Bugs and suggestions

What might be unknown to many CRM people is that Microsoft has a tool for managing bugs and suggestions called Connect. This can be found on connect.microsoft.com. So if you have any suggestions on how you think CRM should be enhanced, don’t keep it to your self, add it to connect, and tell your friends, blog about it. After you have added a suggestion, other people can vote on an item and the more votes and item gets, the more attention Microsoft will give it.

I added two suggestions today, so feel free to go in and vote!

First, I think it would be a good idea to be able to supportedly change the logo in the left hand corner. This is done by companies today in an unsupported way which of course is bad, so it would be better to do enable a supported way to do it. Not that it is something I generally encourage, but many companies find this important.

I also think that the logic when using multiple forms of the latest form being used, to be the defaulted the next time a record of the entity is opened often is not what is required, why a default form for each role per entity would be very good.

Connect is also the Tools which is used for bugs during the TAP and beta programs if you are part of these.

I am currently in Bellevue close to Seattle on the MVP Summit, meeting the other MVP:s and the CRM Product team which is great! Joel Lindstrom and I held a presentation to the Product team today and they are a great crowd who are really interested in listening to our opinions. We are lucky to have them and they are really working hard to give us an excellent Product so giving them good input on things we feel the Product can be enhanced, is really a just doing our part of the development. It is easy to complain about something not being as you would like it to, but try to be constructive and formulate that into a suggestion instead and register it on connect and you may get it. Do keep in mind that they have a lot of things to try to triage and it might take some time, but if they don’t know, you might never get it.

Gustaf Westerlund
MVP, CEO and owner at CRM-konsulterna AB
www.crmkonsulterna.se

MVP Renewal

MVP Renewal

First of July might mean different things to different people. For MVP:s the first Award you get, sets you the phase (beginning of a quarter). As I got mine on the first of July 2012, my nerves we on high today.

When I received my first MVP Award, it arrived in my inbox at about 11 am CET. Hence I naturally was looking very keenly in my inbox at that time, and the following hours.

For those of you not very familiar with the process, if you are awarded, you are sent a letter, however, if you are not renewed, you will be sent nothing. No “you-will-not-be-an-MVP-any-more-email” or similar. You will just not get anything. On top of this, the MVP Award emails are notorious for getting stuck in spam filters, so you had better keep checking there too.

Hence, I was checking my inbox, and my spam-inbox, every 5 minutes, or every 3 minutes, or maybe it was every minute to see if I got any email. But nothing, I got some leads, some new customers, someone wanted to come worked at my Company, someone wanted to send me huge amounts of Money, who cared, no MVP letter.

The time reached 3 pm CET. They say that you can sometimes see the nerves on the outside of someones skin, well, that wasn’t the case anymore, my nerves had crept out like Trichinella worms, made a nest in a nearby tree, fallen down, been eaten by a hungry panda and then shot by a crazy Russian on killing Spree. Close enough.

At about 4 CET, I managed to rewire my brain (like T2 in Terminator) and remembered that I could check the MVP website. Which I did and my surprise was palatable, this is what I saw:

 


Now most of you might have noticed the really stretched image of me or the fact that I look almost bold (which I am on the front part of my head). But what I noticed was the small “2” just below the Picture where it says “Awards since 2012”. Hurray! I had been renewed! But why hadn’t I received the email? Which was answered about 5 seconds later when the email arrived.

So if you are looking for a more exciting July 1:st, I would suggest contributing to the CRM Community and sending me an email describing why I should nominate you for an MVP, then you might very well have just as exiting July 1:sts as I, with Pandas, crazy Russians and Everything!

I am also very happy that Jukka Niiranen got awarded the MVP Award as I got the honor to nominate him. It is a a great honor for me to be able to nominate someone that gets awarded the MVP Award as that is a great confirmation of my judgement which is very gratifying. Jukka has been a great contributor to the Community and very well deserves the Award. The NDA that you are required to sign as an MVP due to the fact that you get to see a lot of classified information, put us under a lot of restriction on what kind of news we are allowed to blog about. Jukka has been very good at drawing out the bleeding edge info from hazy photos from Convergence, eXtremeCRM and similar and I hope he will be able to continue this without too much hindrance from the very strict NDA.

Do read his blog about his MVP Award if you have not done so already!
http://niiranen.eu/crm/2013/07/mvp-award-why-communities-rock/

Gustaf Westerlund
MVP, CEO and owner at CRM-konsulterna AB
www.crmkonsulterna.se

SharePoint & Exchange Forum 2007

SharePoint & Exchange Forum 2007

If you live close to Sweden or close to Europe for that matter, make sure not to miss SharePoint and Exchange Forum 2007 in Sweden, the 14:th and 15:th of May. It is THE place to be for all SharePoint (and Exchange) professionals, decision makers, developers, administrators and powerusers. I will be the presentor for one of the tracks and I will also be holding a seminar on SharePoint and Microsoft CRM integration.

There will be a host of very prominent speakers, some of these will be:

Patrick Tissegheim, SharePoint MVP & author, Belgium
Michael Noel, SharePoint MVP and expert on MS ISA, author, USA
Nick Swan, SharePoint MVP, USA
Göran Husman, SharePoint MVP & Author
Eric Legault, Outlook MVP and author, USA
Scott Schnoll, Exchange expert, Microsoft, USA
Micke Nyström, Windows Server MVP
Lasse Pettersson, Exchange MVP
Peter Andersson, Microsoft Sweden
Kalle Becker, Microsoft Sweden
Pontus Haglund, Microsoft Sweden
Magnus Danielsson, Microsoft Sweden
Christer Olsson, Exchange expert, Microsoft Sweden
Michael Jansson, SharePointexpert and trainer, Humandata

So invest in your social network and knowledge from the worlds most competent SharePoint and Exchange Experts! Not to be there is not an option…

There are a limited amount of seats so make sure you get one! Go to www.seforum.se for more information!

Gustaf Westerlund
CRM and SharePoint Consultant

Humandata AB
www.humandata.se