Anthony Milner

We’ve been using Microsoft Dynamics CRM for about 18 months now but we’ve only really touched the surface with respect to functionality. It’s mainly been in the domain of the telemarketing and sales team but the rest of us have been using it to track email, a useful but annoying feature. Our vision has been to store all customer information from lead to sale to project and timesheet, billing and support under one umbrella system – one view. We’d been exposed to the customisation features whilst implementing it and a few months back and we started to experiment and proof of concept project management, timesheets, and help desk functionality. We found MS CRM to be a highly configurable and flexible environment to build no code functionality. Projects and timesheets don’t exist out of the box but we implemented this without much fuss and again absolutely no code. This is all made possible via the entity customisation tool, an easy to use database and form editor coupled with a workflow manager. So far this has allowed us to collapse three disparate systems into one and modify rapidly as the need arises. “I love it when a plan comes together“. Our next challenge will be exposing this functionality in MOSS :-).

If you’re looking for WSS and MOSS 07 books I was referred today by our Microsoft partner manager to a comprehensive Sharepoint document library which lists 53 titles.

I came away from day one of the APAC SharePoint Conference with two thoughts swirling around my head…

• First thought – This is an outstanding platform and I want it in our armoury as we head out to solve the information management challenges of the enterprise (and the SME?).
• The second thought – Licensing? Why is it that every time I ask a Microsoft specialist the dreaded licensing question I receive in quick succession a nod and then a chuckle, then an answer which leaves me feeling like a hot potato?

Is licensing the “bad boy” at Microsoft? SharePoint is an extremely compelling offering but there needs to be simplicity in licensing to make it work. Maybe it needs a top down shakeup akin to the big security push of 2001? There are so many web 2.0 collaboration tools out there, they may not have the extensibility and scalability of SharePoint but what they do have is functional and licensing clarity, and that can make a huge difference.

If anyone can point me to a clear and concise explanation of the Sharepoint 2007 licensing model for external websites, extranets and intranets, then I’d love to hear from you.

A few of us are attending a SharePoint conference at the Hilton Hotel over the next two days. A good cross section of our company is attending which should allow us to cover most sessions across multiple streams as we continue our build up of MOSS 2007 skills. We’ve already had a few Microsoft Information Worker demonstrations but they’ve only touched the surface. It will be great to dig a bit deeper and see some hands on demonstrations.

I was at the SEM / SEO conference at CeBIT today. There were a range of both business and technical sessions and an audience who seemed really eager to find some gold SEO nuggets. Question time was fairly active and one keen bean had to have the microphone practically wrestled away from him after asking one question too many. Well done to Fred Schebesta who handled the barrage gracefully. One of the speakers, Anne Costello, talked about business blogging and commented on the concept of trust in marketing…

“Today people build trust in a fundamentally different way. They increasingly distrust institutions and trust people like themselves”

This resonated with me. People are increasingly using the web to educate themselves and others regarding purchasing decisions. Wether its in the form of email, blogs, forums or wikis this sophisticated consumer savvy must be changing the marketing/purchasing landscape. The web consumer knows what works and what doesn’t because they’ve found a reputable and independent voice that has written a review; or it may be the consumer that posts a review after making a bad purchasing decision (taken a hit for the boys as a good friend calls it). This “consumer networking” we are seeing is probably only in its infancy but as this sophistication penetrates the masses surely traditional marketing is set for even more shakeup.

Was marketing 1.0 all about positioning the company and product in a way that made it look and feel great, even if it wasn’t? Marketing today should be about having an honest relationship with the customer and delivering on the promise.  Consumer networking will increasingly push businesses (in some cases kicking and screaming) into dealing with the consumer in a transparent, ethical and “organic” way and that’s a major plus if you’re a consumer.

Is this what the Google guys meant when they said  “don’t be evil”. Technology compelling businesses to educate themselves, improve their offerings and be honest with consumer because the world is reading and posting.

What happens when you put lots of tech heads in comfortable room surrounded by the latest technology, and good supply of coffee and food? I’m sitting in the BloggerZone this morning the brainchild of Gilad Grinbaum and Microsoft MVP Hugo Ortega, a dedicated area in hall 4 of CeBIT Australia for bloggers to write about anything and everything. It a great idea and should generate plenty of reviews, opinions and comment in what has become Australia’s premier technology event.

Google has always impressed people with the quality of the search results it produces. It gives you what you want quickly with little fuss or confusion; a recipe for success in any business model. One assumes that this attitude permeates everything that Google does and as far as I can tell from the non-core offerings such as mail, analytics, photo management and the earth, it seems this assumption would be correct. I can’t help but wonder if there are teams at Google that just slack off and take long lunches and smoko breaks? I doubt it. The pace and quality of new releases tend to indicate a workplace of creative, intelligent and most importantly, hard working individuals.

I think this is illustrated well by a service being offered at this year’s CeBIT expo at Darling Harbour in Sydney. Google is offering a free one-on-one Adwords sign up session with a $50 credit or an Adwords optimisation for existing Adword customers. Now this might sound like a standard expo ploy to generate traffic and bring leads but in this case, and to use Google’s own jargon, it’s an instant conversion. But what really impresses me here is the personal attention that Google is giving businesses for what is a massively high volume activity. To even consider, let alone tackle the multitudes of businesses that either use this service or would like to use this service in this way is impressive and they should be commended. I booked the service because our Adwords campaign can do with some tweaking but what really interests me is to observe how Google manage the potential traffic given that CeBIT are expecting more than 300,000 people through the doors over three days. Hopefully it will be much the same as they process search queries – fast!