I applaud Microsoft's foray into cloud computing with the Azure server, but it still leaves me puzzled. Having been a part of the Microsoft culture for so many years, I can see what is going on. There is this perpetual nagging drive to deliver more features and create new waves, when what is needed now is to leverage existing assets and ride the waves of consumer demand.

Microsoft is sitting atop a cloud computing gold mine today with the ultimate software-plus-service "Windows Update".

The old-school mentality is to deliver shrink wrapped software as a one-time transaction for a low price. They then give away monthly security updates, ongoing patches, and lot's of free development tools.

Because of the rate of change in todays networked world, there is now more value in subscribing to an evolving software service than in a one-time "buy and forget" transaction.

Most households would probably think nothing of paying $4.95 per month for Windows update if there were no upfront costs. That may seem like small change, but over 5 years that subscription model yields almost $300.

Plus consider how many bootlegged copies of Windows are running out there (50%+). By minimizing entry costs, demonstrating continual value, and associating key features with genuine installations will encourage more consumers to subscribe.

Businesses, likewise, would find a $10 subscription for Windows and Office much more attractive than a one-time purchase.

But here's the thing that really has got me puzzled. Why is Microsoft building it's own datacenters and talking about becoming a centralized service when it has built an army of loyal and eager partners that will install, deploy, and manage Internet nodes for them?

Google is a fantastic company, but their ability to scale is limited by their ability to raise capital and dedicate internal resources to building datacenters.

If all Microsoft Internet Node Servers (MINS) shared a common API, if all applications written for MINS were portable, and if all existing Microsoft datacenters and partners filled their racks with these servers, Microsoft would not have to spend a dime building datacenters. They could then return to their core competency of writing OS software and applications and leverage the power of their channel partners to scale.

(Alright, so maybe Microsoft Marketing could come up with a better acronym than MINS... but letting partners be their cloud computing 'minions' should be implicit ).

Revenue from Microsoft Internet Node servers would far surpass consumer windows subscriptions within 10 years if this model were deployed.

As an example, I just signed up for Amazon EC2 today to deploy a new email server. I don't know how much of the $0.125 per hour Amazon charges me gets kicked back to Microsoft, but it makes me wonder.... why is Amazon having to develop new Windows OS extensions to make their provisioning model work and why is Microsoft building datacenters like they're going to compete with Amazon?

It's just all backwards. The obvious win-win scenario is for Microsoft to develop a provisionable server OS and partner with the Amazon's and Rackspace's of the world to do the hosting.

 

Summary of October changes rolling into production over the next few days:

• ADDED: Support for IronPython in Dialogue Script editor
• ADDED: CLR library interop support in Python script
• ADDED: Chat-to-Case has improved formatting of chat transcript in Case Description (32KB max storage limit in Salesforce)
• ADDED: Ability to map custom pre-chat form fields to Salesforce Lead/Contact fields
• ADDED: ETL Object Map for Leads and Contacts now auto-populates properties from API metadata
• FIXED: Improved page caching algorithm that prevents concurrent access to cache during startup (issue primarily only occurred in large portals. Caused infrequent object graph corruption under high load)
• ADDED: Visibility of all administrative tree controls now externalized to configuration settings
• ADDED: Ability to log a custom web event on dialogue script View or PostBack event (previously only PostBack supported)
• ADDED: Ability to globally enable/disable private messaging in discussion forums
• ADDED: Ability to support "|" as replacement character for "?" when generating dynamic redirection URLs (Example: signon.aspx?returl=somepage.aspx|param1=1&param2=2)
• ADDED: Support for YetAnotherForum package (open source forums)
• ADDED: Upgraded blog package to DasBlog 2.2
• ADDED: Upgraded ComponentArt library to latest release
• ADDED: Upgraded ScrewTurn open source Wiki to latest release
• ADDED: Support for all ASP.NET controls (previously limited to subset)
• FIXED: Bug where <asp:ListItem> would not properly render
• FIXED: Bug where some Email web events were not properly correlating with their respective Salesforce Campaign
• FIXED: Bug where sending a test email from Email Campaign editor would change the Salesforce Campaign status to "Sent"
• FIXED: Bug where objects deleted in Salesforce were not deleted in portal if deletion occurred during a long running ETL process.
• FIXED: Validation error message in password reset form that incorrectly reported repeat use of old password as identical login name.

Congratulations to this years Navigator Award winners! There were so many to choose from and we ended up adding a couple extra categories to showcase some truly magnificant i-Dialogue solutions.

PORTLAND, OR (October 27, 2008)   

Cubic Compass Announces 2008 Navigator Awards

Cubic Compass, a provider of on-demand web content management solutions, today announced the recipients of the 2008 Navigator Awards. Navigator Awards recognize organizations who have made significant contributions to enabling one-to-one online "dialogues" with their customers, partners, or employees through the use of CRM and the i-Dialogue Web Suite.

