Rules for Making a Good Impression.

Among the seven suggestions: Respond to e-mails within 24 hours. And don't use business cards as cues to bombard new contacts with pitches.

 

By Carmine Gallo

Here are seven rules that will guarantee a strong first impression and a powerful, lasting one.

Rule #1: Respond within 24 Hours

During the course of researching my next book, I came across an interesting trend. The people who run the most successful companies are the most responsive. When I leave a voice message or send an e-mail these individuals get back to me immediately with information, whether they're at the office or traveling. One woman who oversees 5,000 employees makes it a policy to respond to e-mail within 24 hours. She says her responsiveness provides a model for her employees. If she responds quickly to employee questions or concerns, they in turn understand the importance of getting back to customers in a short amount of time.

Even if you don't have an immediate answer, acknowledge receiving an e-mail or voice message within 24 hours or less, and let the person know you're considering the request or taking action on it.

Rule #2: Greet People with Enthusiasm

When a customer or employee calls and you choose to answer, it implies that you have time to talk. Far too many people continue to multitask during phone conversations. Those of us on the other end of the line can sense it, especially when you give one-word answers to our questions and we hear typing in the background!

Give your customers and employees your full attention. Greet them like you're sincerely excited to hear from them. And if the time isn't right, be professional enough to set a later time to give them your full attention.

Rule #3: Make Eye Contact

In conversations with customers or employees, look them in the eye. I know you might love your Blackberry, but please refrain from checking your device during the conversation. Think about how it makes you feel when the person you're talking to continually takes her eyes off you to check out other people in the room. I'll tell you how I feel—like it's a waste of time to even finish the conversation.

Give customers and employees your full attention. It makes people feel as though their opinions and insights are valued. It will help you make a powerful and lasting impression.

Rule #4: Leave Smart Voice Messages

First of all, don't leave long, rambling messages with your phone number at the end. Keep the script concise. Leave your name, time you called, and phone number at the beginning. Repeat the phone number at the end, s-l-o-w-l-y. There's also nothing worse than a drawn out game of phone tag. It can't hurt to leave a specific time when you can be reached. Of course, if you leave a time, be there to answer the call!

Rule #5: Respect Contacts

A conference organizer recently told me attendees have started complaining about fellow participants who treat business cards they have picked up at booths as open invitations to cram in-boxes with solicitations. If someone gives you a card, it's an invitation to begin a conversation. It isn't permission to leave a constant bombardment of e-mail sales pitches under the guise of "newsletters." It's also not an invitation to send 10-MB files that explain what your business does.

Rule #6: Mind Your E-Mail

Speaking of e-mail, keep your correspondence concise. Time is limited. Use a subject line with no more than three to five words that grab your reader's attention. Give the pertinent information in the first line or two, and keep your correspondence to one or two short paragraphs (unless of course a detailed memorandum is expected). Also, don't forget to use proper punctuation and grammar. The spell-check function exists on your computer for a reason. Use it.

Rule #7: Remember Small Touches

When was the last time you received a handwritten note? I bet you remember it. I do. After a brief conversation with the chief executive officer of a well-known franchisor, I was surprised to receive an envelope in the mail with a short handwritten thank-you note along with several coupons for his product. The coupons were for small amounts, but the gesture left a big impression on me.

My insurance and financial planning adviser gets plenty of business from me because of numerous, small touches during the year. Several times a year I can expect to receive a handwritten note, a short voice message, or a copy of an article that I might find valuable given what he knows about my interests. None of these touches are accompanied by a hard sell, but I wouldn't consider bringing my business to anyone else.

Business is far too competitive to risk making a bad impression. But it's not that hard to make a positive one. Just think about the way you like to be treated as a client. Follow these seven rules to stand apart.

For more information about this article please visit http://www.businessweek.com/smallbiz/content/apr2007/sb20070425_158557.htm?campaign_id=rss_topStories

 

 

Warmest Regards,

Faisal F. Bin Zarah | فيصــل فهــد بــن زرعـــه

Marketing Manager | Samama Technologies

IIS 7.0 Features

IIS 7.0 New features

Wondering what the new features in IIS 7.0 going to be? Here you go! you can get a glimpse of IIS 7.0 in this article.

     IIS7 will ship with both Windows Vista and Windows Longhorn Server. It's obvious that Microsoft has put a lot of time and effort into this release and you can expect IIS7 to be the platform of choice as soon as people can get their servers upgraded. It includes a several new functionalities with very rich integration with ASP.NET.

Feature 1: HttpModules and HttpHandlers can participate in all the requests i.e we can have a ASP.NET HttpModule for a JSP or PHP page even. Building HTTPmodules for authentication, authorization, logging, url-rewriting, auditing now will be very easy with .NET.

