Scribe Software Blog

The Results are in – the Inaugural Scribe International User Conference was a success!

I'd like to extend a warm thank you to all of our customers and partners who participated in our first ever international User Conference less than two weeks ago, here in Bedford, NH. The event kicked off with a humorous video to candidly introduce "Scribers" to the audience, followed by a Keynote by our President and CEO, Lou Guercia, who shared Scribe's plan to launch an Online Integration Platform, taking the audience with him as he walked through the world of Scribe and where Scribe is headed with our customers and partners, in the future. The Keynote ended with our faux "inspirational speaker", Jeff Havens, as he educated our audience on just how fun a non-inspirational speaker can be!

Then onto the sessions, and what jam-packed 50 minute sessions they were. Attendees spent a day and a  half submersed in everything Scribe, ranging from Troubleshooting, Features and Highlights, and learning  how to optimize your Scribe products' performance… to deep dives into Adapters of all kinds. And for many, it still wasn't enough! As a special bonus for all of our attendees, each session has been recorded using our vBook technology and they'll have access to these vBooks for the next 6 months, at no additional cost.

I'd like to share a few stats and some of the great feedback we received on what worked and what could be improved for next year.

Scores: Presentation skills of our presenters averaged 4.16 out of 5, proving all of the torturous dry-runs Peter Chase, Lou G and I made our speakers go through (anywhere from 2-4 times each) was well worth it. And the relevance of the sessions also showed we were pretty well on target, averaging 4.07 out of 5, with terrific suggestions to consider including in next year's conference.

Comments from the attendees. This is a very small sample of the over 150 comments received from our attendees:

"This year's conference was fantastic. I enjoyed attending and found the material well worth the trip."
"Next year I'm bringing at least three of my customers!"
"Glad to hear the long term vision of Scribe."
"Sessions were great! I wish the conference was longer!"

Suggestions from the attendees. Again, this is just a small sample of all suggestions received, but gives you an idea of new sessions we're considering for next year:

Incorporate Hands-On labs	Schedule specific support meetings
More technical sessions	Designing integration from scratch
More basic info for beginners	Template sessions
Install class	Security setup
Top 10 Issue Resolutions	Benchmarking
Tech session on DTS scripting	New features

So a huge THANK YOU goes out to all of our customers and partners, some of whom traveled incredible distances such as Netherlands and the UK, Oregon and California! We truly appreciate your efforts in getting to Bedford to attend our conference, and helping make it such a success. If you weren't able to make it this year, we look forward to seeing you next year!

User conference attendees to get sneak peek at Denali, Scribe’s cloud based integration platform

With a little over two weeks to go before our first annual Scribe User Conference our team is busy preparing  a rewarding and enlightening event for you, our customers and partners…we plan to enjoy ourselves too!  It will be a great opportunity to learn new ways to use Scribe technology to shape how your users share CRM and ERP information to make smarter, more informed decisions.  We hope to engage you in a good discussion about trends and opportunities that will result from the integration of cloud delivered services and premise based applications.  This is an area of real interest to me and I plan to show you where we're headed with Project Denali, a code name for our upcoming new cloud based offering.  We'll talk openly about our vision, the future of Scribe and how we will include our partners, consultants, customers as well as ISVs in our offerings and routes to market.  The opportunity is too big to try to do it alone and we want to join forces with you to grow the pie together.  We will continue to update www.scribesoft.com/scribecloud but for those that attend our user conference you will have an even better sense for our strategy and roadmap plans.  I look forward to seeing many of you later this month.

Conference Food, Keynote and Entertainment – Be ready for a surprise

As we prepare for the Scribe User Conference and our early bird discount window closes I thought I would whet your appetite for some of the non-integration related aspects of what we have in store for you.

Thursday will kick off with our keynote speaker. To create an element of surprise we're not going to tell you who this is or even the nature of the presentation. You'll find out when he (or she) hits the stage. We will make you a couple of promises about our special keynote speaker:

• You will not be bored
• You will not recognize him/her (i.e. don't expect someone super-famous)
• You will walk out saying – those Scribe people are pretty cool

Introducing our keynote speaker will be Scribe's new CEO Lou Guercia. Lou has been with us for a little over a month now and he's fitting right in. He'll talk about the future of Scribe and our commitment to our users.

