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CDM: New Data Model For The Common Good?

The first new component of the upcoming Dynamics 365 platform that has reached a stage of public preview is the Microsoft Common Data Model (CDM). Available via PowerApps, CDM can be provisioned in your Office 365 tenant with only a few clicks, so there’s little reason for not having a look an early look at it. In fact, you only need to sit back and relax while watching CRM MVP Scott Durow walk you through a first look at the Common Data Model:

So, there you have it! That’s what CDM looks like when accessed via the PowerApps web management UI. Any questions?

Yeah, I actually do have a couple.

How will this work with CRM and AX?

What we have available in the preview is pretty much the most straightforward part of the very big puzzle to put together, meaning a database on Azure with some preconfigured tables and data model management tools. We do not yet know much about how the Dynamics CRM and Dynamics AX functionality will be linked to CDM as part of the Dynamics 365 cloud platform, so there’s plenty room for speculation, which honestly is mostly what I’m about to do here. In a way I’m just continuing on the theme of my previous post about Dynamics 365 and its potential implications for XRM, to pass the time as we wait for Microsoft’s plans to be revealed in more detail.

Right now the only way to push data into CDM is a Flow. If you’ve ever played with automation tools like IFTTT or Zapier, then you’ll quickly grasp the idea of Microsoft Flow. The application itself shouldn’t be underestimated just because of its current simplistic demo scenarios that usually are along the lines of “when a new row is added to a SharePoint list, send an email to this address”. Built on top of Azure Logic Apps, there’s actually a next generation BizTalk type of cloud integration platform under the hood, which should provide plenty of future potential for advanced messaging solutions to orchestrate business processes across a number of different systems.

Once Dynamics 365 Enterprise arrives and gives us the features of CRM and AX in one seamless cloud environment, there’s naturally going to be a need for something a lot more than a “build your own” type of Flow integration. Keeping the Sales and Operations apps of D365 in sync with the customer and transaction data managed in the process of making an delivering a sale involves a fair amount of business logic. If you’ve ever designed and developed a custom integration for this type of a scenario, you’ll know the requirements can quickly grow a bit hairy. Assuming Microsoft can come along and say “we’ll take care of that hairy part, don’t you worry about it” then who could resist it?

The reason CDM exists is that there will be more than one physical database in the Dynamics 365 suite. It’s not all XRM, which means you can’t find the Operations app entities inside your CRM solution files. For the business processes to work seamlessly, someone needs to keep those database closely in sync with one another. From reading through the Common Data Model tutorials, we can see that at least as of now, Flow is not the system that can handle it:

“Today, when you use Microsoft Flow to import data or export data, it is not a full synchronization service. Whenever an object is added to one service, it will be imported into the other system. However, that means if an object is deleted from one system it will not be deleted in the other system.”

So, the sync part is still in the “To Be Implemented” bucket. So is security, since the passing of a record from CRM to CDM via Flow will not carry over any details about who should have the rights to do some CRUD work on it. Again, it may not sound like such a mission impossible to build. However, if you’ve ever faced the requirement in a Dynamics CRM project to implement SharePoint document library integration with account records that includes not just linking the folders but also enforcing the account access rights on the documents, you’ll know the struggle is real. Sure, a collaboration solution like SharePoint has very different security concepts than a system designed for structured business records management like CRM or ERP. But if Microsoft hasn’t been able to offer OoB synchronization of access rights across Dynamics CRM and SharePoint despite of the clear business demand for it, maybe we’d be foolish to expect that it will all be seamless inside the Dynamics 365 world either.

The thing here is that unless the solution provided by Microsoft is going to be fairly advanced, it might not be an actual solution. It’s like the old saying from the dawn of the internet:

Some people, when confronted with a problem, think “I know, I’ll use regular expressions.” Now they have two problems.

When confronted with the need to integrate processes across two different cloud business applications, there’s always the danger of someone rushing into thinking “I know, I’ll build a database in the middle to unify the process data”. So we end up with three cloud business applications… Now, I’m not saying that Microsoft wouldn’t have the type of application architecture masterminds working on the Dynamics 365 platform that can solve these complex problems when developing a new product. I’m just afraid that things may still turn out a bit more complex in reality than the marketing pitch for the new product launch might lead people to believe.

What limitations will this impose on customization?

The one reason why many of us love the capabilities of the Dynamics XRM platform is the awesome flexibility it offers us to customize the application to meet the specific needs of customers. And by “customize” I actually mean “configure”, since these days you can build such amazing features for business users without writing a single line of Javascript or C#. With Dynamics 365 now promising to deliver so many preconfigured apps for different departments’ needs, as well as making them all work together, I bet some of us are thinking about whether there’s a potential threat to the platform’s flexibility buried in the new approach Microsoft is taking. (more…)

August 29, 2016
Dynamics 365: The Next Chapter of MS Cloud Business Apps
Have you heard about this brand new thing called “Dynamics 365” yet? If you attended or followed the WPC 2016 conference, I bet you have, since it was the big headline news for Microsoft’s partners and corporate customers that kicked off their FY17. Satya Nadella spent a significant part of the WPC keynote explaining how Dynamics 365 is the service through which his vision of reinventing business processes comes to life. So, obviously there’s got to be some big things packaged into this new offering. But putting the visions aside for a moment, what exactly does this service contain in practice?

In short, Microsoft Dynamics 365 is both the same old and brand new when it comes to the underlying components. As presented by many of the tech news sites, essentially Dynamics 365 is about taking the previous Dynamics CRM & ERP products and bundling them into a single cloud service. Comparing it to “the other 365”, meaning Office, it’s not an entirely different approach than taking established server applications like SharePoint & Exchange and making them easier to purchase via a single Office 365 plan. While the name is different and the tools to administer the applications are specific to the subscription service, beneath the portal there are many of the same bits as you could have on your own servers, too. In the case of Dynamics 365, you’ll be mostly getting the latest versions of CRM and AX/NAV from the Microsoft cloud.

“Ok, so we’ll have a new SKU to purchase Dynamics products from the cloud. A bit like the earlier bundles for Sales Productivity then, where you bought CRM, Office 365 and Power BI for a discounted price. Got it, can I now go back to chasing nearby Pokémons with my phone ’cause I’d really want to catch them all?” Well, if you ask me, I think you should look a bit deeper into the Dynamics 365 story to understand how it really will impact CRM as a product as well as the ecosystem around it. I too was initially a bit skeptical about this whole thing when reading the first press release from Microsoft, but the more I’ve investigated the pieces of information available at this early stage, the more I’ve started to believe that what we have here isn’t a mere product marketing stunt but rather the next major chapter in the story of Microsoft Dynamics applications.

