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Microsoft Collaboration and Virtualization: A Real World Deminar

Wed, 30 May 2012 00:00:00 +0000

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What: Live Event
When: Wednesday, May 30, 2012 10:00 AM - 1:00 PM EST
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Application Data Integration – Part Three, Timing and the Rules

Tue, 03 Apr 2012 18:00:00 +0000

This is my third blog in a series concerning data integration. In my first two blog entries we overviewed some of the data integration hurdles as well as some of the common methods used to discover the net-change data that will need to be translated. Here in my third blog I’ll discuss some of the benefits of not integrating in real-time, but creating a batch job to perform the integration. We’ll also look at the Business Rules that may need to be applied within the integration process.

They say ‘timing is everything’. I don’t necessarily agree that it’s everything, but it is an important ingredient in the design of your integration. It’s always my first reaction to go ‘real-time’ with an integration project. Scoping and requirements gathering will then bring me to a place where a part of the integration may not work designed to run as real-time. Every business is built on processes that serve them well, or at least served them well back in the day. There are times when transaction volume will preclude using real-time methods for translation. Running the process, because of the volume, may have such an impact on the system, that user can not tolerate the sluggishness of the system during business hours. Perhaps there is a business process that does not make data available until after business hours. There can be any number of business process scenarios that would dictate utilizing a batch integration process rather than a real-time integration process.

Business processes are not the only consideration when designing your integration. The environment, and specifically the hardware that the integrated systems reside on, can play a key role in determining the integration process to use. For example, if your integration design requires polling a record set for the net-change data, that polling can effect performance. But to a greater extent, the record set that is returned will typically populate any RAM that is available, and if there is not enough RAM to hold the entire return record set, then it will occupy static drive space. Depending on how large the net-change record set is, that’s been returned, stealing all available RAM can seriously impact performance of the system. Conversely, you may have designed a multi-threaded integration process, such as utilizing a message queue as a pickup point for the extracted net- change data. Where running a multi-threaded process, you are able to translation a larger volume of data in a shorter period of time, but, that process will be very CPU intensive.

So, when developing your integration design, keep in mind that batch processing is memory intensive and multi-threaded processes are CPU intensive. Depending on the environment you’re working in, you may have the inclination to build one type of integration process, but the impact of that process would be too costly in terms of system performance and end-user satisfaction.

Ok, so you have one part of your integration setup, great. You’re integrating customers from your CRM system to your ERP system, fantastic. You turn on the integration, and not too long afterward, folks from the finance group are complaining that there are customers in ERP that don’t belong in the system. “What’d?, you say. I thought you wanted customers integrated in both system?”. The response from finance is that some of these aren’t customers, they are only prospects. Ah, so not all customers are the same in the CRM system.

This is a very typical scenario. The CRM system breaks down ‘customers’ into different customer types. Only ‘customers’ that have actually bought something are to be integrated into the ERP system. So, you need to be able to filter records in order to meet the requirements of this business rule . That filtering can take place in two different places, a) at the time of discovery of the net-change data or, b) during the translation process of the net-change data. If you have used a query to discover the net-change data, you may only need to add something to the WHERE clause of the query, to ensure that only records that meet the business rule criteria are discovered. If the application has it’s own net-change method, but cannot be modified to filter the records, you will need to build the filtering into the translation process rather than in the discovery process. There can, however, be some advantages to filtering at the integration process level. Let’s say that you only want purchasing customers being integrated into you ERP system, but you would like to see an aggregated view of all new customers that have been added to the either system. When you filter out the customers at the translation point rather than the discovery point, you have the records discovered in the net-change process, so, the entire record set can be used to create customer, by type, reporting.

Another. more complex example would be; sales orders being placed in the ERP system and then translated to one of several warehouse systems for processing. In this case, you not only have to filter the record set, but you also have to determine what translation processes will be used to ensure the sales order record is consumed by the correct warehouse system. As you can see, business rules will have a huge impact on how you might design your integration process. The entire solution may incorporate many different net-change discovery methods as well as many different data translation methods. Don’t get caught building a useless solution, wasting time and money. Dig deep into the requirements in order to develop the best integration processes for the given scenario your are working under.

As promised, this series is intended to be somewhat high level, but, I hope through some of the topics covered you have become a little more familiar with Application Data Integration. It can be tricky stuff to get your hear around; there are a lot of issues to consider. Not digging deep enough for the requirements can be very costly, not only monetarily, but also with adoption by your end-users if your integration is tied to a new business system implementation. Knowledge is power, so I hope I’ve charged your batteries a little.

Application Data Integration – Part Two, Net-Change

Wed, 28 Mar 2012 22:30:00 +0000

In my previous blog focusing on the hurdles of real-time, two-way data integration, I highlighted the hurdle of how to discover the data you need translated. In most cases, discovering the net-change data is all you want to translate on a real-time basis. Remember, a two-way integration means net-change data going in two directions or more (depending on the number of systems you’re integrating) at a rate determined by how many end-users there are on each of the systems being integrated. Business systems with a significant amount of end-users can create substantial volumes of net-change data.

In order to manage the volume of data flowing between systems, you must choose a net-change model to discover just the data that needs to translate. There are traditionally four basic models to choose from, one of which will discover the net-change data. They are not all equal though, so choosing will depend somewhat on the system(s) you’re working with and somewhat depend on the data model of the system(s) with which you’re working.

The four methods are as follows, in best practice order:

Application Method – this method is the most reliable and system efficient. It relies on the system, or application, to find the net-change data and produce it in a format that is easily translated and consumed by other systems. Some of the advantages of the Application Method are;
a) It typically can support deletes. In other words, records deleted by end-users can be traced to the other integrated systems, and if the business rules permit, will delete those records as well.
b) It is more likely to produce the net-change data in the order in which it was changed. This could become important if the net-change data is being produced in logical but separate extracts. One example would be if the system that is producing the net-change data, splits a sales order into a header file and a detail file. The consuming system will likely have referential integrity rules that would not allow details to be consumed before the header.
c) It has, typically, very little impact on the producing system, providing an un-noticeable effect to the end-users.
d) Reliability is a key factor. If the application is running, then net-change is being discovered and made consumable for other systems.
Tracker-Table Method – Also known as the shadow table method, the tracker-table method is somewhat invasive, but is very useful in cases where the data model does not always supply a last modified date/time stamp on each record. The tracker-table method does just what it says, it tracks the records that have had a change made to them. It is invasive because it requires creating objects in the database of the system. The idea being, create a table with at least three columns (ObjectName, RecordId,ChangeType). This is the tracking table. Then, place triggers on the tables which you are interested in seeing the net-change. The triggers are designed to modify the tracker-table in the following ways;
a) If there is an insert on the table (a new record created), the trigger will add a record to the tracker-table with three values; 1 - the table name where the changes came from, 2 – the recordId that was created when the record was committed, 3 – an identifier of the type of action that was performed (i.e. I = insert, U = update, D = deleted).
b) If there is an update made on the table, the trigger will search the tracker-table to find the ObjectName/RecordId that corresponds to the record that was updated. When the match is made, the trigger then adds a ‘U’ to the ChangeType column indicating that the record corresponding to the recordid in the tracker-table, has been updated..

