Microsoft PartnerSource under construction???

These days Microsoft is reconstructing their PartnerSource extranet for partners. And it also seems they are not doing a fantastic job.

At least I am having lots of diffculties accessing the website,

I'm sorry too, why is it so difficult for Microsoft to upgrade a website - hopefully not becasuse they are using Sharepoint!

I'm wondering if I am the only one having difficulties with PartnerSource?

Microsoft gets rid of stack-ranking

Just read this rather interesting article about how Microsoft is abandoning their rating system which has been around for quite many years.

Read http://blogs.seattletimes.com/microsoftpri0/2013/11/12/microsoft-gets-rid-of-stacking-ranking-review-system/

Although quite many MS employees probably like the fact that this is going away I also believe the system had some good traits.

One aspect is the difficulty boxing people in, but the calibration part of the system which the article doesn't really mention was in my opinion part of ensuring that people were treated fairly.  The fact that different managers had to defend their ratings towards their fellow managers was a good thing. It was not easy to favour a bad-performing individual just because you liked him/her - and the ones truly shining were also identified in agreement with other managers.

It will be interesting to hear how the new system will deal with the cross-team calibration aspect in the future.

Dynamics UX?

I was just checking out the new Dynamics CRM 2013 and some of the User Experience (UX) elements showing up inside the trial version of Office 365.

Please disregard the danish UI texts in the screenshots...


I am wondering if this is the first example of a new general thin client UX from the Dynamics suite of products - or in other words, will the Dynamics CRM, AX and NAV product teams converge towards the same UX...

At first glimpse the interface looks quite appealing with hints to the Windows 8 tiles used in the menu access from the top-bar. The top menu is multilevel with more tiles showing up below the first ones if you click the small drop-down arrow.

What strikes me though is that the UX is not exatly touch-friendly. I would have expected something which works better on the Surface or similar devices. The drop down arrows are quite small and it's a bit difficult to hit the right places on my Lenovo Tablet 2.

What I am also noticing is that the UI loads asynchronously in the different parts of the page and that the loading time seems a bit slow at some times. The customer contact page took around 6 seconds on my normal HP laptop and 12 seconds on my Lenovo Tablet 2. Not critical by any means but not exactly snappy either.

 

In general it seems the menu approach is changing from the traditional Office Ribbon  to a more flat Windows 8 look-a-like with action buttons below the top-menu. It's still not completely carried out - try for instance the "advaced search" feature and you suddenly notice a new browser window opening with the Office ribbon UI appearing (click the "..." in the actionbutton line).

 

A cool quick search feature is the horizontal a-z indication below list pages which enables you to scoll to the records quickly (although I have no data in the demo below).

 

 

There are many interesting aspects of this UI/UX - some problems have been adressed in a good way - others not so much. I like the feature of "latest shown" which is accessible under each main menu. I don't necessarily like the - at times - very busy UI  wich buttons all over to click on. I think I counted more than 50 clickable buttons on the customer contact page.

 

It will be interesting to drill further into the user experience and see how much of this will be taken up by the other product teams over the coming releases of AX and CRM. 

Leaving the comfort zone

I am betting that over the next couple of years quite many people will have to go through a significant learning curve stepping out from their current comfort zone.

I am referring to many of the technical people spending the majority of their time inside "MorphX" (Dynamics AX development environment) or the equivalent Dynamics NAV development environment, "C/SIDE".

So far quite many ERP developers have been living inside a fairly protected environment. They have been able to focus on datamodelling and business logic without worrying too much about aspects of software architecture, design patterns, security, authentication, performance, user experience etc. Things which developers working from scratch spend quite a lot of time on before they can get to actually write the app functionality. Good for developer productivity (let Microsoft worry about these things) but perhaps not so future proof in terms of having a career as developer.

This is my brain storm list of technologies which I would consider if I was an AX developer today. Simply because I believe this is where the AX direction is going. The good news is that there are even more developers out there which knows about where we are heading than developers knowing where we are coming from.

• From MorphX to Team Foundation Server
• From X++ to C#
• From AIF to Webservices and WSDL's
• From flat files to XML and SOAP
• From SQL to SQL Azure
• From Intellimorph thick client to HTML/Javascript/JSON/Entity framework
• From manual test to Microsoft Test Manager/Lab Manager, coded UI and SoapUI 
• From Word to on-line HTML documentation

For many this will mean leaving the comfort zone. The ones being succesful are probabely the ones taking up the challenge.

Bill Gates - a role model to follow

I've had the pleasure of meeting Bill Gates on a few occasions when I worked at Microsoft. The first time was at an internal strategy workshop in Snowqualmie where Bill participated with a few other Microsoft executives and a bunch of us more "normal" employees. This was a fantastic inspiring couple of days and pretty awesome to see the dedication and engagement from the leadership team at Microsoft.
At another session I was participating in a so-called "Gates"review where we - as a product team - were presenting our new project to Bill and others. This was likewise a fantastic experience - although a bit more scary to experience the level of detail which he was capable of dealing with.

