Microsoft Dynamics Profile: Investing in emerging tech around Dynamics 365 / CRM

Newly minted Microsoft Dynamics MVP Michael Ochs says his drive is to see the future of customer relationship software before anyone else, to do that in the context of technology solutions that use Microsoft Dynamics 365.

Ochs is currently director of product development at The Cobalt Company, which delivers business solutions to trade associations and certification organizations. In that role, Ochs is responsible for overseeing product development for all of Cobalt's Dynamics 365-based products. Last year, he was responsible for the release of Cobalt's first horizontally focused Dynamics 365 product, Migration Dynamics.

"I've been with the company for 12 years. I came in right as CRM 3 came out. That was right around the time Cobalt was building its product for associations and we chose the Dynamics CRM platform," Ochs says. "Day-to-day, I oversee development of the product. We [also] do implementation as well and we have a consulting service that does those implementations."

A couple years ago Cobalt began an internal program - a contest to build add-ons for Dynamics. As part of that competition, Ochs built CRM IQ (Intelligent Query0, an add-on that augmented the Advanced Find functionality in Dynamics CRM.

"We also built Snapshot and iterated on that a couple times," he says. "It started out as a backup tool and then it gave us the ability to clone records and restore stuff from the audit history and it had a recycling bin - it sort of became a big behemoth of an add-on with a lot of functionality."

Both CRM IQ and Snapshot are ...