microsoft Dynamics CRM will be upon us and the application will officially open up to browsers other than Internet Explorer. What this means is CRM will also be accessible through different devices than just Windows PC’s: Macs, Linux machines, iPads and other tablets. Exciting times for all CRM geeks around the world, myself included, which is why I already wrote some of my thoughts on the topic after the Q2 2012 Service Update contents was revealed (see the post “To the eXtreme, part 2: The future of the web caught up with IE and Dynamics CRM”).

More supported browsers & devices will inevitably mean more work for CRM developers, as testing your application on IE alone will no longer be enough. As we get closer to R8 go-live before the end of Q2, the need for more detailed information on the practical implications is surely growing. Luckily XRM Virtual had managed to get Karun Krishna from Microsoft to give a webinar on the topic of cross-browser development on May 1st. The Live Meeting recording is now available for viewing at the XRM Virtual site. Apparently also Karun’s slides were shared during the live session, but since the recording didn’t contain them, I decided to write down a few notes of mine from the contents of the presentation.

First up is the detailed browser support matrix seen below, which expands the list previously provided in the R8 release preview guide. Included are new yellow boxes for Internet Explorer 10 on Windows 7 and Windows 8, which indicate a “supported but not full fidelity” user experience for Dynamics CRM. Also the Firefox support on Mac OS X appears to have fallen onto this level where some display/functionality bugs will exist.

In his presentation, Karun explained that while the CRM team tried to use HTML5 compliant techniques wherever possible, there were still some areas where an alternative approach had to be used in order to replicate the existing Dynamics CRM functionality across non-IE browsers. Any IE specific APIs have been removed, but as the w3C standards are still evolving, there isn’t necessarily always one single right way to implement a specific functionality in the cross-browser world. Therefore a feature detection approach for checking for browser capability differences is recommended over developing for any specific browser version. The webinar included examples and best practices on API’s and XML processing, so be sure to view the recording for details.

It was announced already earlier that using browsers other than Internet Explorer for the administration and customization menus of Dynamics CRM would not be supported. Sorry guys, you’ll still need to boot into Windows on your MacBook if you intend to do any customization work. Some additional information was now provided on features that will not be supported on other browsers than IE. These include:

• Workplace calendar
• Services (scheduling) and service calendar
• Editors for workflows and dialogs
• Lync based presence information

One thing to note is that the old crmForm object API from CRM 4.0 days will continue to work only for Internet Explorer. Therefore if you have any scripts in place that have not been updated to use the Xrm.Page methods, these won’t work for users on Chrome, Safari or Firefox.

Finally, while iPad 2 support with iOS 5 is provided, it’s important to note that this is simply the support for usage through Safari browser, not a dedicated application optimized for the tablet environment. For the premium UX you’ll need to acquire/subscribe to an add-on app like the Microsoft Dynamics CRM Mobile for iPad, of which you can view screenshots in this post. The browser experience on an iPad 2 will have the following known limitations/issues:

• No popus. Since Dynamics CRM by default opens a wealth of windows and dialogs, this doesn’t match well with the “flat” UI’s of tablet apps.
• Touch events compared to mouse events will cause some lack of functionality (no right click, double click)
• iFrame scroll bars may be missing.
• Window closing has issues due to a focus related bug in the .close API
• No Silverlight. Well, no surprise there…

Edit 9.5.2012: The long awaited R8 release for Microsoft Dynamics CRM 2011 is now available as a beta version! PartnerSource login is required for the beta program sign-up and download (CustomerSource might also work) at http://bit.ly/crmr8beta. If you want to test your Dynamics CRM solutions in a cross-browser environment (Safari, Chrome, Firefox) before the official release of Update Rollup 9, then this is the program for you. Please note that the beta version of R8 will not support an upgrade to the final version of R8, so you should apply it to a dedicated test environment only.

Dynamics CRM is a great system for managing your customer data. “Alright, so can you tell me how do I upload all my customer document folders in here?” Well, you don’t. Or more precisely, you better not do it. You see, while it’s more than likely that you have lots of files regarding your existing and potential customers, putting these into your customer relationship management system is rarely a sensible approach. Let me illustrate a few issues that you will encounter if trying to use file attachments in Dynamics CRM as document management solution.

Storage cost

Due to some recent announcements on pricing & functionality related updates in Microsoft’s cloud based services in April 2012, I decided to do a little comparison of storage costs between three services. SkyDrive, a consumer focused product that has very recently acquired Dropbpx-like skills of synchronizing content from one or more client PC’s (or mobile devices) into the cloud. SharePoint Online, the SaaS edition of Microsoft’s collaboration / content management platform that’s currently licensed to around 125 million business users around the world in all it’s editions. Finally, CRM Online, the Microsoft hosted version of Dynamics CRM. All of these products include some base level quota for storage, but since the subscription prices per user are not really comparable due to the application functionality included in each, I’ve instead chosen to compare what is the cost of an additional 50 GB storage on each service.

See the percentage difference in the table when compared to SkyDrive? While a pure file system storage service in the cloud for consumers is practically free these days, as we move towards more structured databases with metadata and workflow related functionality wrapped around the file, things tend to get more expensive. SharePoint Online has just recently cut it’s storage prices by a whopping 92%, yet it remains almost five times as expensive as SkyDrive. Since the price per GB on Dynamics CRM Online has not changed (at least yet), CRM in turn is 50 times as expensive as SharePoint Online. (Note: storage space ain’t cheap on other cloud based CRM systems either, including Salesforce.com).

Ok, so maybe you’re managing your own servers and SAN’s, which means the direct cost per GB isn’t dramatically different between file shares and database blobs. Let’s look at some application level features that will affect your CRM users nonetheless.

Search experience

If we put our files into a structured database that has lots of customer information already, surely that makes them easier to discover when needed? Well, to some extent it does, but not necessarily the way you’d expect. “Did I attach that document to an account, opportunity or contract?” When it comes to Dynamics CRM, you’ll need to be able to answer this question before performing your search, as there is no out-of-the-box way to perform search across multiple entities. Also, instead of entering a natural search phrase like “online migration scribe”, you’ll need to build your query one parameter at a time in Advanced Find, specifying which values should be found in which field or related entity.

Chances are you found this blog post through Google. That’s the way us humans tend to find what we’re looking for nowadays: free text searches on whichever keywords we have in our minds, rather than selecting a combination of attribute values that correspond to the parent object of the file we are after. Oh, and in case you wanted to search for text from inside the document, forget about it. Attachment contents is not indexed in Dynamics CRM, only fields on the entities directly are available for the search tools.

Editing experience

Do you ever need to revise the documents you’ve once created? Having the file as an attachment on a CRM record doesn’t quite give you the same kind of flexibility as a network drive or a document management system. You can’t directly open a document from the system into your MS Word, start editing it and save the changes. Rather you’ll need to store it temporarily on your local hard drive, then upload it back to CRM. The number of clicks and dialog windows involved in the process will not exactly encourage your end users to share information through CRM if they need to go through these steps repeatedly.

How about archiving different revisions of the document? Let’s not even go there, at least with CRM alone.

What should we do with our files then?

While it’s certainly not the end all, be all solution for document management, you should definitely give SharePoint a go and see if it delivers the type of functionality your CRM users would benefit from. The built-in integration between Dynamics CRM 2011 and SharePoint 2010/Online removes much of the pain points mentioned above. Even though it may not cover all the customer document management scenarios directly (access rights, custom folder/site structures etc.), storing files in SharePoint document libraries instead of Dynamics CRM will automatically help you address many of the aforementioned issues related to content search, storage and editing. Also, the CRM SDK provides further extension points for SharePoint document management functionality development, combination with SharePoint’s extension points. You can see an example of such a scenario in this post on the CRM Consultancy blog.

Thanks to the cloud version of SharePoint Online supporting Dynamics CRM integration starting from November last year, you can easily test the document management functionality in your existing Dynamics CRM 2011 / Online environment by signing up for an Office 365 trial account. With Office 365 E package subscriptions starting at € 7.25 per user per month, even if you’d use the whole subscription for nothing more than complementing the functionality of your CRM system, the cost wouldn’t be all that high, just 18% of a CRM Online subscription price.

Better yet, if you sign up for Office 365 first and then later on purchase CRM Online, you’ll gain the luxury of using a single Microsoft Online login across both systems (see this post for the steps). Others will need to keep using Windows Live ID for Dynamics CRM until the transition to a single platform on Microsoft’s end has been completed sometime in the future.

In addition to Surviving CRM, I also maintain a blog called Microsoft Dynamics CRM Links. However, it’s not an actual blog but rather my public bookmarking service for collecting interesting tools, solutions, add-ons, services and other sites that are related to Dynamics CRM. If I discover a useful new tool on, say, CodePlex, I simply create a new blog post using the tool’s name as the title, the URL as the body text and add a few tags for link categorization. I keep the list on WordPress.com because it provides a great cloud based app for managing any content, not just blog posts.

Even though the primary purpose of the site is for me to personally keep track of interesting links that I may need to come back to later on, there are also other people who have discovered the site, most likely through a search engine. One day I was looking at the statistics that WordPress.com collects and thought that this actually provides an interesting view to what the Dynamics CRM online community is currently searching for. In the spirit of open data, I decided to publish a snapshot of the website visit stats to show what’s hot in CRM right now and also promote some of the most useful tools and apps out there, to help more people discover them. So, without further ado, here’s the list of…

Most popular Microsoft Dynamics CRM links, Q1 2012

1. Auto Number for Microsoft Dynamics CRM 2011
2. Hierarchical Treeview for Dynamics CRM 2011
3. CRM 2011 User Settings Utility
4. Ribbon Workbench for Dynamics CRM 2011
5. MS CRM 2011 Twitter Integration by Pragmasys
6. MS CRM 2011 Pragma Toolkit: Ribbon, Sitemap Editor
7. CRM 2011 TreeView for Dependent Picklist
8. Silverlight CRM Attachment Image
9. KingswaySoft SSIS Integration Toolkit for Microsoft Dynamics CRM
10. CRM 2011 Visio add-in: Business Unit Org Chart
11. Ribbon Editor for Microsoft Dynamics CRM 2011
12. Dynamics CRM Dashboard for Microsoft Lync by Orbit One
13. Powertrak In-line Editable Grids for Microsoft Dynamics CRM 2011
14. Metadata Document Generator for Microsoft Dynamics CRM 2011
15. CRM 2011 Attribute Mapping
16. CozyRoc SSIS+ with Dynamics CRM Connection Manager
17. CRM 2011 Attachment Image Browser HTML Web Resource
18. Skype Connector Tool for Microsoft Dynamics CRM 2011
19. Bing Maps Browser for Microsoft Dynamics CRM 2011
20. Dynamics CRM 2011 Script# Xrm.Page library
21. Web Resources Manager for Microsoft Dynamics CRM 2011

There we have it, the most in-demand apps or tools for Dynamics CRM! Just don’t take the list ranking too seriously, as this isn’t a very scientific way to analyze the true popularity of the links. Some of them have been published earlier, some during Q1. Some have better keywords for search engine optimization. The page view volumes are quite limited, as the top page received 145 hits during three months. Nevertheless, I think the data still gives a fairly realistic view of the functionality people working with Microsoft Dynamics CRM are typically searching for, such as:

• Auto-numbering
• Hierarchical data visualization
• Ribbon & sitemap editing tools
• Displaying images on forms
• VoIP integration (Lync & Skype)
• Customization documentation generator

One way to look at it would be that these are all features/areas where Microsoft could improve the out-of-the-box functionality that Dynamics CRM 2011 delivers. Luckily there’s an active ecosystem around the platform that is creating either commercial or free solutions to address these areas. Especially the open source tools on CodePlex or free code samples published on various CRM expert blogs are highly valuable resources that I’m thankful for, which is why I attempt to do my own little part by sharing the best links with others. I encourage you all to do the same.

Duplicate detection rules in Dynamics CRM are an example of a configuration item that may often be active only in production environments. Since you don’t actively enter data into development or test environments, why bother thinking too much about them? Well, the one place where you need to be thinking about them is when you are importing new solutions and publishing changes to customizations.

Life would be easy if you could just set up and publish your duplicate detection rules once during the initial configuration of your Dynamics CRM production environment, thus stopping the unintentional entry of duplicate records into the customer database. However, you may run into a situation where a rule that you’ve once published has later on returned to an unpublished state. “What? Who touched my duplicate detection settings?”

The likely answer to the question is “You did, but unintentionally”. You see, the duplicate detection rules are sensitive to changes in your entity customizations. As noted in the Madrona Solutions Group blog article, whenever any entity metadata is changed, all duplicate detection rules associated with that entity are unpublished.

If you look at this from the system’s perspective, the process does make sense. After all, you might have set up a duplicate detection rule that is comparing records based on a criteria that that references fields you’ve changed or removed as a part of your CRM customization actions. Still, the fact that a publish event on a CRM 2011 solution triggers an unpublish event somewhere else is not very intuitive and most system administrators are likely to be unaware of the impact. As a result, there are certainly several production CRM environments out there where the once carefully planned duplicate detection rules have been deactivated because of this dependency between solutions and duplicate detection. In fact, you might want to check your own Dynamics CRM environment right now and check if you see duplicate detection rules with the status reason “unpublished” which should in fact be published.

What this means in practice is that anyone who’s deploying solution updates to an environment that is using duplicate detection rules needs to instructed to always re-enable the rules after they’ve updated customizations that reference an entity which is being monitored for duplicates. In my opinion, it would be very practical to have the system notify you about this task, for example by asking “would you like to re-publish the affected duplicate detection rules?” when publishing a solution. If you would like to see this functionality changed in a future version of Dynamics CRM, please sign in to Microsoft Connect with your Windows Live ID and vote for the item “Automatically re-publish duplicate detection rules after deploying a solution”. Thanks for your contribution.

Full disclosure: I didn’t actually physically attend Microsoft Convergence 2012 in Houston, Texas. However, that doesn’t mean you have to feel left in the dark, thanks to the immersive experience that is the social web of our times. With live webcasts, near-live blogging and some 6000 tweets on the #CONV12 hashtag, keeping up with the online buzz has never been easier. Here’s my summary of what the event looked like through the eyes of a virtual attendee and some thoughts on where Microsoft and its Dynamics product line appear to be heading based on the announcements at Convergence.

Keynote

The opening keynote is where the stage is set for the rest of the event, so watching the live broadcast on Monday was definitely on my agenda. Sure, it’s all about building up hype for your products by telling how great you’ve done so far, how excited you are about your future roadmap and showing off with future concept demos that have little to do with the current reality. So what! You need a little show business alongside your business applications conference.

Having the luxury of my PC keyboard & mouse at my disposal during the event allowed me to experiment with Storify, a social media storytelling tool. I captured the best tweets, photos and screenshots during the keynote and compiled them into my Convergence 2012 story. If you’re anything like me, the mental barrier for sitting down and watching a recorded conference event for 1.5 hours is quite high, so why not glance through the highlights of the show on the Storify summary? After that, you can decide if you want to read the full transcript or watch the recording on the Virtual Convergence site.

