2012 Canadian Leadership Summit–Day 2

On day 2, the Summit contained breakout sessions that allowed us to dig into some of the topics that were introduced on the first day.  More specifically we were able to dive into topics such as Windows 8 and the Consumerization of IT, Dynamics AX 2012 and CRM “R8”.

Consumerization of IT

With worker demographics changing, employees are now placing new demands on organizations to use more modern technology or let them use their own.  For many recent College graduates, they don’t remember a time when there wasn’t an internet.  For many employees, they have more computing power and modern equipment at home than they have in the office.  These situations are creating headaches for Infrastructure managers, IT Directors and CIOs.

Windows 8 provides some tools that address some of the needs of this emerging demographic.

Windows 8 for the Enterprise

• No compromise business tablet
• The flexibility of a tablet with the productivity of a desktop
• Picture Password -  No longer are you forced to remember some password with ridiculous password requirements.
• Touch first experience – introducing touch into Microsoft’s latest Operating System is not an afterthought.  This Operating System was built with touch in mind.
• “Always” Connected applications through live tiles.  No longer do end users have to open applications to determine whether they have received a new purchase order or be glued to their inbox for new alerts.  This information can be presented in form of a Live Tile much like you have on your Windows Phone 7.
• When in “Windows 7 mode” applications behave the same way as in Windows 7.  Not all applications will be “Metro” ready at launch or any time soon after that.  If you have an application that will run on Windows 7, it will run on Windows 8.
• You can dock “’Windows 8” applications beside “Windows 7” applications.  You know that feature in Windows 7 that allows you to dock applications side by side?  You can still do this in Windows 8 and can even doc a Windows 7 application with a Windows 8 application.
• Tablets can be managed by existing infrastructure tools like SCCM
• Innovative Devices
• Touch
• Long battery life
• Thinner, lighter, faster footprints
• Convertibles – want the traditional experience of a keyboard and mouse but the ability to detach your screen and use it as a tablet?  If so this functionality will available
• Workers who require more durable footprints will have the ability to use ruggedized laptops.
• Booting from a USB device
• They showed a demonstration where they had a Windows 7 computer and they inserted a USB key that contained a Windows 8 corporate image.  They rebooted the computer and they were able to boot Windows 8 off of the USB drive.  They then showed a demo where they were playing a video from the Windows 8 computer.  They pulled the USB drive out from the physical computer.  The video freezed.  The presenter then plugged the USB drive back in and the video resumed.  If you plug the USB key in within 60 seconds life is good.  If you take longer than 60 seconds then the machine will be shut down.
• This feature provides a lot of potential for people who want to bring their own device to work or where you have contractors who bring their own laptop but you want them to run your corporate Windows 8 image.
• Enhanced Bitlocker support
• Windows 7 introduced the ability to encrypt a USB key.  The problem was that you had to encrypt the entire volume of the drive.  If you had a larger USB key, like 32 GB or 64 GB, this operation took a long time.  New in Windows 8 is the ability to just encrypt the data instead of the entire volume.  This is a great balance between performance and security.
• New Security features
• New boot loader features will detect when OS files have been tampered with upon boot up.  If the boot loader detects malware, it will make a connection to obtain Anti malware drivers, load them and remove the malware.
• Virtualization and management
• VDI is a technology that allows organizations to operate a farm of virtualized windows clients.  Much like organizations can run virtualized server farms, they can also run virtual desktop farms.  Windows 8 offers a superior experience over Windows 7 VDI experience.
• Scrolling over VDI is very fluid even when using Touch.  This is rather remarkable considering that the Server hosting the Windows 8 image has no hardware support for touch.
• End users can pinch , zoom out and zoom in
• Full fidelity – watching video is flawless over LAN and WAN configurations
• USB re-direction allows you to plug in a USB device on local machine.  A signal then gets sent to the Host Server and is then rendered in the VDI session
• Storage Pools allow administrators to manage a pool of disk instead of have hard quota set for each client
• Windows 8 Market
• With 525 million Windows 7 users, Microsoft has high expectations for Windows 8 adoption and plans to offer a Windows Marketplace that supports 200 locales
• Consumerization of IT an Opportunity or Risk?
• It can be both
• Consumerization Device Scenarios
• On your own (low control)
• Bring your own (medium control)
• Choose your own (Enterprise full control)
• Here is your own (Enterprise Full Control
• Microsoft has different policies depending upon the scenario
• Classify devices and then provide the appropriate enforcements
• Access Strategy
• User Based: who are you (e.g.. No Access, read write, full control)
• Device Based: How much to I trust the device (e.g. managed vs. unmanaged)
• Location Based: Where are you? (e.g. intranet vs. Internet)

