Business Action Virtual Tour Recording – Day 4 – The Power of Choice

Last week we presented the content developed for the Business Action World Tour virtually via Live Meeting.  We had hundreds of people register and join us for these events.  The number one question people had was about getting access to the recordings for these events.  I now have all the recordings and will publish these along with the Questions and Answers we fielded along with the calls. 

On Day 4 (Thursday, April 30) we talked mostly about the Power of Choice in deploy of Dynamics CRM applications.  We also talked about the Azure Services Platform and how it can used to extend Dynamics CRM applications out to the internet to build out self-service applications for your customers, partners, citizens, etc.  We also spent some time walking through the Wide World Importers site to demonstrate just that.

I’ve provided the link to what I think is the best quality recording but have included an edited Q&A log combining questions from all 3 events.  We presented each session 3 times a day (2:00AM, 9:00AM and 6:00PM Pacific time).  Thanks to Trond Brande and Almut Tadsen for handling the 2:00AM calls.  Girish and I would have been pretty sleepy by the end of the week if they hadn’t done such a great job.  :)

Live Meeting Recording and PowerPoint Deck

I would recommend watching the High-Fidelity Recording available here. 

Update:  I’ve posted the PowerPoint decks for all the sessions on my SkyDrive.

Questions and Answers from Day 4

Question: Is this a Silverlight interface?
Answer: The flight booking page is in Silverlight. The Attendee portal is also Silverlight (you'll see that in a second). Everything else is built with simple ASP.NET.

Question: Are Dynamics CRM Live and the Azure Dynamics CRM services one and the same? Or do the Azure services offer more of the CRM capabilities for ISVs (such as custom plug-ins)?
Answer: Dynamics CRM Online (formerly CRM Live) is a finished service application. Windows Azure is a platform that you could use to host applications. Think of it as Windows for the cloud. CRM does not currently run on the windows Azure platform. It's been available for over a year while Azure is still in beta. We haven't made any announcements about moving CRM to Azure. I would expect that, over time, it will be moved there. You could use Azure today to build apps in the cloud that connect to CRM Online.

Question: As a ISV building vertical application on CRM, what's the best practice to manage customizations made by customers while control the versions of application. You know, MSCRM allow flexible customization for users without programming knowledge.
Answer: Answered verbally.

Question: Where are the Professional Developer conference videos?
Answer: https://channel9.msdn.com/pdc2008/

Question: Are there any plans to roll out CRM Online features such as landing pages, to partner hosted options?
Answer: Answered verbally

Question: Is it possible to set up a end users with crm online who don't have exchange, obviously the smaller sites - how does this work?
Answer: Answered verbally.

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