Some notes picked up from the opening keynote included:

• The Dynamics CRM momentum now stands at 2,250,000 users in 33,000 customer organizations.
• “There are no happy Siebel customers in the world, there just aren’t.” - COO Kevin Turner on Microsofts internal journey from Siebel to Dynamics CRM.
• Nearly half of the deals won by Microsoft over Salesforce.com have been due to the on-premises option and the hybrid model.

Metro

It’s Windows reimagined time all across Redmond now as we’re nearing the launch of Windows 8 later this year. This means everything that can be shown as a Metro style app running on a tablet, will be shown precisely that way. The fictional Contoso Electronics scenario of the big keynote demo used a highly customized UI built for the retail store experience only. A much more interesting demo was the project management Metro app that looked so realistic you could imagine it becoming an actual UI to some future Microsoft product to be rolled out at Windows 8 launch.

We didn’t get any official screenshots of a Dynamics CRM Metro app yet, but luckily Garth Knutson was able to snap & tweet this picture of a UI concept presented in one of the sessions. Just imagine if assigning users onto a Dynamics CRM opportunity record would look like this, how much higher would the user adoption of a CRM system be among sales people? Ah, CRM reimagined…

But the road to metro is paved with Apples. The actual tablet product Microsoft had to show at Convergence was the Dynamics CRM Mobile client for iPad, which meant that Apple devices were well presented in many of the Convergence sessions. Funnily enough, during the conference an internal email leak revealed that Microsoft was banning the use of company budget to buy any Apple products for its Sales, Marketing, Services, IT, & Operations Group. Oh well, guess we won’t be seeing many iPads on stage anymore in the following events. For those of you who haven’t seen the current client yet (developed by CWR Mobility), see my previous post on Microsoft Dynamics CRM Mobile iPad screenshots.

An important aspect to note is that the move towards Metro apps and tablet devices does also have an impact on traditional desktop usage of Dynamics CRM. Back in November I speculated that the legacy of Outlook could not be carried over to the world of Windows 8 tablets in its existing form. Since then this assumption has only been enforced by the announcement of Windows on ARM (WOA) tablets with no classic Windows application support and no sign of Outlook in the list of Office apps promised for these “iPad killers”. What this means is that the functionality exclusive to Dynamics CRM Outlook client must be moved to the cloud. At Convergence, the following functionality was more or less revealed to be included in the R9 release later this year:

• Direct synchronization of activities through Exchange (instead of Outlook)
• Support for “track in CRM” functionality in Outlook Web Access (OWA client)

Woo-hoo! It’s been a long time coming, but to me this is a clear sign that Dynamics CRM is definitely on the right track in terms of becoming more compatible with the habits of today’s mobile workforce; how they manage their activities and messages on multiple clients, not just the single Outlook on their work laptop. Making the CRM features available through new channels, such as the Office 15 Agaves, is very important for making Dynamics CRM a relevant tool for knowledge sharing as the applications and devices surrounding it are evolving.

Marketing

The biggest announcement for me personally was that Silverpop is acquiring CoreMotives. I’ve been both a customer and a partner of their Marketing Suite and all I can say is big congratulations to Rhett & Jeremie (the founding team)! You’ve done an awesome job in building the first truly integrated solution for online marketing to leverage the XRM capabilities that Dynamics CRM provides. I’m sure the product will only continue to improve and deliver even more value to the 800+ customers out there.

Despite of the acquisition, Silverpop doesn’t intend to give up on building their own integration between Dynamics CRM and their Engage platform. Another big marketing automation vendor, Marketo, also launched their integration to Dynamics CRM. Both companies have been big on the Salesforce.com scene, but obviously there’s been more and more demand for Microsoft’s platform from the types of accounts that traditionally invest in standalone marketing applications like these.

So, which route should you as a CRM customer take then? Go for a native Dynamics CRM solution like CoreMotives or ClickDimensions, or choose an integrated, external platform like Silverpop Engage or Marketo? There probably isn’t a single right answer. If you know the Dynamics CRM product/platform well and are comfortable with workflows, Advanced Find and view/chart customizations, you can get a really big bang for the buck by investing in a native solution that builds on top of your existing business application. If, on the other hand, your marketing people are not currently working with Dynamics CRM and you foresee the need to grow beyond capabilities that are a natural fit for tight CRM integration (just because it can be done through Dynamics CRM, doesn’t always mean it’s the optimal choice), you might want to investigate these new alternative offerings as well.

Social

All hail the social business, or ignore it at your peril. Already in the opening keynote, Kirill talked about the inevitable shift from systems of record towards systems of engagement that provide the tools needed for improving productivity in modern knowledge work. While Microsoft has seemed to be slow to make moves on the social front, but recent reports give indication that they intend to make significant investments to ride the social enterprise wave, on their own terms. Instead of producing individual tools for the social component, it will rather be baked into every application, one way or another.

We already knew that the upcoming R9 release of Dynamics CRM would finally contain functionality that extends beyond internal communities at work and into the great wide open that is the public social networks. The only question was, what was this thing going to run on? Now we know the answer to that, it’s InsideView. Not only will there be some level of free solutions available for download (there has in fact been a free version for over a year now), but their service will actually be integrated into the core product of Dynamics CRM. There doesn’t seem to be much details out there yet about what to expect, but functionality such as promoting information from an external network into the internal CRM Activity Feeds has mentioned as an upcoming feature.

How relevant is InsideView then for non-US markets? Time will tell. Currently they have been working on expanding their database coverage to the UK & Ireland, so let’s hope their success continues and we see the service reach out to new markets soon. In the meantime, almost everyone in B2B around the globe is using LinkedIn. Luckily enough, it was also announced during a Convergence CRM general session that a solution offering LinkedIn integration with Dynamics CRM would be released to the Dynamics Marketplace “next week” (meaning end of March). Built around the LinkedIn Sales Navigator service (starting at €29/user/month), the feature set will likely be similar to the Salesforce.com counterpart described in this SlideShare presentation.

Other forms of data enrichment also remain as bullets on Microsoft’s slides, with talks about Azure Data Market and the likes, but I haven’t seen much concrete evidence on those. Social customer care, as in “how to turn a tweet into a case record”, will be on the R9 roadmap, potentially leveraging the current Social Analytics experiment on SQL Azure. There’s no shortage of interesting existing tools on the social front at Microsoft (for example, did you know about So.cl, the social search engine?), so the question will really be how they manage to turn all these features and experiments into a product offering that their customers understand and are able to leverage in their day-to-day business.

Cloud

This is the least surprising theme of all. We already know Microsoft is all in the cloud, but rather than forcing everyone to jump in there with them, the hybrid cloud option remains their strategic differentiator.

Richard Seroter posted a collection of numbers and facts on Microsoft’s Online services, which I definitely recommend you to read. Here’s a small sample of those:

• 1,000 servers running CRM Online in 6 data centers around the globe
• 0 seconds of service downtime required for releasing system updates

As a customer, that’s what you get for €40/user/month. How does your own server room stack up in comparison? The economies of scale with services like CRM Online are hard to compete against. Especially when the company operating the service is also developing the applications it is running, with the help of 30.000 engineers on duty for cloud related development work.

Dynamics CRM has been in the clouds for “ages” already, so the biggest attention was on when would Dynamics ERP catch up. Both NAV 2013 and GP 2013 will be available on Azure before the end of the year, and AX will make it there in the next major version. Eventually also CRM Online and Office 365 will move from their current environments to run on Azure, but details on the schedule or implications to the services have not been announced.

While it’s never easy to upgrade CRM systems that contain lots of custom code and integrate to back-end systems and online marketing tools, the situation is hardly any easier on the ERP side, quite the contrary. Since also the Dynamics ERP products have now adopted an agile release policy, with new versions coming once a year, some customers are inevitably asking “in whose interest is this speed of change?” While it’s certainly cool to see demos of NAV running on a web client, deployed in Azure, operated through a Metro style app and even used while wearing your gloves, thanks to Microsoft Kinect sensor integration, surely not everyone is jumping for joy when the ERP system they were used to upgrading maybe only once per decade is now rolling out new features every year and moving onto tablets and clouds.

Speaking of the cloud, access to Dynamics CRM Online data from external applications is about to get easier with R9, if this rumor about OAuth support for the CRM OData endpoint is true. Now we just need OAuth support on other Microsoft apps like PowerPivot and the cloud data sources will soon start to catch up with their on-premises counterparts in terms of BI and integration feature set.

Summary

After the Dynamics CRM Q2 2012 Release Preview Guide was made available during Extreme CRM 2012 Berlin, there obviously wasn’t so much completely new information to be published by Microsoft at Convergence 2012 anymore. The same demos that were shown to 470 attendees in Berlin must have been reused as content to be displayed to the 10,225 attendees at Convergence, but of course that doesn’t lower the significance of these new developments. The speed of change in the Dynamics CRM world isn’t slowing down and it looks like there will increasingly be also new & updated functionality available between the bi-annual R8, R9 etc. releases. This means that you can no longer just attend one conference event per year and expect to keep up with what’s new in the product you are selling, developing for or working with.

Nowadays, just because you didn’t travel, doesn’t mean you couldn’t publish an album of “travel pictures”. As some of you may have heard, Pinterest is perhaps the hottest social network right now, and an event like Convergence finally gave me a good excuse to try the service in action. So, if you want to catch an overview of what was presented in Houston, why not check out my Convergence 2012 pinboard.

Convergence 2013 will be held in New Orleans, at the same dates as this year’s event. Be sure to mark the date on your calendar and turn to #CONV13 if you can’t make it there in person.

Microsoft has released a YouTube video where Ruben Krippner talks you through the upcoming features of the Q2 2012 Service Update, a.k.a. Dynamics CRM R8. Since we already know much of the new release details through the Release Preview Guide, the most interesting part of the video is the live footage of Microsoft Dynamics CRM Mobile running on an iPad. For those of you who want to get a quick glimpse of what the client looks like, I took the liberty of taking a few screenshots from the video.

Sitemap & Dashboards

As we know, the “new” client is actually a rebranded version of the CWR Mobility client for Dynamics CRM. The UI looks almost identical, apart from a new set of Metro style entity icons. The sharp edges and “authentically digital” appearance look somewhat out of place in the otherwise iOS-style app, but let’s hope that there will be a full Metro app for Dynamics CRM available once the Windows 8 tablets hit the stores.

Dashboards appear to be close to the web UI as far as charts go. If you have other types of web resources on your dashboard (say, a Silverlight component), the results may be a bit less so. Also, I’m assuming entity grids will not be rendered on the iPad Dashboard, at least not in their original format.

Views

The iPad UI does support filtering data through views, just like you do on the web client. However, the views themselves will not be presented in the familiar grid style with columns, rather you’ll see a list of records with the primary field and some other data stacked on top of each other. Whether this is because of iOS limitations or an inherited design from the iPhone app, I’m not sure.

Forms

The standard fields are presented on a form that has a single column. Picklist and date fields use native iOS controls, also field types like phone numbers or email addresses will open native apps for respective actions. Why an iPad app shows you the options to dial a phone call or send SMS, I don’t know, because at least my iPad won’t allow me to do those without jailbreaking the device, but maybe Ruben has a special version of the Apple tablet

As you can see from the form, it’s not specifically optimized for landscape mode viewing on a tablet, but rather looks like a big iPhone app. Entity forms with many columns will therefore be presented as a long list the user has to scroll up & down.

Maps

As a funny little detail that Ruben mentions on the video how the account address opens up on Google Maps. Why not Bing Maps? Well, because the native map application on an iOS device comes from Google…

Off-topic: It’s great that the mobile clients for iOS, Android and Windows Phone now have the basic address mapping integration in place, now we just need to get it for the web and Outlook clients as well. While the integration itself is technically quite trivial, the requirement for purchasing a Bing Maps license for using the map data on a non-public application is currently a big barrier in the desktop world. But enough about that, let’s get back to the mobile client.

Related records

Because the sitemap navigation pane is permanently visible on the left hand side of the screen, which on a normal web client entity form would show the related records, in the mobile client these are accessed through a button on the lower right corner of the screen. Subgrid type of functionality is not available on the tablet UI, which can make it a bit cumbersome to navigate through long hierarchies of records. As a result, using the iPad client for tasks such as order entry while on the road is not really optimal in the Microsoft Dynamics CRM Mobile client. These types of use cases will still be better met with a custom developed tablet application equipped with specific data entry screens, so toolkits like Resco will remain relevant even after this official Dynamics CRM iPad client gets released.

Configuration

The mobile client is not just an alternative UI for CRM, but there is a wealth of management options for user and client management, synchronization settings, usage reports etc. Since the way you use a mobile/tablet application is quite different from the normal desktop client usage scenario, it’s important that the information presented to the user can be optimized. Microsoft Dynamics CRM Mobile allows you to do this by defining different user groups and assigning them tailored mobile profiles containing only relevant entities in the sitemap. Also the contents of the mobile forms can be adjusted, so you don’t have to show all the tens of attributes that your entities contain.

Conclusions

The CRM Anywhere theme is definitely a step in the right direction for Microsoft Dynamics CRM to become an application that truly “works the way you do”. Even though the cross-browser compatibility will enable users to open up the CRM web client on their iPad Safari browser, for any serious work on a tablet you’ll want to have a client that is optimized for:

1. touch based user interface
2. streamlined data presentation to support the “working in short bursts” mode of mobile device usage
3. offline access for those moments when 3G or WiFi just doesn’t reach you

For the subscription price of $30 per user per month (or the perpetual license you can still acquire from CWR Mobility), you can install a fully capable Dynamics CRM mobile client on both your iPad and your iPhone, and still have one user license left for trying out the latest Android phone (whether the non-offline Windows Phone 7 client will consume a license, I don’t know yet).

You can read more of my thoughts on Microsoft Dynamics CRM Mobile on this article I wrote after the announcement at eXtreme CRM 2012 Berlin.

Improving internal collaboration has been the driving idea behind Dynamics CRM Activity Feeds. Even though the efficient usage of stream-like notifications may not be immediately obvious to users who’ve come to think of CRM data as permanent records presented in views, they provide a great enhancement on top of the existing customer data that focuses on answering the “what’s going on right now?” question, rather than the “what/who/how much” types of  queries that CRM systems typically have focused on. Joel Lindstrom wrote a great article on the Customer Effective blog about how Activity Feeds are different from RSS feeds, which I recommend everyone to read.

Originally launched in the Q4 2011 Service Update (R7), the Activity Feeds solution is about to receive some enhancements in the upcoming R8 release that will allow users to better filter the content of their wall and also click “like” on posts. (Note: contrary to some comments, the “unlike” feature will most likely be simply the undo action of “like”, rather than a real “thumbs down” reaction.) Compared to other social business applications like Yammer, there still doesn’t seem to be built-in support for features such as groups or hashtags that we’ve come accustomed to use on many platforms. I’ve already written about a DIY approach for leveraging custom groups to follow posts on specific topics. Next, I thought I’d see how we could make use of the hashtag concept in Dynamics CRM.