Satya’s Masterplan

One year ago when Microsoft announced that they were going to tear down the silo of MBS (Microsoft Business Solutions) and merge Dynamics product teams into C+E (Cloud and Enterprise), Nadella said he wanted to “enable the company to accelerate ERP and CRM work and bring it into the mainstream C+E engineering and innovation efforts.” It took a while before saw what this “mainstreaming” really means, but I believe Dynamics 365 is the major output from this process that started with the restructuring. It is elevating the Dynamics product offering from being just an app you can order via the Office 365 portal and turning it into a proper destination of its own.

Back when I was starting my first gig as a Dynamics CRM consultant in 2010, I distinctly remember the day after I had returned home from the Convergence conference in Prague. I was about to sign the contract with my new employer and was riding in a cab with my boss to be, catching up on the latest tweets (with my Windows Mobile 6.0 device and whatever apps we had back then). I came across Microsoft’s announcement of Office 365 and said to him “have you heard about this already, might be kind of a big deal for the business”. Well, the business of my upcoming employer was largely about hosted MS business applications and it turned out to a big deal indeed, as the rationale for offering local CRM or Exchange instances eroded much faster than most service providers were willing to understand – let alone for them to adapt to this new reality.

How I see this relate to the recent Dynamics 365 announcement is that when you stop to think about the tools we work with these days, it’s not just about the cloud as a delivery channel. If it were enough for the customer organizations to just use their business applications via a browser, from a server environment managed by someone other than your own IT department, then we’d still probably be happily working in the BPOS era of application servers hosted by “someone out there”. In reality, it rarely is about the servers or even the server application bits. It’s about services: how they can be consumed and how information flows between them. Sure, someone of course needs to set up the services, but once that problem has been solved (e.g. Dynamics CRM Online removing the need for manually installing customer specific CRM instances) it’s time to start solving problems higher up in the value chain. This, I believe, is what Microsoft is aiming to achieve with Dynamics 365. Making it more than just the sum of its parts, by lowering the barriers between the apps and encouraging customers to build solutions that consist of a network of apps – from MS and ISVs. The new AppSource portal is therefore a very important part of the Dynamics 365 story (even though at launch time it’s not yet that much better than the infamous Dynamics Marketplace).

Front to the Back with Dynamics 365

Once launched later this year, Dynamics 365 will be available as two editions. The Enterprise Edition will be made up of Dynamics CRM modules and Dynamics AX, whereas the Business Edition is being built on top of Project Madeira (brand new cloud version of Dynamics NAV, from what I know). Details about the pricing haven’t yet been disclosed, but at WPC there were slides shown that outline the different plans that the Enterprise Edition will offer. Since the Business Edition is clearly a lot more “work in progress” at this stage, and because it might not even contain any of the Dynamics CRM functionality (if I read the WPC materials correctly), it’s best for us to focus on analyzing the Enterprise Edition.

Looking at it from a CRM perspective, the platform formerly known as Dynamics CRM is being broken down into smaller modules that can be purchased separately. We’ve already seen how the recent CRM Online enhancements like Project Service and Field Service have been introduced as separately licensed modules (and their trials are now distributed via AppSource), but with Dynamics 365 this will be taken even further. A sales user can be assigned only a license to the “Sales app”, rather than needing a “CRM Online Professional” license to manage their opportunity pipeline. Even without knowing the price points for per app licenses in Dynamics 365, it’s easy to see that the barrier for consuming application features from the cloud will be lower when you can only select what you want. In the on-premises world the traditional “all you can eat” model of Dynamics CRM licensing probably made sense, but if Microsoft now has the option to make their cloud service available in various different shapes and sizes, why wouldn’t they?

Even though there will be more individual apps to choose from, the main value proposition of Dynamics 365 is in the possibility of making the whole end to end business process visible to the users. Traditional licensing silos between the front office CRM system and the back office ERP system have often led to scenarios where employees need to ask another employee to check information from a system they can’t access – or needing to work with limited snapshots or static reports rather than the real-time dynamic data from the business application. Microsoft surely recognizes this as a great opportunity to move customers gradually away from using legacy ERP systems by offering a cloud platform where the licensing model is no longer determined by the server application barriers but rather the workloads of the users. The Enterprise Edition contains a “Dynamics 365 for Team Members” plan that covers read rights to each and every application, from marketing to operations (the ERP part), which specifically addresses the information silo issue.

How Can It Actually Work?

Knowing that all the CRM and ERP applications under the Microsoft Dynamics umbrella have been completely separate products with little in common when it comes to architecture, how is Microsoft going to turn these into a single business application platform all of a sudden? Well, that is the billion $ question to which we don’t yet have an exact answer, but let’s speculate a bit while we await for it.

Microsoft has announced that underneath the Dynamics 365 apps there will be a platform layer called Common Data Model. On the official Microsoft Dynamics blog this CDM is described with the following words:

The common data model is a cloud-resident business database, built on years of experience with our enterprise customers. It will come with hundreds of standard business entities spanning both business process (Dynamics 365) and productivity (Office 365). The standardization and consistency of schema enables partners to build innovative applications and to automate business processes spanning the entire business process spectrum with confidence their solutions can be easily deployed and used across Microsoft’s entire customer base.

Hmm, okay, so there’s at least going to be a new database in addition to the application specific databases of CRM and AX, as we can see from the Dynamics 365 architecture image below. The promise of a “standardized, consistent schema” also implies that at least the OoB entities will be connected across CRM and AX without any additional configuration effort required. Now, how exactly the integration of custom entities can be configured, or how the platform will handle the business logic involved in each connected app is something that isn’t very clear at this point.

Surprisingly enough, the most detailed information about CDM was first released not via the Dynamics product blogs but on the Power Apps blog. The post PowerApps and the Microsoft Common Data Model gives us the first practical view into what functionality the CDM part of the platform is expected to deliver. Some examples:
- CDM will encompass not only CRM and AX but also the data model of productivity apps like Outlook.
- CDM will include complex data types like address and auto-numbering.
- CDM will contain features familiar to CRM admins, like field level security and auditing.
Once the CDM Preview arrives in August we’ll hopefully get to explore the contents and functionality of this data model via the PowerApps Studio at least, even though Dynamics 365 itself will probably arrive a bit later. On another PowerApps blog post, it was announced that there will be a Dynamics 365 specific SDK, which should be launched in preview mode before the year ends.

Why does the PowerApps team work so actively in bringing this information available? There’s a simple explanation: PowerApps, Power BI and Flow are a fundamental part of the Dynamics 365 product offering. They are included in the Enterprise Edition plans and they form the new business application platform that supports the 365 apps on top of them – to the extent that there is now even a dedicated site to describe the capabilities of these three products.

Since business process orchestration is fundamentally a cross-application domain, it makes a lot of sense that you don’t only rely on the workflow process engines found inside applications like CRM. Also, if you’ve tried to leverage these three tools with current Dynamics CRM Online application, it soon becomes obvious that working with the relational data and specific data types of CRM is not where Power BI, PowerApps or Flow currently excel. Therefore what CDM as part of Dynamics 365 can offer for the business process orchestration tools to make the interaction easier is surely very welcome.