Now that the net-change has been identified in the tracker-table, a mechanism needs to be developed (or a third-party tool employed i.e. Scribe or Informatica), to poll the tracker table for records with an ‘I’, ‘U’ or ‘D’, then join the recordid to the base table and retrieve the record that was changed. Once retrieved, set the ‘ChangeType’ in the tracker table back to NULL. Then simply choose the frequency that you want to poll the tracker–table for ‘I’, ‘U’ or ‘D’.
Last Update Date Method – This method is non-invasive and can be as reliable as the Application and Tracker-Table methods. With this method you simply create a mechanism (or a third-party tool employed i.e. Scribe or Informatica) to poll the data-object for records that are new, or have an last update date/time stamp that is greater than the last time you polled the data-object. There are a few other caveats to the WHERE clause but, essentially that’s all there is to it. Here’s the kicker. The reason that this method is 3rd in the best-practice ranking is because it is dependent on the clocks being used in the comparison, being synchronized. If for some odd and perplexing reason one of your applications is getting it’s date/time from the desktop clock (or some other unreliable source), you would most likely end up with records falling through the cracks. You must make sure the clocks you are using to compared and stamp are reliable.
Comparison Method – If you must discover your net-change records, and none of the first three methods can be applied, this may be your last option. The Comparison Method (or snapshot method) consists of making a copy of the recordset in which the net-change data resides. Then at some point after that first copy, take another copy of the object and compare each row/column for the differences. This is an extremely laborious method, but at times, desperate men must do desperate things.

Lastly, what to do with concurrent updates to a record. End-user #1 in sales, opens John Smith’s contact record to add a new cell number. At the same moment End-user #2 in finance, opens John Smith’s record to update the billing address. With applications like Dynamics CRM, Salesforce and SharePoint, the application logic will manage the concurrent changes and will make sure both are recognized and able to be discovered as net-change, and translated. Other than that, it’s the ‘last out wins’ method.

In my next post in this series, we’ll take a look at working the business process rules and application rules, into the integration process, and, at what frequency should the integration run.

Convergence Report 1: The Future is Collaborative at #CONV12

Tue, 20 Mar 2012 19:45:00 +0000

After concluding the first day at the Microsoft Convergence 2012 event here in Houston, TX, I can summarize my feelings in one sentence, “It is a great time to be alive and working on collaboration!” Why do I say that? Here are a few brief insights:

Collaboration Has Changed Us

The initial general session opened with a song that was composed by artists working from different locations around the globe. It was impressive to hear music that these individuals put together without having met each other. During the session, I was taking notes on my slate using OneNote – these notes were syncing with our SharePoint server back at the office. I was also having chat discussions with colleagues both at the event and back at the office via Lync and email. Later, I was on a Skype call with a new prospect in Australia. And it began to sink in how much things have changed over the past 10 years. The idea of collaborating in real time, or even iteratively, with people around the globe, has moved from an idea to the norm.

The Future is so Bright…

But as much as things have changed, the future is even brighter. I’ll do a separate blog on some of the changes to expect with the rollout of new versions of Dynamics CRM, SharePoint and Windows in the next 12 months, but here are facts you may not know about Microsoft:

95,000 employees in over 190 countries and over 600,000 partners – that is a tremendous amount of human thinking contributing to innovation
1.5 million people use Microsoft products – and they’re using competing products too, forcing Microsoft to continue to innovate
The spend $9 billion in R&D annually – if I heard it correctly, they’re in the top few companies in the world in R&D spend – this will translate into exciting developments over the next 5-10 years that we’re not even envisioning today

Collaboration Done Right

After many years of working as a Microsoft partner, one of the things I have grown to appreciate is their approach to the market. Make no mistake, I don’t drink all of the Microsoft kool-aid and I know that many have a very negative view of Microsoft just because they are the “big kid on the block.” But they are doing a lot of things right and they get very little credit for it. Specifically:

Open Ecosystem: Although many would argue that Microsoft software is not “open” (which is true and, in my view, is a good thing), their ecosystem is open. What does that mean? Simply that they do not prohibit others from publishing improvements or add-ons to their products. Anyone can publish a Windows program or CRM add-on (for example) without being forced to go through a “closed” marketplace that may mark it up or may eliminate competitive products all together. The downside of this is that some low quality products can find their way to the market – the upside is that individual companies and developers have much more freedom to innovate (even if that means competing with Microsoft).
Choice: Microsoft gives both customers and partners the ability to choose. I had a number of conversations on the first day of the event with customers that said they began working with another company that made it very easy to get started, but they quickly felt trapped. In some cases I heard complaints about working with a vendor that did not do knowledge transfer – so they could never learn enough to function on their own if they wanted to. In other cases, I heard that businesses were frustrated because they were trapped in someone else’s cloud that was expensive and limited what they could do. Microsoft has always worked to provide options (such as the ability to host in their cloud, a partner cloud or a private cloud), and to provide transparent access to knowledge.
Partners: Microsoft has always been dedicated to supporting a partner channel. Although they are not always perfect in their execution of their partner programs, they have created millions of jobs around the globe in partner businesses. They also understand that partners will often need to work with firms that compete with Microsoft; they may wish it were otherwise, but they understand how partner businesses work. There is a downside – there are some partner firms out there that do less than high-quality work or that may have low-integrity sales practices; but there are also many thousands of partner firms to choose from that provide local, regional, national and global options to businesses located anywhere on earth.

I realize that this sounds a little bit like an advertisement for Microsoft. From what I’ve seen, however, Microsoft attracts an undue amount of criticism. I have, admittedly, sometimes been in the chorus of voices offering (hopefully constructive) criticism. But this is an organization that is having a tremendously positive impact for their customers, for their partners and for their employees. With the values they have in place, I hope they thrive for a long time to come.

Having been around collaboration (from the process, technical and human sides) for over 20 years, I’m more excited than I’ve ever been before about the prospects for the future. Not just because of what Microsoft is doing, but because of how the entire world is changing. Here’s to working together to use collaboration to make positive changes, provide tools that enable us to express a genuine care for colleagues and customers, and free people and businesses to innovate!

Application Data Integration – Part One, Overview

Tue, 20 Mar 2012 19:17:00 +0000

In some cases, if not all too some extent, integration between Dynamics™ CRM, Salesforce® or/and SharePoint® with your back-office system is the key to user adoption. Real-time, two-way data integration allows all segments of the business to access the very latest transactional data, and the information that the data contains. One example might be the keying of a ‘large’ order by a sales representative into CRM or Salesforce. Having real-time, two-way data integration in place, that order would go directly from the crm system to your ERP/MRP system for processing. That in turn will reduce inventory and alert the operations team, signaling the purchasing department that orders need to be placed to backfill inventory and, signaling the operation manager that they will need to increase production to fulfill the ‘large’ order. In some cases the integration of data can trigger an alert that will notify outside vendors directly that inventory needs to be replenished.

