Scribe Software Blog

Scribe Adapter for Microsoft Dynamics CRM v5.1 Released

Last week we released v.5.1 of our Adapter for Microsoft Dynamics CRM. In this release we've provided our users with updates to popular OpenMind ideas. Here's a sample of what's new in this release:

• OpenMind Idea #27: CRM Publisher Filter: This was the #1 requested item in OpenMind for CRM adapter. This modification will allow users to filter out CRM changes early in the pipeline. This item is for CRM 2011 only, and the user experience is very similar to other adapter publisher filters (E.g. GP publisher and NAV publisher).
• OpenMind Idea #154: Start Workflows from within an Integration: Another very popular OpenMind idea... Using an execute step, one can invoke "Child" and "On Demand" workflows within CRM.
• This release will also allow users to connect to and publish from CRM 2011 when it is configured for IFD.

 View the Release Notes and get the Download link here.

More Timely OpenMind Emails

Many customers and partners used Scribe's OpenMind Forums & KnowledgeBase to find answers to questions regarding Scribe products. And, as many users already know, you can watch a forum topic in order to be notified automatically via email when a new comment is added to a topic.

By default, email notifications regarding new topic comments are sent at 3AM EST each morning. The email is sent in digest form so that you will receive at most a single daily email from OpenMind regarding updates to topic discussions you are watching.

This works well in many cases, but sometimes your question may be an urgent one, and you'd like to be notified right away if and when someone responds to your topic. Scribe has recently added a feature to allow you to receive immediate notifications of new topic comments. To enable this feature, select the "Update Profile" link at the top right of any OpenMind page, and deselect the option entitled "Topic Notifications As Digest".

Doing so will cause OpenMind to send you an email immediately when a new comment is added to any topic which you are watching. This will potentially result in more emails in your inbox, but when you want to get notified of an answer as soon as one becomes available, this is a good option to know about.

Introducing the New Scribe Portal for Partners and Customers

We announced an exciting new portal for our customers and partners at our User Conference, two weeks ago. The feedback we've received has been overwhelmingly positive, so we wanted to be sure everyone knew what this is (in case you weren't at the conference) and how this project is moving along.

The Scribe Portal will be accessible via OpenMind, and ultimately it will be where partners and customers will be able to view specific information about your account, such as: 
   -  What products you have installed
   -  Who are your certified consultants
   -  What Support Incidents your company has open
   -  Your OpenMind incidents
   -  NFRs, and more!

We will be rolling this out to our partners first, then to our customers. Within the next week we will be sending our Partners an email to "Opt-in" to participate in the portal, which will help us ensure we're not allowing access to your company information, to employees who may not be with your organization any longer.  Following, we will be rolling it out to our customers, so watch the blog and our newsletters for the latest updates on this portal!

Use it or lose it!

It's that magical time of the year again…the leaves start to turn (assuming you're in the northern hemisphere), kids go back to school – and members of the Scribe OpenMind community receive a fresh batch of allocations.

OpenMind is an online community for Scribe partners and customers. In addition to hosting Scribe's Forums & Knowledge Base as well as the Scribe roadmap for future and past releases, a key function of the OpenMind site is to allow Scribe users to provide feedback on the product improvements they'd most like to see added to future versions of Scribe. Any registered OpenMind user can create an idea – where an idea is a suggestion for just such an improvement.

As VP of Engineering for Scribe, I value all OpenMind ideas as they are a source for great product suggestions – but I values votes even more.

One of the key problems OpenMind was created to solve was to provide a means by which Scribe could determine which product ideas would most benefit the Scribe community at large. Previous to OpenMind, I had numerous fruitful discussions with partners and customer in which they provided great product suggestions – but it was very difficult to tell whether such ideas would benefit a small subset of customers or the community as a whole. Thus, in addition to allowing users to create OpenMind ideas, OpenMind allows users to vote for ideas they'd most like to see incorporated into the product. I cannot emphasize strongly enough how valuable this information is to Scribe and how carefully we look at voting in OpenMind when considering what features to include in the Scribe product roadmap. OpenMind is not the only basis upon which we make roadmap decisions – but it is a key component of our decision making process.

