This weekend I was coding away and listening to an episode of .Net Rocks where Dan Appleman was being interviewed. Dan mentioned a custom Google search engine called Search Dot Net that he had created to search .NET-specific content.
In a nutshell, Google has a service where you specify a list of web sites to search against, instead of the entire Internet universe that Google normally examines.
What a cool idea, I thought. Someone should do that for CRM.
So I did.
Here is the search interface:
And here is a sample of the results:
For the list of sites, I used the CRM World link list created by Ronald Lemmen. I can add sites to the list as I discover them but unfortunately, I don't have a method for dynamically displaying a list of what sites are currently being searched.
Give it a shot and let me know what you think.
A week ago I decided update my CRM Accelerators web site ( my company ) by adding some more content and re-enable ASP.NET AJAX on the site since GoDaddy added support for it. I finished it last night.
12 hours of my life and I am sure that more than a few new gray hairs were added to my head because GoDaddy's implementation of ASP.NET AJAX doesn't appear to be complete, or at least, I couldn't get it to work. In fact, even after I removed all of the AJAX stuff and republished my site, and that still didn't restore the site back to it's original functionality. Actually, it wouldn't work at all, so I just replaced the home page with an "Under Construction" message.
After a fruitless email exchange with GoDaddy support at 1:00am, I fixed the problem on Wednesday morning by moving my site to DiscountASP.net. The site was up and running with AJAX in less than 30 minutes.
That taught me a really important lesson about my choice of hosting providers.
I have, and have had, site hosted at a variety of hosting providers over the years and for the most part, they are pretty much all the same. Your experience may vary, of course. And for getting your basic FrontPage or Dreamweaver site up and running, they work just fine.
But on my site, I had a deeper need to be able to control the site and its interaction with the visitor.
What I learned from my various experiences with GoDaddy vs. DiscountASP was the fact that I needed to host my site with a company that really understood the needs of an ASP.NET developer than the more Generic "one size fits all" provider. You should keep such topics in mind should you need to select a hosting provider yourself.
So far, I am very impressed with DiscountASP and everything that I have needed was either provided out of the box or was found within their KnowledgeBase.
Previous Web-Site Related Articles
Andy Goodman has published the final version of a how-to guide that will allow you to publish your CRM web site running on Small Business Server to the Internet.
Great work Andy.
Today is Memorial Day here in the United States, which to some, is more than just another excuse for a three-day weekend.
The simple reason that I have the honor to fly an American flag in front of my house, with the mostly green grass and tall Oak trees, is because at times in our country's past, ordinary people stood up and did extraordinary things and made the world a different place.
Men and women cast from that very same mold, and wearing our country's uniforms, are stationed around the world performing the same duties as did their predecessors.
To those who have gone before, and those who are there now, I would like to say Thanks.
Peace be with you all.
Mitch
[ for those interested, the title for this post is from a song by Billy Ray Cyrus.]
Did you know that if you have a Ford, F-150 pickup, and you are driving down the highway at 75 mph, that it impossible to get the windshield washer fluid to shoot more than eight inches high?
Well, it is.
And that means that you can't get the dried-bug juice off your windshield. You have to slow down to about 50 to make it work properly.
I consider that to be a design defect and will be contacting Ford Motor Company with my findings…
Developers are notorious for not documenting their source code, and I'm sometimes no different.
Well today, I ran a prototype of an encryption application that I had developed back in August of 2006, and this is what I see:
I have no explanation at all for what you see before you. I mean, security is one thing, but this is getting a bit paranoid. :)
At the CMT 2007 Music Awards, Bon Jovi debuted a new song called "( You want to ) Make a Memory," which is a really good song.
CMT.com had that performance listed until Bon Jovi actually came out with a real video for the song.
It's still a great song, but I'm officially a bit disappointed with the video. I mean, hasn't that been done before???
I've been busting body parts this week trying to finish up about four different projects so that I can concentrate on completing a rollout of a CRM installation we have planned for this weekend.
Had planned, that is.
I received an appointment change this morning caused by one of the key team members being sick, so the rollout was moved back two weeks.
I've been working till midnight every night this week and I'm not really sure what to do with myself at this point.
In this moment of indecision about what to do next, I think I'll just do my usual thing and go to DQ for a Oreo Blizzard and see if inspiration strikes.
I doubt that it will. So rather than chance anything, I'll probably just take the afternoon off and enjoy a nap.
Peace out.
to be a smartass this morning. For those that know me, I can be, and most of the time am, a startass – but generally mostly towards people I know.
Today, on the way to lunch, I was tempted to be a smartass to a totally unknown and unsuspecting person.
So I'm driving down the street and I pull up to a stop light already packed with stopped vehicles. One such vehicle was a new, black, Toyota Tundra. This one also had large yellow stickers on the back, sides, hood, and windshield just to let everyone know it was a Tundra.
I almost rolled down the window and said, "Nice truck. Is that like a Tundra or something?"
Stupid, yes. But do you really need that much writing to establish that it's not a Ford, Chevy, or Dodge?
Ben Riga ( Microsoft ) and Jason Hunt ( Invoke Systems ) gave a pretty good presentation of how Dynamics CRM can be used as an application development platform – not just a CRM system.
It was really good to finally see what kind of applications Invoke Systems has produced. Jason gives demonstrations of a couple of their solutions and you really get to see the potential of using CRM as a starting point for your solution development.
The presentation is a bit over an hour and 15 minutes, but it's worth the time.
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