With access to current inventory levels within a sales rep’s CRM or Salesforce system, sales reps can make better informed customer promises with regard to when items will ship and/or if ordered items will be backordered. This greatly improves customer satisfaction and adoption of the new CRM or Salesforce system. Other advantages (among a plethora) is integration into SharePoint as well, where lists can be compiled to help make better business decision as well as having vital documents at your fingertips, which ever application you are currently using.

This is just one small example of how application data integration can improve adoption, and also improve the client’s business prospects. My purpose in this blog is not to discuss the business benefits of data integration, but explore some of the architectural hurdles in designing the real-time, two-way data integration processes. In a short series of blog entries, we’ll examine:

How data is discovered for translation

When to discover data for translation

What data to discover for translation

How to handle concurrent data modification

How to incorporate the client’s and the application’s
business rules into the integration processes

We will, by no means, cover all the detail that goes into data integration, but will cover, at a high level, some of the hurdles and how to overcome them. In some cases, there will be a choice of methods to accomplish a task, so, we’ll also talk about the best method to use in particular situations. Some methods are tool agnostic, some will highlight how a tool like Scribe Insight provides easy access to data and the business rules around the data. We’ll also see that many of the methods are application agnostic, meaning they can be applied to any system to system integration.

Data integration can be tricky stuff if it’s your first time tackling the subject. Whether you are implementing a solution, or just need to talk comfortably about integration, there are several things to be careful of, but having said that, like anything else, it’s just a matter of experience before your comfort level is one that keeps your knees from shaking and your palms from sweating.

Get a CRM Bible at Convergence 2012!

Fri, 16 Mar 2012 20:29:00 +0000

This weekend I’ll be packing my bags and heading off to Houston, TX to attend Microsoft Convergence 2012 to experience all of the Microsoft Dynamics CRM goodness I can get. I’ll plan to publish at least a couple of blogs while I’m there on whatever news or tips I can pick up. Feel free to leave a comment here if you’d like to request any specific topics

Are you planning to attend? Great! Ping me and let’s plan to chat. It would be great to network with individuals who are looking for career opportunities or who would like to chat about the challenges that you are experiencing with your CRM project. I’ll hook you up with a free copy of our CRM 2011 Bible if you don’t already have one (or if you want a second copy for your nightstand).

Game-Changing Dashboards Combining SharePoint and CRM

Mon, 27 Feb 2012 19:54:00 +0000

SharePoint has had excellent dashboard presentation capabilities for a long time now. Dynamics CRM formally rolled out dashboard reporting with CRM 2011 (although using SharePoint and/or SSRS enabled dashboard reporting with previous versions of CRM). Now that this functionality is getting embraced and adopted by many organizations, how can it best be leveraged to change the game by truly accelerating performance? Simple. Combine the best of Microsoft SharePoint, Dynamics CRM 2011 and TV or large monitors placed in public areas within your business. Here’s how we’ve done it at C5 Insight.

First off, we created great dashboards using native CRM 2011 functionality (such as views, charts and, of course, dashboards). We used these for a while in production to ensure that they were producing the kind of information we could use to drive behavior and/or make better business decisions. This includes setting goals and using the goal management features of CRM to help individuals understand exactly where they stand relative to expectations.

Next, we did the same with SharePoint. We looked at the kinds of information that is not in CRM that we would want to report on. This includes things like financials, summarized project information (although this information is tracked by us in CRM, the native charts do not have sufficient functionality to present the dashboards we needed, so we used Excel services in SharePoint to render this kind of information) and the company calendar. Some custom SharePoint information can be added, such as a Wiki where you enter daily announcements or a “welcome” message when you know a client will be visiting the office that day.

Third step? The CRM dashboards can be merged with SharePoint by using Iframes or Web Resources within the CRM 2011 dashboards. These components can “hold” the content that we want to present on our dashboards from SharePoint. We can then trim away the CRM “flash” (such as the ribbon and menu) just by calling the correct URL so the dashboards are presented as a “kiosk”.

The last step: put large screen monitors, that can connect to the web, in key locations in your business. In the nearby image, we’ve placed a monitor near our main entrance where people gather regularly; and we have another one in another office area down the hall. These monitors are configured to show the desktop of a nearby computer (in our case, we’re running the Android OS on these monitors and they remote desktop to the machine, but many other options exist to enable this). We also downloaded remote control apps that can run on iPhone, Windows Mobile or Android so that we can interact with our dashboards with our mobile devices (including our Kindle Fires – very cool!) Multiple dashboards can be setup so that they dashboard rotates periodically, and so that information is refreshed periodically.

That’s how we did it – but it can work a bit differently depending on your situation. One area that many larger businesses may need for their dashboards is a true BI (business intelligence) dashboard that combines data from multiple sources into a data warehouse and then renders that on a dashboard. This, too, can be presented on an interactive monitor. Adding a touch screen to this will be the ultimate, “Minority Report” experience … can’t wait to add that!

Interested in how to change the game in your organization with great dashboards? Click here to contact us and let’s talk about it!

Tips to Avoid Login Prompts in SharePoint

Thu, 23 Feb 2012 09:54:00 +0000

One of the most common issues I hear when implementing SharePoint for new clients, or supporting an existing SharePoint environment is the dreaded login prompt. There are multiple reasons for the password prompt, but I'll try and cover the basics here. Personally, I haven’t had to login to our internal company SharePoint in at least 6 or 8 months! How can you achieve this SharePoint nirvana? Let’s walk through the common steps to avoid having to login to SharePoint, whether opening the site or when opening documents. Here’s a quick rundown.

1. Internet Explorer Security Zone
2. Windows Credential Store
3. Prompts When Opening Documents

Internet Explorer Security Zone

Generally, one of the first things you need to do is add the SharePoint site URL or domain to a more trusted security zone in your web browser (we’ll focus on IE for this post). SharePoint uses activex controls and other features that need to be trusted to run correctly. Here’s what you need to do.

Open Internet Explorer, and click Tools –> Internet Options. This will vary depending on your version of IE. In IE9, click the gear icon in the top right corner, then click Internet Options.
Click the Security tab, then highlight the zone Local Intranet, then click the Sites button.
Ensure “Automatically detect intranet network” is checked. Enter the URL of the SharePoint site. What I suggest here is to use a wildcard entry, to ensure it covers as much as possible. So you could enter http://portal.company.com, or what I recommend is *.company.com.
Click Ok on all the windows, and close the browser. Go to SharePoint, and you will likely get prompted. On this prompt (as seen above), click the checkbox “Remember my credentials”.

Windows Credential Store

This is typically needed when your SharePoint server isn’t in your local network environment. Whether you knew it or not, Windows XP or Windows 7 (who uses Vista anyway) has what is called a “credential store” or vault. It stores usernames and passwords used to connect to websites and other network computers, and online services like Live ID or Exchange. A credential should get stored here from the above prompt when you click “Remember my credentials”.

To access the credential store, you can try this shortcut by typing the following in the Start -> Run command: “control keymgr.dll”. If this doesn’t work, you can get there by going to Start –> Control Panel, then picking Credential Manager in the large icons view.
Under the Windows Credentials heading, look for an entry for the SharePoint URL. If you don’t find one, enter a new one by clicking Add a New Windows Credential.
Enter the information as it requests. You can enter the direct URL as in the IE security zone, or you can also use wildcards like *.domain.com. Enter your username and password just as if you were logging into SharePoint.
Close IE if you had it open, then try SharePoint again. You should not get prompted.