Feature 2: ASP.NET configuration can be integrated with IIS. IIS now uses the same web.config configuration model, which means you can have both configure ASP.NET and IIS in a single web.config file. You can now set things like default pages, IIS security, logging, etc within a web.config file and xcopy/ftp it to a server.

Feature 3: This has an integrated Admin UI tool that can manage both IIS and ASP.NET settings. Rich GUI supports settings for Membership, Roles and Profile providers. This tool also supports remote delegated admin over http -- which means you can point the rich-client admin tool at a shared host server and manage your users/roles/profile settings remotely over http.

Feature 4: It provides better request auditing and error debugging. A new functionality called "Failed Request Event Buffering" (affectionately known as "FREB") is introduced. This allows administrators to configure applications to automatically save request information anytime an error occurs during a request, or if a request takes longer than a specified amount of time to complete. This allows us to analyze what exactly happened during a request failure and what errors or exceptions have occurred. This can capture tracing messages generated within ASP.NET or within any component or class library that uses System.Diagnostics -- which makes it much easier for developers and admins to instrument and analyze what is going on with systems at runtimes.

Feature 5: It provides better configuration APIs and command-line tools. In addition to new config and admin APIs, we now have a great command-line admin story that you can use to set/modify/retrieve all configuration information as well as manage the server (start/stop individual apps, lookup their health state, register new apps, refresh SSL certs, etc). The class hierarchy in brief can be figured as:

A code snippet uses the new .NET APIs to query IIS7 to list the active worker processes on the computer. It also lists the Requests and other details about the request like Url, Clinet IP address ..etc.

ServerManager iisManager = new ServerManager();
 
 

foreach(WorkerProcess w3wp in iisManager.WorkerProcesses) 
 
 

{
 
 

    Console.WriteLine("W3WP ({0})", w3wp.ProcessId);
 
 

    foreach (Request request in w3wp.GetRequests(0)) 
 
 

    {
 
 

        Console.WriteLine("{0} - {1},{2},{3}",
 
 

        request.Url,
 
 

        request.ClientIPAddr,
 
 

        request.TimeElapsed,
 
 

        request.TimeInState);
 
 

    }
 
 

}

Feature 7: Let us examine the new management UI. Here's what the new IIS Manager looks like:

The first thing to notice is the new "Features View" which is shown above. While you can still use the "Content View" to show the files that make up your Web Site in the main pane of the tool, most of the time you'll be using the "Features View" to change site and application settings.

Feature 8: "Actions" pane is a task-based pane shows you the most common tasks that are related to the currently selected object. For example, here's a close up of the "Actions" pane as it looks when the "Default Web Site" is the currently selected object.

 

The contents of the "Actions" pane will naturally change as the selected object changes, but this pane is where you'll generally find links that lead you through most of your common admin tasks.

Feature 9: Modular Architecture


Unless you've been living under a rock somewhere for the past few years, you've heard about all the problems that IIS has had when it comes to security. In earlier versions of IIS, it was either installed or it wasn't. If IIS was installed then all the features were installed. In an attempt to minimize potential vulnerability, in IIS 6, the majority of features were disabled by default, but they still got installed. This time around Microsoft has taken the next logical step. IIS7 is almost completely modular. Take a look at the installation screen:

Now granted, I've installed everything to play around with it all, but on a production server, you now have the flexibility to install only the features you need. That way if you don't use CGI, then you don't need to worry about some new bug that someone finds in the CGI handler. You also won't need to install a patch and reboot, because the affected code was never even installed on your server so there's nothing to patch!

Pakistan partner newsletter - Maison Consulting & Solutions news

 

Partners in motion | October 08

Kamal Ahmed's Message Pakistan's economy has slowed down after a period of massive growth. In the next two years, businesses will focus on cost cutting and removing inefficiencies from their operations. Investments in capacity expansion will slow down and businesses will consolidate their IT infrastructures. Microsoft, in collaboration with its partners, is driving initiatives to promote infrastructure optimization efforts so that businesses can be more efficient in their systems and processes. This slowdown will give businesses an ideal opportunity to gain a competitive edge over their competitors by investing in a reliable and scalable IT infrastructure which will be well in place by the time the economy gets back on track again. The local IT sector has come a long way from being an outsourcing destination for big IT industries for low value added jobs. Pakistan's IT sector can now deliver bigger projects in a more reliable and efficient manner in the international market. In the next few years, more and more international projects should come our way, enabling us to earn valuable foreign exchange for the country. The overall economy is under strain and this compels the businesses to cut down their costs. Pakistan's IT sector can bring in the much needed realization that an effective and dependable IT infrastructure can help control costs and provide a much needed competitive advantage to the local companies. Pakistan's IT sector should focus on attracting international businesses to adopt Pakistan's IT companies for their IT requirements. This will enable our IT sector to stay abreast with the latest IT technologies and practices and bring in the much needed foreign exchange for the country. Kamal Ahmed Country General Manager Microsoft Pakistan