Voting is governed by allocations. Simply put, an allocation gives you the right to cast a vote. An allocation of 5 allows you to cast 5 votes – you can cast those votes any way you like – voting 5 times for a single idea of spreading those votes across multiple ideas. When making roadmap decisions, Scribe is forced to made tradeoff decisions…we cannot do it all, so where should we focus? Allocations are an attempt to guide users to making those same type of tradeoff decisions – you can't vote for everything, so what do you value most?

Allocations do expire. Generally allocations expire after 4 months – and allocations are refreshed three times a year. There is no reason to hoard them – an allocation operates on a use-it-or-lose-it principle. The current batch of allocations is set to expire on September 24^th. If you haven't already done so, please consider voting before your allocations expire. In doing so, you can do your part in determining the future direction of Scribe.

How to Determine What Goes With What

Scribe adapters are powerful components of the Scribe suite of products – doing the heavy lifting whenever possible to allow users to create integrations without having to understand the technical nuances of the various applications to which we connect. At the same time, understanding the multitude of version numbers of adapters and Scribe Insight and the interdependencies between versions can be a daunting task.

There are several places where you can go to determine which adapters are compatible with which versions of Scribe Insight.

• Release notes are always the best resource for determining the capabilities, limitations and compatibilities for any Scribe product. Release notes are placed in the Release Notes directory beneath the Scribe directory when you install Scribe Insight. You can also find links release notes for all products on the Scribe download page (https://www.scribesoftware.com/downloads). Lastly, you can navigate to the product page for any Scribe product release to find a link to the release note as well. For example, the screenshot below shows the product page for version 4.3 of the Scribe Adapter for Dynamics CRM at https://openmind.scribesoftware.com/releases/77.
  

• The Scribe download page itself is also a resource. We reorganized the download page several months back to make it easier to determine which adapters are associated with which versions of Scribe Insight:

  

Additionally, as part of the Insight 7 release, we're making several improvements to OpenMind to make this information easier to find.

• The products page in OpenMind will provide version compatibility information, allowing you to immediately see with which version of Insight an adapter is compatible. For example, the screen shot below shows the product page for version 1.3 of the Scribe Adapter for Dynamics NAV, which shows the NAV adapter version 1.3 is compatible with versions 6.5, 6.5.1 and 6.5.2 of Scribe Insight.

  

• Lastly, Scribe Insight has been enhanced to make it easier to determine version compatibility when you are considering updating Scribe products. Selecting the "Check for Product Updates…" menu item will open up the following OpenMind screen, which shows information specific to your installation:

  

  Let me highlight some of what this new screen shows you:

  • Each installed product is listed, including the version of the product installed.
  • The latest version of each product and a link to download that product. If you are not running the latest version of a product, OpenMind will inform you whether you can upgrade to the latest version of that product, or whether you'll need to upgrade other components first. For example, in the screenshot above, the user would need to upgrade to Insight 7.0 before upgrading either of the two adapters to the latest version.
  • For products on maintenance, OpenMind will display when your maintenance expires.
  • If you are logged in to OpenMind when you navigate to this page, you will be given the option to put a "watch" on any product. By watching a product, you will be automatically alerted via email whenever a release for that product is updated. This is a great way to stay abreast of the latest release information for those Scribe products which you care about.
  • When engaging with Scribe support, you can click the link at the bottom of the page to send your support representative a snapshot of your installed products and versions.

I hope you find these new features useful, and I look forward to your feedback.

Are you Entitled?

 My name is Eric Wahl, I am the Director of Services at Scribe. I've been on board with Scribe Software for almost a year now. During the past year, I've been working hard with my team to improve the level of service that you receive from Scribe Technical Support. We have revamped our Incident Management processes, improved our tooling and reporting, grown our OpenMind Knowledge Base, and through the efforts of Scribe's Mark Walker, delivered training in the vBooks format (see an example of the vBook format). Last week we recorded our 2^nd of 3 sessions that will become the CRM Adapter training. I'm thrilled about this new training medium and the revamped content that is being presented. Why am I thrilled? It's not just because the content is solid, that it is on-demand or even that it gives everyone a chance to see a few of the faces here at Scribe. It's more selfish than that. This training will ultimately reduce the number of Support calls we receive here. We receive numerous "how-to" calls per day, calls that might not have to be made if more people used the vBooks training.