Getting Prompted When Opening Documents

Another common problem with SharePoint is you get prompted for login credentials when opening or editing documents from a library. At least with Windows Vista and Windows 7, this is a known issue and lucky for us, there’s a hotfix! See the following Microsoft KB article:

Prompt for Credentials When Accessing FQDN Sites From a Windows Vista or Windows 7 Computer

Some items of note:

If you have Windows Vista, you need to download and install the hotfix file, and apply the registry setting.
If you have Windows 7, it already has the hotfix included, and you just need to complete the registry setting.
If you are the IT admin, I would recommend creating this on your machine, and saving the key to a .reg file you can send to users, or set in your desktop image.

You will follow the steps 1-7 near the bottom of the article. As in the above steps, you can use the wildcard like *.domain.com for the entry. Close the registry editor, and enjoy opening documents free from login prompts!

While we’re here, I have to share one other thing that I see all the time that I haven’t seen documented.

Problem with Explorer View Being Slow

I fought this for a long time. Every time I would try to use Explorer View, it would work, but it would a LONG time to come up, like 30 seconds. My coworker could open Explorer View and it would open in about 1 second. The fix turned out to be the fix I’ve seen for other weird strange issues with SharePoint. Here’s how to fix it.

Open Internet Explorer, and click Tools –> Internet Options. This will vary depending on your version of IE. In IE9, click the gear icon in the top right corner, then click Internet Options.
Click the Connections tab, then click the LAN Connections button at the bottom of the window.
Check the state of the first checkbox “Automatically detect settings”. This will likely be checked. Uncheck it!
Click ok until all windows are closed, and close IE. Open SharePoint, and try to open a library in Explorer View. It’s magic!

TechNet Content for SharePoint 2007 and 2010 Now Available on Amazon!

Wed, 11 Jan 2012 08:52:00 +0000

There was no big fanfare on this and could have been easily missed, and I thought it was worth repeating. Microsoft and the content publishing team have compiled their downloadable content and made available on Amazon in a nicely bound book! It’s great for all those out there that would stay up late at night feeling guilty for killing so many trees printing it yourself. You can find the the download links here on TechNet. I will include the information here as I’m just nice like that. I also didn’t say they were the cheapest around, but price varies by book ($66 is a little steep in my opinion).

Getting Started with SharePoint 2010	This book provides basic information about the capabilities of and requirements for Microsoft SharePoint Server 2010.
Planning guide for sites and solutions for Microsoft SharePoint Server 2010, Part 1	This book provides information about planning for deploying Microsoft SharePoint Server 2010. Subjects include site security, governance, and enterprise content management.
Planning guide for sites and solutions for Microsoft SharePoint Server 2010, Part 2	This book provides information about planning for site and solutions created by deploying Microsoft SharePoint Server 2010. Subjects include business intelligence, site creation, web content management, and enterprise search.
Planning guide for server farms and environments for Microsoft SharePoint Server 2010	This book provides information and guidelines for making decisions about system architecture for a deployment of Microsoft SharePoint Server 2010. Subjects include system requirements, authentication, and business continuity management.
Capacity planning for Microsoft SharePoint Server 2010	This book provides information about planning for capacity and performance requirements for deploying Microsoft SharePoint Server 2010. Subjects include sizing, performance testing, software boundaries, and capacity case studies.
Business continuity management for Microsoft SharePoint Server 2010	Provides information about business continuity management, which consists of the business decisions, processes, and tools you put in place in advance to handle crises. Information includes features of Microsoft SharePoint Server 2010 that are likely to be part of your business continuity management strategy.
Upgrading to Microsoft SharePoint Server 2010	This book is designed to guide administrators and IT professionals through the process of upgrading to Microsoft SharePoint Server 2010 from Microsoft Office SharePoint Server 2007.
Deployment guide for Microsoft SharePoint Server 2010	This book includes information deployment scenarios, step-by-step installation instructions, and post-installation configuration steps for deploying Microsoft SharePoint Server 2010.
Operations guide for servers and server farms for Microsoft SharePoint Server 2010	This document describes how to operate and maintain your servers, server farms, sites, and solutions in Microsoft SharePoint Server 2010.
Remote BLOB storage for Microsoft SharePoint Server 2010	How to use Microsoft SharePoint Server 2010 together with Remote BLOB Storage (RBS) and Microsoft SQL Server 2008 Express and Microsoft SQL Server 2008 R2 Express to optimize database storage resources.
Technical reference for Microsoft SharePoint Server 2010	This book includes technical information about the Microsoft SharePoint Server 2010 provider for Windows PowerShell and other helpful reference information about general settings, security, and tools.

You can click here if you want to see all books available from the Microsoft Office System and Servers Team publisher on Amazon as there is other content available for SharePoint 2007.

Microsoft SharePoint Conference 2011–Day 4

Fri, 07 Oct 2011 08:47:00 +0000

Well, today’s the last day of the conference. I know, it’s very sad, but a great time was had by all. This was my first big conference, and I really enjoyed the experience. There were 3 breakout sessions today back to back with the day closing out with lunch in the early afternoon. It’s hard to believe they crammed 240 sessions in 3 and a half days! I got to rub elbows with some of the greats in the industry, bloggers, authors, MVPs and lots of folks from Microsoft. If there’s one tip I can give, it’s to stay in a hotel close to the conference! It was awesome to be able to be in 1 minute walking distance. You have to be able to drop off all the freebies in your room.

I started the day with John Holliday’s discussion on Creating an Easy to Use File Plan Builder for Your SharePoint Records Center. This was really interesting, and offered yet another use case for InfoPath. He covered the basics of the importance and makeup of a file plan, and went on to demo his solution. This wouldn’t be necessary for small Records Center implementations, but when you have hundreds or even thousands of document types each with management policies, these would be almost invaluable. Can you imagine creating thousands of content types, with folders or document libraries and then configuring the same number of content organizer rules for each of the folders? I don’t think there’s enough money in a project’s budget for that. With a little custom code and an InfoPath form, the creation and complete configuration of the Records Center site, content types, information management policies can be 100% automated. The flow would be for an admin user to fill out an InfoPath form (representing the file plan) with the required data (document type, category, disposition rules, role assignments and how they want the records sorted. Via an event receiver, the custom code fires that would create a Records Center site (or could configure an existing site) and create the necessary document libraries, folders, retention policies and user security. There are other ways to do it besides InfoPath (like Excel or an XML file), but I think this is a great solution for a large Records Center implementation.

Then I sat in on Gary Lapointe’s session on a behind the scenes look at how they build Microsoft Visio’s public marketing site on SharePoint 2010 and how they customized the Content Query Web Part, showcasing taxonomy content targeting. He discussed the customized solution and why you would need to customize the CQWP with code. I then poked my head in the the Step-by-Step: Building Search Driven Applications That Matter session by Scot Hillier. If you ever wanted to get some ideas on how you could use search to build applications in SharePoint, this was a great demo-driven session.

