Jukka Niiranen

Tag: Convergence

  • Greetings from Microsoft Convergence 2010 in Atlanta – Part 1

    This year’s main event for Microsoft Dynamics product line is now over and done with. It was the second time I attended Microsoft Convergence, and the first one on US soil. Here are some of my miscellaneous notes and thoughts on the event.

    First of all, getting to Convergence 2010 in Atlanta this year was not easy, as I’m sure many fellow Europeans noticed. No, the problem was not in acquiring tickets or hotel accomodation, it was in the physical act of getting to Atlanta through the volcanic ash cloud that paralyzed the airspace in most of Europe the week before Convergence was set to start. I was in Kuala Lumpur at the time of the eruption and had to re-route myself directly from Malaysia to United States, without visiting my home base in Helsinki. The one week trip in South-East Asia turned out to be a three week trip around the world, which was a bit of a rough ride, but I’m glad to have made it to all the meetings I had planned, attended Convergence for the whole duration of the event and returning safely back home (with a huge pile of laundry in my luggage).

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  • Enterprise Scalability and Performance with Microsoft Dynamics CRM 4.0

    As promised in my earlier post, here are some notes I wrote down during Convergence 2008 EMEA. In my opinion, the best session was “Enterprise Scalability and Performance with Microsoft Dynamics CRM 4.0” held by Amir Jafri. Not so much because of the original agenda and slides, but mostly thanks to all the questions and comments from the audience. Here goes:

    Database

    • SQL Server is where performance tuning gives the most “bang for the buck”
    • Creating custom indexes is supported and encouraged
    • Custom search attributes for entity Quick Find view do not automatically get indexes
    • Database index should be moved to a different disk system
    • Old customization versions are stored in the database
      • Performing many customization changes will slow the system down over time
      • Data is not and cannot be utilized in the UI, so what’s the purpose?
      • There are workarounds for cleaning the old data
    • Performance comparison of out-of-the-box setups between v3.0 and v4.0 on identical hardware show 50% reduction in CPU utilization and disk queue length
    • SQL Server 2008 will provide performance improvements for CRM out of the box

    IIS

    • Disabling authentication from static content has been done in v4.0, heavily recommended for also v3.0
    • 401 error page size has been reduced, should be done manually for v3.0
    • v4.0 uses content compression to reduce the amount of data transferred
      • Compression can create an overhead on the client when rendering content
    • Image Strips(?) are used in v4.0 to reduce round trips
    • CRM default home page (my activities) round trips have been reduced by 50% between v3.0 and v4.0

    Workflow

    • Common client for Windows Workflow Foundation is being developed
      • May ship with CRM v.Next
    • Workflows are still a heavy operation even in v4.0
    • Workflow performance measurement is almost impossible, due to the unlimited number of variations how workflows can be built
    • Workflow queue database table is not automatically purged of old data or indexed, should be done manually
      • Table size can grow to become so big that maintenance cannot be run, hotfix is available

    Performance general notes

    • Tests done using Cisco WAAS application accelerator in WAN environment have proved to improve performance by up to 50%
    • Official toolkits for measuring the performance of an existing CRM implementation do not exist
      • Performance measurement toolkit can be used only with test data, prior to live environment deployment
    • New MOM (a.k.a. Systems Center) pack for CRM v4.0 will include CRM specific performance analysis tools
    • Outlook client improvements in v4.0:
      • Reduced memory footprint, but still quite resource intensive, also due to new requirements from Vista and Office 2007
      • CRM client start-up should no longer slow down the email data transfer upon Outlook start-up, client loads in the background

  • Convergence 2008 EMEA

    This was the first time I attended Microsoft’s Convergence, the conference for their Dynamics product family. The event turned out to be quite a positive experience. Sure, there was more than enough marketing hype for MS products, but it certainly wasn’t the only item on the agenda. Plenty of practical examples and real life success stories were included, allowing you to catch interesting details about the future direction of the CRM product and even honest comments about it’s current shortcomings.

    Convergence 2008 EMEA

    I was pleased to see a strong focus on application usability and user experience improvements in many of the presentations. Seems like Microsoft is serious about leveraging its decades worth of experience from producing software for the consumer market and using that understanding as a weapon against its competitors on the business applications playing field.

    Once I’ve managed to grab the presentations and review them, I though I’d share some of my Convergence 2008 session notes here in this blog. Most of the truly valuable information is usually not in the PowerPoint slides but rather in what is said during the presentation. It would be interesting to also read what the other session attendees wrote down, just a shame that the Dynamics Community site is so poor that I’ll probably need to hunt down this information in various CRM blogs around the net.

    Copenhagen was a nice city to visit, check out my Picasa Web Albums for some of the pictures I managed to take during the conference and the afterhours downtown. Would be fun to go back there on a warmer time of the year, so you could truly enjoy all the different flavors of Tuborg beer. Since next year’s Convergence will not be in Denmark anymore, I guess I’d need to pay for the trip myself then.