Through Partner Marketing Dear Valued Partner, Through Partner Marketing (TPM) is a concept for our valued partners to generate revenue and active pipeline of customers for achieving their revenue targets. The main objectives of the TPM's are to: ·         Generate PQPs (Partner Qualified Prospect) from the Target Market. ·         Enable Partners to educate prospects about Microsoft Solutions and Products (based on customer campaigns). ·         Enable Partners to identify and interact with potential new customers. ·         Show that Microsoft Pakistan supports its partners and the Industry by being present in such events. ·         Introduce Microsoft Solutions to customers through our managed Partners in Pakistan. ·         Activate the Microsoft Partner Marketing Center which includes all the Microsoft Customer Campaigns for partners to use in their marketing efforts. To easily and cost-effectively execute the campaigns, Microsoft has created customizable marketing templates such as, emails, business letters, flyers and postcards for direct marketing and event and online resources for generating leads through event and online marketing activities. ·         Revenue opportunities approximately can be USD7000 per deal with approx 40% success ratio. What do you need to run a Through Partner Marketing (TPM) Campaign: ·         TPM is a small event of 10 - 15 customers, you can invite them at your premises or if required this can be accommodated at Microsoft Pakistan office in Karachi and Islamabad. ·         It should be an event of 2 - 3 hours with the following agenda; Customer Promotion - Explain which customer promotions are active and how a customer can get the benefit out of it, or we can highlight any other specific Microsoft product which needs to be focused on specific customer accounts Product Presentation - Arrange a technical resource from your organization to present on the MS Products which are being offered. ·         You can access Partner Marketing Center through MSPP portal to run customer campaigns. All partner levels can get the customizable marketing templates such as, emails, business letters, flyers and postcards for direct marketing and events such as TPMs. ·         You will require to invite 30 potential customers to get the attendance of 15 customers per TPM. ·         Kindly follow-up with all your customers after sending the invitation with the final agenda. Every partner needs to ensure that the customers have confirmed their availability and will be punctual for the events. Prompt follow-ups are key to success on such events. ·         Quality Criteria - 85% of our customer audience should be converted into PQPs. Every partner should call potential customers who are easy to convert into PQPs and will help in closing the deals accordingly. ·         Every partner needs to draft a feedback form for generating PQPs and share the excel sheet with the relevant Partner Account Manager (PAM) in Microsoft Pakistan. What does Microsoft Pakistan Expect from a Partner: ·         Each managed partner is required to do one TPM every quarter. Partners who have presence in other cities will also do one TPM every quarter in each of the other major cities. ·         Each managed partner will generate PQPs for Microsoft Pakistan. ·         Minimum 40% success ratio of the PQPs generated through TPMs. ·         Average deal size should be US$7,000   Certified Partners for Learning Solutions (CPLS) in Pakistan KalSoft Academy http://www.ekalsoft.com Farhan Usman +9221 5393291-3 +92 322 2703208 academy@ekalsoft.com CTTC (Pvt) Ltd http://www.cttc.net.pk Farrukh Nizami +9221 4310956-58 +92 300 8219943 enrollment@cttc.net.pk New Horizons Pakistan http://www.nhpakistan.com.pk Muhammad Enam Ur Rehman +9221 4382352-4 +92 300 3374553 enam.rehman@nhpakistan.com Expert Academy http://www.expertacademy.pk Mubbashir Ahmad +92 321 5173655 info@expertacademy.pk For more information on Certified Partners for Learning Solutions (CPLS) in Pakistan, contact Taimur Mughal at i-tamm@microsoft.com Microsoft Consulting Services In order to facilitate our partners to help position Microsoft Solutions with a proven and tested delivery team, MCS (Microsoft Consulting Services) brings the valued Microsoft based business intelligence solution packaged as MEC (Microsoft Enterprise Cube) offering to customers/partners in PK. This offering is primarily owned by MCS but Microsoft partner can help sell this effective service to customers and help leverage a great revenue and sales opportunity both from licenses and services. More details as follows: Success in the highly competitive telecommunications industry can be determined by a service provider's ability to measure its business performance. Most service providers have vast amounts of subscriber data stored in enterprise resource planning systems, customer relationship management systems, database warehouses, and similar systems. However, these systems frequently operate in isolation, and integrating them is expensive, complex, and time consuming. This disconnected infrastructure causes service providers to spend a significant amount of time analyzing data to identify: ·         Subscribers who spend the most on services. ·         Subscribers who dilute profits. ·         Services that improve subscriber loyalty. ·         Services which are underused. Service providers need a simple, cost-effective solution that overlays existing systems and aggregates disparate information into a single viewpoint. This would allow every analyst in the organization to understand who is using which services, and how, when, and where these services are being used. Microsoft® Enterprise Cube (MEC) is a solution that helps service providers bring their disparate information together. This flexible, easy-to-use business performance management solution provides deep insight into existing processes and subscriber behaviors, and helps service providers reduce overhead while improving customer management. Built on familiar Microsoft technology, the solution also supports a low total cost of ownership (TCO), provides data models that help service providers comply with corporate standards, and addresses the long-term needs of the telecommunications industry.   