iDcrm and Numenes News

iDcrm 1.2.7 is finally available for Microsoft Dynamics CRM 4.0

Sun, 11 Jul 2010 23:50:22 +0200

After a long wait and a lot of work, iDcrm 1.2.7 and iDcrm 1.2.7 SFA edition are finally available.

It took us a long time because we’ve done a lot of rework in the App. The exact list of changes is too long to be listed here.

I invite you to download our iDcrm 1.2.7 Release notes.pdf to review the changes.

You can contact your Microsoft CRM Business Partner to receive your upgrade or you can go to the Appstore in the coming days.

I would like to thanks our customers and partners for their patience and confidence.

Jean Stanghellini
R&D Manager
admin@numenes.com

Company switches from BlackBerry to iPhone, new OS is key

Tue, 22 Jun 2010 12:29:47 +0200

The following article is reprinted from CIO.com. Visit CIO’s Macs in the Enterprise page.

During the next few months, Varian Medical’s Matt Morse plans to live out of a suitcase, venturing around the world for the sole purpose of ushering the iPhone (and maybe the iPad) into his enterprise. He’ll spend time developing a strategy for the iPhone that fits into his company’s existing IT infrastructure and meets security and budget requirements, followed by a series of test cases.
If all goes well, sometime next year he’ll begin to deploy the iPhone and replace the BlackBerry for field service workers. “There are so many facets to look at in a new platform,” says Morse, senior IT admin at Varian Medical, a manufacturer of medical devices and software for hospitals and clinics in 60 countries. “I think the discovery phase and proof of concept will take at least six months.”
When Apple CEO Steve Jobs unveiled iOS 4, formerly known as iPhone OS 4.0, earlier this year, CIOs and tech analysts cheered iOS 4’s deep enterprise support. iOS 4 promised wireless distribution of in-house apps, multitasking, app and email data protection, mobile device management upgrades, and support for SSL VPN via apps from Juniper and Cisco, among other features.
But iOS 4’s expected release to the general public this summer won’t open the enterprise floodgates for the iPhone right away. Rather, it will only signal the beginning of the iPhone’s long march into the corporate world. For techies like Morse, much work still needs to be done.

The security equation changes

For the past five years, Varian employees have carried BlackBerrys to help them do their jobs. Varian’s BlackBerry users are on the frontlines in both sales and field service, tapping into a Microsoft Exchange collaboration messaging system with hooks into SharePoint, Office Communicator and VoIP.
Varian developed an app called MSO, or mobile services online, that lets BlackBerry field technicians securely connect to SAP on the backend. With MSO, they can handle customer-service tickets without having to fire up a laptop. They can look up schedules, dispatch orders, and allocate resources. MSO’s end result: response times within 10 minutes.
When the iPhone debuted three years ago, Varian executives warmed to the beautiful interface. Every year, more and more employees asked for an iPhone, Morse says. With the release of the iPhone 3G, Morse and his team had to officially support it. Today, one out of three mobile devices at Varian is an iPhone.
But none of the approximately 1,600 field technicians around the world are allowed to turn in their BlackBerries for iPhones—at least, not yet.
The reason? Field technicians absolutely depend on MSO, and MSO is not on the iPhone because of lingering security, reliability and management concerns. “BlackBerry has the enterprise integration with BES to really give us a securely and remotely managed device,” Morse says. “Policies can be enforced, and we can guarantee a lot more uptime and monitor it better than we can with an Active Sync-type device like the iPhone.”
But with its touted security and management features, iOS 4 has the potential to bring the iPhone on par with the BlackBerry, Morse says. Of course, he’ll have to wait for the general release to know for sure. “I’ve looked at the early SDK, but we don’t play with beta versions here,” Morse says. “iPhone 4.0 gives us the opportunity to begin the real discovery of the device capabilities.”
Another upside: Varian has been using Zenprise MobileManager for BlackBerry management, which helps IT departments identify who is using a mobile device, how the device is accessing the network, and what version of the OS is installed. Zenprise MobileManager now supports the iPhone.
Before Morse can give the iPhone the green light for field service technicians, he’ll also need to standardize on the iPhone 3GS because of its device encryption—that is, the current standardization on iPhone 3G won’t work for field technicians who require a higher level of security.