Farewell to On-prem

All of this you see coming available for Dynamics 365 is exclusive to the Microsoft cloud. Period. While you could of course take many of the individual technologies like Dynamics CRM and build custom integrations to your own servers, a single commercial offering licensed and managed by Microsoft will not become available for that environment.

In the past Microsoft has been using the “power of choice” as an argument on why investing in Dynamics CRM technology is a safer choice than going with a cloud-only platform like Salesforce. Six years ago when CRM Online was launched that certainly was an important benefit of the MS stack. Even though the business world is a lot more “cloud ready” today, there still are many scenarios where a service hosted outside the borders of the customer’s country is not a valid option. Nevertheless, the power of choice isn’t such a clear differentiator anymore if pretty much everyone is making the same choice. For those organizations who are able to move ahead at the speed of cloud, there just has to be a fast track available. Sure, CRM Online has already been developing at a faster release cadence than CRM on-prem, but with Dynamics 365 the ties are officially cut now.

It isn’t a completely new situation, even within the Dynamics product family. From what I know about Dynamics AX, the latest “AX 7” version has been designed not only as a “cloud first” but pretty much “cloud only” approach. The application architecture has been heavily redesigned and now relies on services from Azure, so it’s not something you could ever install on a Windows Server. The strategy for on-premises support is based on the Azure Stack product, which will allow customers to run a version of the same services on their very own servers. (In related news, the Azure Stack release plans have recently been revised: it won’t arrive for another year yet and it will require specific hardware when it finally does.)

Does the announcement of Dynamics 365 mean that no investment will be made to on-premises Dynamics products anymore? No, at least according to the official statement from Microsoft. CRM, AX and NAV, meaning the in-house application layer of Dynamics 365, will continue to be developed, sold and supported. For example, AX 2012 will be supported until 2021 which gives some indication about the expectations Microsoft has on when existing on-prem ERP customers would really be able to adopt the new cloud offering of Dynamics 365. I bet that the hybrid scenarios will be taken into consideration as well when driving the adoption of the 365 cloud service.

Still, if you’re looking for the latest Microsoft product innovations and integrating your business applications with the coolest new services, it’s hard for me to see how remaining in the on-prem land would be a viable option anymore. While new server versions will still keep on coming, having a new product feature that doesn’t require you to be running Dynamics 365 is probably going to become an exception rather than a rule. Already many of the latest CRM Online features have been built on Azure based services (offline sync for mobile, Relevance Search, machine learning in product recommendations) and the 365 cloud platform is going to make it even easier for MS to hook these things up to their business apps. The gap is just going to grow wider and wider.

What Will Happen to XRM?

Looking at the Dynamics CRM application specifically, there’s been a reasonably good parity between the Online and on-premises editions when it comes to the core XRM platform features. With all of these new integration points and platform layers now being developed for weaving together the complete Dynamics 365 service, it raises the question of whether the “core” really is inside XRM anymore or is it being actively replaced by something completely different?

While I don’t think Dynamics 365 signals the death of XRM, it certainly does give a clear indication about how it is positioned in Microsoft’s new business application platform architecture. It’s what the individual apps are still built on (sales, project service, field service, portals, Voice of the Customer and so on) but it may not deliver the full user experience anymore. The users may interact with data through a purpose built PowerApp rather than the standard CRM client apps. The business process automation may jump across different apps via Flow, with CRM workflows handling only a part of it. The process metrics will frequently be monitored and analyzed with Power BI charts and not the CRM dashboards. I don’t think the 365 platform will overnight replace too many of the traditional XRM features, but it will undoubtedly set a boundary for feature development at Microsoft’s end if the new capabilities could be leveraged also outside the XRM apps.

The arrival of a Dynamics 365 SDK means that the wider ecosystem of partners and service providers who wish to connect with customer organizations using Dynamics 365 may well choose to integrate their apps via this new API and not the XRM specific Web API, as modern and RESTful as it might be. Without knowing the exact services available in 365 it’s of course impossible to say yet what functionality would move to the CDM part of the platform, but since the whole point of CDM is to make it easier to connect cloud apps together, that’s where much of the development effort will naturally gravitate towards. Extending a specific 365 app like Sales with new UI level functionality will surely still require XRM developer skills, similarly as modifying the Operations app’s logic requires knowledge of X++ (the programming language for AX). Now, if you’re an XRM developer with no experience of AX, imagine being tasked with building a custom feature that needs to talk with both the Sales and Operations apps. Would you rather dive right in to learning X++ or start by exploring the common 365 platform SDK instead? Exactly. That’s how our solution design practices get disrupted: first gradually, then suddenly.

Honestly, the direction that Microsoft appears to be taking with Dynamics 365 makes perfect sense to me, and I see it as a brighter future for Dynamics CRM to be a part of this cross-application business platform – rather than a self-sustained “any relationship management” toolkit. No matter how awesome it is, XRM can’t do it all. It could certainly use a lil’ help in certain areas where Microsoft has more advanced tools available. If the new platform gives a wider set of options for me when designing solutions for customers then sign me up for it! Even if the administration experience or depth of functionality may not be on quite the same level when working with a set of connected applications sitting on top of CDM rather than a single XRM solution, it’s probably a price worth paying in the long run.

Dynamics 365 explains a lot of the shortcomings with the current pieces of the MS cloud puzzle. Like: why must Power BI try and consume the CRM Online data via the slow OData endpoint when Microsoft could surely open up a shortcut between their two clouds? Well, here you go! The answer is that instead of taking the easy way out, a brand new Azure based architecture has been designed to support the current and future needs of CRM and other cloud business apps. It’s impossible for us outsiders to know all the different dependencies that the Dynamics 365 product strategy has had on the CRM feature roadmap, but it’s easy to imagine quite a few of them. I’m not expecting the floodgates to open with the initial release of Dynamics 365 this fall (more likely it’s a preview than a fully baked V2 platform), but I do expect the pace to pick up as the new strategy is executed on the commercial delivery side.

How we’ll be able to transition an existing organization from Dynamics CRM Online to Dynamics 365 and connect to the Common Data Model is going to be a big question. I’m not worried about the application functionality really, as it might well be just a simple CDU experience of upgrading to the latest version. On the data model side, If there are some “best practices” implemented in CDM that don’t align with the customer specific entity model and attributes, then some refactoring of the existing CRM solutions may well be needed. While there may not be an immediate need to switch over, in the long run I expect there to be a number of services that target CDM specifically which cannot be used with a “legacy” CRM Online environment. As funny as it sounds, we may have indeed reached a point in the Dynamics CRM lifecycle where even the cloud based environments need a bit of a “reboot” to reach the next generation business application platform compatibility.