For more information refer to the datasheet on Microsoft Enterprise Cube or contact Fareed Mohammed Khan on fareedmk@microsoft.com Maison Consulting & Solutions Makes it to Microsoft Dynamics President Club MAISON CONSULTING & SOLUTIONS has been named to the 2008 Microsoft Dynamics President's Club, receiving recognition from Microsoft Corp. for its dedicated commitment to customers. This honor reflects Maison's success in extending the Microsoft Dynamics platform to drive business advantages in companies across Pakistan. This recognition came during the Microsoft Worldwide Partner Conference 2008 in Houston. The elite club recognizes the top 5 percent of Microsoft Business Solutions partners worldwide and their constant dedication to delivering solutions that meet their customers' unique needs, active pursuit of product and technological advancement, and impressive sales performance. "Microsoft is Pakistan proud to congratulate Maison Consulting & Solutions on being named to this year's Microsoft Dynamics President's Club," the only partner to receive this honor from Pakistan. Maison not only has demonstrated a high level of product expertise, but also has provided a superior level of service and commitment to our Microsoft Dynamics customers, ultimately contributing to the overall success of Microsoft Dynamics and companies worldwide." Maison Consulting & Solutions (http://www.m-consultants.com) is a leading Business Solutions company involved in the implementation of Dynamics ERP and CRM solutions offering a wide array of cost-effective, personalized services to help your organization meet its business goals. About Microsoft Dynamics Microsoft Dynamics is a line of financial, customer relationship and a supply chain management solution that helps businesses work more effectively. Delivered through a network of channel partners providing specialized services, these integrated, adaptable business management solutions work like and with familiar Microsoft software to streamline processes across an entire business.   Virtualization from Desktop to the Datacenter For a fact, computing has become more ubiquitous, more powerful and more portable and has dramatically improved businesses' ability to provide employees with the capabilities needed to capitalize on new opportunities. At the same time, however, the cost and complexity of managing all of this has never been higher. For IT departments, the result is a growing number of contradictory requirements: agility and ease of access vs. security and compliance; performance vs. cost; innovation vs. reliability and continuity. In many ways, the biggest challenge that IT professionals face today is resolving the tension inherent in trying to create an information infrastructure that provides both flexibility and control. This is where the concept of 'virtualization' settles in. Virtualization is the act of isolating or unbinding one computing resource from others. It is to be applied to all layers of a computing stack, from the data center to the desktop. Rather than locking the various layers together - the operating system (OS) to the hardware, the application to the OS, and the user interface to the local machine. This concept of virtualization, however, is not as new as some people may think: virtual machine technology for time-sharing on mainframes dates back to the 1960s. It's the confluence of challenging business demands and the emergence of virtualization technologies that span the entire stack and has paved way for virtualization to emerge as an essential for today's organizations. The benefits; Virtualization is a transformational technology that, if effectively employed, can help companies create IT systems that are not only highly efficient and cost effective, but that have the self-awareness to adapt automatically and instantly to deliver the capabilities needed as business conditions change. Virtual Machine technology is one of the most exciting and transformative technologies to change the cost of IT infrastructure. Enhanced administrative productivity and responsiveness- Virtualization enables IT organizations to enhance their administrative productivity and rapidly deploy new servers to address changing business needs. Efficient use of hardware resources- Virtual machine isolation and resource management enable multiple workloads to coexist on fewer servers, allowing organizations to make more efficient use of their hardware resources. Increasing operational agility- Virtual Machine Manager provides a mechanism to enable functionality such as rapid server provisioning, rapid recovery, and scalable migration capability to make the overall virtual infrastructure robust and easy to manage. Intelligent Placement: Virtual Machine Manager brings a deep and holistic approach to placement and combines the knowledge from historical performance data of the virtual workload and the intelligence about the virtual host system. Self-service provisioning: Virtual infrastructure is commonly used in test and development environments where there is consistent provisioning and teardown of virtual machines for testing purposes. With Virtual Machine Manager, administrators can selectively extend self-provisioning capabilities to user groups and be able to define quotas. Microsoft's Strategy for Virtualization The Microsoft datacenter-to-desktop virtualization strategy enables businesses to leverage virtualization benefits throughout the organization. Hyper-V is an integral part of the overall Microsoft virtualization strategy. Microsoft's virtualization strategy includes five key components: ·         Server virtualization, enabling multiple servers to run on the same physical server   ·         Presentation virtualization, enabling remote users to access their office desktops or server-based applications   ·         Desktop virtualization, enabling desktop operating systems to be consolidated into the datacenter   ·         Application virtualization, helping to prevent conflicts between