End goal: Quickly-deployed web apps

Yet security and management are just part of iPhone enterprise adoption. The iPhone represents an entirely new development platform and services architecture. Morse will have to consider not just the iPhone but what it will bring forth in the future (and whether or not Apple and the iPhone can handle it).
For Morse, though, that’s a good problem.
He gets excited, for instance, about the iPhone’s potential as an end-point to Web apps. The beauty of Web apps, he says, is a faster release cycle. Think of a dynamic MSO. iPhones and iPads “would be a rock star of a solution,” Morse says. “We’re not talking about just a mobile device with some glamorous interface technology, we’re talking about having something that lets people do work and solve problems and that can be reliably revisited over and over again.”
But first Morse will have to meet with field service managers, engineers and installers around the world to find out how an iPhone or iPad can improve their jobs. Can the iPhone’s geo-location help them allocate resources better? Will mobile social networking help? What data should the iPhone track? Can the iPhone facilitate customer interaction?
“There’s an amazing amount of discovery because the capability [of the iPhone] is so large,” Morse says. “Then we have to pare it down into a viable scope, otherwise you’re going to shoot the moon and you’re never going to get anything deployed.”
[Tom Kaneshige is a senior writer for CIO.com in Silicon Valley.]

AT&T: 40 percent of iPhones sold to enterprise users

Wed, 2 Jun 2010 15:39:44 +0200

By Daniel Eran Dilger from Appleinsider

Ron Spears, AT&T's chief executive of its Business Solutions unit, told a conference audience this week that 40 percent of iPhones were being sold to business users and that the enterprise is viewing the device as secure, powerful, and even as a potential replacement for laptop purchases.

Spears was speaking at the Barclays Capital Communications, Media and Technology conference, according to a report by Larry Dignan of ZDNet.

When asked about the iPhone's role in enterprise markets, Spears said, "Four out of 10 sales of the iPhone are made to enterprise users. When the iPhone came out, what most people heard in the first year from ‘07 to ‘08 was oh my God, it’s not BlackBerry secure. This is not going to work on the enterprise space.

"At the end of the day," Spears said, "it’s just software. That’s all it is. And by the time the 3G came out in ‘08 they had solved about 80% of the security issues. By the time the 3GS came out last summer, most CIOs will tell you today they have very few issues around the security that they need provided as they have come to know that RIM can do it because of the way RIM provides their solution.

"So enterprises today view the iPhone as a mobile computer. It happens to have a voice application on it. But what’s important is what you can do with it, and the way you can mobilize workforces, and specific parts of your workforce, not the entire workforce."

Spears also described how the iPhone has changed business within AT&T itself, saying "Most of our monthly reporting is all built into an app that gets updated when our systems get updated, and we do an automatic fetch. And any time I want to look at where we sort of sit from a financial point of view in ABS, it now resides on my iPhone as an app. So it starts to change the way you think about governing your business. It changes the speed with which you can make decisions."

Spears added that there are also a variety of situations where employees are being given iPhones, and increasingly iPads, in place of assigning them a laptop. “If they’ve got a field service force that needs one or two applications on a daily basis; do they need to go out and spend $1,000 or $1,200 for a laptop and then worry about sort of the lifecycle costs of keeping up with the laptop?” Spears rhetorically asked.

Apple vs other mobile platforms in the enterprise

Contrasting the visibility of Android in business, Spears said, "I haven’t seen the Android platform yet in the enterprise space. Not to say it won’t come, but pretty much that platform has been built with a very specific focus to consumers. Over time, my guess is there will be an evolution that’s kind of hard to ignore the enterprise space."

Google's focus on consumers is evident in macho marketing that accompanied the Verizon Droid, and the consumer-oriented pitch for Google's own Nexus One, which paired up with T-Mobile. Google's Android handsets also do not support the minimum security standards required by most businesses using Exchange Server, nor have any support for RIM-style push messaging popularized by the BlackBerry.

Apple has made its push to the Enterprise a major part of its strategy, introducing Exchange support, push messaging, corporate VPN and related security efforts back at the release of iPhone 2.0, which were all expanded and enhanced last year. iPhone OS 4 will seek to further expand Apple's placement in the market for mobile business devices, even as RIM pushes BlackBerry OS 6.0 toward consumers and Microsoft launches Windows Phone 7 in a decisive new direction that abandons its business-oriented Windows Mobile 6.x in favor of promoting a Zune-oriented XNA mobile gaming platform.

Apple’s iPhone replaces Blackberry for some bankers

Fri, 21 May 2010 11:08:32 +0200

SINGAPORE/HONG KONG (Reuters) – Standard Chartered is replacing the Blackberry, currently its standard corporate communication device, with the iPhone, a move that could eventually result in thousands of its bankers switching to the Apple device for business communication on the go.

Standard Chartered bankers in Asia told Reuters that the London-based lender was giving its corporate Blackberry users the option of switching to the iPhone, with the company agreeing to continue to pay monthly billing for business-related telephone and data services.

“It’s a group-wide initiative involving wholesale and consumer banks globally,” said a Singapore-based spokeswoman for Standard Chartered, told Reuters.

The process of migrating corporate email services from the Blackberry to the iPhone started about a month ago, said the spokeswoman, although she did not know how many of the Asia-focussed bank’s 75,000 employees used company-issued Blackberries or when the switchover could be completed.