Best Overall Solution
www.LeftHandNetworks.com

LeftHand Networks (LHN) utilizes the i-Dialogue Web Suite for their main website, partner portal, customer portal, and product discussion forums. The portal staging and high-availability capabilities of i-Dialogue Unlimited Edition are employed to apply a disciplined multi-stage content publishing process that ensures the right information is available to the right person at the right time.

As an early adopter of Salesforce, LHN defined all facets of their business using custom objects in Salesforce and needed a highly customizable CMS to leverage their existing CRM investment. LHN's internal staff used the i-Dialogue API to develop a variety of online web applications, such as event management, license management, product pricelists and quoting, and a site-wide search engine.

LeftHand Networks was acquired by Hewlett Packard in October 2008 for $360M and continues to be recognized as an industry leading provider of iSCSI SAN solutions. 

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Best Web Design
www.ConfigureSoft.com

ConfigureSoft makes use of rich multimedia and informational collateral to provide an interactive and personalized experience for their Customers and Partners.

Other online features deployed by ConfigureSoft include webinar event registration, discussion forums, partner portal, and customer portal.

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Best B2B Portal
portal.iGrafx.com

iGrafx manages the entire customer life-cycle using i-Dialogue; from demand generation and lead cultivation to providing an online eStore and customer support forums.

iGrafx automates the lead cultivation process by providing self-service to case studies, user guides, and product downloads then follows up with automated emails using i-Dialogue drip email marketing. All online interactions and downloads are captured in Salesforce and used by Marketing and Sales to gauge customers interest in online resources.

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Best Partner Portal
Planar

Planar has grown in recent years through the acquisition of new businesses. Planar deployed a partner portal for their digital signage business unit in 2007 and continues to expand their channel marketing efforts in 2008 by deploying partner portals for their home theater and control room business units.

i-Dialogue Premier Edition allows Planar to deploy multiple, uniquely branded partner portals that provide channel partners with 24/7 access to product marketing materials, news, events, software updates, and training resources.

Planar IT staff were early adopters of Dialogue Script and leveraged their in-house web development skills to create a dynamic and well organized online experience.

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Best Non-Profit Portal
www.RISENetwork.org

RISE - Resources for Indispensable Schools and Educators

RISE is a national nonprofit organization that helps K-12 public schools in low-income communities attract and retain experienced, talented teachers so all students can achieve at high levels.  www.RISENetwork.org facilitates online dialogues between Teachers and Schools using i-Dialogue and Salesforce to manage contact identities, applications, and workflow processes.

Online features include application management and screening, Job Search, Application Search, Google maps, Survey response metrics, teacher-school communications, and Job/Teacher interest level tagging.

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Best Consumer Web Solution
my.ColoradoPlasticSurgery.com

Like most small business and practice managers, Dr. Nick Slenkovich of the Colorado Plastic Surgery Center, was inundated with solicitations from pay per click and referral networks promising new Leads. Most referral partners provided information on how many leads were referred, but Dr Slenkovich required more insight into what kinds of Leads and Opportunities were produced from each referral source.
 
By using Salesforce Pro Edition with Campaigns integrated with i-Dialogue, Dr. Slenkovich deployed an intelligent landing page management solution and created unique tracking codes for all referral partners that resulted in detailed campaign influence reports in Salesforce. Google AdWords, banner ads, and referral partner marketing expenses are all now evaluated by the quality of opportunities they produce instead of the quantity of Leads.

Jakob Nielson posted an interesting article on Transactional Email and Confirmation Messages.

In a Salesforce CRM context, this basically boils down to the subject and message contained within Web-to-Lead and Web-to-Case email auto-responders.

On the Lead side, I recommend a series of informative emails, aka an email drip campaign, that are conversational and informative in nature (even though Jacob advises against message sequences in an order shipping scenario, they are very effective when applied to Lead cultivation).

The email should appear as if it were sent from an actual person and not an automated response.

Example:

Subject: Follow-Up To Your Case Study Download
Hello {!Lead.FirstName},

Thank you for your interest in [product/service/organization]. I thought you may also be interested in the following resources:

• Link 1
• Link 2
• Link 3

Please feel free to reply to this email with any questions.


Regards,

Personalized Signature
With complete contact information

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For Web-to-Case, the best advice is to simply acknowledge receipt and describe what next steps are being taken to resolve the customer issue.

Subject: Support Ticket Received
Hello {!Contact.FirstName},

We received your trouble ticket. A service representative will review your case and respond within X hours.

The following online resources may be useful in resolving your issue.

• Link 1
• Link 2
• Link 3

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Notice both emails make use of bullets to break up the monotony of raw text and run-on paragraphs.