Dynamics 2012 AX

Prior to this event, I have not had a lot of exposure to Dynamics AX.  What became extremely evident is that Microsoft is very aggressive and committed to the ERP segment.  They are also not only interested in establishing a platform but are also interested in providing industry specific solutions.

 

Proactive Applications

• Knowing where we have been is no longer enough, we now need to know what is going to happen next
• End users need a UI based upon their role (Role Tailoring).  The CFO needs different info than the shipping clerk and the information better be populated on the front screen.
• Workflow Inside
• Can’t be a bolt on. Needs to be inherent in the application
• Visualization
• Use external data and make it apart of how you use internal data for forecasting.  For instance the weather having an impact on inventory positions.  We can use this data to compare patterns.  This will allow for additional insights from both internal and external data that has been collected.
• Out of the Box integration with Dynamics CRM so that you have 1 view of the customer

Microsoft’s Approach

• Simplicity and Agility
• Business Processes are subject to change so quickly that your ERP needs to have more agility than it has had in the past
• Cloud
• CRM online or on-premise
• This time next year you will be able to run AX in Microsoft’s cloud
• Microsoft Technology
• Dynamics is leveraging existing investments in other Microsoft technologies like:
• Kinect
• Office 365
• Bing
• Windows
• SQL Azure
• SharePoint
• Windows Phone
• Microsoft Lync

What is Dynamics 2012?

• Core ERP
• BI
• Industry solutions

Cloud on your terms

• Embrace Hybrid
• Pay as you go and Grow
• deliver choice

Other

• Microsoft is working on a Metro screens of Dynamics 2012
• Lines between AX and CRM are starting to blur
• Around 2000 people actively work in the AX organization

CRM – What’s coming down the pipeline?

Big trends in CRM

• Big Data
• Social
• Cloud
• Mobile
• Core CRM

CRM “R8”

• More Mobility options
• CRM on an IPAD will be released within the next few days
• IPAD version has synchronization capabilities you can go online-offline.
• Browser flexibility (support for other browsers like Firefox, Chrome, Safari)
• Social
• Partnerships with LinkedIn
• Both at the company level but also at the contact level
• News aggregation about your customers gets sucked in from external sources.
• CRM users also have the ability to share information from CRM to LinkedIn, Twitter, Facebook, Email or the CRM Activity Feed Wall which is a internal “posting board”
• Industry templates
• Repetitive Intellectual Property that has been acquired from ISVs and Partners
• Capital Markets/Wealth Management
• HealthCare/Health Plans
• Processed based Manufacturing
• Certifications
• Microsoft continues to be certify their offerings with industry standards

CRM Growth

• CRM is one of the fastest growing business within Microsoft
• Extensive Customer list across industries:
• Financial Services
• ING
• Barclay
• Professional Services
• Volt
• PointBridge
• Hitachi Consultin
• Manufacturing
• Volvo
• STAT Oil
• Niko
• Public Sector
• City of London
• Kent Fire and Rescu
• Retail
• Cold Stone
• BestBuy
• Health and life sciences
• Pfizer
• Novozyme
• Travel and entertainment
• Phoenix Suns
• Portland Trailblazers
• Toledo Mudhens
• Arizona Diamondbacks

So this concludes the 2012 Canadian Leadership Summit.  Overall, there was some good sessions.  I really enjoyed seeing what is coming down the pipeline in areas of Windows 8, Dynamics AX and CRM.

2012 Canadian Leadership Summit–Day 1

Every year Microsoft invites some key customers down to Redmond to see the latest and greatest technology.  The Summit is geared towards IT Leadership so unfortunately this time around  I will not get to hear Clemens Vasters speak about Service Bus during this trip to Redmond.

