Our portal and eMarketing Developers spend a considerable amount of time translating customer requirements into working features, which requires the use of highly abstract tools, languages, and technologies. To this end, we've standardized on the use of Microsoft tools and services, commonly referred to as ".NET".

We were fortunate enough to spend the afternoon with Scott Hanselman, Development Community Liaison for Microsoft. Scott is fairly well known in the .NET development community. In fact, if you've ever Googled any search term remotely related to .NET, chances are you've most likely come across his blog or PodCasts (prompting some to wonder if he ever sleeps ).

I was really impressed with what Scott presented. Not only with the wealth of new features and services in .NET 3.0 and 3.5, but the myriad 3rd party and open source tools available that can be uniquely combined to create an extremely powerful, test-driven development environment.

The development tools space has become very stable and commoditized. Much like the component-based Eclipse development environment used by Salesforce.com, Visual Studio.NET is so extensible and customizable that the only limits are the Developers imagination. Scott maintains a great list of indispensable tools and utilities.

The highlight of the session? Probably LOL CODE. An actual programming language based on the LOL CATS concept. Who knows... maybe next generation CRM applications will be programmed in languages that look like this?

News is out that Microsoft is investing $240 Million in Facebook for 1.6% in equity, putting a $15B valuation on Facebook. What?! You read correctly. A 1.6% stake for $240M.

Hard to justify by any means, but it reminds me of when the Yankees signed Alex Rodriguez to a 10 year $252M contract. I was among the many Seattle Mariners fans who paid top dollar to see this new Yankee's star play, which in itself probably justified the valuation because the Yankees were selling out just about every game in every town.

A self-fulfilling prophecy perhaps? I would expect Facebook's 50M user community to easily double within the next year as people tune in to see what the commotion is all about.

Nearly one-third of CRM projects fail because of non-adoption, according to AMR Research.

I'm guilty of this problem myself. I get off the phone with someone, look at my scribbled notes on some paper and think "I really should enter this call into Salesforce for future reference." But do I do it? Maybe 50% of the time I do.

Many more people visit Facebook than their CRM system. Why? Because your relationship with people on Facebook is dynamic, just like in real life. If a Facebook friend does something online, you know it. And their action, such as joining a group, may inspire you to pursue joining that same group.

Now imagine opening up a Lead or Contact record in your CRM system and seeing the following information:

• Bob downloaded the case study "ACME in Manufacturing".
• Bob opened his email from campaign "Product Announcement"
• Bob forwarded an email to a friend 'Nancy'.

The list could go on, but you get the idea. It's much easier to adopt CRM when the process of collecting information about customers is less manual or more automated.

That's the premise behind i-Dialogue and Customer Experience Management (CEM). Extending CRM with online interactions so that Sales and Marketing reps will regularly use and adopt CRM to learn about and interact with customers.

Hey... if a survey has only 3-5 questions and can be taken quickly, I'm more than happy to provide feedback. These surveys, however, may make customers think twice.

... as if there is such a thing.  Humorous video from Microsoft digital advertising group.

This one looks pretty disruptive. Salesforce is reserving a 5 hour window to upgrade to Winter '08. As always, all i-Dialogue portals will continue running on the previous API version (currently 10.0) until all instances have been upgraded. We will change over to version 11 within 2-3 weeks of Winter '08 release.

Services such as Web-to-Lead and Web-to-Case typically are uneffected by system updates. However, all asynchronous and real-time portal API integration features will not operate during scheduled maintenance.

Please be aware that salesforce.com has scheduled maintenance for your service instance (NA1):

Friday, November 2nd 2007 8:30pm PDT - Saturday, November 3rd 1:30am PDT

During this time, the salesforce.com service will be unavailable. Users attempting to access the service during this time will receive a scheduled maintenance notification page.

The purpose of this maintenance window is to upgrade your service instance (NA1) to the Winter '08 release.

We apologize for any inconvenience and appreciate your patience during this maintenance window. For more information about the great new features available with the Winter '08 release, feel free to log in to the salesforce.com IdeaExchange at http://ideas.salesforce.com and visit the category "Ideas in Winter '08."

-Salesforce.com Support

I started reading Edward Tufte's 'Beautiful Evidence' (BE) over the weekend. This is the 4th book in a series (he says a quintet is to be expected) dedicated to the craft of information design.

Tufte's books have withstood the test of time with a high level of integrity. His work quite simply reveals "The Truth" of information design as he identifies great works from centuries past (and modern era) that have fought to change mankinds beliefs through the power of the pen and paper on thinking such as "the world is flat" and "the earth is the center of the galaxy".

I personally borrow heavily from Tufte's "let no pixel go to waste" philosophy. There's is most definitely an art to depicting thousands of data points within a single image.