What’s a #hashtag & what’s it good for?

Whether you’re an active Twitter user or not, it’s likely you’ve come across a person using the # sign in his or her online writing. What started out as a user driven policy of grouping tweets has later turned into a whole movement that’s gotten both users as well as commercial entities get very interested on following, measuring and encouraging the use of #hashtags on social media channels.

Twitter allows the users to click on hashtags turned into hyperlinks, thus enabling them to view all recent posts containing the same hashtag. Although Dynamics CRM is a flexible platform for LoB application development, tweaking the default Activity Feeds solution web resources to support this kind of filter functionality wouldn’t be exactly a walk in the park. However, we can certainly explore the concept and see what else the platform might have available for us that could make the Activity Feeds more intelligent. Hmm, how about workflows?

While the post box on a wall doesn’t currently allow us to include any other “magic characters” apart from the @ symbol used for performing mentions, the pound sign does have one clear advantage: it’s rarely used for other purposes than a hashtag (you might have the occasional shouts of “we are #1!” by excited sales reps appear on the wall after they close a deal, but that’s about it). This means we can quite safely use the # symbol as an identifier for our own little magic words.

Triggering processes from wall posts

Suppose you’re browsing through your personal wall on a Windows Phone 7.5 mobile while sipping on a Venti Latte at Starbucks, utilizing the free Microsoft Dynamics CRM Mobile app. You spot an item in your feed that you want to take note for further action once you’re back at your office desk. How are you going to do that?

While an email inbox is hardly a good way to manage a list of open tasks, Activity Feeds are even worse as action items, because they’re not even meant to be persistent records with read/unread status or flags/categories. The stream flows on as other CRM users perform actions such as winning opportunities and solving support incidents, which means that the item you spotted while enjoying your coffee may well be buried into the depths of history the next time you glance at your wall. Posts are merely notifications about something, not the object itself.

Instead of resorting to disconnected manual notes, what you could do is track the regarding record of the interesting wall post as a new task on your own list of CRM activities. All we need is the creation of a very simple workflow rule to achieve this. Create a new workflow process on the Post entity and mark it to be started whenever a new Post record is created.

What the hashtag concept will be used for is evaluating the content of a Post and seeing if the workflow process should be run or not. In our example, let’s use the hashtag #task to identify a Post which we would like to trigger the creation of a new task record. You might also want to check that the Post source is Manual Post instead of Auto Post (more about that later).

In your workflow rule definition, create a new task record and insert the contents of your post in the subject line. Set the regarding field to be the RegardingObjectId of the Post, owner as the person who created the Post, and a due date of 1 Day After Created On. Save your process, activate it and you’re all set.

Just type #task and let the system take care of the rest

In our example, we’ve spotted a Post regarding a new opportunity record. (Ok, so we’re doing this from the web client and not the mobile one, since believe it or not, screen capture on WP7 requires an unlocked device!) We want to mark an action item on the record for us, so we post a new item on the record wall, using the hashtag we defined: “#task Ask Chris for customer references”. Please note that simply commenting a Post will not trigger a workflow, since the PostComment entity is not available for workflows (bummer), so make sure to type a completely new Post on the item of interest.

After the Post is submitted to CRM database, the workflow is triggered and a new task will have been created on you My Activities view in a matter of seconds. Should you ignore your CRM list once you return to the office (shame on you!), the due date reminder we set on the task will cause your Outlook (and probably also your mobile phone) to alert you about the action item you created for yourself.

Drive any process with #hashtags

As you might know, the free mobile client does not allow you to create or update any CRM records, you can only read them on your mobile phone (unless you want to open the somewhat less pretty Mobile Express client). The only exception is Activity Feed Posts, which you can type on your Windows Mobile device and get the data updated into CRM in real time. Together with the creative use of hashtags and workflow processes, we can actually trigger also some other data entry and updates while on the road, as you saw from the #task example.

While you can’t create a workflow that would update the parent object of the Post, you can create new child items for it. In the example below, we’re creating a new case by using the #case hashtag.

The steps of the workflow process configuration are as follows:

• Check if the Post contains the text #case
• Create a new case record, set the title to post text, set customer as the RegardingObjectId(Post)
• Create a queue item for the new case and move it to the Support queue for CSR’s to start working on
• Wait for the case status to change from active to something else
• Create a new post on the customer wall, containing a summary of the information recorded on the case after its creation
• To finish the process with confidence on both sides, also send a direct email to the person who initiated the case creation with his/her wall post

A final word of warning: since you probably don’t want a workflow generated Post to trigger any new workflows accidentally, it’s a good idea to always set the right Post Source value (Auto Post, Manual Post) and also filter these in your workflow conditions. As an example, if you post “#case Customer asks for refund” and then later on use it as the case title that gets inserted into a new Post, you’ll soon be stuck in a loop of each case resolution creating a new case…

One great thing about Microsoft Dynamics CRM as a business application platform has been that it’s modern enough to have been born into the browser window from day one. With no legacy from the pre-web era, the product has been able to stay relevant with no major disruptions in the client side development and also supported the eventual move of the server side functionality to the data centers in the cloud.

Internet Explorer market share peaked in 2003, when 95% of all Internet usage was on IE. Coincidentally, Microsoft CRM 1.0 was released in January 2003. At the time, providing support for any other browser than your in-house product would have certainly sounded like a requirement you could de-prioritize. Today Internet Explorer commands a market share of less than 40%. There are now more iPads sold than any brand of desktop PCs combined. If that doesn’t signal the move to a post-PC era, I don’t know what does. If you’d be a company manufacturing an IE only product for PCs in the year 2012, you could soon be out of business.

This is a fate Microsoft intends to avoid, which is why the cross-browser support for Microsoft Dynamics CRM was officially announced in the Q2 2012 Service Update release preview guide, released at the beginning of Extreme CRM 2012 conference in Berlin. We had already seen the promise of non-IE browser clients for Dynamics CRM presented in Microsoft’s May 2011 Statement of Direction and now we finally have details about what to expect in Dynamics CRM R8 release exactly one year later. As with my previous post on mobile CRM, I won’t rephrase all the content of the official announcement but I’ll rather try and reflect on the topic with some personal observations and thoughts.

There’s Supported and then there’s “supported”

If you’ve glanced at the table of supported browser and OS combinations, you’ll have noticed that Microsoft does not guarantee support on every browser out there on every operating system. This is not too surprising, as any web application developer surely knows what a nightmare the differences in interpretation of web standards between various browsers can be for application development and testing. In the words of Craig Dewar (Director of Product Management for MSDYNCRM), browser testing is a “gigantic effort” for Microsoft, which is why official support is not all encompassing.

Just because a browser or OS is not listed in Microsoft’s documentation as supported, doesn’t mean Dynamics CRM won’t work on it. So, even though there are no supported options for using Microsoft Dynamics CRM on Linux, you might not notice any problems if you access it with Firefox on Ubuntu. In fact, Craig mentioned in his keynote at Extreme CRM 2012 Berlin that even if you’re using a client that’s not officially supported, Microsoft will allow you to open support tickets on issues that are not specific to the browser/OS combination you’re running. I guess you’ll just want to have at least one Win/IE or Mac/Safari device around to make sure you can reproduce the issue when dealing with Microsoft Support representatives.

“Macbooks for everyone!”

In case you’ve been drooling over the cool Apple hardware that all the opinion leaders seem to carry with them these days, the future does indeed look brighter for people working on/with Dynamics CRM. Before you jump head first into the OSX & iOS world and format all your Windows partitions, it’s important to remember that what Microsoft is talking about here is just the browser client support for CRM end users.

While you can get Microsoft Office for OSX and run Outlook on you Mac, what you can’t do is use the Microsoft Dynamics CRM for Outlook client. This means you can’t track emails to CRM, synchronize your calendar appointments between Outlook and CRM, get CRM task and call reminders from your Outlook, synchronize your contacts from CRM to Outlook to your iPhone, or have any offline support for CRM data and application functionality when your Macbook doesn’t have WiFi or 3G data connectivity. All in all, you lose quite a bit of that seamless productivity tools magic that Dynamics CRM promises to deliver for all Windows users. I haven’t seen any announcements about a CRM Outlook client for Mac, so it’s pretty safe to assume that we won’t see one released for the Outlook 2011 for Mac version currently available.

OK, so how about the support of Apple’s mobile devices then? It says Dynamics CRM will run on iPad 2 with iOS 5.x, so that should at least deliver the full flavor of the browser experience on a tablet, right? Well, the problem is you might get more than you bargained for in that deal, since (as far as I’m aware of) the browser client will look and work exactly the same on all supported platforms and devices. If you’ve ever tried running the Dynamics CRM web client on a Windows 7 tablet, you’ll know that simply replacing the mouse cursor with your index finger will not magically “touchify” the user experience. What works nicely on a 24″ screen with mouse & keyboard input may not scale/transform into the tablet environment of 10″ screens and touch UI. If you’ve used a remote desktop app on your iPad, then I’d imagine this is pretty much what you can expect from a browser client on an iPad. Unless you go for the $30 per month subscription of Microsoft Dynamics CRM Mobile app or purchase a perpetual license from CWR Mobility, TenDigits or other ISV’s that develop mobile clients optimized specifically for the touch UI. The same goes for Android tablets, only with the exception that the browser client falls into the “not officially supported” territory.

Finally, if you’re not only using Dynamics CRM but also administering or customizing it, I’ve read that you’ll still need Internet Explorer in order to access these areas in the web client.

‘Reimagining’ Windows, should we also reimagine Dynamics CRM?

It’s important to note that the web client coming out in Q2 2012 is not a HTML5 product, rather it’s a trimmed version of the previous IE only client with removed dependencies on Microsoft’s proprietary extensions that only IE supports (.htc files etc.). The future is not here yet, but there is little doubt on the direction Microsoft is heading towards, with the upcoming WinRT framework and the big push for HTML, Javascript and CSS as the foundation for future Windows apps.

Which brings us to Silverlight. It’s been widely speculated that Silverlight 5 released at the end of 2011 will be the last of it’s kind, the end of the road. Porting existing Silverlight apps to run on Win RT is said to be easy, which should naturally be in the interest of Microsoft to ensure. As I’m not a developer, I’m looking at the discussion more from the point of view of someone who needs to examine all the available technologies out there, evaluate how they fit together and build a working business solution out of them. From this perspective, there are some concerns regarding Silverlight that very much affect Dynamics CRM users as well.

While Dynamics CRM might work on a browser/OS combination that is not officially supported, the game is different if you’re using Silverlight web parts in your CRM. If a Silverlight plugin is not available for the client, it will not work, period. This includes combinations such as Chrome/OSX, any machine running Linux and most notably the iPad. Ok, so what about making the same UI with a different technology, like HTML, Javascript and CSS? In theory everything should work on every platform in this case. You’re free to draw your conclusions on which approach is better for starting your next Dynamics CRM add-on project.

Looking further ahead to Windows 8, we’ve already received the announcement that there will actually be a completely different edition of the operating system, called Windows On ARM (WOA), that will the basis for building always on, always connected, low power consumption devices to rival the iPad. The Internet Explorer 10 browser on WOA will not allow any plug-ins whatsoever, be it Flash or Silverlight. Furthermore, the Office 15 package that is available for WOA tablets will include only Word, Excel, PowerPoint and OneNote, but not Outlook. By now you should have figured out that the Microsoft Dynamics CRM experience on WOA will need to be quite different from what we have on Windows 7 today.

If there will not be Outlook on the “real” Windows tablets, what does the future hold for the CRM Outlook client? I previously wrote about the legacy of Outlook and how it will be increasingly more difficult to carry all that legacy when moving to the Post-PC era of iPad-esque devices for every knowledge worker. By the looks of things, Outlook could possibly get split into Metro Mail, Contacts and Calendar apps. If this happens, then it’s easy to envision a separate Dynamics CRM Metro app sitting alongside them, integrating into all the other installed apps through a simple share contract. After all, isn’t that the way it should really be? Link contacts/friends/followers from any social network app to CRM contacts, track any type of status update/post/tweet from the same app as a custom activity type into your CRM database. There’s no reason why customer relationship management tasks should be any more complex or inflexible than that.

It’s great to have Dynamics CRM available soon on (almost) any browser. Still, if Microsoft truly is reimagining Windows the way they claim to be and if their business customers buy into their new story, perhaps running Dynamics CRM on Safari won’t seem all that exciting anymore this time next year.

This is my first post on news and gossip that the eXtreme CRM 2012 Berlin conference brought to us. As there’s so many posts out there already that review the contents of the Q2 2012 Service Update (aka Dynamics CRM R8), I’m going to try and reflect on the topics based on my own observations and questions that these latest announcements have brought up. The first stop is mobile CRM.

Every consultant knows that Microsoft’s initial offering, the Dynamics CRM Mobile Express client, wasn’t really something you wanted to draw the customers’ attention to. It was just barely good enough to tick the feature box of “yes, we have mobile CRM”. On a non-touch smartphone like the popular business products from Nokia or RIM the user experience might have matched the native apps and device capabilities, but in the age of the iPhone this wasn’t at all what the users had come to expect from their mobile apps.

When Microsoft released the new Windows Phone 7 client application in CRM R7 release (2011 Q4 Service Update), we saw a glimpse of a brighter mobile future, but there was still hardly reason for true celebration. Ok, so we had a mobile optimized client now available, but it had it’s issues:

• Only available for one niche (yet growing) smartphone platform
• No ability to create or update any CRM records (except Activity Feed posts)
• No offline support

The path towards a credible mobile offering would have been quite long for Microsoft to walk all on its own. Therefore it wasn’t really a surprise that they chose to team up with an existing partner and rebrand their mobile applications and services to the new “CRM Anywhere” solution (which is still officially called Microsoft Dynamics CRM Mobile). Out of all the possible mobile CRM ISV’s out there, their partner of choice turned out to be CWR Mobility.

This could of course be seen as a big blow to the other Dynamics CRM mobile ISV’s, who now have to compete against Microsoft’s own offering. However, in the long term this may actually be a positive turn of events for the whole ecosystem. The fact that there will be an official mobile app available from Microsoft to all the major smartphone platforms will surely drive up customer awareness as well as interest towards the possible use cases for “CRM on the road”.

Considering how much talk there’s been around the mobile use of CRM applications in the past few years, in my opinion we haven’t yet seen it really bloom the way many of us would have expected it to. I think one of the reasons is that mobile CRM has often been considered mainly as “CRM lite” that offers a subset of the features the full application delivers, for those awkward moments when your “CRM full” is not available to you. If mobile CRM is an optional feature that does not tie into the processes you absolutely need to execute, how likely is it that companies will choose to invest in such an additional cost factor? Ben Mitchell from TenDigits said it really well in his presentation:

“You’ve got a perfectly working address book on your phone already. If that’s all you’re trying to replace with mobile CRM, it’s always going to be too expensive. Always attach the price of a mobile CRM solution to the business value the customer is trying to achieve by deploying the solution. Mobile functionality pricing must be delivered in the context of business objectives, not just as a last minute addition to the quotation.”