applications on the same PC   ·         Comprehensive management, tying virtual components into the same management tools used to monitor and control physical components   Server Virtualization Microsoft has two server virtualization offerings: Hyper-V in Windows Server 2008, and Virtual Server 2005 R2. Hyper-V extends virtualization capability to manage 32-bit Virtual machines alongside 64-bit Virtual machines, enable Virtual machines to access larger amounts of memory, and enable Virtual machines to leverage multiple processors. Virtualization is a key feature of the operating system and helps customers get complete isolation of the different virtual machines and still benefit from server consolidation. Presentation Virtualization Presentation virtualization is a technology that enables applications to execute on a remote server, yet display its user interface locally. Microsoft's presentation virtualization technology, Microsoft Terminal Services, enables remote users to connect to their office desktops from anywhere in the world, taking full advantage of applications, resources, and familiar interfaces even from computers with different operating systems or system capabilities. Administrators can access system management tools from remote locations, for example, or applications can be run on a server and accessed by remote users. Presentation virtualization enables customers to centralize and secure data, reduce cost of managing applications, reduce test costs for compatibility between the OS and applications, and potentially improve the performance of systems overall. Desktop Virtualization When server virtualization is used host client OSes for remote access, this approach is often called desktop virtualization. While the principles of desktop virtualization are similar to server virtualization, this approach can be useful in a variety of situations. One of the most common is to deal with incompatibility between applications and desktop operating systems. For example, suppose a user running Windows Vista needs to use an application that runs only on Windows XP with Service Pack 2. By creating a VM that runs this older operating system, then installing the application in that VM, this problem can be solved. Microsoft VirtualPC is an example of a solution in this space to help address the scenario for hosting VMs in a desktop environment for application compatibility. Application Virtualization Application virtualization helps isolate the application running environment from the operating system install requirements by creating application-specific copies of all shared resources and helps reduce application to application incompatibility and testing needs. With Microsoft Application Virtualization (App-V) a.k.a SoftGrid, desktop and network users can also reduce application installation time and eliminate potential conflicts between applications by giving each application a virtual environment that's not quite as extensive as an entire virtual machine. By providing an abstracted view of key parts of the system, application virtualization reduces the time and expense required to deploy and update applications.   Microsoft's Products for Virtualization Microsoft offers a comprehensive set of technologies to virtualize servers, applications, and desktop PCs. Equally as important; Microsoft provides a powerful toolset for managing both the virtual and physical resources in a unified environment, reducing system complexity and streamlining management tasks. Resources: For more information please check: http://www.microsoft.com/virtualization Or Contact: zafaru@microsoft.com OEM rewards distribution night OEM recently held to 2 partner events in Karachi & Lahore. These events were a little different from the routine events OEM has been holding. The idea of this event was for the partners to mingle with each other in a relaxed environment. The event that was held in Karachi and Lahore had three components: Award distribution, Lucky draws and musical function. This event also provided excellent opportunity for Networking. The winners were given awards for their sales efforts in Q4. This gave partners encouragement and recognition. The event was kicked off by Faysal Kiyani PAM OEM which was followed by keynote address of Mr. Shahzad Khan, Lead OEM. The awards were announced category wise in four categories. The first prize being a 4 day paid vacation to Egypt. Lucky draws were also held from time to time and kept the audience at the edge of their seats. The partners thoroughly enjoyed the musical and comedy show that was put up by the local talented artists. All the activities were followed by dinner. 80 people attended the event in Karachi and over 300 people were present in Lahore. In his closing remarks Shahzad Khan thanked the partners for attending the event and assured them that the OEM business will be even more rewarding in the future.   Microsoft Innovation Center Microsoft Innovation Centers provide customers and partners with a comprehensive set of Programs and services. The goal of these centers is to foster innovation and growth in local Software Economies. In Pakistan, Microsoft Innovation Center provides access to world-class resources for students, software developers, IT professionals, academic researchers and Entrepreneurs. Primary areas of focus include: 1.    Building skills and intellectual capital through training courses, employment programs and mentoring experiences.   2.    Fostering industry partnerships through programs on how to work successfully with Microsoft, as well as through the cultivation of local and regional industry alliances.   3.    Increasing innovation at the local through hands-on engagements, such as labs geared towards the interests of ISVs, startups, partners, students and entrepreneurs. Microsoft Innovation Center - Pakistan is operated by Microsoft in alliance with National University of Computer and Emerging Sciences (FAST-NU). We partner with local government, academic institutions, industry organizations and software vendors with the ultimate goal of fueling long-term economic growth in the IT industry.