In the welcome session, they discussed the following

• This event continues to grow has 50% more attendees than last year
• Themes
• Saving Money and Gaining efficiencies
• Drive innovation
• Grow our Business
• Support changing User expectations
• Samsung has the exclusive rights to Surface
• New President of Microsoft Canada: Max Long

Sessions

 

Business of the Future (Dynamics AX and CRM)

Dynamics AX 2012 - Business Workloads and Suites

In this session we got the “state of the nation” when it comes to Microsoft’s Dynamics unit.  More specifically it related to Microsoft Dynamics 2012 and Dynamics CRM 2011.

A very common theme was around Workloads.  Workloads meaning processes and where those processes take place.  In some cases those Workloads may take place on-premise where as others may take place in the Cloud.  Also some Workloads may be supported natively by Dynamics AX 2012 and some may be supported by an ISV product.

Microsoft has been investing heavily in Workloads.  Below is a list of various Workloads that they support.  Some may be industry specific and others may be common within organizations (Expenses)

• Business Workloads
• Industry Operational Workloads
• Retail
• Manufacturing
• Distribution
• Horizontal Operational Workloads
• HCM
• Project
• Budget Formulation
• Expenses
• SRM
• Sales Force Automation
• Customer Car
• Marketing Automation
• Administrative “System of Record”
• HR
• Finance

Dynamics AX Adoption

• Great momentum in Retail sector for Dynamics
• Microsoft had a clear industry focus for this release
• Manufacturing
• Food and Beverage
• Chemical
• Public Sector capabilities were introduced
• Professional Services capabilities were introduced
• Acquiring or Building Intellectual Property to support more industry specific solutions
• Are now able to bring processes into a unified solution

Eating their own Dog Food

Microsoft runs on Dynamics AX

• Got rid of Seibel
• XBOX manufacturing is using Dynamics AX
• Expenses

Major Customers in Canada

• Royal Canadian Mint
• Pretro Canada
• Teck
• Subaru
• Techo-Bloc
• Wakefield
• Cordy
• Grics
• David’s Tea

Adding more core, industry specific capabilities is a good idea in my opinion.  Having spent a fair amount of time with SAP solutions, it is quite evident that SAP puts an emphasis on industry specific solutions like the Utilities module: ISU.  I always felt that Microsoft relied too much on 3rd party applications to fulfill these verticals.  I am happy to see them put more emphasis on industry.

 

CRM

The next portion of the session focused on CRM 2011.  They showed an amazing demo where they built a Metro user interface on top of CRM 2011.  The idea behind this was that this company (a beer company) has a mobile workforce that includes “Beer Rangers” (how cool of a job title is that).  These Beer Rangers are much like account managers.  They need to access CRM to manage their client engagements.  Previously, this Brewery had issues with CRM adoption.  They found that the Beer Rangers were not using CRM as much as they should have.

The user interface was extremely fluid.  You would not even know that this was a CRM system unless someone told you it was.  Since the target audience was a mobile workforce, this demonstration was done on a Windows 8 tablet. 

I am responsible for managing our CRM implementation at my organization.  My initial thoughts were that “I want that solution”.  It was amazing.

 

Neat Statistics

• In the last 6 months Microsoft has added 250k users
• 2.25 million users total
• 33k customers world wide
• 31 double digit growth quarters
• 60% of new customers use CRM Online

Major Customers in Canada

• Hydro One
• Globe and Mail
• Children’s Wish
• Big Brothers/Big Sisters
• Paladin
• Starshot
• Legal Aid Alberta
• Tourism Whistler

 

A Perspective on Cloud Computing & Adoption – Steve Martin

Steve delivered a very practical presentation on Windows Azure.  I have been to many Azure sessions that talked about how everyone needs to be in the cloud and made it seem like you were on the outside if you weren’t.  From the beginning, Steve mentioned that we would not see one Windows Azure logo in his presentation and he was right.  He gave a very forthcoming, honest talk on when and why you should use cloud.  He also provided a lot of candid information in areas when you should not use the cloud as it just does not make sense.

When should I embrace the cloud?

Economics

In the majority of cases you will not save money by moving a workload to the cloud. (Yes someone from Microsoft actually said this)  From Microsoft’s perspective they have seen customers save money when using Azure for:

• Dev/Test scenarios
• Temporary workloads
• Bursts
• Proof of Concepts – You can perform many tasks over the course of an afternoon for less than a cup of coffee.