I am challenged with setting the response time expectations of all of our callers and ultimately where they sit in the queue of Support Incidents. Let me give you a bit of background: We address our Support Incidents by Incident Priority where a Priority 1 (P1) is considerably more important than a Priority 4 (P4). On a P1, we drop everything and work until the Incident is resolved. On a P2 we spend significant effort to get the Incident resolved within 3 days. P3s, which are where most of our Incidents sit, are tackled after the P1's and P2's. We use the guidelines below to sort things out.

Priority		Description
P1		Production System, Materially Impacted, No Reasonable Workaround in place
P2		Production System, Materially Impacted, Reasonable Workaround in place - OR - Non-Production System, Project is Materially Impacted, No Reasonable Workaround in place
P3		Production System, No Material Impacts - OR - Non-Production System, Project is Materially Impacted, Reasonable Workaround in place - OR - Non-Production System, Project is Not Materially Impacted, No Reasonable Workaround in place
P4		Non-Production System, Project is Not Materially Impacted, Reasonable Workaround in place - OR - Request for Information

The issue lies with the fact that most Support Incidents are a P3. With most Incidents being a P3, how do we prioritize the P3's? How does Scribe ensure that your support calls are resolved in a timely fashion to meet your needs? Scribe has Service Levels that I have revised and am ready to publish in the next version of our Support Policy. However, in order for us to make the new targets, we need to have a reasonable call volume so we can be responsive to the people that really need the help. To get where I need to be, I am re-enabling our Partner Entitlements program. As part of the Scribe reseller agreement, our partners are obligated to provide level-1 support to all of their customers and depending on their partner status with Scribe they may also receive a number of free Support Incidents per certified consultant per calendar year. What does this really mean to you?

• If you are a partner and are calling about something other than Installation or Registration issues, we'll log your call, deduct that Support Incident from your remaining annual entitlements and help you out. If you have used all of your annual entitlements or never had any to start with, we will help you out and our Sales Team will contact you after the fact to purchase a Support Incident.
• If you are a customer and are calling about something other than Installation or Registration issues, we'll refer you to your Scribe partner for assistance. If you do not want use your partner, we'll direct you to Sales to purchase a Support Incident.
• If you are calling about Installation or Registration issues, we'll always help you free of charge.

I've seen several very responsible partners who have asked to have access to all of the Support Incidents that their consultants have logged with Scribe so that they can address these questions as training issues internally. I think this is a great approach and I am making changes to our SupportWeb pages to give partners full access to all Support Incidents logged for that Partner.

I'm really hoping that re-enabling our Entitlements Program, the changes in our training, and changes to our SupportWeb system will enable you to have a better support experience.

 

 

New OpenMind Allocations

Users of the OpenMind community have just received new allocations.

As you may know, allocations grant you the ability to vote for the ideas you'd most like to see incorporated into Scribe products. For example, an allocation of 10 gives you the ability to vote up to 10 times. User votes are a major consideration as Scribe determines which improvements to incorporation into its product roadmap.

Allocations are use-it-or-lose it…they do carry an expiration date. Therefore, there's no incentive to save your allocations – use them before they expire! The good news is whether you consume your allocations by voting or let them expire, you'll receive more. Scribe refreshes allocations 3 times a year. This latest batch can be used anytime before January 22, 2010.

Enjoy your new allocations. We look forward to seeing the results of your voting.

Scribe OpenMind Signs Up It’s 1000th User

I'm pleased to announce that Scribe recently approved its 1000^th user to the Scribe OpenMind community.

We released OpenMind in March of 2008 with the goal of providing a single location where Scribe partners and customers could provide us meaningful feedback about Scribe products. Since that time, OpenMind has grown. In addition to capturing feature requests (called Ideas in OpenMind parlance), Scribe launched the new and improved KnowledgeBase in February of this year. OpenMind also provides our customers and partners with the latest information about upcoming and recent product releases.

