Thanks to John Westworth for the pointer to the CRM 3.0 Business Scorecard Analyzer templates.

This will really help kick start some work I am looking to demo, along the lines of some very good data mining demos I saw at the Partner Conference.

The download is here.

Seen a couple of good sesions on Mobile solutions.

One was from TBS mobility on a GPS and mobile field service type applications. It seems that they have also done work on Dynamics products in a mobile enviroment.

Then there was a demo of using Map Point and Virtual Earth.

After that we have had a demo of Office live communications server. Very nice, paricularly as you can have multiple members of a converstaion.

There was a demo of Smarter Child we bot and the idea is that there could be an inteligent bot within the Line of Business enviroment.

Unfortunatly it is a very cool set of tools with lots of sexy looks but other than the Communication Server functionality I am not seeing a killer application other than for specific narrow verticals. Added value seems to  be the answer but I am not yet convinced that the budget will yet be released for anything beyond Communication Server.

Saw the spoof film clip this morning for the partner conference.

It was a spoof of the X-Men films with the Microsoft execs as the X-Men saving a poor systems admin from the evil Big Blue, The Googler adn Red Hat.

All the usual high production values but seeing Alison Watson and other execs in a leather cat suits was surprising to say the least!

The big message that I got this morning was that Microsoft wants to go after Linux and Google. No surprise there but it was new to me to hear it stated so explicitly.

Steve makes the comment here about the use of new cool phrases by MS presenters.

execs bashing out the words “mashup” with increasing frequency. My guess though is that over 70% of the audience doesn’t know what mashup is so I’ll be back soon to explain more.

I have to agree with him. I had to explain to four people yesterday what a wikki was and two people what RSS was.The use of these terms at a conference where the content is aimed at mid to senior management is clouding the message a bit. Mind you it has had the effect of educating so maybe not all bad.

Made contact yesterday with a UK Company called XLCubed that is developing a set of bi-directional hooks into Dynamics Ax (Axapta).

They didn’t have it to demo here but will defiantly hook up with them when I get back.

More key notes – Just when I hoped it was safe to escape;)

Office Sharepoint Server

• Team calendars can be included in Outlook
• Tasks are upgraded to full member of the controls with gant chats etc
• Wikkis are in for collaborative work.
• Blogs are in.

BI Stuff

Connecting to data from Sharepoint.

Users can publish data connections to sharepoint.

From then it is one click to get a spreadsheet connected to the data.

There was a big push on the Hosted Solutions platform that MS are pushing into under the Live banner. Windows Live and Office Live

Windows Live will have 20 new offerings by the end of the year.

CRM Will be offered as a hosted product using web and Outlook clients.

The emphasis is that this change is coming – not now but in the next 5 to 10 years so partners have to get used to the change. The message was change and adapt to the change or die.

It was emphasized that there will still be lots of scope within a hosted solution for partners to customise and adapt the product to meet customers requirements and there will be a number of different selling options. These will range from referal rewards to being able to do the hosting.

There is also a NEW CAL Licence coming – no detail at this session though.

These are my notes from Steve Balmer’s keynote.

• People Ready is not a marketing campaign it is the driving mission statement.
• Vista is a block buster release- never again will MS do such a release- count on it.
• Massive launch for Vista and Office 07 – Consumer based campaigns.
  •  If consumer launch is big then then this will drive business take up
  •  Office "Better results faster" – The biggest Office release ever.

• Vista Desktop Search and Office 2007 Both use the same index

• Sharepoint – The next big thing ™
  • Search – There is a big drive to getting a unified search across desktop, Sharepoint, Back Office Solutions and the Internet
  • Sharepoint can now handle 50 million docs in its index
• Business data catalogue – search back office systems
  • Connectors for MS  CRM, SAP and  Seibel when it is RTM
  • Custom actions – Bi-Directional interactions
• People ready – Sharepoint can create  links of people across the organization. think of it as a "MySpace" for business. People who are friends  of friends. This is auto built from  contacts, AD, email etc
  • It shows the Degrees of separation
• Windows Live Search
  • Beta July
  • Rich results live preview
  • Join results from Desktop, Live.com and Sharepoint
• Unified Communications
  • Heard another bastardized word "Coopatition"!!!
  • Round Table peripheral A video conference peripheral
  •  Consistent interface – IM VoIP Email
  • Brings together all forms of comms in one UI
  • Outlook web Exchange now has rich web access with access to voice messaging
  • Can add meta data about can have voice mail forwarding to a phone as well as play in media player
  • Big on presence information.
  • One click contact  IM Messages have context put in as well as a form of meta data
  • multi party video and audio 
    • Video auto switches to speaker – Active Something or other
  • Call management. Solution
• Security – Forefront
  • Move beyond just security – Firewall anti virus anti spyware
  • Server protection

Well I made it.

We had a launch event for Axapta 4.0 last night where Steve Balmer did his bit.

I did not arrive in time for the full event but the bit I did see seemed good.

The UI seems to be nice – very Outlook in style. Users can create their own favorites and it is possible to get at items and records from a unified search bar.

How much impact this will have overall remains to be seem.

Wat was really interesting was the amount of work that has gone into BI and integration.

These are now sharepoint web parts and Axapta processes can be built into the workflow engine.

There are now  SSAS 2005 cubes available and it seems that there is a SSRS Report Model available. This means that the ability to do ad-hoc reporting and Scorecarding will be much much easier.

I was not totally convinced from the short demo that it will totally work, especially as Axapta – Sorry Dynamics AX – is so customizable. There seemed to be a bit too much smoke and mirrors but that could just have been the demo environment. I will try to get to the stand and find out.