He then offered that you will not save money in situations where:

• You have sustained (long term) utilization.  The cost of compute is still too high for financial benefits.

Architecture

People will move to the cloud to take advantage of Architecture building blocks that either do not exist on –premise or is outside that organization’s core competency.  From a personal perspective, this has always resonated with me. The pure elasticity of Azure is just not something that can be easily emulated within your own datacenter.  Also,  when I look at some of the opportunities that technologies like the Service Bus provide, it just makes sense to move some of these workloads into the cloud.

 

Who is adopting?

• Startups
• Are deferring capital expenses until they have reached the scale where spending the capital makes sense
• 32 of Global 100 are using some form of Azure
• Mixture of  DEV/TEST
• Pilots
• Some production

Cloud Adoption Patterns

• Publicly facing applications
• Applications that move between Public and Private
• Unpredictable & Variable Workloads
• Application Development (DEV/TEST)
• Temporary initiatives
• Sizing & Tuning for investment

Neat Statistics

• In the past 5 hours(from the time I arrived at the conference center to the time of writing):
• 6.49 million cloud compute hours were consumed
• 12 158 new virtual machines have been spun up
• Azure has the same amount of compute power as the entire universe had in 1999

 

Cloud is a double edge sword

You know the term “it takes money to make money”?  For many years companies that could afford to spend a lot of money on R&D and infrastructure had more opportunities to create the next big thing.  With Azure, and cloud computing in general, the playing field has now been leveled. Your competitors now have access to the same toolset that you have access to.  These toolsets will now allow businesses to scale at levels that previously just weren’t possible.  In fact, Professor Richard Foster of Yale University is predicting by by 2020 more than 3/4 of the S&P 500 will be companies that we have not heard of yet.  Considering where Facebook came from less than 10 years ago to approaching a 100 Billion dollar IPO, I agree with Professor Foster.

 

So that is some of the highlights from Day 1.  I will also publish my thoughts from Day 2 on Thursday.

BizTalk 2010: Line of Business Systems Integration Book has been released

For the past 10 months I have been involved in a project with 4 other talented individuals.  This project was a little different than the projects that I have been involved with in the past.  While other projects have always had some sort of documentation deliverable, documentation, in the form of a book was the main deliverable this time around.

While many BizTalk books exists, we felt there was an opportunity when it came to discussing Line of Business integration with BizTalk Server 2010.  With the amount of talent involved in this book, I am very confident we have filled some of the void that exists on this topic.

I would like the thank the following authors for their tremendous efforts:

• Richard Seroter
• Sergei Moukhnitski
• Thiago Almeida
• Carl Darski

I also want to thank our Technical Reviewers who spent a lot of hours reviewing our content and definitely increased the quality of the book:

• Ben Cline
• Stephen Thomas
• Mick Badran

You may now find the book available on the Packt Publishing site and on Amazon.com.

Catching SOAP Faults from CRM 4.0 Web Services

A natural follow up to my BizTalk 2010: Calling Dynamics CRM 4.0 Web Services post is one that deals with the Exceptions, or Faults,  that these Web Services may return.  When using the CRM 4.0 Adapter, the adapter would take care of handling SOAP exceptions and bundling them up into a CRM Response message that had a Return Code and Error Nodes.  Whether your operation was successful or not, you could always expect the same type of response message from CRM.

<ns0:Response xmlns:ns0="http://schemas.microsoft.com/crm/BizTalkAdapter/Response">

<Header>

<ReturnCode>1</ReturnCode>

<ErrorCode />

<ErrorString />

<Retryable />

</Header>

Now that we are not using this adapter anymore we need to be able to catch our own exceptions coming out of CRM.  If we don’t perform these actions below(or similar actions) we can expect an error message like the following.

 

Inner exception: Received unexpected message type 'http://schemas.xmlsoap.org/soap/envelope/#Fault' does not match expected type 'http://schemas.microsoft.com/crm/2007/WebServices#CreateResponse'.

The issue is we have a Solicit Response Send Port in which  we are sending a typed Request message into CRM and are expecting a typed Response message in return.  When we encounter a SOAP Fault, a typed message is being returned, it just isn’t what we are expecting.  In order to avoid these situations, we need to perform the following actions within our BizTalk solution. 