It’s Always a Journey

If we look at the history of Microsoft’s CRM software starting from 13 years back and analyze how the platform has evolved over time, we can see that up until the past couple of years, the progress made has been fairly product focused. Setting aside the app vs. platform debate on what the product is really about, the core package of what a Dynamics CRM server does has remained the same on a high level since the start, and I’d assume the story on the ERP side isn’t radically different either. It’s the world around it that has transformed into something quite different, and it’s this interface with the outside world of other apps and services where the most exciting stuff is happening.

On the product code base level, Microsoft tried to merge their in-house CRM with the four acquired ERP products already over a decade ago with Project Green. As we now know, this never resulted in any “One Microsoft Dynamics” type of a platform nor new products being brought to market. When Satya Nadella (CVP of MBS at that time) was asked about why the ambitious initiative appeared to have stalled in 2007, his response was “we don’t have the goal of just convergence for convergence’s sake”. I can believe that while technically not an impossible task, there just wasn’t a clear enough business benefit for the customers to make them want to move into a single code base product merged from five existing applications, knowing how disruptive the migration could have been for their day to day operations. Fast forward ten years to the Dynamics 365 announcement and the business case now looks a lot more solid in this cloud era. Although the initial release of Dynamics 365 this fall is likely to be more of a preview than a fully functioning business application platform, it will already be a lot further in terms of visible platform harmonization than what Project Green achieved.

While it’s easy to label almost anything in the IT business these days as “digital transformation”, there are quite a few signs that Microsoft is serious about aligning their set of different cloud products into a comprehensive toolkit for companies wanting to build and operate those digital business processes. How transformative will the end results be is something that we’ll see in time as the Dynamics 365 platform materializes. Whatever happens, Surviving CRM will be there to report on the progress of this journey!

For a summary of what other community members have shared around the Dynamics 365 announcement and sessions from WPC, please have a look at this Sway presentation I’ve compiled from the #Dynamics365 tweets:
July 15, 2016
A Million Voices: VoC Survey Results Analysis

A few weeks ago I launched a demo survey built on Voice of the Customer, the brand new survey tool from Microsoft. The goals I had for this exercise were twofold: 1) see how these type of interactive tools could be used in live events like eXtremeCRM 2016 Warsaw, and 2) gain some experience on what it is actually like to work with incoming survey response data inside Dynamics CRM. In this post I’ll mainly be focusing on the latter one, although the example data we’ll be looking at are the live answers you & other readers of this blog submitted via the eXtreme MVP Survey.

As you may know, Voice of the Customer (or VoC as we’ll refer to it from now on) is a pure XRM solution. Although the actual customer facing survey forms are of course not presented via the Dynamics CRM client UI, everything that you use for configuring the survey questions and logic, as well as the incoming survey responses, is managed with CRM entities and stored into the CRM database. The reason this is such a big deal is that most of you will already possess the skills needed for leveraging such data via views, charts and dashboards as it’s just XRM all the way. Furthermore, you’re free to design business processes around the survey functionality with tools like real-time workflows or business rules. Naturally you’re also able to interact with the survey entities and records via the latest CRM Web API, should you come across some integration scenarios where data needs to either flow in or out to another system.

The flip side of this coin is that VoC is unfortunately very XRM-ish to work with. If you compared it to dedicated survey apps that do nothing but questionnaire design (like SurveyMonkey, Surveypal and the likes), survey publishing and response data analysis, then there’s still quite a big gap for Microsoft to work on bridging when it comes to the end user experience of this tool. In a way this is quite understandable since the value proposition of VoC really is all about the tight integration with your customer data and the ability to send survey invitations automatically as a part of your customer facing processes; such as a survey link being emailed to a customer after a support case is closed in CRM, to gather quick ratings and design automatic escalation paths if the KPI’s are not met. Nevertheless, since VoC does also support creating pretty advanced surveys for collecting quantitative data from a broad target group in more traditional campaign style satisfaction surveys, as well as anonymous survey links presented on website, it’s good to understand what it’s like analyzing such data inside Dynamics CRM.

There are a lot of components in the VoC solution right out of the box. First off, there are four SSRS reports: Survey Summary, Question Summary, Net Promoter Score and Survey Export. The first two are general purpose reports with tables and charts summarizing the data either across a single survey or a specific question, as illustrated in the screenshots shown here. The NPS report is naturally aimed for this particular survey type, whereas the export one is a single huge matrix for dumping out the raw survey response data into Excel for further manipulation.

For more interactive data analysis there are eight dashboards in the VoC solution. However, these may not be all that useful for many real life scenarios, since they suffer from the same limitation as all Dynamics CRM dashboards: there are no global filters you can apply for all the dashboard components. Meaning, unlike with an SSRS report launched from CRM, you can’t set the context of the dashboard to be a specific survey. Yes, with the new “interactive experience dashboards” introduced in CRM 2016 you do get this type of filters, but since right now those features are limited to the Interactive Service Hub only (which in turn has a fair number of limitations for general use), it’s not exactly the kind of solution we’d need right here.

That doesn’t mean we couldn’t build pretty dashboards to summarize our survey responses, though. I had a go at this with the eXtreme MVP Survey and it turned out pretty well. Have a look (click for a larger image):

In the survey form I had three pages full of questions and I constructed the corresponding pages as personal CRM dashboards. This allowed me to both monitor the incoming responses during the survey data collection period as well as present the results to the audience at the MVP Showcase session in eXtremeCRM. It looks good, it appears very familiar to existing CRM users and it gets the job done without having to resort to any complex report development. (more…)

May 8, 2016
My CRM User Experience Presentation at eXtremeCRM 2016 Warsaw

If you’re a Microsoft Dynamics CRM partner in EMEA then eXtremeCRM is definitely an event you don’t want to miss. This spring the event was arranged in Warsaw, Poland, and I had the pleasure of not only attending but also contributing to some of the content at the conference. Together with 8 other CRM MVPs, we all presented in our own sessions, did a joint “ask the MVPs” showcase and also got the chance to talk with many of the awesome Dynamics CRM community members at our Team eXtreme Pitcrew booth. Thanks to everyone who came around to compete in a lap of Forza 6 with the MVPs!

It was the first eXtremeCRM event where I was not only attending the breakout sessions but also speaking at one session of my own. The topic that I ended up covering was something that has been touched upon also in this blog a few times: user experience of CRM systems. In addition, the focus of my presentation was specifically on the no-code configuration possibilities and how they can impact the solution UX, in good and bad. (It seems to be a common misconception among the MVP’s that I would know something about writing custom code, when in fact I’m almost illiterate when it comes to the CRM SDK. But anyway…). You can find my presentation slides below, or access them via this direct link to Docs.com.