My only complaints with this book are:
a) material from previous books is recycled, such as Joseph Minyard's March of 1812 (to Tufte's credit, he does spend considerably more time on this piece than in previous books)
and
b) the chapter dedicated to PowerPoint bashing takes away from the overall integrity of his work. It would have sufficed to say that PowerPoint templates and charts are the cause for much misinformation, and many people would tend to agree. But just about everyone uses PowerPoint occasionally, so this chapter does little more than to alienate everyone to a degree and denies PowerPoint it's key utility of being a framework for discussion rather than an actual informational artifact.

Those who work with massive datasets in Salesforce.com understand the "If we only knew what know" feeling. But it is the work of Tufte that helps us focus on mining these databases and unearthing hidden information through heat maps, graphs, and other types of multi-variate charts.

A few years ago, when this book was in pre-publication, I wrote a simple sparkline program based on Tufte's latest research, but alas it was abandoned as a solution looking for a problem. I'm inspired to start using VisualForce to implement some of these concepts again.

I recommend catching Edward on one of his many book tours. All of his books are typically included in the registration fee and he explains the concepts in a very entertaining manner. This is a must attend event for anyone in Graphic Design or BI Visualization.

The Microsoft CRM Live buzz appears to have died down. We started looking at the opportunity to implement an "i-Dialogue for CRM Live" solution back in March, but nothing ever materialized that we could get our hands on.

This delay violates the on-demand credo of "Release early and often". I had really hoped Microsoft would earn their operational stripes by jumping into the market with "good enough" and letting customer and partner feedback dictate the evolution of CRM Live. Now we're left to assume that the project is in a state of "analysis paralysis" with Program Managers bickering with Engineers over how to "get it perfect" for launch (it'll never be "perfect" guys... don't take it personally. It was ready last year).

Dynamics CRM 3.0 is a great CRM solution (see my test drive last year), but I'm beginning to have serious doubts about Microsoft's ability to enter the market behind Salesforce.com. This is not like throwing an XBox up against a PlayStation. There's no Halo 3 equivalent killer app that can make CRM Live an overnight success (or within 5 years) that I can see. But there is one killer infrastructure angle up Microsoft's sleeve that could change how CRM is deployed and hosted in the future.

If Microsoft truly wants to be a CRM contender then, in my opinion, they need to leap frog the whole multi-tenant architecture discussion and focus exclusively on next generation CRM virtualization, which is the ability to pre-configure an entire Windows CRM server with all dependencies, and allow this "image" to be hosted by any 3rd party.

Leverage would then fall back to the consumer who could "shop around" for virtualization hosts and take their entire CRM/Active Directory/SQL Server VM image with them anywhere they want to go. I suppose that would give new meaning to "Where do you want to go today?"

Information Week has been running a series of articles on the changing, and perhaps disappearing, role of the CIO.

The most recent edition published a list of "Top 12 Reasons the CIO Role is Disappearing", and one item in particular caught my eye:

Reason #9: Never ending need to improve the customer experience.

Now, I can't say I follow the reasoning why this trend would contribute to a reduced need for a CIO. I do know that more line-of-business marketing and support managers are now more empowered than ever to procure, configure, and manage their on-demand CRM and CEM solutions with less dependence on IT.

I also know that there are "old ways" and "new ways" of doing things, and perhaps this trend could be attributed to CIO's hanging onto "old ways" and not embracing the "new ways".

What do you see in the "new way" column that indicates that the CIO's job is now any easier? I see nothing. If anything, the job is much more complicated and difficult than before.

Customer Experience Management (CEM) fundamentally is a Marketing activity, but CEM that provides a competitive advantage requires significant IT guidance and coordination. It's just that the day to day operations of specialized services are becoming increasingly easier to outsource.

Paul Graham has a great article on the future of web startups that is relevant to Salesforce.com's recent partnership with Bay Partners to help fund startups on the AppExchange.

The article asks the fundamental question "Is venture capital needed to start a web company?" and Paul (A VC himself) provides an honest answer that if history is any indication, then increasingly the answer will be "no".

I've struggled with this question for several years. During the peak of the dot-com bubble I pitched ideas and working prototypes to several investors, which was really a drain of time and resources. I knew the cost of entry was low enough that qualified companies should be demonstrating real customers.... not just technology.

The beauty of today's environment is that 1-2 people can quickly implement an idea on a platform like Salesforce.com (ahem... I mean force.com), engage with real customers, deliver immediate value, and grow with little upfront capital expense (meanwhile passing this efficiency of scale onto customers at the same time).

Fortunately, our advisors and management team do not believe VC is necessary at this point. We're growing at 100%+ annually with a backlog of work and opportunities that traditional financial institutions would eagerly support via debt, but still I wonder.... why would a web startup need $5M or even $500,000 to get started today?

Of course any entrepreneur could find a use for any amount of capital, but would it be the most appropriate use and provide the greatest return to investors?

A notable point from Paul's article:

"When starting a startup was expensive, you had to get the permission of investors to do it. Now the only threshold is courage."