Note: these actions are not specific to CRM, but may be used in other Web Service scenarios.

• Create a multi-part message that includes a part that is of type BTS.soap_envelope_1__1.Fault.  You will find this schema in the Microsoft.BizTalk.GlobalPropertySchemas assembly.

• Right mouse click on your selected operation and select “New Fault Message”

• Select the Message Type to be the value of our Multi-part message that we just created.

• Add a scope around your send/receive shapes.  The transaction type can be “None” and the Exception Object Type should be set to the Fault that we just created within our Operation.

• So while technically this is defined as a message, within our current scope exception handler it is actually an object.  So if we wanted to dump the contents of this message to the Event Viewer we could perform the following actions by assigning the message to an XML Document and then getting the OuterXml so that we can send this text into the event viewer.

• At this point we can stop if we are so inclined.  If we wanted to actually use this information in our CRM Response message we can assign this “exception” object into an instance of a message that is of the same type (our multi-part message). 

 

• We then can use a Message Assignment shape to assign this object into an instance of our message.

• Now that we have a typed message, we can use this message in a map to instantiate an instance of our CRM Response.  To keep things simple I am just going to concatenate the faultcode, faultstring and faultactor values and assign to the CreateResult node.  If we wanted to get the actual details out, we will need to write a .Net helper method or use XSLT to extract this content out since we have an untyped “Any” node.

• After all of these changes, our Orchestration should look like this:

• We can now deploy our application and test it.  In order to generate a SOAP Fault, I am going to send in the same message as in my previous post, but this time I am going to make the First Name to be greater than 50 characters.

• Now when we process this message, we will not get an unhandled exception or suspended message.  Instead, we will see an informational message in our event viewer that contains the details that we are interested in.

• Also, we will send this error information to a folder in the form of a CreateResponse message that will include some SOAP Fault details.

<ns0:CreateResponse xmlns:ns1="http://schemas.microsoft.com/crm/2007/CoreTypes" xmlns:ns2="http://microsoft.com/wsdl/types/" xmlns:ns3="http://schemas.microsoft.com/crm/2006/Query" xmlns:ns0="http://schemas.microsoft.com/crm/2007/WebServices" xmlns:ns4="http://schemas.microsoft.com/crm/2006/Scheduling" xmlns:ns5="http://schemas.microsoft.com/crm/2006/WebServices" xmlns:ns6="http://schemas.microsoft.com/crm/2006/CoreTypes">

<ns0:CreateResult>soap:Server - Server was unable to process request. -</ns0:CreateResult>

</ns0:CreateResponse>

 

Note: some other blog posts mention using an XPATH statement, within our WCF Send Port,  for both types of messages that we are expecting; typed CRM response and SOAP Fault.  In my scenario, this step was not required since I am expecting a typed SOAP Fault exception object within my Scope – Exception handler.

BizTalk 2010: Calling Dynamics CRM 4.0 Web Services

The project that I am on ran into a critical and somewhat embarrassing situation this past week.  As we moved from a single node project environment into a multi-node test environment we discovered that the Dynamics 4.0 Adapter cannot be installed on multiple BizTalk Servers in the same group.  Yes – you read that correctly.  I have never heard of this kind of limitation and struggle with the idea the adapter was actually made available without this feature.  You can read more about this limitation in the FAQ section here.

With this in mind, we needed to quickly make a 180 degree turn.  I had heard of other people calling the ASMX CRM Web Services from BizTalk via WCF Adapter.  The process of consuming these ASMX services is much like consuming any other Web Service.  That is until you start your application and get the dreaded 401 Unauthorized error. 

 

System.ServiceModel.Security.MessageSecurityException: The HTTP request is unauthorized with client authentication scheme 'Negotiate'. The authentication header received from the server was 'Negotiate,NTLM'. ---> System.Net.WebException: The remote server returned an error: (401) Unauthorized

This seems like a pretty common error within the BizTalk and CRM forums.  However, I was not able find any resolutions to the issue.  It wasn’t until I started stepping through a .NET SDK sample that I realized that I was missing something and that was a required SOAP header.  For your convenience I have built an end to end sample that will walk through creating a Lead within a Dynamics 4.0 system. Keep an eye open for the Message Assignment shape where I assign this header.