Since we're really going out of our way to plan a day filled with great Scribe material (read about this in our session blog posts) we decided that we'll all need to have some fun Thursday night. Our cocktails and dinner at the Bedford Village Inn is going to be first class. The BVI, as it known to locals, is a top New England Inn and Restaurant and it looks the part. A temporary home to many Presidential hopefuls during the New Hampshire primaries the BVI is a place to remember. Click here to browse their photo gallery.

To entertain us during our cocktail hour, dinner and after we have the Bobby Keyes Trio performing. A couple of us Scribers went and saw Bobby and the boys playing to a packed room this weekend and he did not disappoint. I wish he has some music online I could link you to but he is old school. You're going to like it.

For more information on the conference and registration click here to visit the event site.

A Different Kind of Panel Discussion

I have the enviable responsibility of moderating a panel discussion at the upcoming Scribe User Group Conference. Join me and three of the most experienced and creative Scribe Most Valuable Professionals (MVPs) in the community - Correna Sergent of Tribridge, Jason Griffith of Aspect Software, and Pierre Hulsebus of EHTC - as we kick off the second day of the event. 

Like me, you've been to a lot of conferences and sat through many panel discussions. Often these panels can be entertaining, but I usually measure their value to me by the number of new and actionable ideas I gain. A good session is usually reflected by the circled and underlined notes that I've taken.

We'll be stretching the definition of "panel" in this session. We're taking the best parts of a panel (enabling a dynamic interaction between experts and the audience) and jettisoning the bad parts (listening to people, who are sitting in much more comfortable chairs than anyone else, talk endlessly on a variety of self-serving topics).

Each of the panelists will present a specific and particularly challenging customer project. They will review what the customer's requirements were and will show how they designed a Scribe solution to meet those requirements. They will drill down on a few of the thorniest issues they've had to deal with and show you how they configured Scribe to address it. You can expect to see some really creative and well designed step control, source queries, publishers, etc. in this session. There is nothing like real life to drive deep and informative discussion.

While each of the panelists is presenting, we'll be asking questions along the way. Members of the audience can ask questions of the panelists too. This should keep the session lively and focused on the things the audience really wants to know.

We're zeroing in on the best customer projects for the session. So far the nominees involve some really interesting scenarios including integrating customers, orders and invoices between a single CRM deployment with multiple companies in a single ERP deployment, integrating CRM to ERP along with 2 to 3 other line of business applications, calling external processes within a Scribe job, and optimizing for high volume data needs. I am certain the ones that Correna, Jason, and Pierre choose will be quite compelling.

I am really excited to moderate this panel and look forward to seeing you at the conference.

User Conference Session Content Outline: Tips, Tricks and Traps around the Scribe NAV Adapter

Greetings!

I am Markus Lischka, a consultant with succentric, specializing in Microsoft Dynamics NAV. This September I will be traveling from Germany to be a guest speaker at the Scribe User conference. Along with Morgan Pierce, a QA Engineer from Scribe, whose focus has been the NAV adapter and template, I will be presenting a session about tips, tricks and traps when using the Scribe Adapter for Microsoft Dynamics NAV.

When using application adapters, it is vital to understand the underlying business logic as well as the characteristics and limitations of the connected business solution, especially as it so easy to get connected using the Scribe adapter technology. Experience in the field has shown Microsoft Dynamics NAV to be an application where users need particular in-depth knowledge about the techniques used, and the problems that can arise using them. This session will provide insight on how to deal with or avoid the most common issues, how to decide whether a problem that emerges when using the Scribe Adapter for Dynamics NAV actually originates in Scribe or rather in Dynamics NAV, and some common customizations around the adapter and template.

Here is some additional information about the topics that will be covered:

-Brief overview about external accessibility and exception handling in Dynamics NAV. Understand on a high level what interfaces Dynamics NAV offer by its design and what functionalities they have. Understand the effect this has on any integration scenario.

-Discuss the most common application specific problems in Dynamics NAV and how to deal with them. Learn typical issues when using the NAS and C/FRONT and understand the impact of the NAV version and build.

-Learn how to evaluate a problem that occurs during the execution of a DTS in the Workbench or in an Integration process that uses Dynamics NAV as a source or a target. Understand how to make a sensible choice about where to seek for the reason if no or limited error messaging is available.