Killer UX – Delivering a Great CRM User Experience without Custom Code—Jukka Niiranen

In my session I covered quite a wide variety of topics. To start with, I wanted to address the business impact of CRM system UX and provide some tools for demonstrating why user experience not just about application usability but really about the organization’s ability to deliver great customer experiences. Then I reviewed some of the basic CRM customization best practices that we all should keep in mind when configuring our solutions (but which are all too easy to forget when dealing with schedule constraints in CRM deployment projects). I then explored the concept of how Dynamics CRM could be made to feel more responsive to the end user’s actions via tools like Business Rules, Quick View Forms and Real-time Workflows. Finally I highlighted the importance of continuously maintaining the UX of a CRM environment when both the platform, the usage patterns as well as the ecosystem around it keep on evolving at an ever increasing pace in the cloud.

At eXtremeCRM there’s never a shortage of interesting sessions to attend, nor the amount of great new CRM roadmap insights that Jujhar Singh and the other members of Microsoft’s organization are there to share with the community. In an attempt to capture some of the highlights from the event, I compiled them into the following Sway presentation that includes content shared on Twitter via the #eXtremeCRM hashtag.

That’s all for today, but do check back for the next blog post where I’ll be sharing some of the results from the Voice of the Customer survey that we did for the MVP session at eXtremeCRM.

April 27, 2016
Voice of the Customer: Conditional Questions

My favorite podcast by far is CRM Audio. In fact, it’s the only podcast I regularly follow, since whenever I put my headphones on, quite often it will be for playing something from Spotify or Mixcloud to keep me from being distracted by people talking around me. Anyway, the podcasts that Joel, George and Shawn record about the latest news from the Dynamics CRM world together with their guest stars always provide some interesting insights that you can’t catch from the blogosphere. If you haven’t subscribed to it yet, I encourage you to give it a go.

In episode 21 of CRM Audio, titled “That’s Not A Survey”, these CRM tipsters explored the brand new Voice of the Customer solution and discussed how to position it in relation to other tools like ClickDimensions Surveys and the likes. As you may have noticed from my previous blog post, I’ve also spent a bit of time playing around with VoC, since I see quite a lot of potential with this XRM based survey engine.

One of the misconceptions around VoC that I’ve come across a few times before was also mentioned in the podcast was about conditional questions in a survey. It’s quite a basic requirement from any more advanced online surveys that the remaining questions should be adapted based on the earlier answers that the user has given. Call it “skip logic” or conditional show/hide, this would be something that a well designed survey would often need to apply, so that it adapts to the customer’s scenario being studied and can branch into different directions if parts of the questions are not relevant in a particular path. The misconception here is that in the Voice of the Customer survey designer UI there doesn’t appear to be a way to define such conditional logic. However, VoC does have this functionality already today.

Being a very recent addition to Microsoft’s portfolio, and having been delayed from the original CRM 2016 release schedule, the features of VoC aren’t very well documented at the moment, nor is there much training material available for instructing users how to get familiar with the tool. The regular readers of Surviving CRM might recall that VoC was actually called Mojo Surveys when MS acquired it one year ago. This means that documentation does exist, but it just hasn’t been remade into Microsoft’s format yet. Here’s a little tip: Google for mojo surveys filetype:pdf and see what you’ll find…

How the “skip logic” is done in VoC surveys is via a feature/entity called Response Routing. Found from the related records menu under a survey record, this is where you can define both the response conditions under which the routing should take place as well as the response actions that should be carried out when the conditions are met (or not met). A condition would be associated with the response given to a particular question and evaluated via “equal/greater/less” type of operators. Below you see a simple example of a single condition per response routing, but you could also group multiple conditions together via AND/OR operator.

The actions that you can take based on the conditions are split into two categories: client and server. As you may guess, the client side actions are performed during survey runtime, similar to client side scripts on CRM forms. Server actions are not performed until the survey response is submitted into the CRM database (like plugins), at which time it will be too late to affect what questions were presented to the user. So, the most interesting actions will be client side, which allow us to determine show/hide actions for questions or sections of a survey page, skip to a specific page, end the survey or even direct the user to a whole different survey.

In the example of the eXtremeCRM MVP Survey which I published together with my previous post, I added a Response Routing on the page 1 question “are you attending eXtremeCRM 2016 in Warsaw”:

If the user selects the answer option “Definitely!” then a further set of three questions will be revealed underneath that question on the same page. Similarly, because I also built response actions for the reversed scenario, if they change the answer value and click “I’ll have to skip it” then these additional questions are again hidden in real time on the survey page.

As you can see, VoC does already contain quite nice functionality in the first version that’s been released now. There are many more features to discover, such as piping dynamic data fields into surveys, so let’s hope that Microsoft will publish tutorials that showcase the real potential of these VoC surveys – not to mention the possibilities of what you can do with the response data as it flows into your XRM environment!

One word of warning is in order here: currently there’s a known issue with the Voice of the Customer solution that will break the CRM v8.0 OData feeds (the new OData v4 endpoint) if you install it into your environment. If you then try to build a report with Power BI Desktop and want to use CRM Online as the data source, you may run into an error dialog saying “The field ‘regardingobjectid_msdyn_surveyresponse’ already exists in the record.” Microsoft is aware of this bug and is working on a fix, but if you are relying on Power BI for your production CRM Online reporting, then it’s maybe better not to deploy VoC outside of your sandbox environment just yet. (more…)

March 30, 2016
eXtremeCRM 2016 in Warsaw – See You There!

As you may have heard, the long running Microsoft Dynamics CRM & ERP conference Convergence is no more. Microsoft has revised their event catalog and is now instead encouraging people to attend either the brand new Envision conference for business level discussions or Ignite for the technology platform updates. However, since both these events are much more generic in nature than the Dynamics focused Convergence used to be, it does leave quite a gap in the market for the CRM application deep dive content. Also, there’s nothing in the MSFT event calendar that would directly cater to the Envision and Ignite crowd in Europe, so anyone from around here who doesn’t want to spend too much time on a plane (and mentally in between time zones for the relatively short period of the conference) may not be quite as excited about these changes as the marketing message coming from Redmond might want them to feel.

Luckily the Dynamics CRM ecosystem isn’t dependent on only the events that Microsoft arranges. CRMUG has been building up their presence also on this side of the Atlantic and is now launching their first European Congress this spring in Stuttgart. eXtremeCRM is a long running event that has been catering to both the US and Europe partner audience for many years already and they’ll also have an event nearby very soon, as eXtremeCRM 2016 Warsaw takes place on April 18-21. So, whether you’re working on the customer’s side of the table or consulting a variety of different organizations on how to best take advantage of Dynamics CRM, there’s bound to be the right event for you where you can meet professionals like yourself, exchange ideas with them and hear presentations from knowledgeable members of the #MSDynCRM community on what’s hot (and not) in the CRM space.