• Once we have created a BizTalk project we need to “Add Generated Items” and then select “Consume WCF Service”

• Even though Dynamics 4.0 still uses ASMX style Web Services we can select “Metadata Exchange (MEX) endpoint.

• Enter the location of your CRM Web Service i.e. http://server/MSCrmServices/2007/CrmService.asmx and click on the “Get” button.

• Once the WSDL definition has been loaded, click the “Next” button to continue.
• Click “Import” to create your schemas and sample Orchestration.
• You should find that the following artifacts have been added to your BizTalk Solution.

• Our “main” schema is called CrmService_schemas_microsoft_com_crm_2007_WebServices.xsd.  Within this schema you will find all of the available Actions (Create/Update/Delete/Fetch etc) and the related entities (both custom and out of box).  In this scenario we are going to create a “Lead” within our CRM system.  So we can find the “Create” node and then scroll down and find the “Lead” entity.

 

• To keep things simple, I have created a little helper message that I will use in a Map to create an instance of this CRM Create message.

• Inside my map, I will simply map from this helper message to the actual CRM Request.

• With the building blocks in place, the next step was to update the  Orchestration that was generated for us.  Pretty standard stuff going on here.  We want to receive an instance of our “helper” message, transform it, send the request to CRM and then write the response to disk. 

• When we generated our CRM schemas, BizTalk also created a Port Type called “CrmServiceSoap” that contains all of the available operations including “Create”.

• Earlier in this post I mentioned that we need to set a SOAP header on the CRM Request message.  In order to do this we want to add a Message Assignment shape after our Transformation shape.
  
• Within this shape we want to set the following:

msgCreateCustomer (WCF.OutboundCustomHeaders) = "<headers><CrmAuthenticationToken xmlns=\"http://schemas.microsoft.com/crm/2007/WebServices\"><AuthenticationType xmlns=\"http://schemas.microsoft.com/crm/2007/CoreTypes\">0</AuthenticationType><OrganizationName xmlns=\"http://schemas.microsoft.com/crm/2007/CoreTypes\">YourOrganization</OrganizationName><CallerId xmlns=\"http://schemas.microsoft.com/crm/2007/CoreTypes\">00000000-0000-0000-0000-000000000000</CallerId></CrmAuthenticationToken></headers>";

• The two important settings are the “AuthenticationType” and the “OrganizationName” properties.    The Authentication property can take one of three values:
  • 0 – AD
  • 1 – Passport
  • 2 – Internet Facing Deployment
• Since this is an on-premise installation we will go with 0.
• The “OrganizationName” property becomes extremely important in multi-tenant configurations where you may have multiple organizations or departments sharing a CRM implementation.  Since we only have 1 organization in our deployment it is safe to just set our default value.
• It is now time to deploy and configure the BizTalk application.
• When BizTalk generated our CRM schemas and sample Orchestration, it also generated a Binding file.  When we import the binding file we will discover that two send ports have been created.  The first is a basicHttpBinding and the second send port uses a Custom Adapter with a Custom binding.  What is the difference?  Really it comes down to some addition security configuration that is available with the Custom adapter.

• Using these binding as is didn’t work for me.  I needed to change the WCF-Custom Adapter to use the basicHttpBinding.  I also had to make a few Security related changes including setting the Security “mode” was set to “TransportCredentialOnly”

• I also needed to set the “clientCredentialType” to “Windows”

• I wasn’t quite done here.  I also need to add an Endpoint Behavior.  In this case it was a “clientCredentials” behavior.  Within this behavior, I set “Windows” - “allowedImpersonation” = “Impersonation”

• At this point, I am ready to configure the rest of the application and start it.  Once started, I can process my sample helper message.
• Within my sample file, I have provided the following information.  Once processed by BizTalk, I expect this Lead to be created within our CRM system and the CRM response to be send to disk.

• The response from CRM is a GUID.

• Once we launch the Dynamics CRM GUI, I am able to find my Barry Sanders record. 

Conclusion

If you have high-availability requirements then I highly recommend abandoning the Dynamics CRM 4.0 adapter.  Currently, and I am not sure if there are any plans, CRM 2011 does not have an adapter so now is as good as time as any to make the move.   You can read more about CRM 2011 integration on Richard Seroter’s blog.  Also look for a chapter on CRM 2011 integration in our upcoming book.