Heading for the Cloud

It looks 2012 is becoming the year of the 'Cloud'. I remember that years back people did talk about 24/7 online, easy data access, not bounded to certain device. It seems that many steps are currently taken into this direction.

We see the offering of CRM Online, Office 365, Scribe Online (RS & SYS) and also the competition is not sitting still and offers services like Oracle On Demand and Salesforce. I personally think we are on the right track, but still at the beginning. A lot of steps still have to be taken in the area of connected clouds together, integration and hybrid solutions (cloud & on-premise) .

There is also a down site to all this cloud business, people still worry about the safety of cloud, is my data still secure, is my privacy still guaranteed are just some frequently asked questions.

Also new laws to control the internet e.g. ACTA  & SOPA might have negative effect on the development of cloud business. Nevertheless, this development would also raise awareness at companies to see that data have to be kept save and hopefully they start taking the topic more serious and come up with solution to keep our data safe.

Personally, I think still the strange in the internet is the ability to provide & share knowledge, which is a great asset and should not be bounded.

So, I am very eager to discover the cloud and experience it all.

Happy clouding :)

started with bug hunting

Yes, the first post of the year, so you might say a bit late :)  This year started not too bad and if you might have heard or seen I am currently hunting bugs.

The bugs come in all different sizes and different forms and where better to hunt bugs than at Microsoft EMEA support. As we speak I am now almost 6 weeks working as CRM Support Engineer. It is also refreshing to see the other side for a change and more or less facing the same issues as CRM consultant only now from Microsoft perspective.

So, the last few weeks I did see a variety of bugs from simple installation issues, to complex ADFS issue and actually also some real bugs.

Already working on some post about common issue and ways to solve them.

Just as appetizer the CRM EMEA support website, which is good source for gettin up-to-date and check in case you might run into an issue yourself.

Happy bug hunting :)

Merry Christmas !

Only few days, hours left and it is X-mas, the time for eating, celebrating and have a good time.

So, I would like to wish all the readers of my blog a

Of course, more posts are coming your way :)

Keep reading!

New CRM 2011 book

Of course several books have been published about CRM 2011 already, but this book is kinda special. I was one of the technical reviewers of the book (yes, shameless echo boost).

As reviewer you just get the chapters review them and send them back. The book Microsoft Dynamics CRM 2011 New Features book dropped on my doormat few days ago. It was kinda cool to see that the authors were Jim Wang & Darren Liu.

Of course I can tell you that you should buy and read it, but decide for yourself. Its good book and also for more experienced CRM users nice to have and it might give you some new insights. More info about the book here . 


Happy reviewing reading :)

The Magic Ribbon: greyed-out + active buttons

Releasing your solution to another environment brings a lot of challenges, especially when this is the production environment. It is an extra challenge to deploy to architecture where RDS (Remote Desktop Services), the next version of Terminal Server 2003.

During testing we runned into strange behaviour of the ribbon. It suddenly got greyed-out, but even stranger, the buttons still worked.

Magic Ribbon: grey-out but clickable buttons

Looking closely we saw an JavaScript error (yes, bottom left of your IE). The error point out to SEC7115, which should have something to do with CSS not loaded correctly (to show errors hit F12). You may have similar errors.

Error message in debug window

Security settings in IE 

After some basic debugging and searches we also got some messages stating that "This page is accessing information that is not under control...".

Other side effect was that reaching the CRM application on server name worked fine, using the ip-address did show the mystery ribbon.

After some research this should do the trick and get it working again:
1) Add your CRM url to Local internet  (Internet Options > Security)
2)  Edit the settings in this zone -> Custom Level 
3) Change in Miscellaneous section: Access data sources cross domain to Enable




Hope this post save you some frustrations and looking for solutions. The error might sent you to different path..

Happy debugging :)

iSad

Just started to wake up and read the breaking news that Steve Jobs has passed away. I must say in the beginning I disliked the iMac ( tv like "PC"), in the time that I was building website. I spent lot of hours to have the same site on all OS's and browser versions.

This changed since the introduction of the iPad, which is used even more then my pc by my family, almost more then the television :) The step to iPhone was heavenly after all crappy other Smartphone like Blackberry, how you can type with that tiny keyboard, Nokia and also Samsung.

R.I.P. - Steve Jobs, 1955 - 2011

Prototyping CRM with mSketch

Yes, August was quiet month or at least it seems so on my blog. Nevertheless, very busy month with a lot going on.

Currently working on an new implementation of CRM 2011. In every project you have to demonstrate/show the screen based on the requirements you have gathered.

 Its commonly down in mock-up, images (either vmware, hyper-v or virtualbox) or via demo system like crm online. In all cases you have the challenges that you cannot show full functionality (besides out-of-box stuff). 

A good alternative is the use of mSketch a solution (e.g. stencils) for Microsoft Expression Blend. I must admit I seen the name popup in my MSDN account, but didn't use it before.

The most interesting about this mSketch is that you can make a mock-up with actually functionality behind it e.g. pull downs are opening when clicking on it. The solution, yes everything is called solutions today same as in Visual Studio, exist of toolbox with all fields you can use for designing your form as you can see in the image to the left.

So you might think I could also use my own tools or my own development enviroment. There is more about this way of working then you might expect. I did some basic research I came across the book "Dynamic Prototyping with Sketchflow in Expression Blend".

There have been a lot of studies about how our brain is processing images. In short our visual cortex initially reacts and is attracted by straight lines and angles of light,which means that if we use black and white sketches we have a advantage over something with lots of colors, images etc. It would also mean that the audience quicker should understand what you mean and your feedback should also be more constructive.

Of course, you have to get used to the Microsoft Expression tool first, but that shouldn't be that hard. You don't have build your own solution for CRM, it is already there too, so you can start almost immediately.

The mSketch stencils are made by Magnetism, also more information about the out of the box functionality can be found there.

 So start make your prototyping easier and more convincing, who wouldn't like that :-)