MrDave's (David Yack) Blog!

Tomorrow is the first day of the Microsoft Partner conference in Houston - it runs from the 7th through the 9th.   I know a popular question I've been asked in the last month was "Are you going?".  Not this year, just did too much travel in June and still getting caught up!  I am planning on catching a few of the sessions via the webcasts and I would love to hear from others that are there what was cool!

Last week I had the privilege of previewing a couple of the sessions that will be given and I wanted to highlight them in case you are heading to WPC.

The first is on using CRM and software plus services - the actual session details:

DYN007 Expanding Your Microsoft Dynamics CRM Business with Software plus Services  Wednesday, July 9 12:00 PM - 1:00 PM, 370 ABCDEF

Now if you read the description of the session it sounds like a lot of marketing speak don't give up, the reason I think it's interesting was the demo's I saw and the discussion I heard during my preview. Mitchell Humphrey Software will talk about their reduced time to market leveraging CRM as a platform.  They started with a "get to know the platform" period and then rapidly moved to build their solution using it.  Mondo is another ISV that will be featured.  I'm excited to see them features both because we have helped them off and on and I also think they demonstrate use of Silveright beyond some of the wiz bang use on the web.  They use Silverlight 2 to extend CRM's core UX features to add a more interactive process for the user to a Solution Selling application.  To often Silvelight get's portrayed as a great video player technology, when it has great potential for use in LOB applications as well.

The other session I saw was on developing ISV solutions - the action session details:

DYN010 Developing and Going to Market with Your ISV Solution for Microsoft Dynamics CRM    Wednesday, July 9 1:30 PM - 2:30 PM, 371 ABDE

Not sure the layout of the WPC, but looks like this session is right next door!  Nikhil Hasija is the presenter for this session and will talk about ISV opportunities - CourseMax will be talking about how they integrated and leveraged the CRM platform  and how they also included several of the Live.com tools such as Virtual Earth and Live Messenger APIs.   AlfaPeople will also be featured - what caught my eye that they had was their technology for helping to packaging up and provisioning ISV solutions.  I think their techniques for provisioning would be interesting to any ISV that was offering a hosted type solution and had to manage provisioning of it.

So if you make it to WPC, drop me a note and let me know if you see any cool stuff!