For my very last session of the conference, I decided to attend Christina Wheeler’s session on how to package up Publishing features. Her demo seemed to be working better than in the CQWP session yesterday, and it was a really informative session on how to take package up all those master page customizations you worked so hard on for deployment in another environment.

The conference is over, but I had a blast and met a lot of great folks. If you ever get the chance, Whether you are a consultant, business user, or developer, there was something for everyone. Now I’ll spend the next week downloading all the PowerPoint slide decks and session recordings. See you next year!

Microsoft SharePoint Conference 2011–Days 2 and 3

Thu, 06 Oct 2011 11:38:00 +0000

Whew what a wild couple of days! I didn’t get to blog last night so I figured I would combine yesterday and today. The sessions have been really good.

Tuesday – Day 2

Tuesday started with the Todd Carter’s session about Extending SharePoint Health & Monitoring. He put on a good show, giving details on web analytics and diagnostic logging, and how to extend them using custom providers to get detailed reports. Very cool stuff! Then I attended one of the more popular sessions of the day by Microsoft Certified Master Scott Jamison, Best Practices Around SharePoint 2010 User Profiles. Now this topic is very near and dear to my heart. I’ve laughed, I’ve cried, but I’ve come to a place where I accept the UPA for what it is, even with its shortcomings. He got a volunteer from the crowd (a fellow MCM and MCA Spence Harbar) to configure the UPA live. This was really more of a part 1 of 2, where Spence would take it deeper under the covers and show how to implement it via the UI and PowerShell.

The afternoon started with a session with Eric Harlan, on Creating Awesome Dashboards with SharePoint, InfoPath 2010 and SharePoint Designer. This was a cool session, and it turns out was similar to the solution presented in Eric’s fellow Microsoftee Ira Fuch’s book Enterprise Application Development in SharePoint 2010. It wasn’t the same solution, but Eric showed how to configure a similar solution, and rethinking your definition of “dashboard”. No longer are dashboards relegated to KPIs, graphs and charts, but can include using InfoPath form web parts. Interesting!

Along the same lines, I ended the day following Keenan Newton on a journey Automating Business Processes with SharePoint 2010 with SharePoint Designer, InfoPath 2010 and Workflow. This was part 1 of 2 sessions outlining the solution, and creating the base forms and initial workflow to complete the overall solution for automating an HR new hire onboarding process. Would you like to be able to have HR fill out a form for a new hire that would automatically generate an offer letter Word document, pre-filled with the user’s data, start an approval workflow once the person accepted, and then automatically create a user account in Active Directory? This session was for you.

Wednesday – Day 3

I spent this morning with Nikos Anagnostou and Lesly Goh discussing Best Practices for Managing Corporate Metadata and Taxonomies. Together, they provided guidance on good design practices for Managed Metadata. For example, when designing your taxonomies, you should try to organize them as behavioral, organizational or navigational. I then attended a Design Best Practices session by Laura Rogers and Darvish Shadravan (authors of the InfoPath 2010 and SharePoint 2010 Step by Step book soon to be released). This was a refreshingly deeper level session, with demos and discussions on how to avoid pitfalls with InfoPath form services performance and troubleshooting with Fiddler and around data connections. It was very lively, as he would stop periodically and check for live tweets for questions and give out swag to the tweeters. He passed on Microsoft’s top 3 call generators for InfoPath 2010. They are:

Security
Data Connections
Publishing forms

After lunch, I attended the part 2 session of Scott Jamison’s UPA session from Tuesday. Spence Harbar discussed Enterprise Deployment Considerations for the User Profile Service. Who better to learn from than a Microsoft Certified Master and Architect, the highest levels of certifications attainable? Ironically, there wasn’t anyone in the room that was syncing more than 25,000 users so we didn’t have to discuss issues there. We watched Spence actually provision a UPA via PowerShell live on stage, and it worked! He showed us how to workaround the Sync DB dbo database issue when creating the UPA service application via PowerShell. In short, you can use Get-Credential and Start-Job cmdlets to do a runas.

Then it was on to part 2 of Keenan’s session of completing the HR process automation. He showed how to configure the BCS entities properly, and the web service he wrote to talk to AD. I believe all his source will be available post conference.

I ended the day on one of the more technical sessions covering a Deep Dive on the Content Query WebPart with Christina Wheeler. She tried to show how to configure and customize the CQWP to change the columns and covered best practices around internal column naming. Avoid special characters at all possible as it will get nasty to chase down. For example, a space in a name translates to _x0020_. Keep that in mind when using customizing your XSL.

Long days but there were lots of good stuff to digest. Tomorrow is the final day, but it will be packed too!

Microsoft SharePoint Conference 2011–Day 1

Tue, 04 Oct 2011 10:58:00 +0000

The first day started with the big keynote with all of the about 7500 attendees! That’s a lot of people lovin’ some SharePoint in one place! Well, let me back up. On my way into the convention center for breakfast before the keynote, I noticed there was all this noise outside. Turns out a software vendor and SharePoint competitor called Huddle had hired a marching band to play a few tunes right outside the conference and march through. In my opinion, quite childish. Anyway, on the good stuff …

Walked into the keynote speech, and was entertained by the sweet sounds of DJ Keenan Kameleon. He’s a Senior Product Manager with the SharePoint Team at Microsoft. I’m told you can listen to his music mix from the keynote online here. Jared Spataro, Senior Director of SharePoint Product Management was up first, and gave some updates on some numbers. Can you say 62 million licenses sold of SharePoint with 125 million users? The overall theme for the conference is Productivity Delivered, which celebrates all the excellent work and solutions that customers and partners have developed on the platform. I won’t bore you with all the details, but you can read more on the MS SharePoint Team blog.

There was a very sweet demo of some extremely high end redundancy and failover for a SharePoint farm. Can you say 1TBs of RAM and 80 CPU cores? The test sites were loaded with 130 million documents totaling 14TB in a single content database, and that’s without Remote Blob Storage. A FAST search query returned 130 million results in .23 seconds. That’s FAST! Their assistant pulled the network plug live on stage, and we all watched while clustering failed over every database in the farm in under 15 seconds. Wow!

They also announced a new Certified Architect certification for SharePoint. You can read all the juicy details on the team’s blog. They also made another announcement – details on the SharePoint Conference 2012. Looks like it’s going to be held in Las Vegas in the middle of November.

I started with my first session with the antics of Todd Klindt and Shane Young from SharePoint911 for their Understanding SharePoint Administration session. After that I went over to see Laura Rodgers and Darvish Shadravan for their book signing of their book InfoPath 2010 and SharePoint 2010 Step by Step. Needless to say, we had some good InfoPath discussions.

It was lunch, then off to the afternoon sessions covering Records Management with the CTO from GimmalSoft, and ended with a bang with the session by Scott Jamison Making SharePoint 2010 Collaboration Rock by Increasing Findability. He’s a great speaker, and gave some very useful and practical recommendations to get your search results more accurate and useful. The single most important takeaway I’ll share from this session was about the Title field, and how important it is that this field is accurate.