It’s been a while since I’ve been to a CRM conference myself but this year I decided to make room in my customer projects calendar for attending one, since one doesn’t simply survive in this business with content you can find from online sources and social channels. So, I registered for the eXtremeCRM Warsaw event early on and then decided to also suggest a topic I could do a presentation on. The suggestion got approved, which means… well, the picture of yours truly right underneath Jujhar Singh says it all!

I’m honored to have the opportunity to join such a prestigious list of speakers in the eXtremeCRM 2016 Warsaw event. I wont of course be competing on the level of Jujhar (who BTW seems like exactly the right man for the Dynamics CRM GM position, based on our encounters at the MVP Summit) but will rather be focused on preaching what I know. Which is all about how to make the most of the XRM platform when you don’t know how (or just don’t want to) work with the API’s but rather need to leverage the built-in customization tools. My session is titled “Killer UX: Delivering a Great CRM User Experience without Custom Code” and what I’ll try to do is show how anyone who knows his or her way around the solution configuration UI can make a real difference in what Dynamics CRM as an application feels like for the end users to work with.

Now, I should of course be working feverishly on my presentation slides already, but here I am just reading and writing blog posts like I always do. If you’ve ever encountered a situation where instead of focusing on completing the important work that has a deadline approaching in the distant but all too inevitable future, you find yourself wondering around between Twitter and YouTube instead, then you know the feeling. Well, speaking of online videos, there just happens to be an excellent TED Talk from Tim Urban on the topic “Inside the mind of a master procrastinator”. You really should watch it because A) the Instant Gratification Monkey inside your brain will totally love the distraction, and B) it’ll help you better understand the dynamics of (not CRM but) procrastination.

“Hey, get off the wheel, you Monkey! We haven’t even finished this blog post yet! Grrr…”

In addition to myself, there are also eight other awesome CRM MVP’s who are coming to Warsaw. We’ll all be having our own sessions of course, but in addition to that, there will be a joint session where the audience can present questions to all the CRM MVP’s in the room on the latest CRM 2016 Spring Release in particular. Now, as we were thinking about what’s a good way to coordinate such a session, it occurred to me that “hey, why couldn’t we use CRM for this?” More specifically, wouldn’t this be a great opportunity to showcase the new Voice of the Customer functionality that’s very recently been made generally available for CRM Online customers?

As it turns out, Voice of the Customer (or “VoC” as we’ll all end up calling it) allows you to easily design surveys on any topic that you’re interested in collecting data on. If you haven’t yet explored this great new addition to the XRM family of add-ons that Microsoft has integrated into the core Dynamics CRM product offering, you could start by watching this introductory VoC video on YouTube. Or, you could see a VoC survey live in action by answering our eXtreme MVP Survey.

The survey is mainly targeted at those who are planning to attend the eXtremeCRM 2016 Warsaw event, but there’s nothing stopping you from taking it if you can’t make it there. The survey starts with some questions about the event and closes with a “feedback form” that you can use for submitting your questions to the CRM MVPs in advance, to be answered in the live event (time permitting). It also contains a few questions about how you feel about the upcoming CRM 2016 Spring Release, so I’m planning to also experiment with some of the analytics capabilities that these XRM style surveys offer us. I might even write a blog article about how the VoC experiment worked (unless the ‘Monkey gets its way again), so it’s all conducted in the name of science! (No marketing spam will come from this survey, it’s my personal CRM Online trial org that will disintegrate within a couple of months.)

March 28, 2016
Everything as a Service – Not Just Your CRM

Spring is in the air, at least if the Dynamics CRM 2016 Spring Wave announcement is anything to go by. It’s pretty amazing that only 2 days after we were given the 2016 update for our CRM Online environment there’s already the next batch of updates to pay attention to. Now here I was thinking about spending some time experimenting with the new v8.0 functionality like the Interactive Service Hub or Knowledge Articles and OH, LOOK, A NEW RELEASE WAS ANNOUNCED! (Welcome to my goldfish bowl…)

Another thing that further contributes to the growing inability to concentrate on just a single CRM version at a time is that, well, there aren’t really any proper versions anymore. Sure, there are still official announcements regarding the major (Fall) and minor (Spring) releases, but it’s not like there would be a single point in time when the product bits become available for you to download. To a certain extent they still do, for the type of software that’s shipped as bits on MSDN, but if you’ve been working with Dynamics CRM for a while you might have found yourself thinking “all the fun stuff’s in the cloud”. I certainly have, and I don’t even see anything wrong with this, because pulling off this type of continuously updated application delivery is in practice only really feasible for customers when it’s consumed purely as a service.

By the time the CRM 2016 version became generally available, as in new CRM Online trial orgs were provisioned with v8.0, there was a slight feeling of “meh” when you discovered that most of the coolest new features touted in the Release Preview Guide were actually not yet there. No Mobile Offline, no Voice of the Customer surveys, no Relevance Search, no External Party Access… Many of the features being developed didn’t appear to have made the release train of v8.0 and were instead moved to what seemed like a Plan B, meaning rolling them out in limited Previews rather than the big fanfare of the GA. This would have been quite controversial back in the days of “one release every three years”, but these days it’s not really such a big source of concern at the end of the day, because there is no “gold master” disc to signify an RTM product anymore.

Recently Microsoft released an official Roadmap site for Dynamics CRM, which may be a small step for content management but a giant leap for the release policy around the CRM product. Following on the footsteps of many other MSFT product teams, like Office 365, this further moves Dynamics CRM into the service delivery model as the traditional product versioning gets pushed behind the scenes and the application functionality is brought to the forefront. Yes, the sysadmin will still need to be aware of the specific release that his or her CRM Online instance is running on, but from a business perspective this is becoming less and less relevant. New things will arrive in a continuous stream and the decisions for how to deploy a particular application functionality and what actions are needed for ensuring user adoption is an ongoing task for the persons in charge of making their workforce more productive and building customer facing processes that meet or exceed their ever going demands.

I guess it’s fair to say the world of CRM software reflects the bigger picture of how we the individuals are also operating when it comes to acquiring the things we desire: as a service. Instead of making big upfront investments in gaining the full possession of physical goods or property, our consumption patterns are increasingly leaning towards making a few clicks in an electronic environment and gaining access to the missing piece that will fulfill the needs we’ve identified. Our magic wands with wireless connectivity can be used to conjure up pretty much anything that you can imagine via a “buy now” button somewhere, almost at the exact moment you’ve thought of it. The end product may still be a physical package that gets delivered to your door, but the experience that the customer receives from your company is increasingly being evaluated against not how well the physical gizmo has been crafted but rather how well the various interactions around the customer lifecycle stages of information acquisition, financial transaction and ownership/service consumption are in line with the expectations that the customer had when he or she embarked on this journey. (more…)

March 6, 2016
CRM 2016 Solution Segmentation for The Rest of Us

There’s been a significant enhancement to the Dynamics CRM solution framework in the 2016 release. Here’s what the TechNet article on CRM solution segmentation promises us:

To gain tighter control over what you distribute in solutions and solution patches, use solution segmentation. With Microsoft Dynamics CRM solution segmentation, you can export solutions with selected entity assets, such as entity fields, forms, and views, rather than entire entities with all the assets. To create the segmented solutions and patches, you can use the CRM user interface, without writing code.

