Oct. 14, 2009 — How exciting: an upcoming Service Update for Dynamics CRM Online! Here’s my notification email from the support team at Microsoft, with hints about new features like mobile device support, a new “home page dashboard” with embedded charts, an improved Outlook client experience and an updated data import wizard. And best of all, I don’t need to install anything!

Oct. 7, 2009 — My company’s 12-month migration from a traditional on-premise to an all-cloud IT platform was about as much fun as a root canal, but the one bright spot was the CRM piece: to Dynamics CRM Online, the cloud version of the Microsoft CRM. The platform is rock-solid, it’s essentially the same as on-premise (except Microsoft’s servers never go down unexpectedly!), and the migration was easy. This article summarizes the experience of a “VSAT” CRM Online customer, and includes a slide presentation comparing the online and on-premise versions of Dynamics CRM I gave at a user group meeting a while back. Enjoy!

Oct 5, 2009 — It took twelve months, but I’ve nearly reached Cloud Nirvana.
Here’s the executive summary of my firm’s migration saga, including the highs (CRM Online), the lows (BPOS e-mail), and the sad farewells (MOSS 2007 web site).

If you’ve never seen the sun rise in downtown Chicago on or near the vernal equinox (autumnal will do just as well), it’s worth scheduling a trip for. I’m from Seattle originally, so I was always impressed with how Chicago’s street grid is laid out: unlike a city with actual geography getting in the way, [...]

If ever there were a good candidate for cloud computing the Microsoft way, it’s me. I’ve managed a Microsoft partner firm for …well, a long time, and we pretty much drink the Redmond kool-aid: Exchange for email, SharePoint for our web site and collaboration, Office for all the docs that go into SharePoint, Dynamics CRM [...]

If you are reading this and had planned on attending the Dynamics CRM User Group Meeting on 2/26…I apologize. We had an unforutunate perfoect storm of server and connectivity problems, and I felt terrible about having to cancel at the last minute. But Live Meeting sessions without the Live Meeting part are inherently boring.
Anyway, I [...]