For case management, these links should also be published directly next to the web-to-case form to encourage self-service to FAQ'a and solutions prior to submitting a case.

Great news from the Amazon EC2 team. They've dropped the "beta" designation and are now rolling in full production.

They're even hosting Windows instances in the cloud for $0.125 per hour (SQL Server is also available).

That's about $85 per month for a fully managed Windows server instance. Not too bad.

It's rare that Microsoft issues patches outside of their regularly scheduled "Patch Tuesday", but apparently a critical vulnerability was recently discovered.

Some hosting services will be temporarily suspended tonight for up to 10 minutes to apply this update.

I just can't see how Steve Jobs and Eric Schmidt can sit in the same room now that their respective iPhone and Google Phone products are competing (Eric sits on Apple's Board).

I've been using my G1 for a couple days now and became instantly 20% more efficient with the Google Apps integration. Amazing.

So, it was announced back in July that Journey will play Dreamforce. Then Mark at SalesforceWatch spots a change on the Dreamforce website announcing Foo Fighters will play.

hmmmm... seems like deja vu all over again.

Update 1: Added link to cloaking definition.

For the past several years the practice of displaying page content to GoogleBot that was inaccessible to actual users could get you in "Google Jail", resulting in a PageRank of 0 and removal from their search index. This is known as "cloaking"... aka "stealthing".

This practice is now encouraged under a new feature named "First Click Free", which allows publishers to serve protected content to GoogleBot, but requires users to register for subsequent page requests. More discussion here.

Now, if Google would just remove the jail sentence for programmatically retrieving PR for each page, then CMS and marketing analytics vendors could comfortably contribute to the virtuous cycle of helping Google organize the worlds information.

Python is here! A couple months ago I mentioned the need for more dynamic language support in SaaS solutions. Last month we announced support for JScript and this month I'm happy to announce support for IronPython in i-Dialogue.

I spent the weekend learning some Python basics and created a simple (and I mean simple) Python demonstration in the i-Dialogue Developers Sandbox. You're welcome to modify this source and experiment on your own.

After years of working with the Salesforce API using statically typed languages; such as C#, Java, and Apex; it is refreshing to re-approach old problems through new eyes. After only a few days of playing with Python, I see now what others have been raving about.

Web developers will really enjoy using Python with Dialogue Script:

• Cleaner code. Easier to read and manage
• No need for thick IDEs. Too often, an IDE like Eclipse or Visual Studio stands between you and the desired solution. Dialogue Script development is 100% browser-based (yes, it even works in Chrome!)
• Agile business rules management. Work side-by-side with business users and apply business rules directly in web pages
• Dynamic typing

Wow... one day I'm recognizing a company for their innovative approach to using rich clients for CRM, and then suddenly they're laying off almost the entire workforce and the CEO/CFO are arrested by the FBI.

Ouch... that's a set back.

There's been a reshuffling of booths at Dreamforce. We're in the same location, but the booth number is now #211 (was 311).

I'm really looking forward to finally placing names with faces, and meeting lots of new people at this event

Last January I shared some thoughts on keeping hosted services up and running 99.9% of the time. eMarketing Websites and portals often do not have the luxury of going down for 3 hours of maintenance (or even 3 minutes), leaving me to often envy the planned maintenance notices I receive from Salesforce when logging in .

As you can see from the daily report below, our monitoring service loves to occasionally tease us with uptime reports hovering at 99.89% uptime.

Some key things we observe and monitor:

• "Downtime" in the report is measured in blocks of 5 minutes, so what may have actually been a 10 second outage gets reported as a 5 minute outage, skewing the actual results.
• Sub-second response time (< 1000 milliseconds), while not contractually in the SLA, is a key metric in determining site performance and customer experience.
• Customers who deploy changes to a staging server first (available in Unlimited Edition) have a much higher likelihood of sustaining 100% uptime day over day.
• Reliance on a good datacenter partner is critical. Our offices are not the most luxurious, but we spare no expense on our datacenter location and services.

Inevitably, some Developers need to apply advanced business and content manipulation rules to web/portal pages that display collections of Salesforce records.

This trick of using Javascript Arrays works very well. The basic components of this pattern are:

• Create a Javascript object that mirrors the Salesforce object and fields to be managed
• Use a Dialogue Script Repeater control to select a collection of records from Salesforce and package them into a client-side Javascript array.
• Render the web page using the Javascript collection of objects.

Very powerful technique. I can foresee the need to extend DScript controls to return results in a format such as JSON, which is already in use in our AJAX library.

You can view a source code example in the Developer Sandbox.

In honor of Google's 10th birthday, they've brought back their earliest search index from January 2001. Bummer.... Cubic Compass was formed in March 2001, just 2 months later.

Truly a Don Adams moment... "Missed it by that much"