by Gustaf Westerlund | Sep 13, 2012
Today I was helping a customer out that have experienced rather bad performance of the CRM system.
They described the performance as being bad in Europe (the server being hosted in Sweden), it was quite obvious that the problems do not originate from network latency, which can be an issue if performacne problems are experienced from the other side of the world (ex. from New Zealand with servers in Europe).
One of the most common problems with performance in CRM systems is bad SQL performance. In large installations, this is usually due to bad SAN (Storage Area Network) configurations from a SQL perspective. As CRM is meta-data driven, it is quite database heavy since it cannot be fully database optimized like custom made ASP.NET applications. Hence good database performance is vital to a rapid CRM.
This is also evident in the large scale performance test that Microsoft have done with 150 000 concurrent users, where the setup was based on High-performance SSD:s in RAID configuration to enable the scale of the test. Read more about it here: http://www.consultcrm.co.uk/sites/default/files/microsoft_dynamics_crm_2011_performance_and_scalability_with_intel.pdf
A very good tool to use for benchmarking the disk performance on a server is SQLIO which can be downloaded for free at Microsofts site.
The two parameters to look for are IO and throughput. Do bare in mind that many SAN:s have caching which can make results strange, so it can be a good idea to try to increase the test file size. Also make sure to put the file on the drive which you wish to test.
I did some test on some of my environments which you can use to benchmark your system setups:
GW VPC – Microsoft Dynamics CRM Demo environment run with 6 GB Memory on my E:
GW LAB – Our development environment, virtualized with RAID drive (4×150 GB 15k rpm)
GW C – Intel SSD 3:rd Generation 250 GB
GW E – Intel SSD 2:nd Generaton 150 GB
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| IO/s |
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| Throughput MB/s |
SSD performance in this case blows the roof off the RAID and the loss of performance is rather substantial inside the VPC, but the read performance is still 5-7 times that of the RAID.
An interesting aspect of this is the GW LAB, our development machine run on RAID, it has almost 3 to 4 times the IO and throughput in writes compared to reads, which is not the fact for the SSD-based disks. This is probably due to some write caching functionality of the RAID.
My recommendation based on this is that if you need high performance on you CRM, use SSD:s in your setup. Do use server-grade SSD:s and used at least RAID:s with 2 disks redundancy, but it will give your CRM a rather large performance boost compared to normal grade SAN.
Gustaf Westerlund
MVP, CEO and owner at CRM-konsulterna AB
www.crmkonsulterna.se
by Gustaf Westerlund | Sep 1, 2012
There seems to be a nice trend of lot of new CRM bloggers here in Sweden. I think this is great, mercantilism always has to give way to free trade! Even more so in the information era.
Alan Varcoe, a Dynamics CRM veteran and architect, who some of you might have noticed has left some comments here from time to time, has now started his own blog. He has written an interesting post managed and unmanaged solutions. Do check it out!
Let’s hope this discussion results in some new features from Microsoft in this area, as that would be greatly appreciated!
Gustaf Westerlund
MVP, CEO and owner at CRM-konsulterna AB
www.crmkonsulterna.se
by Gustaf Westerlund | Aug 9, 2012
Today I watched an interview on CRMSoftware.TV with David Pennington, Director of Product Marketing for Dynamics CRM where he talks about where Microsoft is headed in terms of social functionality.
In short this is what is mentioned:
The recent updates from november 2011 added some social functionality, namely the wall functionality in CRM and also the ability to leverage hash-tags to some extent.
Microsoft’s focus is, as they usually do, on productivity in the sense that you should spend more time closing business and less in computer systems, and this has also been the guiding star when developing these new CRM features.
He also talked about the new update coming in the end of the year with functionality to enrich your data based on social intelligence. Brought in technology from Inside View (http://www.insideview.com/) to bring in data from social systems and enrich the CRM data. Inside Views offer is to assemble social data from over 25 000 news sources and social media directly to the CRM system to give salespeople an edge over competitors by knowing more about the customer.
They are also adding integrations with LinkedIn which will add functionalities that allow users to see the relationships that exists to contacts in the system. Ex A salesperson can see that another salesperson has a connection to a potential customer.
Also social customer care, grab comment or similar in social media like twitter and make cases of it.
Looking at social from the perspective of three different categories
– Managed – internal social channels like for instance discussions in SharePoint
– Semi-managed – external social channels with a distinct precense, like SharePoint sites hosted by a customer
– Independent channels like Facebook or Twitter where you mainly listen to what is going on.
Important part of this is to be able to know what is happening so that the strategy of the company’s marketing etc. can be adapted to this.
I look forward to seeing social media integrations in CRM, some of it has been available in Outlook for some time now using the Outlook social connector so from my perspective I have expected this for some time.
How CRM will be using Inside View is also interesting. I do now know if Microsoft have bought full rights to their software to enable it in Dynamics CRM without extra licensing or if it will be made available as some add-on license. Another interesting aspect of this is how extensible it will be or if it will be a more or less static functionality. I am personally hoping it will be very extensible since I would expect many customers to appreciate this functionality but probably ask for adaptions to it.
The integration of the social media data, from Twitter and Facebook to CRM will also be interesting. Since the amount of data available in these sites is no less than vast and stored in databases that are not SQL-based there might be interesting performance issues that might arise if the filtering of this functionality is not set correctly. I also hope that this functionality will be extensible as I would expect many customers to look for extensions or changes to this. Being a bit cynical, I don’t expect there will be though.
The three different categorizations of social channels seem logical, however, he didn’t really mention anything on how they were to manage the first two in CRM, if at all. Perhaps that would signal that there would be some adaptable functionality where you can plug-in any social adapter of your choice where you could also develop your own. But that is pure speculation, so we will have to see.
In general I welcome all of these new functions as they do bring really good value to the customers and let us just hope that our competitors are a few steps behind.
Gustaf Westerlund
MVP, CEO and owner at CRM-konsulterna AB
www.crmkonsulterna.se
by Gustaf Westerlund | Jul 6, 2012
My colleague Rickard Norström, who is a very skilled Dynamics CRM developer and consultant has finally started his own blog. Make sure you add it as he has many interesting perspectives on Dynamics CRM and consultancy around it.
Rickard Norström is my closest colleague and is involved with some of the more major installations of Dynamics CRM as well as iScala CRM implementations. He has worked with Dynamics CRM for about 2 years now in a variety of versions and has also held several courses, both for end uses, powerusers and other CRM consultants. He is very skilled in development, installations and configurations of Dynamics CRM, for instance he is currenlty working with an upgrade of a webfarm based CRM system that has some interesting issues. Make sure not to miss what he is writing!
You will find his blog at the following url:
Gustaf Westerlund
MVP, CEO and owner at CRM-konsulterna AB
www.crmkonsulterna.se
by Gustaf Westerlund | Jul 1, 2012
Today I was awarded the MVP status for Dynamics CRM! I am very grateful for this award and it is thanks to all of you who read my blog and value what I write that this was at all possible. So first of all, I want to give you all a this recognition.
I also hope this will give me further contacts and insights into what is going on within Microsoft despite the fact that some facts received in the MVP program are under strict NDA.
You can find my MVP profile here: https://mvp.support.microsoft.com/profile=C23EEC24-1A5A-41F1-9B53-A5C2C2B658EE
Gustaf Westerlund
MVP, CEO and owner at CRM-konsulterna AB
www.crmkonsulterna.se
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