Microsoft Dynamics CRM – CRM 2016 New Era Has Arrived

It has arrived. Microsoft Dynamics CRM 2016 is here.

 

Available both as CRM Online and on-premises in 130 markets and 44 languages, Dynamics CRM 2016 is focused on empowering employees to deliver the optimal experiences to customers, as well as engaging customers across all channels

Jujhar Singh the new leader of Microsoft’s CRM Business Applications group, after Bob Stutz left Microsoft, has posted a great blog post with the announcement of CRM 2016.  I recommend you head over to the link below and take a read of this announcement.

https://community.dynamics.com/b/msftdynamicsblog/archive/2015/11/30/microsoft-dynamics-crm-2016-now-available-ushering-in-a-new-era-of-intelligent-customer-engagement

You will be seeing more blog posts over the next few weeks relating to Microsoft Dynamics CRM 2016, so stay tuned.

Greg Olsen
YellowDuckGuy

Advertisement

Dynamics CRM – Certified Hosting of Dynamics CRM in Microsoft Azure

At the World Wide Partner Conference in Orlando, Microsoft announced certified hosting of Microsoft Dynamics CRM within Microsoft Azure. This is a great step forward.

 

 

What this means in summary? This means that customers or businesses will be able to run Microsoft Dynamics CRM on Microsoft Azure Infrastructure Services (IaaS) with Azure Premium Storage for production environments. In the past, Microsoft Dynamics CRM has not been supported or certified to be run in Microsoft Azure.

So you can now take advantage of installing Microsoft Dynamics CRM on-premises installation software in Microsoft Azure and be certified – for production as well!

Another great benefit Microsoft is offering is the ability for current on-premises CAL license holders the ability to use those licenses to run their CRM instances on Azure. This is a great advantage for customers who want to move to cloud computing but are unable to deploy a complete SaaS based solution like CRM Online. Along with this benefit, customers or businesses may also use their MSDN credits for running test environments.

You can read the Microsoft release from Bob Stuz here:

https://community.dynamics.com/b/msftdynamicsblog/archive/2015/07/15/cloud-certification-now-available-for-microsoft-dynamics-crm

Greg Olsen
YellowDuckGuy

Office 365 – Office 365 and CRM now available from Australia Data Center

Today (March 31st for NZ, 30th for USA), Microsoft has announced that Office 365 and Dynamics CRM are available from the Microsoft Australian data centers.

I recently created a blog post outlining the up and coming data center for Australia and the questions you might have. You can read this blog post at the link below.

https://yellowduckguy.wordpress.com/2015/03/03/office-365-accessing-the-australia-office-365-data-center-for-nz/

Overall this is great news for New Zealand and Australian customers. This will provide businesses faster performance (through the drop in latency), geo-redundant backup and reduce concerns some may have around data sovereignty.

Office 365 – Accessing the Australia Office 365 Data Center for NZ

As I write this article, New Zealand (NZ) Office 365 subscribers have their services hosted out of a data center in Singapore.  The distance from New Zealand to Singapore is a good length, which means it can take a bit longer for our client requests in NZ to hit the servers in Singapore meaning Latency can be a issue for some customers.

We have known for a while now that there is a new data center in Australia. Actually two of them. One in Sydney and the other in Melbourne. This is great news. Since geographically Australia is closer to NZ than Singapore, this will mean greater speed connections and a drop in latency. The new service includes two geo-redundant sub regions in NSW and Victoria.

But the question now for customers is … how do I access the Australia Office 365 data center or move my existing Office 365 subscription to Australia from Singapore? Well, this article will provide you with options for those queries.

When is it scheduled for release?

The Australian data center is planned to start taking new subscriptions from March this year. Remember these are for new sign-ups of Office 365.

When is my Office 365 instance scheduled to be moved?

Standard Office 365 instance moves from Singapore to Australia will commence in September 2015. See below to move earlier.

What is the process for moving my existing Office 365 subscription?

Microsoft has put together a quick process table and guide to explain this for you.  The table from the guide is shown below.

More info: https://technet.microsoft.com/library/dn878163.aspx

What planning should be done before shifting to Australia?

I would recommend you take a look at this page on TechNet. This page has some handy tasks to do. The page also includes the link to apply for the beta program. https://technet.microsoft.com/en-nz/library/dn879433.aspx

Can I sign up early to have my Office 365 instance moved?

You can apply for an early move by visiting the beta request form and firstly signing into MS Connect and completing the form.

Remember, you must notify the Office 365 support team if you DO NOT want to move to the Australia data centre. All New Zealand instances will be moved eventually to Australia.

This is going to be of huge benefit to APAC customers, especially for Australia and New Zealand. Here in NZ, we are looking forward to this new data center.

Greg Olsen
YellowDuckGuy

Office 365 – Integration with Office 365 APIs

As we continue to work more and more with Office 365, we are likely require some form of integration from our custom application or business system with Office 365. The Office 365 platform has some APIs available for integration, which will also allow our hybrid systems to integrate with the cloud.

The Office 365 APIs are exposed using the REST architecture. The following API areas (you could also say these a Office 365 data areas) are available now for you to interact or integrate with.

• Mail – read, compose and send messages and attachments, manage folders in a user’s mailbox in Office 365 or Exchange Online
• Calendar – provides access to a user’s contacts and contact folders in Office 365 or Exchange Online
• Contacts – provides access to events, calendars, and calendar groups in Exchange Online as part of Office 365
• Files – provides access to work with OneDrive for Business Files and Folders
• Discovery Service – to interact with the Discovery Service API you send HTTP and OData requests. Discovery Service supports discovering Calendar, Contacts, Mail, MyFiles (for OneDrive and OneDrive for Business service endpoints), and RootSite (for SharePoint).
  So what can you do with these APIs? Head to this URL for detailed information on each, it’s quite useful. http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/office/office365/api/api-catalog

I wanted to included this illustration (taken from http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/office/office365/howto/platform-development-overview), which clearly shows you must be authenticated first before accessing the Office 365 data layer.

 

The illustration also shows you can choose your desired application programming language along with your development environment toolset when working with non-Microsoft toolsets such as XCode or Eclipse/Android Studio.

 

Some Helpful Links

 

Below are some helpful links when working with the Office 365 APIs. These can also help you get started.

Office 365 APIs starter projects, code samples, and videos

http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/office/office365/howto/starter-projects-and-code-samples

Office 365 Starter Project for ASP.NET MVC

If you want to get a look at some starter code, have a look at this one:

https://github.com/OfficeDev/Office-365-APIs-Starter-Project-for-ASPNETMVC

Authentication

http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/office/office365/howto/common-app-authentication-tasks

Enjoy!