Mobile CRM is like Social CRM in this sense: companies know why they need to embrace it sooner or later, but they’re still having difficulties in articulating exactly how they plan to go about it. As the limitations of available software are quickly fading away, the focus on real life use cases must rise on top. No, mobile CRM isn’t just about replicating the desktop experience on a smaller device. It must support the mode of working in infrequent bursts and dealing with specific scenarios, such as order entry or survey answer recording while the user is at the customer’s site. The UI needs to be optimized for the process in question, not just equipped with big icons to be poked with your fingers. Whether it’s going to be packaged apps like the Microsoft Dynamics CRM Mobile growing beyond their current feature sets in customizability, platforms like the Resco Mobile CRM Studio gaining popularity as the basis for mobile app development, or even a future release of a HTML5 compliant version of the core Dynamics CRM browser app stealing the show with responsive web design, the playing field for a true CRM Anywhere solution that takes the “mobile first” thinking into everyday practice still looks wide open to me.

One interesting thing to keep an eye on is what’s going to happen to the Microsoft developed Windows Phone 7 CRM client. The R8 release preview guide states that there will not yet be offline functionality available for Windows Phone devices when the new service launches. This means that Microsoft Dynamics CRM will initially work better on pretty much any other mobile platforms compared to Microsoft Windows Phone 7 (doh!). I’m assuming that the current client version will receive some minor feature updates (new Activity Feeds filters etc.) but a full integration into the CWR Mobile platform will take more time. I’ve noticed in some occasions the WP7 client has actually been referred to as the “Activity Feeds Mobile App”, but I’m not sure if Microsoft could get away with renaming product X to product Y, then launching a new product X and charging extra money for it.

This leads us to the pricing model. Whereas the Windows Phone 7 client is a free download from the Marketplace, the CWR clients are based on a subscription fee. A company who buys licenses for Dynamics CRM, be it on-premises or CRM Online, will not receive any mobile client functionality as a part of the core product. Microsoft Dynamics CRM Mobile will therefore remain as an add-on that customers must purchase licenses for separately. Considering the price is $30 per user per month, compared to the base product price of CRM Online of $44, this means in many cases not all CRM users will be given mobile client licenses. Or perhaps they’ll just be given a midprice Windows Phone device, such as the Nokia Lumia 710, and access to the free WP7 version of Dynamics CRM Mobile. With a number of Dynamics CRM apps already out there in iOS and Android marketplaces that any user can purchase for themselves and point it to a CRM Online or IFD organization, I’m not even sure companies can effectively standardize on a single official mobile app anymore, thanks to the BYOD culture and shadow IT.

The official Microsoft Dynamics CRM Mobile service won’t be able to match the 40 markets / 41 languages level of the core CRM product, as it will initially be available only in 24 markets and 10 languages. The explanation offered by Microsoft was that there are such regulatory limitations for mobile services in many markets that they simply can’t roll out their mobile CRM offering as quickly as a cloud app like CRM Online. We’ll see how fast they can catch up and bring the service to markets like Finland. It will also be interesting to see whether the initial unavailability will simply mean the lack of local languages or if MS will actually not offer the mobile app for download at all in these tier 2 regions’ marketplaces. I sure hope it won’t be the latter option, even if it would mean I’d have to temporarily return from WP7 to Android for doing proper presales demos of the new mobile service with offline capability. The sacrifices one needs to make for the love of CRM…

Vaikka Microsoft Dynamics CRM on tehty alusta alkaen web-sovellukseksi, on sen käyttäminen kuitenkin vaatinut nimenomaan Internet Explorer -selainta. Mikäli sovellukseen yrittää kirjautua esim. Firefox- tai Chrome-selaimella, on tuloksena ollut versiosta riippuen joko virheilmoitus (“unsupported browser version”) tai käyttäjän ohjaaminen rajoitettuun, mobiililaitteille tarkoitettuun Mobile Express -versioon. Koska Internet Explorer -selain on saatavilla vain Windows-laitteille, on tämä tarkoittanut sitä, ettei Dynamics CRM:n käyttö ole onnistunut Mac- tai Linux-tietokoneilla ilman virtualisointiratkaisuja.

Helmikuussa julkistettiin yksityiskohtia seuraavasta Dynamics CRM 2011:n päivitysversiosta, joka tunnetaan nimellä R8 tai Q2 2012 Service Update (suomeksi todennäköisesti “Microsoft Dynamics CRM:n toukokuun 2012 palvelupäivitys”). Yksi keskeisimpiä uutuuksia R8:ssa tulee olemaan laajennettu selaintuki, joka mahdollistaa Dynamics CRM:n käytön useimmilla eri selainsovelluksilla.

Virallisesti tuettujen selain- ja käyttöjärjestelmäkombinaatioiden listalla on mm. Chrome/Firefox & Windows sekä Mac OS X & Safari. Kaikilla alustoilla ei tueta samoja selaimia, eli esim. Chrome Macilla tai Safari PC:llä eivät kuulu listalle. Tästä huolimatta useimpien Dynamics CRM:n toimintojen tulisi jatkossa toimia myös näillä alustoilla virallisesta tuesta huolimatta, eli vaikkapa Linux-käyttäjä oletettavasti pystyy käyttämään CRM:ää haluamallaan selaimella. Virallisesti tuettujen käyttöjärjestelmien ja selaimien lista on Microsoftin edustajan sanojen mukaan pidetty rajallisena sovelluksen testaamiseen vaadittavan työmäärän pitämiseksi aisoissa. Eri selainversioiden määrän kasvu tulee luonnollisesti myös aiheuttamaan lisätyötä Dynamics CRM:ää mukauttaville ja laajentaville kumppaneille, verrattuna aiempaan tilanteeseen, jossa koodin testaaminen pelkällä Internet Explorer -selaimella oli riittävää.

Mielenkiintoinen uutuus listalla on iPad-tuki, joka mahdollistaa Microsoft Dynamics CRM -selainkäyttöliittymän käyttämisen toisen ja kolmannen sukupolven iPad-laitteilla. Oletettavasti myös muut tabletit Android-käyttöjärjestelmällä tulevat tarvittaessa toimimaan CRM-päätelaitteina. On kuitenkin syytä huomioida, että tuki tablet-laitteille ei tässä yhteydessä tarkoita kosketuskäyttöön optimoitua sovellusta, vaan perinteisen, hiirelle suunnitellun Dynamics CRM:n käyttöliittymän tuomista taulutietokoneen ruudulle. Siksi tehokkaan mobiililaitteilla työskentelyn mahdollistamiseksi on syytä harkita juuri kosketuskäyttöön tarkoitetun sovelluksen hankkimista.

R8-versio eli Q2 2012 Service Update on nimensä mukaan saapumassa vuoden 2012 toisen kvartaalin aikana. Microsoftin esittämissä roadmap-kalvoissa julkaisun ajankohta on toukokuu, eli uuden version toiminnallisuudet on näillä näkymin mahdollista saada omalla toimistolla käyttöön vielä ennen kesälomia. CRM Online -pilvipalvelua käyttäville asiakkaille päivitys tulee saataville automaattisesti, omaa Dynamics CRM -palvelinta ylläpitävien taas on asennettava todennäköisesti Update Rollup 8 -nimellä julkaistava päivityskokoelma.

Microsoft julkaisi lokakuun viimeisellä viikolla merkittävän päivityksen Dynamics CRM 2011 -tuotteeseensa. Tämä marraskuun 2011 palvelupäivitys tunnetaan myös nimellä Q4 2011 Service Update, tai vaihtoehtoisesti CRM Online R7. Päivitys koskee sekä omalla palvelimella ajettavaa on-premises -versiota että Microsoftin palvelinkeskuksesta toimitettavaa CRM Onlinea. Jos käytössäsi on jälkimmäinen palveluvaihtoehto, on organisaatiosi laskutuksen hallintakäyttäjä todennäköisesti jo saanyt alla näkyvän ilmoituksen siitä, että “CRM Online organisaatiosi on päivitetty automaattisesti tämän palvelun uusimpaan versioon”.

Omalla palvelimella toimivaan CRM 2011 -sovellukseen nämä uudet ominaisuudet on saatavissa käyttöön Update Rollup 5 -päivityskokoelman asennuksella. Päivitys tulee saataville Microsoft Update -päivityspalvelun kautta automaattisesti marraskuun 8. päivä alkaen. Myös Online-käyttäjien on syytä muistaa, että Dynamics CRM for Microsoft Office Outlook -työasemasovelluksiin tulee asentaa vastaavat päivitykset. Koska kyseessä on tavallista merkittävämpi päivityskokonaisuus, Update Rollup 5 ei tue asennuksen poistoa, joten on hyvin suositeltavaa varmistaa oman CRM-ympäristön mahdollisten laajennusten ja integraatioiden toimivuus testiympäristössä ennen tuotantokäyttöönottoa.

Asiakastiedon uusi sosiaalinen ulottuvuus

Näkyvimpänä uutuutena marraskuun 2011 palvelupäivitys tuo mukanaan Activity Feeds -toiminnot eli suomeksi “toimintasyötteet”/”aktiviteettisyötteet”, jotka tarjoavat uuden, sosiaalisemman tavan jakaa tietoa yrityksen sisällä. Monista sosiaalisen media palveluista tuttu mahdollisuus lähettää statuspäivityksiä ja kommentoida muiden käyttäjien kirjoituksia on nyt tuotu myös CRM:n sisään. Kyse ei ole kuitenkaan ainoastaan käyttäjien välisten keskustelujen mahdollistamisesta, vaan tiedon liittämisestä oikeaan asiayhteyteen eli asiakastietoihin ja muihin liiketoimintatietueisiin (tarjoukset, palvelupyynnöt, sopimukset, projektit ym.). Activity Feeds rakentuu Dynamics CRM:n joustavan tietomallin päälle ja täydentää sitä uudella sosiaalisella kerroksella, jonka avulla käyttäjät voivat seurata heille tärkeitä tietueita ja saada niihin liittyviä tilapäivityksiä.

Jokaisella CRM-käyttäjällä on uudessa palvelussa oma seinä (personal wall), jonka kautta toimintasyötteiden sisältöä voi lukea, kommentoida ja tietysti myös kirjoittaa. Seinällä näkyvät kaikki sellaisiin tietueisiin liittyvät päivitykset, jotka käyttäjä on lisännyt omalle seurantalistalleen. Koko yrityksen ei siis tarvitse lukea samoja tilapäivityksiä kaikkiin tietueisiin liittyen, vaan kyse on käyttäjäkohtaisesti tuotetusta personoidusta sisällöstä, jonka tarkoituksena on nostaa näkyville käyttäjän oman roolin kannalta relevantti tieto. Esimerkiksi isoa myyntimahdollisuutta saattaa olla mukana työstämässä laaja tiimi työntekijöitä eri organisaatioyksiköistä. Seuraamalla CRM:n mahdollisuustietuetta on näiden käyttäjien helppoa pysyä selvillä viimeisimmistä siihen liittyneistä toimenpiteistä, ilman että tietoa pitäisi erikseen jakaa sähköpostitse eri osapuolille.

Käyttäjien itse tuottama syötesisältö (manuaaliset viestit) ei ole ainoa tapa saada tietoa esille seinälle. CRM:n tietueita koskevista tapahtumista voidaan määrittää syntyväksi automaattisia viestejä, jotka nousevat näkyville kaikkien liittyvien tietueiden syöteseinille että myös niitä seuraavien käyttäjien seinille. Kun esimerkiksi myyntimahdollisuus suljetaan voitettuna tai hävittynä, luo CRM automaattisesti merkinnän seinälle, joka sekä nopeuttaa tiedon levittämistä että tarjoaa käyttäjille kätevän kanavan kommentoida tapahtunutta yhteisellä foorumilla.

Syötteiden käyttöönotto

Kun rekisteröit uuden CRM Online -organisaation koekäyttöön, saat jatkossa Activity Feeds -toiminnot suoraan käyttöösi. Nykyisille organisaatioille toimintasyötteiden tietomalli tulee alustaan aiemmin mainitun Update Rollup 5 -päivityksen mukana. On kuitenkin syytä huomioida, että itse aktiviteettisyötteet eivät vielä näy käyttöliittymässä päivityksen jälkeen. Kyse on nimittäin erillisestä ratkaisupaketista, joka pitää ladata Microsoft Dynamics Marketplace -sivustolta.

Kun asennustiedosto on ladattu, tulee ratkaisupaketti asentaa CRM-organisaatioon asetukset-osion mukauttaminen-valikosta. Ohjeita ja vinkkejä aktiviteettisyötteiden käyttöönottoon löydät mm. tästä blogikirjoituksesta.

Windows Phone 7 -sovellus

Nokian ansiosta paljon huomiota viime aikoina Suomessa saanut Windows Phone 7 -käyttöjärjestelmä on nyt erityisasemassa Dynamics CRM -maailmassa, sillä Microsoft on julkaissut tälle alustalle natiivisovelluksen CRM:n mobiilikäyttöön. Microsoft Dynamics CRM Mobile on ladattavissa ilmaiseksi Windows Phone Marketplacesta, aivan kuten muutkin WP7-sovellukset. CRM Online -käyttäjät voivat kirjautua sovelluksella suoraan omaan CRM-organisaatioonsa syöttämällä palvelimen osoitteen. Myös on-premises -ympäristöt ovat tuettuja, kunhan ne ovat ns. IFD-konfiguroituja (Internet Facing Deployment) eli mahdollistavat sisäänkirjautumisen yrityksen verkon ulkopuolelta.

Microsoft Dynamics CRM Mobile tukee täysipainoisesti uusia aktiviteettisyötteitä, jotka ovatkin omiaan juuri mobiililaitteella selattavaksi. Tarkempi lista sovelluksen muista toiminnoista on luettavissa aiemmasta artikkelista Mango tuo uutta makua mobiili-CRM:ään. WP7-sovellus parantaa merkittävästi CRM-tiedon käytettävyyttä verrattuna aiempaan selaimella käytettyyn Mobile Express -kevytversioon verrattuna, tarjoten mm. verkosta haettujen tietojen tallennusta välimuistiin sekä luonnollisesti Windows Phonen Metro-käyttöliittymäkieltä noudattavan navigointitavan, joka on optimoitu kosketusnäytöllisille älypuhelimille. CRM-tietueisiin liittyvien statuspäivitysten kirjaaminen tien päältä on siis jatkossa yhtä helppoa kuin vaikkapa Facebookin mobiiliselailu, mikä varmasti on omiaan alentamaan kynnystä CRM:n hyödyntämiseen luontevana osana nykypäivän tietotyöläisen työkalupakkia.

