2009 updates ... A little late :)

Well, The last blog entry I made was back in November after the PDC and since then I have been pretty much lost between holidays and work. There was a time where i came very close to making an entry but then again couldn't find the effort to do it for some reason.
Anyways, rather than spending extra lines writing about me and of course i am not going to blubber about the economical crisis (I think All Networks are doing a great Job there :) ... so back to the basics, what's New on the CRM Side of Things ?

* To start, Microsoft released update Rollup 2 for Microsoft Dynamics CRM 4.0 mid January. If you remember they had released update roll up one, two month back, so why are they releasing this update now ?
Well, It turns out that the CRM Engineering Team changed strategy and is planning to release Update Rollups on 8-week cycles; therefore, Update Rollup 3 is scheduled for mid-March:

"While quality is the focus of every release, we are also trying to be predictable in our release schedule so that our customers can schedule deployments of our Update Rollups with confidence. In November, when we released Update Rollup 1, we set the date of Update Rollup 2 to January 15th and we met this time frame. We will do our best to establish a release rhythm that our customers can come to depend on"

** A New white paper is released titled "Improving Microsoft Dynamics CRM Performance and Securing Data with Microsoft SQL Server 2008"
It provides ways to improve performance and security of the CRM database, together with benchmark results and recommendations for implementation on SQL 2008. If you are implementing CRM with SQL 2008 than this document will guide you through best practices.

*** Christian published an interesting "What If" article on his Blog Titled :"Clarifying “What-If” scenarios regarding Leads and Opportunities in Dynamics CRM" If you are new to CRM, this article will guide you on how to create/qualify leads, opportunities, accounts in Microsoft CRM.

**** I came across an interesting white Paper published by "Right Now Technologies" titled: "Accelerate Your Customer-Centric Journey: Four Best Practices" It provides in depth guidance to 4 best practices you can follow to design a customer experience. you would need to register in order to access this white paper but the effort and knowledge are worthwhile.

Cheers,
M.G