These days Bill Gates has dedicated his time to the Bill & Melinda Gates foundation where he is spending the majority of the money earned through Microsoft trying to improve health and fight poverty around the globe.

I just read a brillant interview with Bill Gates which I would recommend. It can be found here:

http://www.ft.com/cms/s/2/dacd1f84-41bf-11e3-b064-00144feabdc0.html#axzz2jkx7s3Hg

It's interesting to see that even though Bill has spent most of his life building technology he doesn't believe it in itself can save the world.

"I certainly love the IT thing,” he says. “But when we want to improve lives, you’ve got to deal with more basic things like child survival, child nutrition.”

As he also states in the interview [parafrased], "what is most important - internet connectivity or finding a vaccination for malaria". There is not doubt that these days Bill Gates prioritizes the disease challenges rather than bringing internet connectivity to everyone.

I'm not sure I've ever had a role model as such, but Bill Gates certainly could be one.

Read the article - it's truly inspiring.

EG aims to become the world's largest Microsoft ERP partner

After recently having been acquired by Axcel, the new board of directors have been formed. Check out the press release.

New chairman of the board is Klaus Holse, who some of us know from his past as Corporate VP, MBS Sales and Operations and later President Western Europe with Microsoft.

This is really good news which will help us in EG reaching our ambitions of becoming Microsoft's largest ERP implementation partner. I'm sure it will also help us grow our own portfolio of software solutions built on the Microsoft technology stack.

To integrate or not - thats' NOT the question

The real question is how to get integration done with a minimum effort and maximum future benefit.

Let me start by elaborating a bit on what I mean by integration.

Integration in my opinion the process of making two distinctly different systems work together in a well-defined, consistent and meaningful manner. For instance Dynamics AX and Dynamics CRM - or Dynamics AX and a vertical solution such as the Zynergy solution we are working on in EG Utility. By "different systems" I typically refer to different codebases which can be deployed and used independently in a meaningful way.

As noted before many people have for many years argued for all-in-one solutions like Dynamics AX. Many of them typically in order to avoid the frustration of integrations. The paradigm has been - let Microsoft worry about making it work. Why? Usually because integrations are difficult, cumbersome and provide less "richness" than something which is knitted tightly together.

But there are really just as many good arguments for why two integrated systems provide a better total solution than the all-in-one - even considering the trouble of integration. Take the example of Dynamics AX and Dynamics CRM.

AX is in my opinion (a little biased I admit) the worlds leading ERP solution. At some point some years ago some folks believed that it needed CRM functionality as well. However, that did not work out well - and later someone else invented Dynamics CRM. Which today provides much better CRM functionality.

Now, many mid-sized companies find themself in need of superb ERP functionality as well as superb CRM functionality and suddenly an integration project is born. If you then add a vertical best-of-breed solution to that mix you could end up with a three-way integration challenge.

The three-way integration project

For such project to succeed consider these aspects,

• How often does the different systems change (think release cycle, patching etc.)
• To which extent do upgrades impact the integration points
• Which depth of integration is required

The total complexity of the project typically grows with each of these parameters.

Dynamics Connector
For the Dynamics product suite, Microsoft has released an extensible "Connector" which has some pre-defined integration capabilities as well as an extensible adapter framework (check out MS Partnersource for more details).

For simple integrations (such as synchronizing selected datasets) a pre-defined framework like the connector may be a good idea. It reduces the plumbing code - or rather makes it more a configuration issue - and it probably increases the quality.

For more complex integrations the connector may not be sufficient. This goes especially if the requirement is integrating an end-to-end business process across different systems rather than merely synchronizing data. In this example it is preferred that the two systems already have some notion of business processes. Furthermore that the relevant entry- and exit points in those processes are exposed as web services and preferably supporting some kind of eventing mechanism.

Regarding the Dynamics Connector I have not heard of many projects using this. It would be interesting to get comments or examples from readers of this blog.

Service integration
Integrating two systems through web services is optimal if the two systems have well-defined interfaces with services which are designed with a business scenario in mind. Using a web service method forces the two independant systems to be designed to run both independently as well as connected.

The tricky thing is to design web services with the right granularity. They should be simple enough to be consumed (used) fairly easy, yet provide the right level of autonomous funtionality. If a system ends up with a service catalog of 5000 services it's either a really really large system or the services are too granular. On the other side if a system only has 5 services it's either a really really simple system or the services are way too generic.

Integrating different systems are in no way a simple job. If the end result make people swear and curse every time they are using it you've probably done a bad job. If the users don't know they are working with two systems you've probably done a really good job. In the latter I guess you can even talk about embedded systems. Two separate systems where users sees it as one embedded in the other is rarely found  - good examples can be dropped in the comments section.