Tämän kvartaalin aikana ilmestyvä Microsoft Dynamics CRM Q4 2011 Service Update sisältää lukuisia tervetulleita parannuksia CRM 2011:n nykyisiin toimintoihin (mm. uusia kaaviotyyppejä, laajemman kenttätuen dialog-prosesseihin) sekä kokonaan uusia toiminnallisuuksia, joista näkyvimpänä todennäköisesti Activity Feeds. Vähäpätöinen ominaisuus ei myöskään ole federoidun identiteetin tuki, jonka myötä käyttäjätunnusten hallinta mukautuu yhteensopivaksi Office 365:n kanssa. Tarkempia tietoja tämän myös CRM Online R7 -päivityksen nimellä kulkevan version sisällöstä on nyt saatavilla virallisesta Release Preview Guidesta.

Ajankohtainen ja kauan kaivattu uutuus sijoittuu mobiilirintamalle. Microsoft sai viikko sitten viimein viralliseen jakeluun Windows Phone 7.5 eli Mango-päivityksen mobiilikäyttöjärjestelmäänsä, joka nosti niin nykyisten kuin tulevien WP7-laitteiden käytettävyyden aivan uudelle tasolle, sisältäen mm. uuden IE9-selaimen, tuen sovellusten moniajolle, sisäänrakennetut Facebook, Twitter, ja LinkedIn-verkostojen integraatiot sekä paljon muuta. Nokia on vasta tuomassa omia laitteitaan markkinoille loppuvuodesta (Suomeen kenties vasta Q1/2012), mutta kotimaisen kehittäjäyhteisön mielenkiinto on verkkokeskusteluista päätellen noussut jo hyvin korkealle tätä älypuhelinmarkkinan kolmatta/mustaa hevosta kohtaan. Mikä olisikaan parempi hetki Microsoftille julkistaa myös ensimmäinen virallinen Windows Phone 7 -sovellus Microsoft Dynamics CRM:lle!

Aiemmin Microsoftin tarjoama mobiililaitteiden tuki CRM:ssä on rajoittunut Mobile Express clientiin, joka on ollut lähinnä BlackBerryn / Nokia E71:n kaltaisille näppäimistöllä varustetuille puhelimille suunniteltu kevytversio Dynamics CRM:n käyttöliittymästä. Kolmansien osapuolien tuottamat sovellukset (mm. CWR Mobility, TenDigits) ovat tarjonneet lisähintaan kosketusnäytöllisille älypuhelimille optimoitua mobiili-CRM:ää, mutta nyt myös Microsoftin vakiotuotepaketti laajenee kattamaan nimenomaan Windows Phone 7 -alustalle rakennetun natiivin Dynamics CRM -sovelluksen. Luonnollisesti käyttöliittymä tulee hyödyntämään samaa Metro-käyttöliittymäkieltä, johon niin WP7 kuin myös tuleva Windows 8 -työpöytäkäyttöjärjestelmä vahvasti nojaavat. Toiminnallisuuslistalla ovat muun muassa:

• Asiakas-, yhteyshenkilö-, liidi-, ja mahdollisuustietueiden lukeminen (huom: ei siis vielä luonti/muokkaus)
• Yhden klikkauksen päässä oleva sähköpostin lähetys tai puhelinsoitto CRM-tietueelle
• Osoitteiden haku yhdellä klikkauksella Bing Maps -karttapalvelusta
• CRM:n viimeisimpien päivitysten selaaminen Activity Feeds -näkymästä
• Reaaliaikaisten statuspäivitysten kirjoittaminen ja lukeminen (á la FB/Twitter/Yammer/Chatter)
• Mukautettavissa olevat tietuelomakkeet

Dynamics CRM:ään jo aikojen alusta sisältyneen Outlook/Exchange-integraation ansiosta CRM:n yhteystiedot, kalenteritapahtumat ja tehtävät ovat jo tähän mennessä kulkeneet vaivatta mobiililaitteissa mukana. Älypuhelinsovellus tuo asiakastiedon askelta lähemmäksi niitä tilanteita, joissa asiakkaan kanssa todennäköisimmin ollaan tekemisissä. Yrityskäyttäjien kiirehtiessä jo innolla hankkimaan iPadeja ja muita tablettilaitteita korvaamaan perinteisten kannettavien käyttöä tien päällä työskennellessä on yrityssovellusten kehityksen painopiste myös vahvasti siirtymässä kohti “mobile first” -ajattelua. Ensi vuoden alkupuoliskolle aikataulutettu Dynamics CRM Q2 2012 -versio onkin tuomassa mukanaan kokonaan uuden HTML5-pohjaisen käyttöliittymän. Vaikka moni Mac-käyttäjä onkin tätä päivitystä jo kaipaillut, tulee sen merkitys todennäköisesti olemaan paljon kauaskantoisempi juuri laajemman mobiilikäytön mahdollistajana.

CRM-tietokannan sisällön selaaminen mobiililaitteista edellyttää tyypilliesti, että palvelimelle on konfiguroitu käyttöön ns. IFD-moodi (Internet Facing Deployment), jos käytössä on oma on-premises -versio Dynamics CRM 2011:sta. Tämän voi olettaa säilyvän vaatimuksena myös tulevan WP7-version käytölle. CRM Online -käyttäjillä tämä lomakepohjainen autentikointitapa on jo valmiiksi käytössä, joten heidän ei tarvitse muuta kuin odottaa pilvipalveluun loppuvuodesta asentuvaa Q4 2011 Service Update -päivitystä ja Windows Phone Marketplace -sovelluskauppaan ladattavaksi saapuvaa Dynamics CRM -sovellusta.

Los Angelesissa tänä vuonna järjestetty Microsoft Worldwide Partner Conference eli tuttavallisemmin WPC on kasvanut osanottajamäärältään huimiin mittasuhteisiin. 15.000:n osallistujan joukko koostuu pääasiassa Microsoftin kumppaniyritysten edustajista, jotka ovat kerääntyneet Staples Centeriin kuulemaan viimeisimpiä uutisia päämieheltään. Esillä oleva tuotteiden ja palveluiden kirjo kattaa käytännössä kaiken Microsoftin tarjonnan, alkaen Windows-käyttöjärjestelmistä ja Office-sovelluksista, päätyen mobiili- ja konsolitarjonnan kautta yrityspuolen palvelinsovelluksiin ja yhä keskeisemmin pilvipalveluiden äärelle. Jos vuonna 2010 WPC:ssä julkistettiin Microsoftin “all in”-pilvistrategia ja aloitettiin Cloud Power -sanoman todellinen vyöryttäminen, ei tämänvuotinen tapahtuma edusta suunnanmuutosta vaan pikemminkin jatkumoa. Päivän sana on edelleen “cloud”, jota ei pääse pakoon missään Microsoftin tuoteperheessä.

Kasvulukuja

WPC:n toisen päivän keynote-esityksessä lavalle nousi Microsoftin Dynamics-liiketoiminnasta vastaava Kirill Tatarinov. Periamerikkalaiseen tyyliin ylisanoja ei ole esityksissä tapana säästellä, mutta Dynamics-tuotesalkun osalta myös numerot puhuvat puolestaan. Microsoft Dynamics CRM -käyttäjien määrä on globaalilla tasolla ylittänyt jo 2 miljoonan rajapyykin, saavuttaen tämän nopeammin kuin mikään CRM-järjestelmätoimittaja aiemmin. Tarkasteltaessa Microsoftin tasan kymmenen vuotta sitten aloittamaa yrityssovellusten liiketoimintaa (alkaen Great Plainsin ostosta 2001), yksikön nykyiset asiakasmäärät niin CRM- kuin ERP-puolella (300.000 asiakasorganisaatiota tuotteilla GP, SL, AX, NAV) kertovat siitä, että Dynamics-tuoteperheen merkitys Microsoftin tuotekehityksen panostuksissa tuskin on ainakaan laskemaan päin. Ottaen huomioon CRM-pilvipalveluiden markkinoiden kasvuennusteet, voidaan Dynamics CRM-käyttäjämäärän kasvun olettaa jatkavan kasvuaan kaksinumeroisilla prosenttiyksiköillä tulevinakin kvarataaleina.

Pitkään Siebel CRM:ää toiminnassaan käyttänyt Microsoftin oma organisaatio julistettiin Siebel-vapaaksi vyöhykkeeksi, tarkoittaen että viimeisetkin yksiköt olisi viimein saatu siirrettyä käyttämään omaa Dynamics CRM:ää asiakkuudenhallinnan tietojärjestelmänä. Kirill kehoitti myös MS-kumppaneita käymään Oracle Siebel CRM -tuotetta käyttävän 5000 asiakasorganisaation kimppuun, jotta nämä saataisiin siirrettyä Dynamics CRM -maailmaan, koska tämän sanoin “Siebel is a dead product”. Niitä MS-kumppaniyrityksiä, jotka ovat tähän asti käyttäneet sisäisenä CRM-ratkaisunaan Salesforce.com:ia (“god forbid!”), ohjeistettiin ystävällisesti ottamaan käyttöön partner-etuna ilmaiseksi tarjottava Dynamics CRM Online.

Dynamics CRM Q4 2011 Service Update

Keväällä julkaistun, päivitetyn Statement of Direction -whitepaperin mukaisesti Dynamics CRM:ään on jatkossa odotettavissa päivityksiä kaksi kertaa vuodessa, aiemman 2-3 vuoden päivitysvälin sijaan. Tämän uuden julkaisupolitiikan ensimmäinen ilmentymä tulee olemaan vuoden viimeisellä kvartaalilla julkaistava Service Update, joka tuo uusia ja paranneltuja toimintoja sekä CRM Online- että on-premise -käyttäjien saataville.

Activity feeds on yksi WPC:ssä esiteltyjä näkyviä uudistuksia. Demosta päätellen toiminto tulee mahdollistamaan yrityksen sisäisen mikrobloggauksen/status-päivitysten julkaisemisen, kuten esimerkiksi suosittu Yammer-palvelu tai Nokian organisaation käyttämä Socialcast. CRM:n sisään integroituva palvelu tulee lisäksi mahdollistamaan CRM:n tietueisiin liittyvien muutosten seurannan syötteiden kautta, esim. myyntimahdollisuuksien tilan päivittyessä. Salesforce.com:in vastaava Chatter-palvelu on herättänyt paljon kiinnostusta entistä sosiaalisempien yrityssovellusten tarjoamista mahdollisuuksista. Kun tiedon määrä CRM-tietokannoissa kasvaa, tulee relevantin ja viimeisimmän tiedon esille nostaminen entistä keskeisemmäksi toiminnoksi niin CRM- kuin muissakin tietojärjestelmissä.

Muita CRM-tuotteen parannuksia Q4 2011 -päivityksessä on luvassa ainakin analytiikkatoimintoihin, sekä CRM 2011:n yhteydessä lanseerattuihin interaktiivisiin dialog-prosesseihin.

Office 365

Samassa yhteydessä kun Dynamics CRM:ään julkaistaan Q4-päivitys, tulee CRM Online siirtymään osaksi samaa alustaa kuin Office 365. Tämän myötä mahdollistuu yhtäaikainen koekäyttöympäristöjen provisiointi CRM:ää tai Office 365:ttä kokeilevien organisaatioiden käyttöön. Myös tilaushallinta ja laskutus tulevat yhtenäistymään, tehden CRM:stä käytännössä yhden lisäoption Office 365 -pilvipalvelun käyttäjille.

CRM Onlinen uusi käyttäjähallinta tulee Windows Live ID:n sijaan perustumaan jatkossa samaan ratkaisuun kuin Office 365:ssä, mikä tarkoittaa mahdollisuutta integroida CRM-käyttäjätilit osaksi yritysten nykyistä, paikallisesti hallinnoitua Active Directory -palvelua (aivan kuten on-premise -ympäristöissä aiemmin). Siirtyminen osaksi isompaa Online-palvelukokonaisuutta tulee parantamaan myös CRM:n saavutettavuutta ongelmatilanteissa, kun Microsoft luo mahdollisuuden siirtää vakavan palveluhäiriön ilmetessä palvelinalustassa CRM-organisaatiot kokonaisuudessaan yhdestä EU:n sisällä sijaitsevasta data centeristä toiseen.

Mielenkiintoinen uusi ominaisuus Lync-viestintäpalveluun liittyen, jota esiteltiin WPC 2011:n keynote-demossa, on läsnäolotietojen federointi. Jo aiemmin Dynamics CRM on tukenut käyttäjien tavoitettavuustietojen näyttämistä esim. CRM-tietueen omistajakentän yhteydessä, jolloin pikaviestikeskustelun aloittaminen asiakkuudesta vastaavan henkilön kanssa on ollut vain yhden klikkauksen päässä. Jatkossa on mahdollista nähdä reaaliaikaisesti myös asiakkaan läsnäolotieto, mikäli tämän organisaatio käyttää Office 365:ttä ja jakaa Lync-palveluun liitettyjen sähköpostiosoitteiden läsnäolotietoa oman organisaation rajojen ulkopuolelle. Tähän kun vielä yhdistäisi Microsoftin hiljattain ostaman Skypen käyttäjätilien integraation, niin…

CRM:n mobiilikäyttö

Keynote-esitysten vakiosisältöä ovat nykyään perinteiselle PC:lle vaihtoehtoisten käyttöliittymien esittely. WPC:ssä Dynamics CRM:ää käytettiin sekä tablet-pohjaiselta laitteelta että Windows Phone 7 -älypuhelimesta. Näistä ensiksi mainittu oli toki näyttävyydeltään omaa luokkaansa. CRM-sovelluksen käyttöliittymä oli rakennettu Metro-tyyliin, tarjoten isoja, live-dataa sisältäviä ja interaktiivisia kuvakkeita. Arkipäivänen CRM:n käyttö tuskin vielä muuttuu tällaiseksi aivan lähiaikoina, mutta kosketuspohjaisten käyttöliittymien ja mobiililaitteiden voittokulku pakottavat myös yrityssovellusten kehittäjät tuomaan saataville vaihtoehtoja hiirellä klikkailtaville lomakkeille.

Kolmansien osapuolien sovellusten ohelle tarjolle tulevasta Microsoftin omasta mobiili-CRM -clientista ei edelleenkään saatu tarkkaa faktatietoa. Demossa Windows Phone 7 -client tuki tuttujen CRM-asiakastietuiden lisäksi myös Q4 2011 Service Updaten myötä lanseerattavaa activity feed -toimintoa. Erityisesti mobiilikäyttöön tällainen tiedon esitystapa tulee tarjoamaan kätevän tavan pysyä ajantasalla asiakkuuksiin liittyvistä viimeisimmistä käänteistä, ilman että myyjän tarvitsee kaivaa PC:tä esiin läppärilaukustaan.

Vuoden 2012 keväälle aikataulutetussa toisessa versiopäivityksissä siintävä siirtymä HTML5-pohjaiseen käyttöliittymään Dynamics CRM:n vakiosovelluksen osalta tulee mahdollistamaan CRM:n käytön muillakin kuin Microsoftin Internet Explorer -selaimilla. Tällöin myös Applen laitteita käyttävillä organisaatioilla on mahdollisuus Dynamics CRM:n hyödyntämiseen asiakkuudenhallinnan ratkaisuna, olipa sitten laitteena MacBook tai iPad.