Sounds pretty cool, doesn’t it? I’m sure there’s hardly a CRM customizer out there who wouldn’t have encountered the challenges with the lack of granularity when it comes to how Dynamics CRM defines some of the solution components to be inseparable from their parent entity. For example, if you just wanted to add a custom chart or modify a system view you always had to include the whole entity into your solution to distribute it from your development environment to other CRM orgs. With this type of “all or nothing” approach, it’s very easy to end up overwriting customizations in the target organization for components that you had no intention of modifying. The worst part really is that you can never be sure if you’ve done some damage after clicking on “publish solution”.

The TechNet article immediately starts talking about concepts like patching and cloning solutions, so it’s important to note here that these really are mostly relevant only to people who ship managed solutions. If you’re an ISV developing an add-on product or work in a large enterprise developer team with automated release processes, this will surely be what you do all day everyday. If, on the other hand, your work is more focused on customizing and configuring Dynamics CRM environments in projects that don’t contain a large amount of custom code and only target a single customer specific production instance, I bet you’re dealing a lot with unmanaged solutions. I know I am, since the price you pay for deploying unmanaged solutions is most often a lot lower than what you’d face when committing to the path of the managed solutions (and crossing that scary point of no return while at it).

What makes the new solution segmentation concept important to understand for any CRM customizer is that each and every one of you will come across it when adding default entities into your solution in CRM 2016 and beyond. After you select an entity like the opportunity, for instance, you’ll be presented with a brand new screen asking you to “select entity assets to include in the solution”:

This is where you now can pick just the components that you wish to ship with your solution once you export it out from the development environment. You could choose just a specific set of fields, for example, or go to the views tab and click the top left corner of the grid to mark all the assets of type “view” to be included in the solution. Want to see how it can be used in practice? Okay, let’s go ahead and pick from the opportunity entity just the Sales Pipeline chart into our solution, so we can modify it.

Let’s say we want to change the pipeline chart to use weighted revenue instead of estimated revenue values. So, where do we get those fields? You create them! CRM doesn’t ship with a weighted revenue field OoB but instead it contains the tools for building it, thanks to the great calculated fields feature introduced in CRM 2015. We’ll therefore need to create a new currency field and set its formula as “estimated revenue * (probability / 100)”. Even though we’re referencing other fields in the formula, there’s no requirement to include them in our solution, as these system fields will be in place in the target environment regardless of our actions. What we might want to pay attention to is something that the solution segmentation engine doesn’t worry about, which is including the system generated “Weighted Revenue (Base)” field into the solution, as that’s where the base currency version of our calculation will be automatically stored. Better safe than sorry! Furthermore, the new solution segmentation model means we can remove any individual component from the solution if we later deem it unnecessary (as shown below).

Now that we’ve got our Weighted Revenue field, we can update the Sales Pipeline chart to use this new value. To test the segmented solutions functionality in more depth, let’s also pick another system component into our package: the Sales Activity Social Dashboard. We’ll update the elements of this dashboard and see how they transfer into the target organization. Once we’re ready, let’s export the solution as an unmanaged package like we’ve always done. We’ll get the warnings on missing dependencies (again, like we always do), but since the whole exercise is about updating just selected pieces of the CRM puzzle, we don’t need to worry about any of those.

Upon importing the solution .zip file into the target org, there are no differences to how things worked with non-segmented solutions. If we want to peek inside solution details before hitting publish, we’re only presented with the high level components, which means there’s no way to tell at this point if the package contains the entire opportunity entity or just a couple of fields from it. If I was importing an ISV solution received from an external source, I would actually like to know what’s included on a very detailed level, but for now we’ll just need to keep on trusting the publisher.

Let’s see what happens to our updated dashboard now. As a starting point I have a CRM Online demo environment from my previous post regarding “preferred vendor solutions” offered by Microsoft. As you can see, one of these solutions (probably FieldOne) has turned the flat CRM 2016 funnel chart into a retro 2011 style 3D version. Yeah, that’s precisely why solution segmentation makes a big difference, as you no longer need to overwrite things just to add new things.

Once we import our new solution and publish the changes, we’ll see that the funnel chart has now been restored to the flat version that we exported from another CRM 2016 org. More importantly, the stages are now different as we’re mapping the opportunities into the pipeline based on our custom field Weighted Revenue instead of Estimated Revenue. The Top Opportunities chart has also been replaced by another custom chart I included into the solution. Looks like our segmentation is working great so far!

Picking the entity assets one by one is perfectly fine for a scenario where you are deploying a very specific change like the one presented here. However, when you aren’t just performing minor tweaks to an existing CRM environment but rather deploying a brand new CRM system for a customer, you’re likely going to be touching a very large number of components. For instance, this week I’ve been working on a deployment project where the current sprint focuses on sales process management functionality. The number of tweaks I’ve done during two straight days of CRM customization is pretty massive, when you start from an out-of-the-box Dynamics CRM environment and turn it into something that actually works the way the users expect. If I would have had to plan in advance which components I need to be touching, or alternatively adding them into the solution one by one as I realize they need to be customized, I would have probably spent ~20 days instead of 2 while waiting for the CRM Online customization dialog windows to open.

What I’m saying is that while having the full granularity of solution components available to you is awesome, there are common scenarios where you actually may want to keep on working the way you’re used to – adding the whole big entity chunk into your solution. Let’s say I’m building a “base customizations” solution package in a development environment which should contain all the core data model and UI customizations for a new CRM org. I know I’ll be messing with the opportunity entity big time, so I want to ensure every change to the OoB configuration is covered. Instead of picking the individual assets, I can tick the box in the top right corner to “add all assets” into the solution at once.