 

OpenMind adoption has been accelerating. It took us 15 months to sign up our 500^th user, and now a mere 3 months later the community has grown to 1000 users. Here are several other statistics about the OpenMind community:

• 152 users have cast 850 votes for ideas representing improvements they'd like to see added to Scribe products
• 44 user ideas have been incorporated into Scribe products representing 150 user votes.
• 548 distinct users have responded to poll questions, yielding us 918 data points of feedback.
• 1,894 comments have been recorded covering 658 topics in the KnowledgeBase and elsewhere.
• Each day between 100 and 150 users log on to OpenMind – and this does not count people who browse the KnowledgeBase without logging on to the system

Feedback we receive in OpenMind has become an essential tool for determining how we can improve our products and our services to better serve you. We appreciate all the feedback we've received thus far. I look forward to posting another blog entry in a couple months heralding our 2000^th OpenMind user.

Bob

Product Developments

I'm very excited by the launch of the Scribe Blog. The Scribe Blog represents a continuation of our renewed focus on reaching out to and communicating with our partners and customers. As head of Scribe's development organization, I want to give you a flavor for what you can expect from the Scribe product team in the upcoming months. Going forward you will see regular blog posts by members of the Scribe development organization about topics ranging from high level descriptions of upcoming releases to very detailed explanations of powerful yet little known features of Scribe products.

Let me describe several of the initiatives on which the development team is currently focused.

Web Services

Scribe released version 1.0 of the Scribe Adapter for Web Services in April of this year. This is an exciting new product for Scribe, as it provides a robust mechanism by which you can connect to applications for which Scribe does not already provide an application adapter. Version 1.1 of the Web Services Adapter is scheduled for release on July 7, 2009. The focus of this release has been to incorporate feedback received by early users of the adapter. The release includes a number of improvements and enhancements:

• Support for both wsHttpBinding and HttpBinding protocols. In version 1.0, you were required to change the default binding for WCF web services.
• Support for WSDL files the reference other WSDL files (OpenMind idea #225).
• Ability to use services for which some methods are unsupported. In version 1.0, if any web method was unsupported (because, for example, it utilized unsupported data types), then the entire web service was unusable (OpenMind idea #204).
• Binary Large Objects (BLOBs) can now be integrated into a SharePoint list (OpenMind idea #231).
• An improved configuration UI that is more intuitive and easier to use (OpenMind idea #230).

If you're interested in trying out this new release before its GA date, please contact productmanagement@scribesoft.com.

Scribe plans to release version 1.2 of the Web Services adapter later this year. If there are features and improvements you'd like to see added to that release, please consider voting for your favorite idea in Scribe OpenMind.

Dynamics AX

We have seen tremendous interest from the Scribe community in a Scribe Adapter for Dynamics AX, both in OpenMind voting (see OpenMind idea #11) and in direct communications with our partners. We are currently in the planning stages for a Dynamics AX adapter. I'm not ready at this time to offer details or dates, but I can confirm that it is our intent to release an adapter for Dynamics AX before the end of 2009. Watch this blog for further details in the future.

OpenMind

Scribe OpenMind was launched a little over a year ago, and it has grown into an important tool for the Scribe community. With over 800 Scribe users and consultants logging into the OpenMind community regularly, the site represents a vibrant online community and a tremendous source of information for both our customers and partners, and for Scribe itself.

Scribe created OpenMind with two goals in mind. First, we wanted to provide a useful and update-to-date source of information about our products. The latest product roadmap is always available in OpenMind. The new and improved Knowledge Base also resides in OpenMind. Since the re-launch of the Knowledge Base in March of this year, we've added over 700 Knowledge Base articles. And, unlike the old Knowledge Base, Scribe monitors and responds to questions posted in the Knowledge Base. The feedback we've received thus far has been extremely positive.

Second, OpenMind provides a means by which our users can provide us feedback about which features they'd most like to see added to the Scribe product. I value all feedback…but I particularly value feedback that comes in the form of OpenMind ideas. Since any user can comment on an OpenMind idea, it represents a public dialog in which other members of the community can engage. This multi-lateral communication helps to define the scope and intended use cases that in turn make it likely that the enhancements we deliver will actually meet the business need. Voting also allows Scribe to understand what features would be valued by the community as a whole.

I cannot stress how carefully we consider OpenMind feedback as we scope out new releases. We cannot always address the top-voted ideas in a particular release, as we need to consider tradeoffs of size and scope against dates and resources, but we weigh feedback and voting very heavily. If you've not already done so, please consider requesting an account today (https://openmind.scribesoftware.com/user_requests/new). Your vote counts!

Bob Sturim

VP of Products