Gartnerin tuoreen ennusteen mukaan maailmanlaajuinen SaaS-markkina kasvaa tänä vuonna 20,7%, saavuttaen 8,5 miljardin euron kokonaisarvon vuodelle 2011. SaaS kaappaa sovellusten hankitoihin kohdistuvista budjeteista tällä hetkellä jo 10%, eikä Yritysten kiinnostus pilvipalveluja kohtaan näytä laantumisen merkkejä, ei etenkään asiakkuudenhallinnan osalta.

Perinteisesti CRM on ollut SaaS-palveluiden suurin segmentti ja Gartner ennustaa sen voittokulun jatkuvan tänäkin vuonna. SaaS:in osuus CRM-ratkaisumarkkinasta kohoaisi ennusteen mukaan tänä vuonna jo kolmannekseen eli 32%. Pitkään markkinoilla olleet asiakkuudenhallinnan SaaS-sovellukset kuten Salesforce.com ovat viime aikoina saaneet rinnalleen kilpailevia pilvituotteita myös perinteisiltä softataloilta. Microsoft toi Dynamics CRM Online -palvelunsa globaalisti saataville tämän vuoden alussa, kun se oli aiemmin ollut tarjolla vain Pohjois-Amerikan asiakkaille. Lisääntyvä pilvipalvelujen valikoima aikaansaa markkinoilla kiristyvää hintakilpailua (tässä esimerkkiä Microsoftin vertailutaulukosta Salesforceen), joka osaltaan tuo täysveriset CRM-ratkaisut entistä pienempien organisaatioiden ulottuville.

On-premise eli omalle palvelimelle asennettu versio on varmasti yhä monille isommille organisaatioille preferoitu tapa oman asiakastietojärjestelmän ylläpitoon, kehitykseen ja integrointiin, mutta PK-sektorille pilvipalveluna tarjottava CRM Online muodostanee jo selkeän ykkösvaihtoehdon. Microsoft on jatkanut aiemmin kesäkuun loppuun voimassa ollutta kampanjahinnoittelua, joten CRM Online maksaa yhä vain 31 euroa per käyttäjä, per kuukausi (listahinta 40,25 euroa).

Toinen segmentti, jossa voidaan ennakoida nähtävän jatkuvaa kasvua SaaS-mallin osuudessa ohjelmistoinvestoinneista, on Gartnerin kielellä CCC eli Content, Communications & Collaboration. Sisällönhallinan, viestinnän ja ryhmätyön ratkaisumarkkinaan tulee omalta osaltaan pistämään vauhtia Microsoftin kesäkuussa lanseeraama Office 365. Aivan kuten CRM Online, myös Office 365 tuo enterprise-tason sovellusratkaisut (SharePoint, Exchange, Lync) saataville PK-ystävällisellä hinnoittelumallilla. E1-E4 -pakettien hinta liikkuu välillä 9-25,50 euroa, jälkimmäisen sisältäessä myös paikallisen Office 2010 -ohjelmiston käyttöoikeuden.

Dynamics CRM:n kannalta tulee olemaan kiinnostavaa nähdä, miten palvelun liittäminen myöhemmin tänä vuonna osaksi Office 365 -palvelutarjontaa tulee vaikuttamaan sen kysyntään. Tiukempi integraatio niin tilaus- kuin käyttäjähallinnan puolella tulevat varmasti madaltamaan yritysten kynnystä täydentää aiemmin hankkimiaan Microsoftin viestintä- ja sisällönhallintasovelluksia saman yrityksen CRM-ratkaisulla. Pilvitarjooman roadmapiin liittyviä julkistuksia on mahdollisesti luvassa 10. heinäkuuta alkavassa Microsoft Worldwide Partner Conferencessa eli WPC 2011:ssa.

Anvia IT järjesti yhteistyössä Microsoft Oy:n kanssa Markkinoinnin uudet työkalut -tilaisuuden Keilarannassa 26. toukokuuta, jossa esitteltiin ensimmäistä kertaa Suomessa CoreMotives Marketing Suite -tuotelaajennus Microsoft Dynamics CRM:lle. Kyseessä on Windows Azure -pilvialustan päälle rakennettu palvelu, joka tuo niin sähköpostikampanjat, web-kävijäseurannan, web-lomakkeet kuin liidien pisteytyksen suoraan CRM:n käyttöliittymän sisältä hallinoitavaksi, integroiduksia ratkaisuksi.

Toisin kuin monet muut vastaavat markkinoinnin työkalut, CoreMotivesin ratkaisu on alunperin rakennettu vain ja ainoastaan Microsoft Dynamics CRM:n tietomallin päällä toimivaksi. Miksi tällä sitten on merkitystä? Niin kampanjoiden, kohderyhmien kuin kampanjoista syntyvän historian ja palautteiden kirjaamisessa käytetään Dynamics CRM:n vakiotietueita, jolloin data on sekä loogisesti esitettynä käyttöliittymässä että myös hyödynnettävissä CRM-alustan tarjoamien toimintojen kanssa käytettäväksi. Työnkulun säännöt (prosessit), koontinäytöt (dashboards, raportit, tiedon tuonti/vienti ja pelaavat yhteen CoreMotivesin tuotelaajennuksen kanssa, aivan kuin se olisi luonnollinen osa Dynamics CRM:ää.

CoreMotives Marketing Suiten keskeisimpiä etuja erillisratkaisuihin verrattuna on se, että järjestelmä mahdollistaa yhteismitallisen markkinoinnin toimenpiteiden seurannan läpi eri kanavien. Oli kyseessä sitten uutiskirjeen postitus HTML-viestipohjia käyttäen, yhteydenottolomake webissä, kotisivujen kävijäseuranta tai sosiaalisen median kautta jaettujen linkkien klikkaukset, kaikki tämä tieto näkyy CRM-järjestelmässä asiakastietojen yhteydessä, helposti hyödynnettävässä muodossa. Ohessa löyvät aamiaisseminaarin CoreMotives-tuotedemon yhteydessä esitetyt kalvot, joissa käydään läpi online-markkinoinnin toimintojen käytännön hyödyntämismahdollisuudet kuvitteellisen esimerkkiyrityksen näkökulmasta.

Palvelun käyttöönoton kynnys on tehty hyvin matalaksi. CoreMotives Marketing Suite toimii käytännössä minkä tahansa Microsoft Dynamics CRM -version päällä. Niin 3.0 kuin 4.0 ovat yhä tuettuja, lisäksi 2011-tuki on ollut saatavilla heti uuden CRM-version lanseeraamisesta lähtien. Ei ole väliä käytetäänkö CRM:ää omalta palvelimelta (on premise), kumppanin ylläpitämältä alustalta (partner hosted) tai Microsoftin tarjoamasta CRM Online -ympäristöstä, sillä CoreMotivesin sovellus ei vaadi ensimmäistäkään palvelimelle asennettavaa komponenttia. Ratkaisu koostuu CRM:ään tuotavasta mukatuspaketista, joka luo CRM:n tietorakenteeseen tarvittavat uudet entiteetit ja niiden sisällä iFrame-kehyksessä näkyvät ulkoiset käyttöliitymäkomponentit, asennusprosessin hoituessa parhaimmillaan 15 minuutissa.

Windows Azure -pilvialusta (PaaS, platform as a service) on toiminut CoreMotivesin ratkaisun jakelukanavana tuotteen ensimmäisestä versiosta lähtien. Marketing Suite voitti vuonna 2009 Microsoftin startup-yrityksille suunnatun BizSpark-ohjelman järjestämän Azure-kilpailusarjan kunniamaininnalla “most viable busines model”. Yrityksen kokemuksia Azuren tarjoamista skaalaeduista ja palvelinalustan hallinnoinin helppoudesta voi lukea Microsoftin aiheesta tekemästä case study -dokumentista. Globaalisti yli 300 asiakasyritykselle palveluitaan tarjoava CoreMotives on myös mukana ensimmäisten Azure-käyttäjien joukossa hyödyntämässä ns. geo-aware -reititystä dataliikenteelle, jolloin Azure-palvelut tarjotaan automaattisesti lähinnä käyttäjää sijaitsevasta Microsoftin palvelinkeskuksesta.

Mikäli olet kiinnostunut tietämään lisää sähköisen markkinoinnin työkalujen hyödyntämisestä integroituna osana Microsoft Dynamics CRM -järjestelmää, ota yhteyttä Anviaan crmpalvelu.fi-sivujen kautta.

Microsoftin suomalaisille sovelluskehittäjille suunnatussa vuoden päätapahtumassa TechDaysissa oli tänä vuonna ensimmäistä kertaa oma kokonainen trackki Microsoft Dynamics CRM:lle. Tämä toivottavasti toi Dynamics CRM:n mahdollisuuksia sovelluskehitysalustana laajemmalti esille kotimaisten MS-kehittäjien ja IT-ammattilaisten keskuudessa.

Globaalisti jo 1,4 miljoonaa ihmistä käyttää Dynamics CRM:ää 23.000:ssa asiakasorganisaatiossa, eikä CRM Online -pilvipalvelun lanseeraus varmasti ainakaan vähennä tuotteen painoarvoa markkinoilla. Kysyntä CRM-osaajista on kova, samoin mahdollisuudet sovelluslaajennusten tuotteistamiseen ovat nyt Dynamics Marketplacen ja CRM 2011:n solution management -jakelumallin myötä selvästi paremmat kuin aikaisemmin.

Videot TechDays-esityksistä ovat nähtävillä MSN Video-palvelussa ja sisältävät paljon hyvää informaatiota sekä niille, joille Dynamics CRM alustana ei vielä ole kovin tuttu (Rasmus Fogedin esitykset) että CRM:lle kehitystyötä jo tehneille, 2011:n uusista ominaisuuksista kiinnostuneelle (Kalle Salon esitykset). Alla linkit videoihin sekä muutamia nostoja niiden sisällöstä. Valitettavasti esitysten kalvot eivät CRM-träkin osalta ole päätyneet julkiseen levitykseen (katso täältä ja täältä TechDays-kalvot esim. Office 365:een liittyen).

What’s new in Microsoft Dynamics CRM 2011

Puhuja: Rasmus Foged
Aihe: CRM 2011:n uudet toiminnallisuudet ja CRM Onlinen vaikutus sekä asiakkaiden käyttäytymiseen että Microsoft-kumppanien mahdollisuuksiin
Videon linkki: http://video.fi.msn.com/watch/video/what-s-new-in-microsoft-dynamics-crm-2011-rasmus-foged-microsoft/15dwvhxne

Utilizing the full Microsoft cloud stack with Dynamics CRM online

Puhuja: Rasmus Foged
Aihe: Miten CRM Online ja tuleva Office 365 integroituvat keskenään, käyttäjän identiteetin federointi esim. Active Directorysta, dokumentinhallintaa SharePoint Onlinen avulla
Videolinkki: http://video.fi.msn.com/watch/video/utilizing-the-full-microsoft-cloud-stack-with-dynamics-crm-online-rasmus-foged-microsoft/15dmoplgu

How to develop and publish applications to Microsoft Dynamics Marketplace

Puhuja: Rasmus Foged
Aihe: Miten Dynamics Marketplace tulee ISV:iden ja kehittäjien näkökulmasta muuttamaan tapaa, jolla asiakkaat/loppukäyttäjät etsivät sovelluksia ja laajennuksia Dynamics CRM -ympäristöönsä
Videon linkki: http://video.fi.msn.com/watch/video/how-to-develop-and-publish-applications-to-microsoft-dynamics-marketplace-rasmus-foged-microsoft/15dtabtjq

Liiketoimintasovellusten kehittäminen käyttäen CRM 2011 kustomointityökaluja

Puhuja: Kalle Salo
Aihe: XRM-skenaariot uuden CRM 2011 -version tarjoamien mukautustyökalujen avulla, miten käyttöliittymää pystytään tuetusti mukauttamaan entistä joustavammin
Videolinkki: http://video.fi.msn.com/watch/video/liiketoimintasovellusten-kehittaminen-kayttaen-crm-2011-kustomointityokaluja-kalle-salo-microsoft/15d7qu2c6

CRM Online sovelluksen laajentaminen käyttäen CRM 2011:n uusia rajapintoja

Puhuja: Kalle Salo
Aihe: WCF ja OData rajapintoina CRM:n tietojen ohjelmalliseen käsittelyyyn, skenaarioita web-resurssien hyödyntämiseen osana CRM 2011:n solutions-pakettia
Videolinkki: http://video.fi.msn.com/watch/video/crm-online-sovelluksen-laajentaminen-kayttaen-crm-2011-n-uusia-rajapintoja-kalle-salo-microsoft-oy/15dhzn4r7

CRM sovellukseni on pilvessä: Miten integroin muut pilvi- ja paikallisesti asennetut sovellukseni Dynamics CRM:ään

Puhuja: Kalle Salo
Aihe: Kuinka pilvi-CRM voidaan integroida esimerkiksi on-premises ERP:hen käyttämällä Windows Azure AppFabric Service Bus -väylää viestien välittämiseen, miten rakennetaan oma listener-sovellus, mitä toiminnallisuuksia tarjoaa Microsoftin julkaisema ilmainen Dynamics Connector -tuote CRM, AX ja NAV -asiakkaille
Videon linkki: http://video.fi.msn.com/watch/video/crm-sovellukseni-on-pilvessa-miten-integroin-muut-pilvi-ja-paikallisesti-asennetut/15d5wucmv

Oli CRM-järjestelmä sitten omalla palvelimella tai pilvessä, monesti se on yrityksen ikioma saareke, jonne tietoa tuottaa vain ja ainoastaan yritys itse. Myyjiä velvoitetaan ylläpitämään oman myyntiputkensa tietoja parhaan arvauksen perusteella, asiakaspalvelu kirjaa puhelinsoittoja sikäli kun ongelmatilanteissa täyttyviltä linjoilta kerkeää, lisäksi jonkun onnekkaan osana on vastata asiakastietokannan ajantasaisuudesta ihmisten vaihtaessa toimenkuvaa ja työnantajaa yhä kiihtyvällä tahdilla. Hienompikin CRM-järjestelmä kertoo asiakkuuksien tilasta tyypillisesti vain sen, mitä joku käyttäjistä on järjestelmälle kertonut, jos on muistanut, ehtinyt tai viitsinyt.

Vaikka CRM:n tietojen ylläpito vaatii organisaatiolta konkreettisia työpanoksia, useimmat asiakasrajapinnassa toimivat henkilöt silti tunnistavat syyn, miksi asioita on kirjattava yhteiseen tietojärjestelmään. Vaihtoehto kun olisi paljon synkempi: ei voitaisi edes teoriassa tietää mitä on tehty, kenelle ja miksi. Organisaation toimijoiden määrän kasvaessa ja fyysisen rakenteen hajaantuessa on pakko sopia toimintatavoista, jotta prosesseja voi suorittaa useampi kuin yksi henkilö. Viestinnän, kanavien, kontaktien ja dokumenttien määrän alati kasvaessa voi kuitenkin tuntua siltä, ettei yrityksen ymmärrys asiakkuuksistaan kaikesta seurannasta huolimatta kasva sitä tahtia kuin kirjattava tietomassa.