Bankers at other financial institutions such as HSBC Holdings Plc and Morgan Stanley have so far been restricted to the Blackberry as the standard device issued by their firms for business communications. Despite some indications of change, it may take time for a broader switch to take place, mainly because of security concerns, according to financial professionals and information technology analysts.

“If more companies switch to the iPhone, this is of course bad news for RIM,” said Lu Chialin, an IT industry analyst at Macquarie Securities in Taipei. “However, it will take a long time for companies to do their own internal testing before deciding to change, so it will be a while before it has any effect on RIM.”

Blackberries, from Canada’s Research in Motion, are the device of choice for bankers and executives who need regular access to email and the Internet when outside the office.

RIM had the biggest share of the U.S. smartphone market at 36 percent, ahead of handsets running Google’s Android operating system with 28 percent and Apple with 21 percent, according to a recent study by NPB Group.

Singapore-headquartered Oversea-Chinese Banking Corp began offering its staff the choice of Blackberry or iPhone about a year ago, although most of its bankers have so far stuck to their Blackberries.

Some small, privately-held financial companies in Asia have also started allowing employees to port corporate emails to their personal iPhones on request, bankers and asset managers told Trading China, a Thomson Reuters online community for financial professionals focussing on the Greater China market.

The biggest issue for most companies choosing telephone and email hardware is data encryption, said Macquarie’s Lin.

“RIM has a system that is more effective than most other handset makers, so if there is a shift towards the iPhone it’s not going to happen overnight but rather a slow and gradual change.” he said.

iDcrm, Microsoft CRM for iPhone, is one year old

Mon, 3 May 2010 15:52:03 +0200

We are pleased to say that iDcrm is now (a little bit more than) one year old!! Thanks to our customers.

What started like a dream: have a “plug and play” Microsoft CRM on the iPhone is now a successful software solution.

But what’s the exact situation?

1- Let’s talk about numbers

- Partners: we have now more than 110 active partners worldwide (active means working on a minimum of one opportunity with us) in more than 20 countries. We still have countries that are not correctly covered but we are working on that.
- OEM Partners: we are currently working with a large Microsoft CRM hosting provider to deliver a specific iDcrm for their customers (this version will only work on their system)
- Today we have 586 users of iDcrm SFA edition (launched in January 2010) and 1103 full users of iDcrm (launched in May 2009)
- Our pipeline indicates around 2000 additional users in opportunities above 70% certainty and estimated close date within 6 months

2- Let’s talk about what we can improve

- Support: our support process is still long. How? We are redesigning iDcrm to reduce the needs for support. We are also working on a FAQ document because a big part of the issues are more setup-related that real bugs.
- Communication of coming versions. How? By giving a better visibility and serious timeline.
This is our commitment for this year.

3- What about the future of the product?

- iDcrm 1.2.7 - May 2010
We are late but this version will be released in May 2010. I invite you to read a previous blog to see what’s new.

- iDcrm Server component 1.0 - June 2010
A server component? Yes! Not a component requiring you to rebuild MS CRM but an Administration component. This was requested by corporate users, so here it is. It will be priced around $ 1,000.00. It will work either on iFD, On-premises and Microsoft CRM online.

- iDcrm 1.2.8 = iDcrm 2 - July / August 2010
This version will deliver various features like: final redesigned interface, More standard entities with Sales / marketing / Service profile, Full MS CRM security model implementation, MS CRM views and a lot more. It will also replace the 1.3 version that was initially delayed and now cancelled due to the iPad requirements.

- iDcrm XL - August 2010
THE iPad version. It will be an iDcrm 2 adapted for iPad with a lot of ergonomic changes.

Again, thanks for your confidence.

Edwin Quarles van Ufford
General Manager
Numenes BV
edwin.quarles@numenes.com

iPhone + Microsoft CRM = iDcrm and big opportunity

Mon, 3 May 2010 15:41:54 +0200

What is the opportunity?

Microsoft Dynamics CRM is growing fast. Looking at various different sources this CRM package is in the top 10 list in almost every country. The interesting thing is that MS Dynamics CRM is used from the very small to very big companies. Especially in the mid market area, we see tremendous growth figures.

On the other side we see the mobile devices market where the iPhone has been growing in market share at an enormous rates. In last weeks article HSBC is looking at replacing their Blackberry's with iPhone (worldwide! 200,000 units!). This proves that the iPhone has become a serious business device.

As we have two products with great growth figures the combination of the two has great potential. With the Numenes philosophy that it should be an easy to use and also require no server side installation, we have created a solutions that can be purchased by the individual sales person who wants to improve his business as well as by the corporates that want to set it as their standard.

We hope and believe you see the same potential in your market. So we invite to step on the Numenes train and provide a great solutions to your customers.

Looking forward to hearing from you

Edwin Quarles van Ufford
General Manager
Numenes BV
edwin.quarles@numenes.com