-Review common customizations using the NAV Adapter (and the NAV template) – Discussion around the template architecture (focusing on contacts and pricing) and customizations relating to Dynamics NAV sales persons and teams.

Both Morgan and I are very excited about this session and hope to see many of you at the conference this fall!

Regards,

Markus

User Conference Session: Web Services and SharePoint

For those who work in the field, I don't need to tell you that SharePoint is one of the most popular and widely adopted Microsoft products in the history of the company. To make the most of SharePoint, users want to connect it to other systems in their company. SharePoint provides web services and other API's to allow users to bring their enterprise data into the portal, however one must have knowledge of .Net and other development related skills to be able to accomplish this. For those who are familiar with Scribe Insight, SharePoint is just another connection in your arsenal of integration adapters.

Both Robert "Fuzz" Schroeder and I will be giving a session in the upcoming Scribe User Conference dedicated to SharePoint integration using the Scribe Web Services adapter. This session will include:

• A walk through of the Scribe Web Services Adapter (how to connect to web services and what features can be brought to bear in the world of web service integration)
• An overview of the SharePoint web services (where they are installed, common themes and overall design)
• How to create a site in SharePoint
• How to populate a list in SharePoint
• How to add a document to an item in a list (including document libraries)
• How to traverse content in a SharePoint list for use in another application

We look forward to seeing you in September & be sure to bring any questions or real-world use cases you would like to walk through!

More than you could ever want to know about integrating with Dynamics GP

Many of you are aware about the upcoming Scribe User Conference this September. One of the topics that will be covered by me (as the Product Manager here at Scribe) and Mike Bates (Scribe Template Guru Extraordinaire) is a detailed walk through of the Scribe Microsoft Dynamics GP Adapter. Mike has been with Scribe for nearly a decade and is the author of many the templates you use (including the GP<>CRM Template). I am the Product Manager here at Scribe and, over the past 15 years or so, have written and worked with many integration solutions with Microsoft Dynamics products. Between the two of us, we will be walking you through the details of the Scribe GP Adapter and integration solutions to Microsoft Dynamics GP.

This session will be a deep-dive on the various moving parts of the adapter including the role of Metadata in the Scribe GP Adapter and how to expose customizations in Microsoft Dynamics GP fields for integration.

There have also some dramatic changes around how we publish data out of Microsoft Dynamics GP in the recent months, so there will a particular emphasis on how the new Scribe GP Publisher works and options you have to customize when and how data is published out of Microsoft Dynamics GP.

To illustrate the various technical points, we will be doing demo's that use the product in action. With this real-time interaction with the product, we will be able to react to questions and scenarios that you bring with you - so please do come prepared with any specific questions or real-world use cases.

We look forward to seeing you in Sunny NH at the end of September!

Go BIG with Scribe!! (using Scribe throughout your organization)

As the Manager of the Major Accounts Group, I get involved in large projects where companies are using Scribe in unique or complex ways – in other words, they go big with Scribe!  What’s important to understand is that “going big” is not necessarily about the user size of the deployment or the employee size of the company using Scribe.  It is about the size of the need that Scribe is being utilized to address. 

 

I will be co-presenting this session with Jim Clarke.*  Jim and I will discuss how Scribe can be used to address data driven needs that many customers and partners don’t even think about.  We’ll also walk you through some real-world applications of Scribe being used in big ways that may translate in your own environments.

Some of the topics that we will touch on include: 

· Seeing and planning the big picture – many companies jump in and build point-to-point integrations without planning the big picture.  This can lead to a data disaster!

· Controlling data changes in an integrated multi-app ecosystem – users and administrators need to consider the impact of changes across all of the integrated apps, not just the app they are using.  Certain actions should be restricted or carefully managed (for example, merge!).

· Master Data Management – Scribe can be a powerful tool in an organization’s MDM topology.  We will discuss how to properly plan for its use.

· Using Scribe in less common scenarios, like data cleansing, de-duping, data enhancement, and multi-app “workflow” management.

· BizTalk and Scribe – many large projects have both of these tools at their disposal.  We will walk you through how they compare to each other and when one fits better than the other.

· Query vs. Queued based processing for the best performance – sometimes query is the more effective and effective processing choice.

 

Simple, one-time migrations are for chumps….  GO BIG With Scribe!

 

* Jim is a co-founder of Scribe and now owns his own business, Customer Sync, which provides deep Scribe expertise to customers and/or partners. 

