Happy Holidays from Piraeus!

We had a busy holiday season here, but not too busy that we forgot how to have fun We hosted a Mad Men themed potluck, complete with cocktails. It was great to see everyone dressed to the nines. Thanks for playing along!

I went to a presentation this morning detailing the release of Microsoft Dynamics CRM 2011.  It was fun to see Piraeus work in action, and I’m glad to know that we’re responsible for the charts that are actually useful, not the pie charts.  (Doesn’t anyone pay attention to Stephen Few? Pie charts are one of the worst ways to display information accurately.)

Yes, it seems that CRM 2011 is really customer driven, and the user can modify it in a lot of cool ways.  But I still think that’s assuming that the user knows what kinds of questions he or she needs to be asking.  I liked the idea of a dialog wizard and I could see that being useful in my day to day duties, but it still means I have to define what I need to be asking.  Isn’t that where business intelligence firms help?  We can come in and help you figure out the right questions and the way to look at results.  It’s all well and good to say “I can drive this myself,” but I think companies are still going to need help figuring out exactly where they’re driving.

Also, from what I understand, upgrading from CRM 3 to CRM 4 was a beast. (This is speculation, off of comments I overheard, because I haven’t been through the 3 to 4 process.)  CRM 4 to CRM 2011 is supposed to be a lot easier, but again, I suspect help will be needed.

I’ll be interested to see what the responses are when people start transitioning, but even the Madrona folks presenting recommended caution… though the release date is set for Q1, I heard Q4 as a reasonable time to upgrade.

On an entertaining note: apparently Texas has cities I’d always associated with other states.  Missoula? Renton? Both in Texas.  Turns out Microsoft’s sample data set has cities and states, but no rule to associate one with the other.  Drill down in the sample of accounts in Texas and you’ll see a city breakdown that’s not quite right.  Made me giggle a little inside

Found a quick blurb in the NY Times about Clue, a web app that sets up a screenshot test to help understand what people remember about your website.

My idea is to do this for the Piraeus home page and create an infographic explaining the results for part two of this post.  The test will be live for 24 hours, starting at 2:30 (PST)  today.  The more test results, the better the infographic (I hope) so please pitch in and respond!  Thanks

Take the test here.