Asiakkaan rooli on viimeisen vuosikymmenen aikana muuttunut passiivisesta kampanjakohderyhmän jäsenestä ja tuote-esitteen vastaanottajasta aktiiviseksi toimijaksi, oli toimiala sitten mikä tahansa. Aiemmin myyjä pystyi kontrolloimaan sitä, millaista tietoa potentiaaliselle asiakkaalle kannatti toimittaa tietyssä vaiheessa myyntiprosessia. Nyt tietoa tuotteista, toimittajista ja muista asiakkaista on useissa tapauksissa saatavilla suorastaan rajaton määrä verkon ja verkostojen syövereissä, josta tieto kuplii asiakkaan silmien eteen hakukoneiden tai kavereiden suositusten kautta. Sen sijaan että aktivoiduttaisiin vasta potentiaalisen palveluntarjoajan ottaessa asiakkaaseen yhteyttä, aktiivinen tiedonhaku palvelua koskien alkaa nykyisin todennäköisemmin verkossa saadusta kimmokkeesta. Jos hyvin käy, silloin kun asiakas on valmis evaluoimaan esikvalifioimiensa palveluntarjoajien kyvykkyyttä täyttää hänen tarpeensa, tämä saattaa ottaa yhteyttä myös sinun yrityksesi myyntihenkilöstöön.

Push ei enää toimi kuten ennen, Pull on parempi markkinoinnin strategia tämän päivän aktiivisten kuluttajien ja päättäjien tavoittamiseen. Mitä tämä sitten merkitsee CRM:n järjestelmien ja prosessien näkökulmasta?

Yhä suurempi osa asiakkuuden kannalta kriittisestä tiedosta on jatkossa peräisin palomuurin ulkopuolelta.

Vaikka organisaatiosi olisi täynnä mallioppilaita, jotka aktiivisesti kirjaavat tekemisensä CRM-järjestelmään, et välttämättä enää pysty saavuttamaan tämän prosessin kautta kilpailuetua. Uusasiakashankinnassa liidit pitäisi tunnistaa verkossa jo ennen kuin niillä edes on CRM:ään kirjattavissa olevaa henkilön nimeä. Nykyasiakkaasi eivät välttämättä viitsi istua kanssasi palavereissa kuuntelemassa lisämyyntiin tähtääviä kalvosulkeisia, mutta tieto tuoteuutuuksista ja innovaatioista voi kyllä löytää heidät muita kanavia pitkin. Tyytymättömät, kohta entiset asiakkasi, eivät reklamoi sinulle suoraan, vaan sen sijaan päädyt heidän ignore-listalle.

Mistä tämä palomuurin ulkopuolinen maailma koostuu? Verkkosivustoista, blogeista, keskustelupalstoista, sosiaalisista verkostoista, kaikista meille nykypäivänä jo hyvin arkisista online-medioista ja viestintävälineistä. Jos yrityksellä on käytössä CRM-järjestelmä, on se myös hyvin todennäköisesti investoinut web-presenssiinsä, sekä luultavasti harkitsee tulevaisuudessa kasvattavansa suhteellista markkinointipanostusta verkossa tapahtuvaan viestintään. Niin toimenpiteiden, toimijoiden kuin käytettävien järjestelmien määrä on siis nousussa, josta pääsemme taas siihen tuttuun aiheeseen. Kaikkea tätä asiakkaisiin liittyvää tietoa pitäisi kyetä hallinnoimaan jossain yhteisessä paikassa, mutta CRM:n manuaaliseen ylläpitoon ei enää ole tietotulvan keskellä annettavaksi lisäresursseja.

Onko tässä uudessa ympäristössä tapahtuvaan asiakasviestinnän organisointiin, toteuttamiseen ja seurantaan olemassa valmiita työkaluja, joilla tieto saataisiin virtaamaan suoraan asiakaskortille? Tottahan toki. Microsoft Dynamics CRM asiakastiedon hallinnan alustana ja CoreMotives Marketing Suite sähköisen viestinnän ratkaisupakettina mahdollistavat yhdessä saumattoman seurannan eri kanavien kautta tapahtuvasta asiakasvuorovaikutuksesta. Sähköpostikampanjoiden lähetys, web-sivujen kävijöiden seuranta, web-lomakkeiden ja -kyselyiden toteutus onnistuvat suoraan Dynamics CRM:stä, ajantasaista asiakastietoa hyödyntäen ja reaaliaikaisia, yksilöitäviä tulostietoja tarjoten. Molemmat sovellukset ovat otettavissa käyttöön nopeasti ja vaivattomasti pilvipalveluna, jos asiakas niin haluaa, mutta myös oma CRM-palvelin (on-premise) tai partner hosted -toimitusmallit ovat toki tuettuja. Myöskään versiorajoituksia ei ole, sillä CoreMotives toimii niin CRM 3.0, CRM 4.0 kuin CRM 2011 -alustoilla.

Mitä jos CRM osaisikin kertoa sinulle asiakkaistasi jotain, mitä kukaan työntekijäsi ei ole sinne syöttänyt? Sen sijaan, että myyjä pisteyttää liidien arvoja, voisiko järjestelmä automaattisesti nostaa verkkosisältöön reagoineet kävijät soittolistan ykkössijalle? Voisivatko web-lomakkeiden kautta tulevat yhteydenotot kirjautua suoraan oikean asiakkuuden alle CRM:ssä, ilman työläitä järjestelmäintegraatioita tai manuaalista tietojen kopiointia sähköpostista?

Tule mukaan Anvia IT:n ja Microsoftin järjestämään, maksuttomaan aamiaisseminaariin 26.5. kuulemaan ja näkemään, kuinka Dynamics CRM ja CoreMotives voisivat avata näkymän verkossa jo nyt käymääsi asiakasdialogiin. Ilmoittaudu mukaan crmpalvelu.fi-sivuston kautta. Käsiteltävinä aiheina tilaisuudessa ovat mm. sähköpostimarkkinointi, web-sivujen kävijäseuranta, tiedon visualisointi ja prosessien automatisointi – kaikki tämä tutuilla Microsoftin työkaluilla ja Azure-pilvessä toimivilla sovelluslaajennuksilla.

Microsoft TechDays 2011 Finland -tapahtuma pidettiin 30.3.-1.4. Helsingin Messukeskuksessa. Kenellekään osallistujalle ei liene jäänyt epäselväksi Microsoftin Cloud Power -viesti. Pilvi ei ole enää jotain horisontissa siintävää tulevaisuuden teknologiaa tai ainoastaan hypellä kyllästettyjä kalvoja, vaan nyt puhutaan konkreettisista tuotteista, jotka ovat otettavissa käyttöön osaksi yrityksen IT-palvelukokonaisuutta. Niinpä on tullut myös entistä ajankohtaisemmaksi tarkastella sitä, kuinka Microsoftin pilvipalvelut rinnastuvat omalle palvelimelle asennettaviin on-premises -versioihin. Monen mielessä liikkuu varmasti kysymys siitä, tukeeko pilvi riittävästi asiakaskohtaisia sovellusten mukautustarpeita.

Microsoft Office 365, kohta sitä saa!

Kesällä lanseerattava Office 365 pilvipalvelu eli Microsoftin BPOS:in (Business Productivity Online Suite) seuraaja tulee tarjoamaan todella lupaavan kokoelman sovelluksia nykypäivän tietotyöläisen käyttöön. Exchange, SharePoint ja Lync päivittyvät toiminnallisuuksiltaan 2010-tuoteversioiden tasolle, siinä missä BPOS on vielä toistaiseksi toiminut 2007-tuotteiden varassa.

Office 365:n myötä myös aiemmin julkaistu Microsoft Dynamic CRM Online tulee jatkossa siirtymään samalle palvelualustalle. Asiakkaille tämä tulee näkymään mm. parantuneina tilauksenhallinna prosesseina ja laajempina vaihtoehtoina käyttäjien tunnistautumisen toteutuksessa. Tarkkoja aikatauluja ja toiminnallisuuksia Microsoft ei vielä ole julkistanut, mutta kehityksen suunta on selvä.

Jatkossa Microsoftin sovellusten uudet toiminnot tullaan pääsääntöisesti näkemään aluksi pilvipalvelussa, joka kehittyy oman syklinsä mukaan. On-premises -versiot säilyvät täysverisinä vaihtoehtona rinnalla, mutta niiden päivitystahdin noudattaessa perinteistä 3-vuotiskiertoa. Versionumeroista ei kuitenkaan enää pilvessä virallisesti puhuta, koska asiakkailla tulee olemaan käytössään yksi ja sama, viimeisin julkaistu palvelu. Aivan kuten Google Apps ei sisällä julkista versiotietoa, myöskään esimerkiksi SharePoint Online ei ole jatkossa sidottu vuosilukuun.

Onko pilvipalvelu kaikille sama?

Kun asiantuntijoilta kysytään neuvoa siitä, mitkä sovellukset yrityksen kannattaisi ensimmäiseksi viedä pilveen, suosittelevat nämä yleensä aloittamaan Exchangesta. Sähköposti on hyvä esimerkki yrityspalvelusta, josta on muodostunut yhteinen, standardisoitu sähköisen viestinnän muoto. Vaatimukset palvelun luotettavuudelle ja saatavuudelle ovat korkea, kun taas mukautuksen tarpeet tai hyödyt ovat yleensä varsin matalat. Tällainen sovellus on parhaimmillaan tarjoiltuna keskitetysti hallinnoidusta pisteestä mahdollisimman monelle loppukäyttäjälle, jolloin saadaan rahallisesti merkittäviä skaalaetuja pilvimalliin siirtymisestä.

Myös Lync eli Microsoftin uusi pikaviestien, neuvottelupalveluiden ja puheviestinnän sovellus noudattaa pitkälti tätä kaavaa. Tärkeintä on työkalujen yhteensopivuus viestivien osapuolien kesken, ei niinkään työkalujen kustomointi juuri oman firman tai oman yksikön viestisisällön tai palaverikäytännön mukaiseksi. Pikemminkin voisi sanoa, että vaihtoehtojen ja variaatioiden määrä laskee palvelusta saatavan potentiaalisen hyödyn määrää. Jos myös yhteistyökumppani käyttäisi samaa alustaa, olisi saatavuustietojen jakaminen ja virtuaalineuvottelujen toteuttaminen paljon kivuttomampaa kuin heterogeenisessä Skype/Messenger/Gtalk/GoToMeeting/jne. ympäristössä. No, markkinamielessä minkään yhden palvelun tai toimittajan monopoli ei pidemmän päälle tietenkään olisi hyvä ratkaisu, joten tärkeintä olisi standardien muodostuminen pilvipalveluiden tarjoamien viestintätoimintojen välille.

Sähköposti, puhelut ja pikaviestintä eivät yksinään riitä toimiston viestintäkanavaksi, vielä vähemmän dokumenttimuotoisen tiedon jakamiseen ja tiimityön tukemiseen. Tähän tarvitaan SharePointin kaltaista järjestelmää, joka auttaa organisaatiota luomaan yhtenäisen muistijäljen viestitystä tiedosta, luo ympäristön tiedon jalostamiseen ja mahdollistaa sen löytämisen myöhemmissä asiayhteyksissä myöhemmin mukaan astuneille osapuolille. SharePointilla on mahdollista saavuttaa pienemmässä organisaatiossa paljon arkihyötyjä jo mukauttamattomalla “vanilja”-asennuksella, kunhan opetellaan hyödyntämään järjestelmän tarjoamia vakiotoimintoja ja malleja. Toisessa ääripäässä ovat globaalisti toimivien organisaatioiden kunnianhimoiset hankkeet roolipohjaisesti mukautuvien sähköisten työpöytien kehittämiseksi, tai sitten julkiseen verkkoon tuotettavat julkaisut ja sovellukset. Toisin kuin sähköpostipalveluissa, sama SharePoint-alusta voi toimia moottorina suorastaan dramaattisesti toisistaan eroaville käyttökohteille, mikä luonnollisesti asettaa hyvin suuria vaatimuksia alustan mukautus- ja laajennusmahdollisuuksille.

SharePoint Onlinen mukauttaminen

Office 365:n lanseerauksen myötä tarjolle tuleva SharePoint Online tarjoaa merkittävästi enemmän mukautusmahdollisuuksia kuin edeltävä BPOS-versio. Mukana on kattavampi valikoima vakiotoimintoja kuten My Sites, Excel Services, Visio Services. Omien web-osien kehittäminen Visual Studion avulla SharePoint Onlineen on nyt tuettua, sikäli kun koodin voi suorittaa SharePoint Onlinen tarjoaman sandbox-moodin puitteissa. Kattava tietopaketti aiheesta löytyy TechDays 2011:n Office 365 -esitysmateriaaleista, joista etenkin Jussi Roineen kalvot (01, 02) kannattaa lukaista johdantona pilvi-SharePointin maailmaan.

Näkyvimpiä rajoituksia perinteiseen SharePoint 2010:iin verrattuna ovat Onlinesta puuttuvat BI-toiminnot ja FAST-hakupalvelu. Myöskään integrointimahdollisuudet eivät ole Onlinessa vastaavat kuin on-premisesissä. Tulevaisuudessa SharePoint Onlineen ollaan kyllä lisäämässä mm. tuki BCS:lle (Business Connectivity Services), jonka avulla muiden järjestelmien tietoa voidaan lukea ja päivittää SharePointin kautta. Nykytilanteessa integraatioiden toteutukseen ei kuitenkaan ole tarjolla suoria palvelinpuolelle tehtäviä ratkaisuja, vaan vaihtoehdot tietojen yhdistämiseen useasta eri lähteestä perustuvat client-koneella suoritettavaan koodiin, esimerkiksi SilverLight-komponenttien hyödyntämiseen.

Yhtenä poikkeuksena on integraatio CRM Onlinen ja SharePoint Onlinen välillä, sillä tiedostonhallinnan automatisoitujen toiminnallisuuksien vaatiman luettelo-osan (List Component) odotetaan tulevan saataville Office 365:een jo palvelun julkistamisen yhteydessä.

Extranet-käyttöön soveltuvien portaaleiden toteuttaminen lienee täysin realistinen vaihtoehto SharePoint Onlinen avulla, samoin jotkin yksinkertaiset julkiset websivut esim. kampanjakohtaisen, rajatun aihealueen sisällön nopeaan julkaisuun. Vaativampi sivustojen ulkoasun mukauttaminen ja spesifit asiakaskohtaiset toimintotarpeet tulevat kuitenkin todennäköisesti olemaan jatkossakin on-premises -version heiniä. Tämä on varsin ymmärrettävää, sillä perinteisen CMS:n rajoja venyttävien julkaisutarpeiden kattamiseen keskitetysti hallinnoidun pilvipalvelun kautta on vaikea nähdä teknisesti tai taloudellisesti kannattavaa mallia. Tällaisiin hankkeisiin valmistauduttaessa on parempi tarkastella dedikoitujen SharePoint-ympäristöjen hosting-palvelua tarjoavia tahoja, samalla pitäen mielessä että Microsoftin ylläpitämän Office 365:n rinnakkaiskäyttö ei sekään välttämättä ole kustannusmielessä poissuljettua.