 

Employees and employer

1. Are you a crutch for your employees? If you design your schedule around your employees, cater to their work requirements and preferences or perform any part of their job, then you're acting like a classic over-pleaser. Your employees surely appreciate your willingness to take on their workloads, but you risk becoming their crutch instead of their leader.

 

2. Do your employees report to you or do you chase after them for updates? If you find yourself checking, chasing or repeatedly requesting updates from employees to find out what is going on in your own business, you need to try something different. The "hate to bother you . . ." management approach is a classic trait of serial pleasers. But it harms your business by keeping you out of the loop on daily and important developments.

 

3. Do you counsel employees on their personal troubles? If you spend any part of your day listening to or counseling employees about their personal problems, you may be running a shelter instead of a business. Worse, if you subsidize housing or transportation for your employees, loan them money, hire lawyers for them or grant time off that isn't accounted for, your business may become a costly vehicle for enablement rather than a profitable place of employment. You compromise your future if you focus on providing shelter for troubled souls. Has it happened already?

 

4. Are your employees not paying for themselves? Do your employees justify their pay through productivity? Employees must deliver value greater than all the costs incurred in hiring, training and retaining them. Otherwise, keeping employees becomes another extension of pleasing vs. being accountable to your business's success. This dead-end situation causes long-term consequences for you and your company.

 

5. Do your employees make more money than you do? If you're not taking home more money than your employees, you've set yourself up for problems. Business owners shouldn't go without a paycheck or get paid less than their employees. This signals fiscal scarcity and OPS behavior that is both risky and dangerous to the health of your business.

 

 

Farhan Ahmad, CTO & Senior Consultant

Maison Consulting & Solutions (Your ERP & CRM Partner.....Microsoft Certified Gold - Dynamics AX, GP, CRM)

Cell: +92 (321) 8488116, Land: +92 42 5203469, KSA Cell: +966 54 119 3986

UAE Cell:+971 55 856 4023, http://www.m-consultants.com

 

The Microsoft Dynamics GP Demo Site

The new Microsoft Dynamics GP Demo Site is so cool, you just got to see it.  Probably the coolest thing you will see all year!! 

And, it goes beyond just cool, there is a huge value:

· Partners can use it with prospect and existing customers. 

· People can download parts of it to display on their websites or use in presentations.

· Businesses interested in becoming a partner will get value from it.

· Anyone needing an overview of Dynamics GP, should see this.

The Microsoft Dynamics GP Demo Site

Please take a look at the site today and evangelize it.

With Dynamics, Microsoft's ERP and CRM Business Apps Go Head-to-Head with Oracle and SAP

 

ERP has been a two-horse race between SAP and Oracle for years. Microsoft's Chris Caren is battling to change that, with the company's Dynamics ERP and CRM products. Here's his take on what Dynamics is delivering to enterprises as compared with its entrenched rivals.

By Thomas Wailgum

October 29, 2008 — CIO — Enterprise software analysts and industry observers usually refer to the competition in the ERP and CRM space as essentially a two-horse race between Oracle and SAP. The breadth of applications in both vendors' stables, their collective R&D budgets, and the fact that these giants aren't shy about buying up the competition cements that market reality.

But watch out, SAP and Oracle. While continuing to bludgeon and attack each other as they go after SMBs, both vendors now must look over their shoulders at hard-charging Microsoft and its burgeoning Dynamics set of business applications.

"Microsoft remains a relative newcomer to the business applications market," notes Warren Wilson, a research director at Ovum, in a report. "However, it is committing more and more resources to its Dynamics solutions, and its ability to integrate Dynamics with its ubiquitous Windows applications—especially Office—makes Microsoft a threat that neither SAP nor Oracle can afford to take lightly."

CIO.com Senior Editor Thomas Wailgum recently talked with Chris Caren, general manager of product management and marketing for Microsoft's Dynamics line of ERP and CRM products. Caren described the overriding strategy for the Dynamics line and how the software will take advantage of users' familiarity with the Office suite. He also explained why he thinks on-premise and cloud computing options won't hurt Microsoft's business, and offered his take on how Microsoft is competing—and winning—against Oracle and SAP in midmarket and large organizations.

CIO.com: What's been Microsoft's strategy with Dynamics so far?

Chris Caren: Whether it's us talking to our customers or analysts like AMR, or doing studies of the market, we view business applications—and I'd say this both applies to ERP and CRM—as long-existing categories of software that are woefully underutilized and underused inside of organizations.

