Blogging and being a consultant

by | May 22, 2007

Some of you who read this blog are probably consultants and find it strange (or stupid) that I should share my knowledge with you and others on this blog and in the forums that I attend (mostly the swedish forum www.itproffs.se). Some other find it strange that I wont give answers to certain questions, so I thought I might clear things up a bit by describing my thoughts on what to blog on and what not.

In general, I will blog on topics that are non-customer specific, meaning that I will discuss common problems, design patterns, installation issues, tips and tricks. I might also discuss a specific solution in the aspect that it might be of interest for other implementors as inspiration. However, specific customer problems that are very unlikely to happen in other environments, customer specific analysis and designs are what I do for a living. I will not blog on these topics, in more than a general sense.

So, I will be more than happy to share my thoughts on common issues and if you want my opinion on any of those, please comment my blog or send me an email at gustaf (a) humandata.se.

I apply the same rules for postings in forums meaning that I will not answer questions like:
“We are a company that has 50 emplyees with 10 inside sales and 4 outside sales. How should we configure CRM?”. This question can only be answered by doing a deeper analysis of how the companys sales processes (and other processes) work, and the answer is a CRM design. The same question but focused on which license or what hardware would be needed, is more of a general question and this I could discuss.

Of course there will always be gray areas and I will leave this to my judgement and I hope you will respect this.

As for commenting, your chances are a lot greater if your comments are not anonymous. I also like to quote my grandfather who used to say: “It is better to drive a strong point than strong language (freely translated from Swedish)” meaning that harsh language will get you nowhere.

Gustaf Westerlund
CRM and SharePoint Consultant

Humandata AB
www.humandata.se

Excel Services as report system for CRM

by | May 14, 2007

Today I held a presentation at this years SharePoint and Exchange Forum in Nynäshamn, close to Stockholm, here in Sweden. Lots of very interesting experts here like Patrick Tisseghem, Michael Noel and Nick Swan, not forgetting my boss, Göran Husman and other great speakers from Microsoft and other companies.

The presentation I held was BDM-focused and concerned the power of simple mesh-up integration between SharePoint and MS CRM 3. The main point being that SharePoint has a lot of great features that can be used by other applications.

One of the most powerful ones is excel services that can very powerfully be used as a reports tool for MS CRM. The main advantages being the ease of use for the end users and report owners since they easily can modify their own reports with Excel.

It is almost too simple to write a blog about it, since it is very straight forward, but I will see if I can get something together anyway.

By the way, I am expecting to be a father around the 1:st of june (my first child!) and I migth be a bit absent for a week or two after this event, but I will be back.

Gustaf Westerlund
CRM and SharePoint Consultant

Humandata AB
www.humandata.se