I saw TITAN in action at WWPC on Monday 7/9. It was awesome!.
Sounds like they will stick with the current Dynamics naming conventions and call it Dynamics CRM 4.0.
It was Friday’s build so it was the latest and greatest. They had us in an invite only meeting for the key partners in CRM from around the world. Just a handful of people and the MSFT folks.
Here are some of the tidbits and notables from the presentation. This is totally confidential and only my opinion of what I saw so please do not spread this around to anyone else at this time until something more official comes out:
· The UI is a little cleaner but almost exactly the same.
· SPEED - The system is caching faster so everything is speedier.
· Multi Tenancy, Language, and Currency is included in the Version.
· Many to Many relationships are now easily handled.
· Reports Wizard - There is a lot more Reports creation features that will make it easier to create most of the reports and cross entity reporting stuff we do.
· There is a Data migration tool set for that will do look ups and updates and migrations. It is a lot like scribe but not as powerful for translations and integrations. It will help a lot on that front. You can add info and inject it into the existing data set.
· WWF - Windows Workflow Foundation looks really slick and easy to use. Much better then what we have now.
· Mobility will be a core part of TITAN and will be integral and treated like the Outlook client.
· It has Duplicate Detection rules and scheduler built in.
· You can now refer to multiple USERS from an entity like and account or opp for primary owner and secondary owners and backups etc.
· Templates look a little improved and now you can pull in fields from all related entities onto the template.
· You can now add multiple users in a couple clicks instead of one at a time
· Import Export - ISV Config, WEB Config and Workflow and Sitemaps etc are all now in the customize entity area. This will make it much easier to move or drop in customizations to a client system.
· The GUID Tracking Token can now be hidden/removed but still tracked! There are many more options to do this better and cleaner.
· They have added auto-complete features to the fields as you fill them out.
Regards,
Jon Petrucelli
President and Founder
ProductiveGap Corp - http://www.productivegap.com/
Monday, July 9, 2007
Saturday, July 7, 2007
Multi-Tenancy with value for the client
What does Multi Tenancy mean to the client??
Not much if you are working with a SAAS provider. Some SAAS providers like SalesForce.com tout Multi Tenancy as a valuable feature to a client. The only real value is to the provider or to Salesforce. That is if you are working with a SAAS solution. Multi Tenancy to salesforce type companies means they can cram more clients on one server and greatly reduce their costs. There is no value to the client or users in this model.
I find it funny that they used to tout Multi Tenancy in their marketing materials. They made it sound like it was a benefit to the Client. The only benefit might be in a lowered user cost to the client but that does not seem to be happening as Salesforce.com prising is double to triple MS CRM hosting costs and the projected CRM LIVE costs.
MS CRM v4.0 will offer multi tenancy to clients that will actually translate into value for the client and the end users. Larger mid market companies and enterprises will be able to have one server to deliver separate CRM instances to multiple departments, divisions, or groups/teams. That is valuable to them. No multiple CRM front end servers to manage and patch and backup etc.
We have multiple clients that are very excited about this architecture model. Some have 5-10 different CRM Front end servers with one back end SQL server. They will be able to upgrade and then move all the CRM instances to one box! This will have to be a beefy box but it will GREATLY Reduce their costs and management tasks. That is valuable to the IT group.
I was in Redmond at the end of September 2007 for 5 days on the new version and I experimented quite a bit with the creation of new instances. It is pretty AWESOME! I could not believe how easy it is to build out a new, entirely separate instance of CRM.
They have moved around the DB architecture to facilitate this and other features. Now there are basically 2 DBs. The CRM DB and the Config DB.
In the CRM DB you now have all the records and customizations for an instance.
In the Config DB you now have all the System and User Settings.
When you create a new instance of CRM it just adds a new named CRM DB instance.
So the Config DB Services all the CRM DB Instances in SQL. This makes moving around as an Admin very easy!
The one thing that I did not like is that you cannot easily move data and utilize it between instances. There will have to be backend synch or integration to facilitate that sharing and unification of the data. That is ok. It would have been cool if you could have mapped from one DB Instance to another to share fields and all the data stayed synched. Maybe in the next version.
Regards,
Jon Petrucelli - http://www.productivegap.com/
Not much if you are working with a SAAS provider. Some SAAS providers like SalesForce.com tout Multi Tenancy as a valuable feature to a client. The only real value is to the provider or to Salesforce. That is if you are working with a SAAS solution. Multi Tenancy to salesforce type companies means they can cram more clients on one server and greatly reduce their costs. There is no value to the client or users in this model.
I find it funny that they used to tout Multi Tenancy in their marketing materials. They made it sound like it was a benefit to the Client. The only benefit might be in a lowered user cost to the client but that does not seem to be happening as Salesforce.com prising is double to triple MS CRM hosting costs and the projected CRM LIVE costs.
MS CRM v4.0 will offer multi tenancy to clients that will actually translate into value for the client and the end users. Larger mid market companies and enterprises will be able to have one server to deliver separate CRM instances to multiple departments, divisions, or groups/teams. That is valuable to them. No multiple CRM front end servers to manage and patch and backup etc.
We have multiple clients that are very excited about this architecture model. Some have 5-10 different CRM Front end servers with one back end SQL server. They will be able to upgrade and then move all the CRM instances to one box! This will have to be a beefy box but it will GREATLY Reduce their costs and management tasks. That is valuable to the IT group.
I was in Redmond at the end of September 2007 for 5 days on the new version and I experimented quite a bit with the creation of new instances. It is pretty AWESOME! I could not believe how easy it is to build out a new, entirely separate instance of CRM.
They have moved around the DB architecture to facilitate this and other features. Now there are basically 2 DBs. The CRM DB and the Config DB.
In the CRM DB you now have all the records and customizations for an instance.
In the Config DB you now have all the System and User Settings.
When you create a new instance of CRM it just adds a new named CRM DB instance.
So the Config DB Services all the CRM DB Instances in SQL. This makes moving around as an Admin very easy!
The one thing that I did not like is that you cannot easily move data and utilize it between instances. There will have to be backend synch or integration to facilitate that sharing and unification of the data. That is ok. It would have been cool if you could have mapped from one DB Instance to another to share fields and all the data stayed synched. Maybe in the next version.
Regards,
Jon Petrucelli - http://www.productivegap.com/
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