Microsoft Dynamics CRM Online ja mukauttaminen

Dynamics CRM lanseerattiin Online-versiona Yhdysvaltojen markkinoille kaksi vuotta sitten, jolloin palvelu perustui CRM 4.0 -versioon. Jo tämä versio tarjosi XRM-tasoisia ominaisuuksia, joiden avulla tietokantaan oli mahdollista lisätä uusia tauluja (CRM:n kielellä entiteettejä), automatisoida työnkulkuja ja muokata käyttöliittymän lomakkeita ja näkymiä samalla tavalla kuin omalle palvelimelle asennetussa on-premises CRM-ympäristössä. Koodipohjainen laajennus plug-inien avulla ei kuitenkaan ollut tuettua, custom-raportteja ei voinut palveluun ladata, eikä käyttöliittymään ollut mahdollista tuoda tietosisältöä CRM:n omien lomakkeiden täydentämiseksi käyttämättä toista palvelinta/palvelua sisällön tarjoamiseen.

Uuden CRM 2011 -version myötä tilanne on muuttunut hyvin merkittävästi. Voidaan jopa sanoa, että lähtökohtaisesti CRM Online tukee kaikkia keskeisiä Microsoft Dynamics CRM -alustan mukautustoimintoja. Tyypillisen CRM-asiakkaan ei siis tarvitse enää tinkiä järjestelmän joustavuudesta valitessaan käyttöönsä kuukausimaksupohjaisesti laskutettava, minuuteissa käyttöön saatava pilviversio Microsoftin asiakkuudenhallinnan sovelluksesta. Alustavalinta voidaan tehdä puhtaasti asiakkaan IT-resurssien ja kokonaisarkkitehtuurin tarpeisiin peilaten.

Microsoft Dynamics CRM on alusta alkaen rakennettu web-sovellukseksi, jonka clientin selainkäyttöliittymä on toteutettu hyödyntämällä CRM-palvelinsovelluksen web services -rajapintaa. Tämä sama rajapinta on avoin kolmansien osapuolien hyödynnettäväksi sovelluslaajennuksia tehtäessä. CRM Online tukee samaa SDK:ta kuin CRM on-premises, eli web services API on käytettävissä pilviversiossa siinä missä omalla palvelimellakin. Integraatio CRM:n ja muiden tietojärjestelmien kuten ERP:n tai dokumentinhallinnan välillä onnistuu siis tietojen lukemisen ja päivittämisen osalta yhtä hyvin riippumatta siitä, onko käytössä CRM Online tai omassa konehuoneessa sijaitseva CRM-palvelin. Tieto ei jää pilven vangiksi, eikä pilvestä muodostu omaa tietosaareketta, joka ei keskustelisi muiden järjestelmien kanssa.

Miten CRM Online eroaa on-premisestä?

Sovelluskehittäjän näkökulmasta konkreettisia rajoituksia Dynamics CRM Online -pilviympäristössä toimittaessa ovat seuraavat:

• CRM-tietokannan tauluihin/näkymiin (filtered views) ei ole suoraa pääsyä, joten mm. omat raportit on kirjoitettava FetchXML -kyselykielellä perinteisten SQL-hakulausekkeiden sijaan.
• Plug-init eli CRM:n bisneslogiikkaa laajentava tai muuttava .NET-koodi on suoritettava sandbox-moodissa.
• Työnkulkujen laajentaminen koodaamalla WWF:n mukaisia kustom-aktiviteetteja ei ole tuettua, kuten ei myöskään CRM:n ulkopuolella rakennettujen XAML-työnkulkujen tuominen järjestelmään.

Luonnollisesti mikään paikallisia palvelinresursseja  vaativa laajennus ei ole sellaisenaan siirrettävissä pilveen, jossa fyysiselle palvelimelle ei ole pääsyä. Uuden 2011-version mukana tulleisiin ratkaisupaketteihin (solutions) on kuitenkin mahdollista sisällyttää laaja valikoima web-resursseja, kuten HTML-sivuja, kuvia, Javascriptiä, CSS:ää ja SilverLightia, jotka ovat tätä kautta siirrettävissä CRM Online -palvelimelle. Jos siis vanha CRM 3.0/4.0 käyttöliittymälaajennus oli toteutettu ASP.NET-sivuina, ehkäpä nyt olisi oikea hetki siirtyä hyödyntämään viimeisimpiä SilverLight-teknologioita ja tarjota sekä paremmin hallinnoitava CRM-laajennus että mahdollisesti aiempaa rikkaampi käyttöliittymä loppukäyttäjälle.

Kuten olettaa saattaa, ei-tuetut muokkaukset eivät ole… no, tuettuja CRM Onlinessa. Seuraavaksi kannattaa kysyä, että onko tämä rajoitus hyvä vai huono asia? Haluaisivatko asiakasorganisaatiot todella ottaa tietoisesti sitä riskiä, että kumppanin toimittama CRM-laajennus tai lisäosa ei toimikaan versiopäivityksen jälkeen (tai edes viimeisimmän hotfixin asennuksen jälkeen)? Olisiko sittenkin parempi, että kumppani kertoisi avoimesti millaisia muutoksia CRM-alustaan on mahdollista tehdä tuetusti, sekä suunnittelisi asiakkaan kanssa parhaan mahdollisen vaihtoehdon päästä pyydetyn kaltaiseen custom-toiminnallisuuteen?

Yhteenveto: mukautuvan pilven laidalla

Liiketoimintasovellukset eivät ole siirtymässä kohti pilveä ainoastaan suurten palvelinkeskusten ja keskitetyn ylläpidon mukanaan tuoman kustannustehokkuuden vuoksi. Yksi keskeinen syy pilvimalliin panostamiselle on itse asiassa se, että tämä ympäristö kiihdyttää sovellusten evoluution tahtia, jonka seurauksena saamme entistä tarkemmin asiakkaan tarpeisiin mukautuvia sovelluskokonaisuuksia entistä nopeammin.

Sovellukset muuttuvat yhä enemmän palvelualustoiksi, joihin prosessi-, toimiala- tai asiakaskohtaisia laajennuksia tuotetaan tuettujen rajapintojen kautta. Näiden laajennusten jakeluun ja käyttöönottoon taas alustatoimittaja kehittää yhä standardoidumpia tapoja, kuten esimerkiksi Dynamics CRM 2011:n mukanaan tuomat ratkaisupaketit ja Dynamics Marketplace. Tällaiset yksittäisen sovelluksen sisältä tarkasteluna pieniltä vaikuttavat muutokset ovat siksi kauaskantoisia, että ne mahdollistavat ekosysteemien syntymisen sovellusalustojen ympärille ja sovellusten välille. Ei siis enemmän uusia geenejä, vaan geenien uusia kombinaatiota.

So what, vaikkei enää pääsekään puukottamaan sovelluspalvelimen config-tiedostoja, kun fyysinen palvelin on kadonnut koodarin ulottumattomiin? Kun vanha keino ei toimi, on vain etsittävä uusia. Muutosprosessia nopeuttaa se lohduttava tieto, että pilvipalvelun potentiaalinen globaali asiakasmassa todennäköisesti houkuttelee paikalle useampia toimijoita ratkomaan samaa pulmaa. Yhden toimittajan ympäristössä ei tarvinnut välttämättä investoida paljoa aikaa ratkaisun tuotteistamiseen, hallittavuuteen ja yhteiseloon muiden laajennusten kanssa. Haittana asiakkaalle oli se, että silloin kaiken toiminnallisuuden piti melkeinpä tulla siltä samalta toimittajalta. Pitkällä tähtäimellä pilviympäristön uudet pelisäännöt tuovat lisää vaihtoehtoja molemmille tahoille: asiakkaalle enemmän potentiaalisia toimittajia, toimittajalle enemmän potentiaalisia asiakkaita.

Se, mikä ei vielä toimi pilviversiossa, todennäköisesti toimii siellä kohta. Se, mikä on jo nyt mahdollista, voi luoda vanhoille toiminnoille täysin uusia käyttökohteita. Ajattele jos voisitkin kutsua perinteiseen SharePoint-työtilaan käyttäjiä ei vain oman organisaation sisältä vaan vaikkapa alihankkijan työntekijöistä? Tai mitä jos saisit CRM:n sähköpostikampanjoihin lisätoimintona seurantatiedot viestin linkkejä klikanneista yksinkertaisesti asentamalla uuden ratkaisupaketin? Moni aiemmin teknisesti mahdollinen asia on vaarassa muuttua pilvisovelluksien kohdalla lähes naurettavan helpoksi ottaa käyttöön. Uhkakuvana on järjestelmien käytön monipuolistuminen ja ominaisuuksien mukautuminen käyttäjien todellisiin tarpeisiin, sitä mukaa kun nämä tulevat tarpeistaan tietoisiksi.

Kun Nokia ilmoitti viime kuussa käytännössä lopettavansa Symbianin kehittämisen ja tähtäävänsä jatkossa kohti Windows Phone 7 -maailmaa, jäi monelle tietotyöläiselle käteen uudehko älypuhelin vailla toivoa uusista älykkäistä sovelluksista. Varsinkin Suomessa lukemattomat yritykset ovat lukinneet mobiililaitepolitiikkansa tiukasti Nokian tarjoamiin malleihin. Vaikka kyseiset politiikat otettaneenkin useassa paikassa uudelleenarvioitavaksi, eivät jo hankitut Symbian-laitteet kuitenkaan poistu käytöstä ihan hetkessä. iPhone ja Android-luurit toki ovat jo nyt läsnä työpaikalla varjo-IT:n muodossa, eri asia sitten tukevatko yrityksen sovellukset tai IT-osasto näitä epävirallisia alustoja.

Mitä tehdä esimerkiksi uudella Nokia E7 -puhelilmella, joka rautansa puolesta sopii mainiosti työkäyttöön, mutta jonka väistyvälle Symbian-alustalle mobiilikehittäjät eivät enää ole kiinnostuneita tekemään uutta softaa? Yksi hyödyllinen käyttökohde on asiakastietojen hallinta ja hyödyntäminen mobiilisti, Microsoft Dynamics CRM:n avulla. Työkalun tähän tarjoaa Abile DynaMitt mobiili-client, jonka voi ladata ilmaiseksi puhelimeen tästä Ovi Store -linkistä.

Abile DynaMitt tukee niin uudempaa Symbian^3 käyttöjärjestelmää (N8, E7, C7) kuin myös aiempia Symbian S60 3rd & 5th editioneita (esim. E51 – E55, E71 – E75) vailla kosketusnäyttöä. Personal Edition on ilmainen, mutta saatavilla olevan datan ja asetusten osalta rajoittunut. Personal+ Edition tarjoaa € 20 hintaan joustavammat vaihtoehdot CRM:n tietojen hyödyntämiseen. Abile DynaMitt keskustelee CRM:n kanssa käyttäjän tietokoneelle asennettavan DynaSync-sovelluksen ja Outlook-tunnistetietojen avulla, synkronoiden CRM:n tietoja Symbian-laitteen paikalliseen tietokantaan, joten periaatteessa käyttöönotto onnistuu ilman IT-osaston tukea tai CRM-palvelimeen koskemista. Tuettuja versioita ovat Dynamics CRM 4.0 ja CRM 2011, sekä on premises- että hosted-ympäristössä.

Entä jos käytössä onkin CRM Online, tai jokin muu kuin Symbian-puhelin? Useimmille älypuhelinalustoille löytyy kyllä nykyään CRM-mobiilisovelluksia, joista osa on suoraan sovelluskaupoista käyttäjän ladattavissa. Hyvä tapa lähestyä Dynamics CRM:n puhelinkäyttöä yrityksenlaajuisesti on kuitenkin aluksi tutustua Microsoftin tarjoamaan CRM Mobile Express -versioon, joka on ilmaiseksi käytettävissä kaikissa Dynamics CRM -ympäristöissä, mukautettavissa olevan selainkäyttöliittymän kautta. Mikäli haluat lisätietoja tarjolla olevista vaihtoehdoista CRM:n käyttöön matkapuhelimellasi, ota yhteyttä tämän lomakkeen kautta.

https://connect.microsoft.com/dynamicssuggestions (Windows Live ID registration required)

“Use this Connection to submit your product suggestions for Microsoft Dynamics products. Search existing suggestions and vote on suggestions submitted by others. Future versions and enhancements of Microsoft Dynamics products will be built with a better understanding of customer and partner needs. Suggestions about product features and enhancements can be submitted anytime, day or night!”

http://www.north52.com/formulamanager.html

Available formula types:

• Auto Number
• Display Alert
• Calculated Field
• Calculated Hyperlink
• Dialog\Workflow Result
• Dialog\Workflow Action
• Notification Critical
• Notification Warning
• Notification Information
• Save to Child Records
• Save to Current Record
• Save to Parent Record
• Validation

https://www.sentri.com/whatwedo/collaboration/CRM/Pages/Dynamics-CRM-Grid-Editor-.aspx

“An easy way to navigate and update your Microsoft CRM data in an Excel-like intuitive way. “

http://www.gapconsulting.co.uk/solutions/essentials/auto-summary

“Auto Summary solution provides you with the ability to store information on a parent record summarised from multiple child records. With Auto Summary for Dynamics CRM 2011 you can sum any source field on all related child records and store the result on the parent record. It’s also possible to count the number of related child records and even apply a filter query before storing the result in the chosen field of the parent record. “

http://www.gapconsulting.co.uk/solutions/manager-suite/scrum-manager

http://rc.crm.dynamics.com/rc/2011/en-us/online/5.0/outlook-troubleshooting.aspx

https://yammer.zendesk.com/entries/21284143-yammer-for-microsoft-dynamics

http://demobuilder.cloudapp.net/

Includes provisioning of Office 365 trial account, sample data, SharePoint Online integration, Bing Maps, Customer Portal, Partner Portal, InsideView. Read introduction post here.

http://www.zero2ten.com/Blog/tabid/63/EntryId/106/Phone-Schedule-Assistant-for-Microsoft-Dynamics-CRM-2011.aspx

http://optionsetmanager.codeplex.com/

http://mscrmblogger.com/2012/03/31/imagebrowser-webresource/

http://www.xpert360.com/lightning_products.html

http://www.campaignmonitor.com/downloads/microsoft-dynamics-crm/

http://www.whoson.com/microsoftcrm.aspx

http://crmjsmodelgenerator.codeplex.com/

http://sharpxrmpage.codeplex.com/

http://mapsforcrm2011.codeplex.com/

http://treeviewfordependent.codeplex.com/

http://crm2011lookuppreview.codeplex.com/

http://crmtreeviewforlookup.codeplex.com/