Welcome to Thinking Forward – my new blog built on top of the foundation that was laid by Surviving CRM in 2008-2019. As we’re approaching the turn of the decade, it’s a great moment to push myself into more actively exploring the world beyond CRM.
4 Stages of MS Cloud Business Apps Evolution
In the past I’ve written about the History of Microsoft CRM from it’s first 10 years. I’ve also explored how the platform evolution up until Dynamics CRM 2013 had changed the product and how we worked with it. This time I want to focus on specifically the Microsoft Cloud era. I started to think about […]
Yes, XRM Is The New Common Data Service
In November 2016 I wrote an article on LinkedIn with the title “No, Common Data Service is not the new XRM”. This was my response to the speculation that had emerged from Microsoft’s announcement of a new cloud-native platform to store, model and integrate business data with other (cloud) applications. This platform called CDS was […]
In Praise Of Code and No-Code
Two weeks ago Neil Benson wrote an excellent article on LinkedIn, as a response to a claim that everyone working as a functional consultant in a Dynamics 365 project team should also know how to write code. This really resonated with me and I shared the article, along with a bit of commentary of my […]
CRM Hindsight Is 20/20 – My Blogging Retrospective
It’s the end of another year, which means the blogosphere is filling up with “looking back” type of articles that examine the various topics discussed during the year. Analyzing past actions is activity that we all should probably spend time on a bit more frequently, although one day out of 365 is a good start. […]
History of Microsoft’s CRM Software
I recently read the news that Siebel had turned 20 years. Man, that is a respectable age for a CRM software product! Although its market share may have peaked 10 years ago already and today the discussion on the future of Siebel is now circling around the question of when will the last Siebel instance […]
Thank You, Readers!
Today Surviving CRM passed the 1,000 +1’s milestone on Google+. Wow! Thank you to all of you who’ve been reading the post over here on the blog or following the latest Microsoft Dynamics CRM news and links shared over at the Surviving CRM Google+ page. Even though I think the most immediate benefit from publishing […]
Making use of Dynamics CRM process automation capabilities
You shouldn’t use Dynamics CRM only for storing and presenting data entered by users, otherwise you’re really missing out on much of the capabilities that a CRM system has to offer. Sure, the immediate need for a CRM system will often be establishing a single location for customer data, rather than having it spread out […]
When will my cloud get updated? CRM Online and Update Rollup status
The benefits of running your Dynamics CRM application in Microsoft’s cloud is that you don’t have to worry about installing update rollups to your server, since MS takes care of all that maintenance. The downside is that you can’t be sure when exactly the updates take place. As we’re coming closer to the expected release […]
Dynamics CRM update & version madness explained
Things used to be simple back in 2005 when I started working with Microsoft Dynamics CRM (known as only Microsoft CRM back then). You pretty much knew that there would be a version update every 2-3 years. In between, there would be a number of hotfixes created to address software bugs, which were packaged as […]