Microsoft SharePoint Conference 2011–The Pre-Game Show

Mon, 03 Oct 2011 11:14:00 +0000

Wow, the time is finally here for the Microsoft SharePoint Conference 2011! What an exciting time this is for SharePoint. The product celebrated it’s 10 year anniversary recently, and it has come a long way! The latest release SharePoint 2010 is really a game changer and is continuously expanding it’s presence and impact in the industry. This conference celebrates the product in a way that is just amazing. There are so many people from all over the world coming together for a single purpose – to share knowledge.

This year’s conference takes place in sunny Anaheim, California at the Anaheim Convention Center. Every hotel in a 15 mile area is SOLD OUT! Ok some of that is probably Disneyland. After checking in to my hotel and getting settled, I walked across the street to the convention center to check things out. I got registered and checked out the venue. This place is huge, three floors of SharePoint goodness! There are lots of great-looking sessions, and I narrowed down the ones I want to attend.

The conference officially started this evening when they opened up the Exhibit Hall for a Welcome Reception from 6 – 9pm. There are a lot of people here (and vendors). I have never seen vendor booths like this before. The booth for fpweb.net had stairs to a 2nd floor overlook. Nice! Talked to the nice folks at O’Relliy Press, Idera, Mindsharp, Quest Software, AvePoint and K2. I think that was just on one row. As you can see, there were already a lot of SharePointers checking things out:

I’m looking forward to the festivities that start tomorrow with the keynote speakers and then the sessions. More to come from Anaheim so stay tuned!

7 Steps to Successful Client Scorecards

Wed, 23 Feb 2011 23:30:00 +0000

Which clients should we focus more time on? Are there any clients that we should consider firing? How can we find new clients that look like our best current clients? Do we have clients that should be more profitable?

These are the questions that many B2B firms are asking themselves as they think through how they should prioritize their client list. So read on for some of the how’s and why’s of establishing a client scoring system.

What is a Client Scorecard?

Client scoring is a way to develop a consistent client scorecard (or client report card) for every client that a business serves. The scorecard serves a number of purposes, including:

Identifying best customers, and providing them with a higher level of service
Identifying worst customers and, in some cases, discontinuing service to them
Finding past customers who have a great score but are now inactive, and re-activating them
Identifying prospects that are similar to your top customers for acquisition efforts
Identifying lost high value customers, and determining why you lost them and how you can improve your performance

Every sales and marketing manager will tell you that it costs many times more to acquire a new customer than it does to retain or upsell an existing one. Client scorecards are all about leveraging your hardest won and greatest asset – your current customer base!

“It is 5-10 times more expensive to gain a new customer than it is to retain an existing one.”
-Gartner Group

But sometimes the best way to define something is to define what it is not...

A client scorecard is not the same thing as lead scoring. Lead scoring focuses on the likelihood of converting a non-customer into a customer, whereas client scoring focuses on the value of existing customers. Maybe we’ll talk about lead scoring in a future post.
A client scorecard is not limited strictly to active customers. Client scorecards can include both inactive customers (in fact, this can be one of the most important segments for evaluating client scorecards) and prospective customers. In the case of prospective customers, your scorecard may be more focused on (dis)qualifying prospective customers that are showing the signs of becoming the kinds of customers you do not want in your portfolio.
A client scorecard is not the same thing as client profitability. Profitability is an important factor, but profitability may not tell the whole story about the value that a client contributes to your business.
A client scorecard is not limited to objective data. There are many subjective drivers of business value that should influence your scorecard.
A client scorecard is not a “score.” Although one output of a scorecard may be a single score, keep in mind that there are many components of a scorecard that should be evaluated – a high score or a low score do not tell the whole story about a client relationship. For example, many of the data points for new clients (or even prospective clients) may be unknown – resulting in a lower score until these items can be evaluated.

7 Steps to Successful Client Scorecards

Like all projects that are worth investing in, a successful client scorecard project requires far more than the CEO taking a Saturday morning to write down the attributes of a good client – and handing those off to IT to add to a CRM system. Sadly, most businesses tend to take that approach – and end up wasting time, making their CRM systems unnecessarily complex and generating scorecards that no one uses.

1. Get Your Team Involved

The people who work with your clients every day already have a good idea of what makes and good client and what makes a bad client. The agenda for the session is pretty straight forward:

Put your clients into lists of good and bad – focusing on longer-term clients so you have a good understanding of how the relationship has evolved.
Discuss what the characteristics of the clients in each group are – the goal here is to define what makes one group different from the other (most businesses are surprised at some of the findings at this stage)
Determine at what stage of the relationship this information can be known and which role (or which system) will capture it

For this meeting, you should use an outside facilitator and a proven methodology. The reality is that most meetings of this type are ineffective because as soon as one person shares an idea, the rest of the group begins to evaluate the idea and respond to it – creativity is stifled, politics come into play and the results from the session are weak.

You will want to get beyond the basics (i.e. profitable customers are all good; unprofitable customers are all bad) and get to some of the leading indicators of profitability; you will also want to recognize that some “hidden variables” can make even your most profitable customers undesirable (i.e. requiring an extremely high level of service, a brand that may damage your own reputation, an approach to your team that is demoralizing). Most businesses also need to recognize that profitability can be an elusive calculation, so subjective variables can play an important role.

2. Evaluate Public and Private Data

You should do some analysis of both internally available data (such as from your accounting or CRM systems) and external data (such as data available from D&B) to see if any of this plays a role in differentiating your top customers from your bottom customers. For example, you may find that certain industries tend to outperform others; or you may find that you tend to do better with private or public companies. This can be a very important source of scorecard data because it doesn’t require your team to do extra data entry to create the scorecard. For larger enterprises, predictive modeling methods can be used as part of this evaluation.

3. Talk to Your Clients

Conduct interviews or surveys with your customer list. They are likely to tell you things about themselves that your own internal team did not identify. This can be an important source of information that helps you qualify prospects or new customers. This early qualification can help you focus your resources on the prospects that are most likely to convert into long-term, mutually-beneficial relationships.

4. Define the Criteria

Now comes the hard part, you need to winnow the list of criteria down to a minimal amount of new data that your team will need to begin to track. The more information that you can get from internal or external systems (see item #2, above), the better. But you should expect to require your team to capture some additional information on their own. Remember that a successful scorecard system incorporates both objective information (i.e. hard numbers that you are likely to be able to pull from other systems( and subjective information (i.e. opinions of team members that will need to be keyed into the system). Ideally, you will limit the items that your team needs to key in to a list of 5-10 items.

5. Capture the Data

Now comes the hardest part – you have to actually start capturing the data.

