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Social Media and the Customer Relationship

Richard December 17, 2010 CRM, CRM 2011, Facebook, Social Media, Twitter Comments Off on Social Media and the Customer Relationship

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A recent report from Gartner says that worldwide enterprise social software revenue is on track to total $664.4 Million in 2010. This is a 14% increase on 2009 with a forecast growth for 2011 of 15.7% giving an expected revenue of around $769 million.

The use of social software to drive business is well knowm however take up is supprisingly slow. A Forbes article on “The Future of Selling: Its Social” states that although many U.S companies claim to have a social media strategy, only 9% of U.S salespeople have training in using social media for sales.

The … Continue Reading

Android announce version 2.3: Gingerbread

Richard December 07, 2010 Android, Google Apps, Mobile Comments Off on Android announce version 2.3: Gingerbread

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Android 2.3 introduces many new platform technologies and API to help develop amazing apps.

A full overview of whats in the new platform is given in the Android 2.3 Platform Highlights.

Get a headstart developing on Android 2.3 and visit the Android Developers site for information about theAndroid 2.3 platform, the SDK Tools, the ADT Plugin and the new NDK.

Dropping unnamed CONSTRAINTS in SQL Server

Richard December 06, 2010 SQL Server Comments Off on Dropping unnamed CONSTRAINTS in SQL Server

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As maintainers of a number of client databases we come across issues in automating updates and changes to their SQL Server database schemas.  One such issue revolves around the automatic naming of CONSTRAINTS.

If you create a CONSTRAINT, such as a Primary Key, Foreign Key or even a Default without explicitly givin a name, SQL will generate its own unique name for the CONSTRAINT.

This is handy since its a unique name in the database, but its also unique across all databases so for clients with a hosted application, automated upgrades to each application database can be tricky.

This script below is a generic way … Continue Reading

REST based access to CRM 2011

Richard December 01, 2010 CRM 2011, OData, REST Comments Off on REST based access to CRM 2011

Dynamics CRM 2011 supports a rich REST based endpoint allowing Javascript, Silverlight and other resources to access your CRM data.  The latest CRM 2011 SDK contains some (beta) details on the request and response structures needed to perform the CRUD operations.

These CRM 2011 web services also support the OData Protocol and $select, $filter, $orderby and $top can be applied to a query string request to return ATOM formatted data to your client application.   Continue Reading