User Conference session: Tips and Tricks for working with the Scribe Adapter for Dynamics CRM

Mike Bates, Scribe's Lead Template Engineer, and I will be presenting at a session about the Adapter for Dynamics CRM at our upcoming user conference. While we were planning our approach to the session, we were slowed down at first by a few things that made it seem a difficult task. The Dynamics CRM SDK is robust and well documented, the Adapter for Dynamics CRM is one of the more mature products in Scribe's adapter product line, and we totally redeveloped our adapter training this year.

Does that leave us anything to teach people?

At first, we thought we were stumped. I think a lot of projects start like that. (Is that revealing too much? J) After we started brainstorming, it did not take us long to come up with a list of topics. We had too many ideas, in fact. Then we set about prioritizing based on a several inputs. We re-read the posts in the product forums, we checked with the technical support team about common problems or misconceptions they hear about from the field, and we checked in with the product development team about what they thought was important to present. As a result, I think we've come up with a set of topics that you will find helpful if you use Scribe for integrating with Dynamics CRM.

As a side benefit, we came up with some topics that were just too big to fit into this session, but would be great topics for a workshop. Would any of you Scribe experts in our partner community want to make a guest appearance in a vBook based workshop sometime? I'd be happy to share the limelight with you and have you tell the user community about the tips and tricks you are willing to share. But that's another story…

Back to the user conference… In this session, Mike and I will present some adapter features and Dynamics CRM features that are overlooked, misunderstood, or undocumented. Through discussion, demonstration, and use case scenarios, we will show you tips and tricks that only some Scribe insiders and more experienced consultants know. We will also discuss the roadmap for the next version of the adapter, which will support Microsoft Dynamics CRM 2011.

Here is more detail on the topics we will cover in our presentation:

• Working with Activities and Activity Party
• Using Adapter XML Logging to Troubleshoot Problems
• A Methodology for Reverse Engineering CRM to Determine Scribe Design
• Working with Integration Mode
• Publisher Topics
• setting the workflow publisher polling interval
• using the workflow publisher for filtering
• 64-bit update
• transitioning from the workflow publisher to the plug-in publisher
• Adapter Roadmap and Support for Dynamics CRM 2011

We look forward to meeting you and sharing this information with you at our inaugural user conference.

User Conference Session: Scribe Technology Roadmap

Ah, the product roadmap. What is Scribe’s plan for the increasing number of cloud apps out there? What are we doing with CRM 2011? NAV?  AX? Are we going to expand our Web Services adapter? What about SharePoint adapter? SAP anyone?

In my previous role as Director of Business Development, when I was not working with our strategic partners like Celenia and Microsoft, I was conducting market studies, researching, and discussing those very questions, particularly around the ERP and SaaS integration markets.  How do we continue to   expand our offerings in ERP and SaaS, what do our partners and customers need, how can we improve our product experience, what new products can we offer, and what’s the roadmap?

As the new Director of Product Management, I’m excited to have the opportunity to work with you – our partners and customers – to help answer those questions so we can deliver excellent products and ultimately, an integration platform that has zero or no installation, is simpler and easier to use, allows partners and customers to collaborate, and is highly scalable, allowing you to focus more time and effort on optimizing your. 

So, let’s talk about what Product Management really means for you at Scribe. We’ve got a lot of smart, talented folks at Scribe who know a great deal about integration however, we can’t possibly dream up all the scenarios and situations you encounter using the product. We’re going to formalize and introduce new ways for you to interact with Scribe so we hear, see, discuss, and understand what you go through day to day using our products. We want to know what’s most important in the “real world” of integration so our product planning and roadmap incorporate those needs. And we’d like to collaborate with you on upcoming innovations to our products.

The Product Management, Development, and Support teams are working closely together on our roadmap for Scribe Insight, Scribe Adapters, as well as new product offerings in the next 18-24 months.  We’ve got a number of changes in store for Scribe’s product line up that we’d like to share with you, including our upcoming cloud integration offering.

Please join me and Bob Sturim, our Vice President of Engineering, at Scribe’s User Group Conference where we’ll be presenting our product roadmap for Scribe Insight and Adapters, the plan for our upcoming cloud-based integration service, and how you can get involved with Scribe to influence future product direction.  Bob and I are looking forward to meeting you!