This is where most scorecard projects fall apart. Either they require too much manual data entry that is time consuming for employees that already have enough to do. Or they require a herculean effort to integrate data from disparate internal systems. Or both. There may be no way to completely go around these issues, but here are a few suggestions:

Keep it Simple: The temptation is to jump right in and develop a “dream scorecard” in the first stab at this type of project. Keeping the scope of the project simple will save you a tremendous amount of time and frustration.
Understand the Scope: Even if you can’t keep the project simple, it is important to fully understand the scope of the project so you will know what you are getting into. Most projects of this type fail simply because the organization loses interest in making it a priority long before it is ever completed.
Piggyback on Other Projects: In large enterprises, there are almost always multiple projects going on with a goal of unifying information across different systems. Rather than starting a project dedicated to the scorecard, see if you can piggyback on an existing project that may already be gathering much of the same information.
Automate What you Can: The more effort you can keep off the backs of the individuals who will have to use the scorecard, the better. Automation can come in two flavors: (1) automate capturing scorecard metrics that are already available elsewhere – so no one has to re-enter data; (2) provide process mapping and automation for data that needs to be gathered manually – this can include an annual process, updates made at the conclusion of each project, etc. Modern BPA (business process automation) tools built into CRM and other tools can handle much of the heavy lifting in this area.
Provide Ongoing Training and Support: I cannot overemphasize this point. It never ceases to amaze me how many businesses put a tremendous amount of time into the IT part of projects like this – and almost no time in getting their team up to speed on how they need to participate.

6. Collaborate

“If you build it, they will come,” may work in the movies, but not when it comes to rolling out client scorecards.

You will need to ensure that the salient information from the scorecards is distributed to the individuals who will need it. And you will need to ensure that referencing the scorecard becomes a part of your corporate culture. This means that scorecard data needs to appear on your internal portals, dashboards and on many of your client related reports. Discussing the scorecard needs to become part of the every day conversation in your sales, service, accounting and customer management conversations.

7. Train, Support, Improve, Repeat

Your scorecard project will require plenty of care and nurturing. You will need to constantly monitor the business process you established for creating scorecards to ensure that the team is following it. You will need to work with the team to ensure that the scorecard management process is not too time consuming (this is particularly true during the early days after the initial launch). In addition, the criteria for your scorecards will need to be reviewed and updated periodically as the economy, your customers, your competitors and your understanding of the marketplace evolve.

Next Steps

Developing a client scorecard does not have to consume a tremendous amount of time. With proper planning and session facilitation a mid-sized business can launch client scorecards in just a few months; larger enterprises may take longer. If you’re using modern collaboration, dashboard and CRM tools, you can significantly simplify the process of maintaining scorecards for your team. Take the first step of facilitating a session with your team to get started.

SharePoint Tip: Searching SharePoint From Windows 7

Wed, 23 Feb 2011 05:09:00 +0000

I believe that one of the most under-evangelized areas of SharePoint is its Windows integration. Consistently, we find that many users simply assume they have to use the Web interface to access SharePoint, but you can actually do a majority of your daily document management and collaboration work without ever accessing SharePoint via the Web. In fact, my ratio of Windows to Web SharePoint use is probably 75:25; 75% of my document management and collaboration work being done completely within Microsoft Windows.

In this tip, we focus on searching SharePoint from Windows. The screenshot-filled instructions below will walk you through downloading the search connector provided by your company or SharePoint, installing the connector, and using it in Windows 7.

At C5 Insight, we have created our own Search Connector that points everyone to our Search Center site. We have also customized the search connector for our organization, and provided this to our employees, rather than everyone having to use the default SharePoint connector.

To build your own search connector, you can start here:
http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/dd742958(v=vs.85).aspx
You can also use SharePoint's default search connector that is available on the search results page.

Check out the walkthrough here:
http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/library/ff899315.aspx#BKMK_O14AsAFedProvider
Regardless of the search connector you choose, if you have never downloaded the connector, you will be prompted to add the connector to Windows.
Once added, you will notice that there is a new search option in your left navigation, and the focus is on the search text box in the upper right corner of the Explorer window.
You can immediately begin searching, and this search will cross all boundaries, including individual sites (depending on the scope of your search connector).
Tips and Tricks:
a. For quicker access, rearrange this search connector in your "Favorites" section

b. For even faster access, pin to your Start Menu or add a Quick Launch button

i. To pin to your Start Menu, simply drag the search from your Windows Favorites navigation to the Start Menu.

ii. To add a Quick Launch button, first do this, then you can add this shortcut in the same manner - one-click access to SharePoint search.

c. By default, the search view is set to "Content." You can change this as you would with any view in Windows, just under the search bar. Content is a nice view, since it actually shows you portions of the file and also does "hit highlighting."

d. You can adjust your sort as well, but by default, I would ensure your results are sorted by Search ranking, Descending. Right-click to get to this menu.

e. Quotes and filters in the search box work on SharePoint as well!

i. Only "SharePoint 2010" PowerPoint presentations.

ii. "SharePoint 2010" documents where Amber Butler was an author.

iii. "SharePoint 2010" documents modified after 1/1/2011

i. You can easily save a search for quickly finding similar documents at a later time

j. Lastly, with one click, you can open this search in the SharePoint site for additional filtering and refinements.

i. Once opened in the Search Center, all refinements are available on the left.

As you can see, there are many ways to integrate SharePoint with Microsoft Windows, and this was only for search! Our goal is to always add value for our clients, and Windows integration is a huge time saver and productivity booster. We hope this has been helpful for you as well.

The Dynamics CRM 2011 Administration Bible is Almost Here!

Tue, 15 Feb 2011 19:30:00 +0000

The Microsoft Dynamics CRM 2011 Administration Bible is only a few weeks away (March 1, 2011) from being available! After lots of hard work and long hours, we’re going to celebrate by giving away five copies of the book for free!

To be entered to win a free copy, just sign up to follow C5 Insight on one of the various social channels that we offer (you must have a United States mailing address to be qualified). You can click here to select a social channel to follow. We’re planning to select 5 winners on March 21, 2011 (or once we have 200 new followers across our social channels – whichever comes first).

Or, if you’re in a hurry, then use the link to the left to order your copy today (our kid’s college funds thank you)!

For those of you who are interested in SharePoint 2010, the book includes a chapter on the “out of the box” SharePoint integration and a special appendix on customized SharePoint 2010 / CRM 2011 integration written by Curtis Hughes.

What’s next? We’ve created a site for the book (www.dynamicscrmbible.com) and we need to get the finishing touches on it ... Gotta get going!

Get Social: More Options for Following Us

Fri, 11 Feb 2011 08:40:00 +0000

Some Background

At the beginning of 2010, our two companies (StreamLogic and Customer Connect) merged to become C5 Insight. One company focused on Microsoft SharePoint and cloud application development. The other company focused on CRM (Dynamics CRM and Salesforce.com) and sales and marketing strategy.

When we merged our blogs, we started to receive feedback that we were providing an overwhelming amount of information. Our blogs included high level strategic and best practice information, as well as detailed technical tips for developers and administrators. They also included information on all of the different solutions that we support. So most of those who were following us found that they were getting some information that wasn’t useful for them. In addition, options for following us were limited to email or RSS feeds.

Something had to change!

The Social Channels

So we decided to take a page out of our own Social CRM playbook (it was a typical case of, “the cobbler’s children are the ones with no shoes.”) At a later date, we’ll share details about Social CRM and our specific strategy as a separate blog. For now, suffice it to say that:

We took feeds from our: Blog Site, On Demand Video Site and Live Event Site.
We then parsed them out by role and solution type.
And we made them available across the most popular social channels.

