I am currently in the middle of the blizzard of getting the company I am starting, up and running, taking care of all the customers we are moving from Hermelin IT-Partner, managing all the administration and so on. For us, you and me, who work with CRM, a customer centric approach should be obvious, so the customers are of course first why the webpage is still a bit slim.
One of my strong visions for the company is to be very focused. We will focus on the market leading CRM system, Microsoft Dynamics CRM and no other CRM systems or other systems at all. It is a very dynamics system and the possibilities are endless. On top of that there are huge numbers of third party products available and the only way of giving customers the best possible recommendations and services on how to adapt the CRM system and which 3:rd party product will give the customer the best bang for the buck is to focus. It is hard enough with just such a huge system as Microsoft Dynamics CRM, that working with more than it is just not possible.
Lauren Carlson at Software advice has assembled a list of their 15 favorite verticalizations for Microsoft Dynmaics CRM. It a good list to have in the back of you head when speaking to customers, why invent the the wheel twice? Have a look at it here: http://www.softwareadvice.com/articles/crm/microsoft-dynamics-crm-industry-solutions-our-20-favorites-1082010/ . These most certainly will give your customers a bigger bang for the buck.
Gustaf Westerlund
CEO, Chief Architect and co-Founder at CRM-konsulterna AB
http://www.crmkonsulterna.se/
Wednesday, August 25, 2010
Friday, August 20, 2010
Working with language translations and Dynamics CRM
I was recently preparing a demo for a potential customer here in Sweden, my last task at Logica, a company I am now leaving, which is a bit sad since I like the company and most especially my colleageus there.
When preparing this demo I was working with an english version of CRM but the demo was to be all in Swedish and the potential customer was a state-owned company which does all it's work in Swedish. Hence I needed to translate some of the customizations I had made and I had also used the eService accelerator and need to translate this aswell.
I hadn't actually done any translations previously, it had always been my colleagues doing this and it was a good lesson.
I exported the translations, opened the zip and started working with the translations in the xml. Wrong... despite the fact that it is xml it is actually an Excel document and I hadn't read that part and since my CRM server didn't have Excel installed, I didn't see the icon you can see when you do have Excel installed.
So, I was using Visual Studio to edit the translations and it was a bit of a hassle since it was quite a large document and visual studio didn't really like it.
Well, after some time I noticed that it had some tags saying it was an Excel document. So, I opened it in Excel and voilà a lot easier to work with. So, just a suggestion, don't do the same misstake and sometimes, RTFM.
Another thing I found was that it was a bit hard finding the right attributes in the rather large list and the solution was quite simple. When adding an attribute and entering the english display name, I added a string at the end, for instance "GWCRM". I could then use this as a search string in Excel when editing it, to find the correct displaynames to change. And when adding the swedish translation, I removed the "GWCRM" part at the end of the English.
This is the last day at Logica, all my best to my wonderful colleagues here and I wish you all the best of luck with your future business!
Gustaf Westerlund
CEO, Chief Architect and co-Founder at CRM-konsulterna AB
www.crmkonsulterna.se
When preparing this demo I was working with an english version of CRM but the demo was to be all in Swedish and the potential customer was a state-owned company which does all it's work in Swedish. Hence I needed to translate some of the customizations I had made and I had also used the eService accelerator and need to translate this aswell.
I hadn't actually done any translations previously, it had always been my colleagues doing this and it was a good lesson.
I exported the translations, opened the zip and started working with the translations in the xml. Wrong... despite the fact that it is xml it is actually an Excel document and I hadn't read that part and since my CRM server didn't have Excel installed, I didn't see the icon you can see when you do have Excel installed.
So, I was using Visual Studio to edit the translations and it was a bit of a hassle since it was quite a large document and visual studio didn't really like it.
Well, after some time I noticed that it had some tags saying it was an Excel document. So, I opened it in Excel and voilà a lot easier to work with. So, just a suggestion, don't do the same misstake and sometimes, RTFM.
Another thing I found was that it was a bit hard finding the right attributes in the rather large list and the solution was quite simple. When adding an attribute and entering the english display name, I added a string at the end, for instance "GWCRM". I could then use this as a search string in Excel when editing it, to find the correct displaynames to change. And when adding the swedish translation, I removed the "GWCRM" part at the end of the English.
This is the last day at Logica, all my best to my wonderful colleagues here and I wish you all the best of luck with your future business!
Gustaf Westerlund
CEO, Chief Architect and co-Founder at CRM-konsulterna AB
www.crmkonsulterna.se
Thursday, August 12, 2010
32 bit apps in 64 bit IIS 7
I havn't been working that much with IIS 7 and not on 64 bit environments yet. Always easier to work with what you know but sometimes you just have to get out of that comfort zone and grasp the new!
IIS 7 has a very different GUI from IIS 6 and there are many changes under the hull aswell.
I was trying to install the eService Accelerator on a 64 bit environment with IIS 7 on Windows Server 2008 R2 and the example portal (Fabrikam) gave me the following error:
Could not load file or assembly 'Microsoft.Crm.Sdk' or one of its dependencies. An attempt was made to load a program wih an incorrect format.
A little digging around and checking some blogs I found the error, the app pool was set up to not support 32 bit applications. The fix is to mark the app pool, click advanced settings, and under the general section, change the "Enable 32-Bit Applications" to true. Then you can just confirm this by updating the webpage.
Gustaf Westerlund
President, Chief Architect and co-Founder at CRM-konsulterna AB
www.crmkonsulterna.se
IIS 7 has a very different GUI from IIS 6 and there are many changes under the hull aswell.
I was trying to install the eService Accelerator on a 64 bit environment with IIS 7 on Windows Server 2008 R2 and the example portal (Fabrikam) gave me the following error:
Could not load file or assembly 'Microsoft.Crm.Sdk' or one of its dependencies. An attempt was made to load a program wih an incorrect format.
A little digging around and checking some blogs I found the error, the app pool was set up to not support 32 bit applications. The fix is to mark the app pool, click advanced settings, and under the general section, change the "Enable 32-Bit Applications" to true. Then you can just confirm this by updating the webpage.
Gustaf Westerlund
President, Chief Architect and co-Founder at CRM-konsulterna AB
www.crmkonsulterna.se
New times!
I am starting a new company together with Hermelin IT Partner (http://www.hermelin.com/). This new company will be named CRM-konsulterna, (CRM Consultants in Swedish) and will focus on Microsoft Dynamics CRM and related products only. We will drive to attract the foremost Microsoft Dynamics CRM consultants in Sweden and be the Dynamics CRM partner for customers in Sweden and also be the driver of Microsoft Dynamics CRM in Sweden in general. However, Rome wasn't built in a day and neither will this.
Are you interested in joining us or want to learn more of how we can help your company reach new heights, please send me an email at myfirstname.mylastname@crmkonsulterna.se and I think you can figure out what you need to change in that adress.
Gustaf Westerlund
President, Chief Architect and co-Founder at CRM-konsulterna AB
http://www.crmkonsulterna.se/
Are you interested in joining us or want to learn more of how we can help your company reach new heights, please send me an email at myfirstname.mylastname@crmkonsulterna.se and I think you can figure out what you need to change in that adress.
Gustaf Westerlund
President, Chief Architect and co-Founder at CRM-konsulterna AB
http://www.crmkonsulterna.se/
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