I think AMR did a poll and found on average about 10 percent of employees are licensed to use a business application, and of those 10 percent, only about half actually access the application as part of their job. So, the footprint inside of organizations is incredibly limited.

Whether it's business applications or other categories of software like business intelligence, we really believe there's a huge opportunity to democratize the application and get it much more broadly used in organizations for both increasing the productivity of employees and letting them be more effective in their jobs. But also to give them, in the case of business applications, better information for decision-making—just to help them work a lot more intelligently and a lot smarter.

CIO.com: Does that tie into Microsoft's existing product sets?

Caren: The core approach to our product strategy is to overcome the inflexibility and the ease-of-use issues that have limited adoption of business applications, and for us that means really blurring the lines between what a business application is and what the world of Microsoft Office is.

And by that I mean not just Microsoft Office, the desktop suite of products, like Outlook and Excel and Word, but more and more the business server applications like SharePoint for collaboration, PerformancePoint for business intelligence, or Office Communications Server for instant messaging, presence, and voice over IP.

CIO.com: So making sure that the user interface and basic tools were easy to use has been a huge part of Dynamics' roadmap?

Caren: Yeah, one big part of it is just that: making the user experience really approachable, familiar. Part of our strategy is preconfiguring it to the types of things you'd likely want to do if you're a salesperson or a payroll manager or a marketing manager. So, we focus on kind of consumerizing the user experience so it looks a lot more like a consumer Web application, a lot less like business software. And we're building what we call these role-tailored user experiences, which is prepackaging what we think a vast majority of employees are going to want to do with the business applications.

CIO.com: Clearly you have a huge advantage in the SMB space, because people's familiarity with Office and Excel. But you also have to show some power behind those applications?

Caren: Yes, definitely. If you look, for example, at our CRM application, the majority of the revenue for that business comes out of the enterprise space. So, to your point, while our product strategy really resonates with mid-market customers, we're having a lot of success at the large enterprise and in the public sector where we have very large projects as well.

CIO.com: When I talk to CIOs, IT staff and users who have these big installed systems, privately many will tell me how much people revert back to Outlook or Excel and reject these new big systems that come in and seem too complex. You've probably heard that a lot?

Caren: I think that's very true. Actually, the experience that drew me to join the Microsoft Business Solutions group was an interesting one. It was out in the Midwest with one of the largest oil companies in the world, and they're a big SAP customer and a big Microsoft customer, and I was meeting with their senior IT leaders.

After a long discussion, just about how they think about Microsoft and how they think about SAP, one of the gentleman basically came to the realization and said: You know, we actually don't run our business with SAP; SAP is the place at the end of the week that we put in some high-level numbers to keep finance happy, but we run our business day-in and day-out, we make decisions, we do analysis, we collaborate with e-mail and with Excel.

Our goal is to let companies continue to collaborate and make decisions, share information using Excel and e-mail, but have it be attached to the kind of workflows and processes that companies want to have their employees follow, and have the data be in Excel, but have it be secure and current so that everyone has the same view of the business.

It's letting you stay where you naturally want to work and keep that flexibility, but get the benefits of having really efficient structured workflows and very secure and auditable information, and to be able to access and make decisions on.

CIO.com: Would you say that one of the challenges over the years has been to get the word out to these businesses that when they think of ERP and CRM, they should consider Microsoft?

Caren: Yeah, I'd say one of the biggest areas of focus for me is building category awareness, so that when a senior executive, whether IT or business, thinks about the business application purchase, they know Microsoft has really compelling solutions. It still is an area of work for us.

CIO.com: How do you sell them on Microsoft's business applications?

Caren: We talk a lot about the traditional experience of using a business application. So, you spend a lot of money upfront to buy the software, spend a lot of money to train your employees, and you spend even more over time maintaining the system and trying to evolve it to keep up with how you do business. And despite all those investments, the traditionally very narrow user population and the end value the company gets back in return on investment, it's a lot more limited than it could be.

Then we just talk about a world where business applications are self-service, are flexible, and are used by a majority of employees, and how much better that world is for IT, and how much better that world is for their employees and their management.

We talk a lot about Office as the user experience and we talk a lot about how well our business applications leverage the Microsoft server infrastructure to really minimize the cost of owning the application year-in and year-out, which traditionally is another big negative companies and CIOs have about CRM and ERP—just the incredible cost of maintaining the applications.

CIO.com: An article I just wrote in September was about a very small business that ended up purchasing SAP ERP applications, when in the past, they probably would have gone with Microsoft. I thought it was an interesting case because this company, who had like 10 users on the SAP system, was not what we generally think of as SAP ERP customer. So as SAP and Oracle start invading this space, where before there wasn't a ton of people going after the 12-seat companies and Microsoft applications were king, how do you see the competition playing out?

