Ultimate PC chair

cool.... i want one. :)

Microsoft CRM

Went to the newcastle coders group last night, where Adam Cogan of SSW talked about Microsoft CRM 4 (or titan), which is in beta but gearing up for release over the next few months.

First impressions are - it's powerful, but slow. Totally web based, it surprisingly doesn't have any AJAX, and the interface can get pretty cluttered with pop ups everywhere and a not totally intuitive interface.

It's power however comes in it's customisation. The ability to define your own entities, attributes, forms, and work flows gives it huge potential to adapt to whatever you need it to do. It's also based totally on SQL Server so reporting services can be hooked in nicely. Adam, being a Microsoft regional director himself sold the product well, but the load times and confusing visual elements held him back a bit.

I liked the customisation features, but ultimately hated the interface. I still think there could be a middle ground niche market that's not M$ CRM or salesforce.com (which is also pretty pricey... 3K per year for 10 users), but takes the good features of them and makes them better then ACT! or LeGrand. What'll make such a niche product work will be that balance of extendability, ease of use and accessibility to the masses financially. Who knows... with Google in talks with Salesforce.com they might get there before everybody else.

Google Developer Day 07 Review

I came away from the GDDo7 feeling very impressed with their professionalism - I mean, geez, what other company would get James O'Loghlin of new inventors fame as a host for the day? very cool.

Google definitely seems to have caught on to the developer evangelism thing now, which Microsoft have done well in the last few years - momentum in this area is definitely hotting up. Kind of like the "teach a man how to fish" idea, but if you fish with a Google fishing rod and tackle, you (and google) can get these benefits:

• Google Gears (offline web browsing - database built into the browser. Firefox3 and google toolbar)
• API's galore: Maps, Gadgets, Adsense, Gdata (extracting and manipulating data in google spreadsheet and calendar + other up and coming google apps),
• KML (xml framework that is a presentation language to Maps and Google Earth to feed dynamic data)
• Web application toolkit

Some impressive technologies were on display, many of them were open source for customising if needed (eg. gears), and there were some cool examples of sites already using them. check out http://www.bikely.com and http://www.propertyguru.com.au for some good examples.

There was an inkling of worry that you're tying yourself to a development maintenance spiral if they continually upgrade their APIs (I mean, how do you sell this to the end client? giving the answer "because google said so" doesn't seem to give you great credibility). Alot of them also rely on Google's service offerings, rather then being able to build your own. Don't get me wrong, I don't have the resources to build my own Maps application from scratch, but there's more a feeling of a lack of an application framework (like .NET offers) - it's more at this stage like a "plug bits and pieces into your app" kind of mentality. To their creditability though, they have begun on this road with the web app toolkit (using Java to build AJAX apps) and hopefully we'll see more of this kind of thing to give developers ultimate flexibility. I just have to go and learn Java now :).

All in all, a good day was had by all (plus I've never seen so many Mac Book Pros in the one place before) - I think it was very beneficial to both Developers and Google to get important feedback, and if the relationship continues like this I can see many reasons why Microsoft should be worried.