Voila – a lot of blood, sweat and tears for us delivered a much more relevant way to consume the information that you want. And it’s all free to you (we guarantee that you’ll get your money’s worth).

If you want to learn a bit more about Social CRM, check out this video.

Current C5 Followers

If you’re currently following one of the older C5 Insight feeds, we encourage you to look at the new options. You will find that you can filter what you’re receiving to just the information that is most relevant to you. Plus, some of our old channels will soon be discontinued – so take the time to sign up for one of the new ones.

www.c5insight.com/follow

The Free Giveaway

Another exciting bit of news at C5 Insight – we have just completed authoring a book, “Microsoft Dynamics CRM 2011 Administration Bible.” There’s even a special appendix on advanced SharePoint integration. To celebrate the book and our new social channels, we’re giving away 5 free copies of the book.

Where do you sign up? I’m glad you asked. We’re going to give away the 5 free copies by randomly drawing from a list of all of our followers once we reach 200 new followers across all of our social channels (or on March 21, 2011 – whichever comes first). So be sure to sign up to follow us by March 21!

Or, if you’re in a hurry to get the book, go ahead and click the image to order it from Amazon.com. If we draw your name as a winner, you can get a signed copy to treasure for generations to come!

So, be sure to sign up for the social channel of your choice today!

www.c5insight.com/follow

Grant Management

SuperUser Account — Wed, 09 Feb 2011 09:47:36 +0000

Grants Manager is designed to help educational institutions and government organizations to quickly deploy a new grant management system or compliment an existing one. The solution addresses vital business needs in the PS grants and financial aid management space. This video provides an overview of the Grants Management solution. Contact C5 Insight for more information or a live demo.

Accelerated Sales with Dynamics CRM 2011 and SharePoint 2010

SuperUser Account — Tue, 01 Feb 2011 22:59:29 +0000

Combing the power of Dynamics CRM 2011 and SharePoint 2010 can significantly accelerate sales processes. This video includes an overview of dashboards, goal management, SharePoint integration and quote management.

Social Media and Dynamics CRM

SuperUser Account — Wed, 26 Jan 2011 18:24:16 +0000

Social networking is changing how customer relationships are formed and maintained. Not only is this new paradigm affecting how businesses work with customers, but it is also changing the way that employees collaborate with one another. But the core principals of social networking (decentralized, customer or stakeholder driven, opt-in) are often at odds with the way most businesses structure their CRM solution (centralized, company control driven, targeted). This session provides a strategic framework for integrating your website, CRM and social channels. It includes 3 examples of how to integrate Dynamics CRM with social networking for improved marketing, customer service and collaboration.

Final Word on the Fab 40 Templates for SharePoint 2010

Fri, 24 Sep 2010 03:15:00 +0000

So we’ve all been waiting, and waiting, and waiting to hear from Microsoft about the fate of the “fab 40” templates for SharePoint 2010. Well, they finally have made a decision. You’re not going to like it. Read the full details.

The bottom line from the article:

Microsoft is not releasing new versions of these templates for SharePoint 2010 Products.

Quick Tip for Uploading Multiple Files to SharePoint 2010 Picture Library

Fri, 17 Sep 2010 19:34:00 +0000

SharePoint 2010 is great at many things, and one of the new integrations with Office 2010 is with uploading multiple pictures to a picture library using the Office Picture Manager.

Say you you’ve got a bunch of logos you want to get into your new fancy 2010 picture library. You would click Upload –> Upload Multiple Pictures right?

Change Tag Spelling and Capitalization in SharePoint 2010

Sat, 14 Aug 2010 02:55:00 +0000

The ability to tag EVERYTHING in SharePoint 2010 is one of my favorite features.

But, if you’re like me, you sometimes create a personal or enterprise tag hastily. And you know what they say about haste … you end up with typographical errors or inconsistent capitalization.

And, if you’re like me, it REALLY bugs you to see all of those inconsistencies in your terms.

SharePoint in Plain English

SuperUser Account — Fri, 09 Jul 2010 14:00:16 +0000

A very brief and informative video on the fundamentals of document management and collaboration in SharePoint.

Best Practice: Should SharePoint Replace Your File Servers?

Thu, 24 Jun 2010 23:51:00 +0000

One of SharePoint’s popular features is Document Management, which leads many organizations to migrate their data from files shares or their Document Management System over to SharePoint. Is this best practice? Let’s not be hasty, and look at the various things to consider on both sides of the coin.

User Adoption and Ideas for Getting Everyone On Board

Thu, 24 Jun 2010 20:43:00 +0000

Although the idea of user adoption is not a new idea, we consistently find our clients asking for more ways or better ways to get users to “use the system.” Depending on the scope of the project, we always recommend some level of governance and training for our clients to get the most from their implementation. These are critical pieces of the overall solution that we feel play a significant role in whether or not the product is accepted or rejected by the users.

In addition, with the recent release of SharePoint 2010, this topic has once again become a priority for many of our clients looking to implement this new version. While superior to the previous version in far too many ways to mention here, the user interface has been completely enhanced with the “Ribbon” interface first seen Office 2007. For users of SharePoint 2007, this will be a slight learning curve to use the new interface, but as with Office 2007, once learned the productivity and efficiency will increase exponentially.

SharePoint 2010 World Premiere

SuperUser Account — Mon, 21 Jun 2010 00:00:00 +0000

SharePoint 2010 is a leap forward for document management, collaboration, intranet portals, business intelligence and much more. View this video to learn the fundamentals of SharePoint and some of the new functionality available in SharePoint 2010.

SharePoint 2010 Communities: Allow Users to Connect, Innovate and Share

SuperUser Account — Mon, 14 Jun 2010 01:50:00 +0000

Social computing promotes sharing and openness within communities. Learn from customers how their enhanced people-centric collaboration solutions empowered their users and improved performance within the organization.

SharePoint 2010 Ribbon Menu Preview

SuperUser Account — Sat, 22 May 2010 23:01:51 +0000

Quickly and easily find and use relevant features with the new contextual SharePoint Ribbon.

Web Marketing with SharePoint 2010

SuperUser Account — Sat, 22 May 2010 22:52:43 +0000

Digital Marketers today need to launch an increasing amount of websites quickly and easily. SharePoint 2010 shows marketers how to be competitive and build their business through digital marketing.

SharePoint Server 2010 for Internet Sites Drives Revenues

SuperUser Account — Sat, 22 May 2010 22:39:03 +0000

See how Seek.com brings job seekers, employers, and advertisers together.

What Can SharePoint Do For You?

SuperUser Account — Wed, 12 May 2010 08:00:00 +0000

Improve Productivity, Efficiency, Agility. Catch a glimpse of the exciting work customers are rolling out across their enterprise. See what SharePoint 2010 can do for you

SharePoint 2010 Search Demo

SuperUser Account — Sun, 09 May 2010 08:16:00 +0000

Take a tour of the search capabilities in SharePoint Server 2010

Better Together: Microsoft CRM and SharePoint

SuperUser Account — Thu, 18 Jun 2009 00:00:00 +0000

SharePoint and Dynamics CRM are both powerful development platforms. This video takes a look at how these tools are being combined to accelerate performance.