As many of you know, I’m the Program Manager in charge of the Outlook Client. One of the most common asks that I see is a tool to “push out” offline data filters to individual clients. The lack of a tool was pretty painful for our administrators out there.

In CRM 3.0, you could modify a user’s offline data filters centrally, but it pretty much required you to hack the database. Possible, but entirely unsupported (naturally!).

In CRM 4.0 we still haven’t shipped a tool, but we’ve opened up the SDK sufficiently enough that you can accomplish this programatically. Clint Warriner of our support team has just published a tool he wrote to administer offline data filters, which is installed via MSI.

Updated: Clint tells me it’s not actually an MSI install, but a command-line app that does the work.

In our last episode, we hooked up the CRM 4.0 E-mail Router to a POP3 mailbox on Gmail, then pushed that mail into a CRM queue. This is a stelar feature of CRM 4.0 that allows you to integrate with e-mail solutions outside of the Microsoft stack.

Today, I explore another one of the new features of CRM 4.0: the ability to connect directly to an individual’s Exchange mailbox. This means that you don’t have to deal with forward mailboxes and rule deployment to do e-mail integration. It also means you won’t have to deal with the hassle of coordinating multiple IT departments and having them sign off on your architecture.

I’ve heard some people refer to this feature as RPC-over-HTTP connectivity, vis-a-vis Outlook. In actuality we are using the DAV protocol to retrieve mail (hence why we only support Exchange 2003 and 2007).

Enjoy!

http://video.mikelu.org/emailrouterexchange/emailrouterexchange.html

As Philip Richardson, my co-worker and fellow coffee snob, wrote about on his blog yesterday, a few of us in the office got together for a cupping of the Kopi Luwak coffee. Philip received this as a Christmas gift from a partner and I was totally thrilled that he was willing to share it.

It’s not surprising that you probably haven’t heard of Kopi Luwak coffee. For one thing, only 500 pounds of beans are produced a year. For another, it’s about $200/lb and upper crust espresso shops sell it for about $50 a shot. To
top it all off, the coffee is literally collected from the shit of an Indonesian cat called a Luwak, which lives in trees and eats coffee beans.

No kidding. The little sheet of paper included in the package says…

The resulting coffee is said to be like no other. It has a rich, heavy flavor with hints of caramel or chocolate.

Other terms used to describe it are earth, musty, and exotic.

Musty?

I had originally suggested to Phil that we get in touch with Dave Schomer of Espresso Vivace, arguably one of the best baristas in the world. Turns out we needn’t look outisde the halls for talent and equipment. Terry, our CRM Perf Test Lead, is a fellow coffee fanatic. He showed up yesterday with a Brewtus Expobar (as recommended by David Schomer), a Mazza Mini burr grinder, and something that totally blew my mind: a gram-weight scale. When it comes to coffee, the CRM team doesn’t mess around.

Terry was measuring 23 grams to the shot and with a quarter pound each of bold and medium roasts, gave us exactly ten shots. Enough for each person to get a shot from both roasts.

The Bold. It was go big or go home, so we started off with the bold. Damn, these guys aren’t messing around, this is good coffee. The pull started dark and evened out quickly, staying a rich brown all the way through. Taste was good, with full expression of all the oils in the bean, but I wouldn’t have paid $50.

The Medium. Realistically, I’m not ever one to pay 50 bucks on a shot of espresso, but this one might change my mind. Stunningly better than the bold, it was absolutely fantastic with a rich caramel color and a thick, thick, thick shot from top to bottom. Not a single hint of bitterness with a delicious sweet taste coating the inside of my mouth at the end. I dare say it cleanly beats Vivace, though at the price…

Wow. Pretty good for something that came out of the tail end of an Indonesian cat.

With CRM 4.0 off and running now, I’ve been seeing a lot of questions on how to get the E-mail Router to work with POP3 mail access. I’ve recorded a video of how you can take a Gmail mailbox and hook it up to a Queue inside of CRM via the E-mail Router.

Enjoy! Next video…using the E-mail Router with an individual Exchange mailbox!

http://video.mikelu.org/emailrouterpop3/emailrouterpop3.html

iflickr

Originally uploaded by nanoflux

Days like today I’m really glad I bus to work. It’s well known that Seattle shuts down when it snows even an inch, but today is really exceptional. Last night we were hit with snow showers–very wet snow that’s on the edge of becoming rain. We accumulated no more than an inch, but it dropped below freezing last night, which means all of that turned into solid sheets of ice. Walking down sidewalks produces this cool *crunch crunch* sound, but it equivlates to a disaster in traffic terms, especially with all the hills here.

More from the Top Gear circuit…

James from Top Gear takes the new Fiat 500 through my favorite European city (Budapest) in a race against a pair of amazing BMX bikers. I never saw anything like this on my visits there…clearly I’m going to the wrong spots. I recognize several of the streets, but where the heck was that underground garage thing??

I recently discovered a “cache” of Top Gear episodes that I’ve been watching today in the last bit of R&R time I have before returning to the office.

Formula 1 cars are the pinnacle of car engineering and the source of most modern car innovations–engine design, exhaust design, gearbox design, etc. Richard Hammond takes an F1 car for two laps…just two laps…on the 8th episode of Top Gear’s 10th season.

It blows me away the engineering tolerances that are part of this car. Naturally, F1 cars are designed to be driven at speeds greater than 150mph, however, things don’t really work unless you’re over 100mph. The tires won’t be warm enough, so they won’t grip. And because the tires won’t be warm enough, the brakes don’t work. Amazing.