Caren: That kind of leads to the second point that's core to our strategy. You mentioned overcoming the ease of use and inflexibility that limits adoption. The other one that is core to our strategy is working through partners to serve customers—meaning building a great, flexible application, but then relying on a really strong, healthy channel to build vertical and micro-vertical solutions that particularly for the mid-market help a customer not just buy an ERP system but buy an ERP system that, for example, works for frozen fish manufacturers.

It's a solution that's much closer to what you need, in the end, that's off the shelf—although off the shelf from a partner, so you get the solution faster and you spend a lot less money on it. It's also the local partner that can really augment or in some cases handle the needs of a company that doesn't even have an IT department. That local touch that our channel provides really gives a strong advantage in the mid-market.

So, to your point, despite Oracle and especially SAP talking about their mid-market focus, we really haven't seen a huge impact on our ability to win business there, and I think that's in large part due to our strong partner channel.

CIO.com: So, when you're going into the RFPs, who is your competition?

Caren: It's typically SAP or Oracle, and then it probably is a combination of two or three mid-market specialists, these firms like a Sage or an Epicor, and in the case of many international deals a local French competitor, a German competitor. In the enterprise ERP and CRM market, obviously there are a few players that have high share. In the case of the mid-market it's an extremely long tail and a very small head in terms of the share of markets from different ISVs.

CIO.com: You had previously worked on Duet, Microsoft's product partnership with SAP. What's the status of that partnership? It seems to me that, in the future, if you're going in and selling against SAP's product, to have kind of this complementary product, maybe that's not great for either of you.

Caren: I'd say Duet was one of the hottest products I think SAP ever saw when it showed it to its installed base, because of the great ease-of-use story it brought to their customers. Duet today serves a narrow set of scenarios. Of the hundreds of different workflows that SAP enables, probably a dozen, at most, are handled today by Duet. So, for some customers it's a great fit; for many it's a great vision, but not yet delivering on what they as an organization most need.

Duet is all about SAP's large enterprise business suite, and there we really don't focus our ERP business. Our ERP business is much more mid-market up through the enterprise segment and more like subsidiaries or divisions of global 2,000 companies. So, where SAP is [selling] at the headquarters of Global 2000, we're at the subsidiaries of those organization or in the mid-market.

CIO.com: As Microsoft expands its Live on-demand and cloud computing product lines, do you see those as just different product offerings for different types of businesses, on a different service? Or products at fundamental odds with each other?

Caren: For CRM, where we have obviously an on-premise business and we have CRM Online, which has been in market for nine months, we see the sort of same representation of customers using either offering—meaning CRM Online is not about small business where CRM on-premise is about enterprise and mid-market. We see the same representation across enterprise, mid-market and small business for our CRM on-premise business and for our CRM Online business.

The deployment decision tends to be secondary to the vendor decision from what we're seeing, versus customers saying I want to go on-premise or in the cloud, and then have a list that's just more mapped to those companies with those kinds of solutions.

CIO.com: So, in your mind and in Microsoft's mind, those two business models can coexist? Some of these pure SaaS vendors contend that these are like apples and oranges—they're so different that for Microsoft to offer both just seems not right or doesn't seem like it's good business.

Caren: We see a certain segment of customers that say: I want to be in the cloud, maybe because I don't have an IT department or I can't wait for IT to serve my needs. So cloud-based is the only way for me to go.

Other [customers] tend to have more of a traditional view of liking the on-premise deployment method for a number of reasons, whether it's ownership of the data inside their four walls or owning the application start to finish.

We see more and more customers that like that flexibility to be able to start with a hosted service and either over time stay there but always have the flexibility to pull it in-house if they end up wanting to do a lot of deep integration between the CRM application and the other legacy applications they have. That flexibility is more and more becoming a big selling point for our customers.

CIO.com: We know that Vista and operating systems and Office garner a lot of the attention from the press and certainly from everyone who thinks of Microsoft, but just how much going forward is Microsoft looking to Dynamics to contribute?

Caren: The aspiration is definitely to become a multibillion-dollar organization, and right now we're over a billion but not yet at multibillion, which means high growth rates. Right now I think our latest reported growth was 21 percent year over year, which is about triple the growth of the market overall.

For people like Steve Ballmer, it's an incredibly strategic business, because it really is the linchpin of the overall solution Microsoft hopes to deliver to customers. It's the application leveraged by our platform, if you look at our Windows and BizTalk and SQL platform business, and it becomes more and more a showcase application to be delivered to end users through the Microsoft Office business, which is just another very important core to our business strategy.

So the platform beneath it, the world of Office on top of it, makes it a really important part of the solution we're trying to encourage our customers to adopt.