Nice, now I’ve got the best of both worlds! My base customizations package looks like things were before CRM 2016 so I’m comfortable with building the customer specific solution with it. So, with that I’ll conclude my feature overview of a CRM 2016 highlight…

“Wait, hold on just a moment there! Are you telling me there’s not a single “gotcha” discussed in this blog post? This is Surviving CRM! You never do a happy path walkthrough of CRM features without finding some issues in them.” Okay, you got me. I wasn’t really going to stop there. Let’s keep exploring this segmentation path a little deeper, shall we? (more…)

February 4, 2016
Gentlemen Prefer Solutions: The Expanding Dynamics CRM Footprint
If you haven’t worked with CRM Online using Office 365 Global Admin rights recently, you might have missed the new delivery mechanism that Microsoft has created for additional CRM functionality not included in a new Online org by default: preferred solutions. Unlike the traditional solution import mechanism under the CRM application’s Settings area, these preferred solutions are both installed as well as updated (upgraded) via a miniature “CRM app store” controlled by and reserved for Microsoft exclusively. To access these preferred solutions you need to go to the O365 Admin Portal, open the CRM Online Administration Center, choose an instance and click the edit icon next to “Solutions”. You’ll be presented with a list like this one:

OK, maybe not exactly like this one, unless you work in the United States. You see, these preferred solutions are also targeted to preferred customers, meaning in practice CRM Online customers who use a tenant located in North America. Let me point this preferred region out to you from the Office 365 and CRM Online datacenter map:

The current availability of the preferred solutions is as follows:
- Insights for Microsoft Dynamics CRM Online: powered by InsideView, this service is free for CRM Online US customers only. Presumably due to the fact that their database wouldn’t have very good coverage of companies in other parts of the world. You could of course buy the service from InsideView directly if you really must have it.
- FantasySalesTeam: acquired by MS in August 2015, this gamification solution is built on the concept of fantasy sports that’s apparently a huge industry in the US but less familiar in most other regions. Sales people all around the world surely are a competitive species but no one turns the competition into entertainment quite like the Americans do. Expanded availability of the preview is coming any day now.
- Voice of the Customer: built in the UK and acquired by MS in March, the solution formerly known as Mojo Surveys has been launched in preview mode for US customers only. Ouch. Well, don’t worry, this feedback management solution will surely come to other geos quite quickly (or MS will need to deal with some customer feedback of their own…)
- Office 365 Groups: not acquired from anywhere but rather an original Redmond design, this solution became available already back in CRM 2015 Update 1 (v7.1) time frame as a preview globally (yay!)and is now available in full production support mode to all CRM Online customers.
- FieldOne Sky: only the sky’s the limit for this solution that’s available to CRM Online users with Professional licenses, no matter where your field service personnel may roam. Acquired in July 2015, FieldOne is running mostly on Microsoft’s XRM platform, but the mobile client still relies on Resco and allows only access to a subset of CRM default entities, so for broader mobile use you’ll still need to buy a separate Resco license.
Although not a CRM solution in technical terms, it’s also worth mentioning that the CRM App for Outlook which was released as US only preview last summer is now available to all CRM Online users who are on CRM 2016 version. I haven’t seen any upgrade time slots being scheduled for existing CRM Online customers yet, so currently mostly newly provisioned orgs can access the Settings – CRM App for Outlook menu to enable users for this lightweight successor to the “heavyweight” Outlook client of the past. (more…)
January 16, 2016
CRM Hindsight Is 20/20 – My Blogging Retrospective
It’s the end of another year, which means the blogosphere is filling up with “looking back” type of articles that examine the various topics discussed during the year. Analyzing past actions is activity that we all should probably spend time on a bit more frequently, although one day out of 365 is a good start. Following this pattern, I also ended up having a look back at some of my earlier writings during the Xmas break.

So, how was 2015 for Dynamics CRM? Beats me, because that’s not where I was looking at! Via a seemingly random navigation path that started with me exploring the brand new PowerApps announced by Microsoft a few weeks ago, I actually ended up reading some of my Surviving CRM writings from the year 2010. I’ll perhaps describe the events behind this abrupt jump back in time in a post covering the future of mobile business apps and CRM, but for now that’s not on the agenda. No, instead I found plenty of interesting material covering quite a wide spectrum of CRM related topics that in many ways are as relevant today as they were five years ago.

My journey with Microsoft Dynamics CRM started almost exactly 10 years ago, when the MS CRM 3.0 version with Finnish language support was introduced and my then forward thinking organization decided to adopt this system instead of a proven, industry specific solution tailored for the Nordic markets. I did not start blogging about my experiences right from day one, since back in 2005 that wasn’t how any normal person would behave (today it would be something I’d encourage everyone to consider). As my focus gradually moved away from generic marketing and IT topics into a more tightly defined domain of business applications and the MS ecosystem in particular, more and more material started accumulating on my blog, on Twitter, on SlideShare and so on. By 2010 it looks like I had already sunk pretty deep into these waters, which makes it interesting (at least for myself!) to see how I envisioned the world around Dynamics CRM to evolve.

I picked out a few topics from my 2010 writings and reflected back on what I thought was going to be their impact vs. what we now know five years later. In (mostly) the order of the original blog posts, the themes ended up being the following:
- Cloud
- Mobile
- Portals
- MS Office
- Social
- Business app development/XRM
- Outlook
- SharePoint
- ISV ecosystem
- Solution management
- Charts & dashboards
- MSFT organization
Here’s a presentation that contains excerpts from the original blog posts and some notes 5 years later on the topic:

Dynamics CRM in 2010 – 5 year retrospective from Jukka Niiranen

Luckily I’m not in the habit of making bold, precise predictions like “by year N+2 the market size of technology X will have grown by 300%”, since those are better left for the industry analysts who are paid for such statements. I’m of course completely biased in evaluating how accurately my own writings matched with the future reality, but it’s easy to find a number of observations from there we one could arrogantly say “I told you this was going to happen” and “some things never change, now do they”. What’s not so apparent from looking at past articles are the things that actually did change at a blinding speed.

Just think about it: only five years ago the big new CRM 2011 release was being developed for an “Internet Explorer only” world and the thought of MS favoring competing OS’s in their own apps over Windows would have been simply ludicrous. Getting new CRM versions released every 6 months instead of a 3 year upgrade cycle sounded like something the customers could never cope with, but here we are with CRM Online. Mastering the whole Dynamics CRM product in 2010 was a perfectly realistic goal for consultants, whereas in 2015 you’re not going to find a person who’s fluent in CRM, MDM, MSE, Parature, FieldOne, Adxstudio and the rest of the current MS product stack in this area. All these changes and more mean that a CRM project starting today may not have much in common at all with the one you were working on in 2010.

The future isn’t ever exactly what you would think, but that doesn’t mean you wouldn’t benefit from the effort of trying to project the possible paths forward in your mind. I personally find the best way to build up clarity into your vision on where things are going is spending some time on connecting the dots between what information you’ve just recently acquired and what analysis you’ve performed earlier. It’s all too easy to just launch a news app or log into a social feed and start taking in new announcements of what someone else thinks is noteworthy right now, but those bits & pieces are fairly unlikely to carry significance to you in the long term – unless you’re able to put them into context with the knowledge structures built from prior pieces. That’s why it doesn’t hurt to recap the history of how the technologies you’re working with have evolved over time, when thinking about what might be coming next on the road ahead.
December 28, 2015