I would like to know about your experience with Microsoft Dynamics CRM.
Please refer to the version you hae work with as it seems to be a lot of recent changes.
Hi
I worked with CRM3 for about a year with a handful of clients. The main issue I found was people expected it to be easy to customise to exactly their business requirements. They'd already paid for the software... so the tweaks should be easy. Right??
Wrong! (to be fair it is very customisable, just takes time to get up to speed).
Also installation can be tricky.. think website / reporting services / SQL.. then trust relationships across multiple servers. Even on a single server instance, I've had to do scary registry hacks to get everything running.
However it does work as a product..
Cheers
I've worked with MSCRM for a couple of years, both versions 3 and 4. I've also implemented a LINQ query provider for it (http://www.codeplex.com/LinqtoCRM).
Users take to it fairly easily, it's a web-app and integration with the rest of the MS stack is very good, particularly with Outlook where salespeople tend to spend most of their time. The workflow system is strong, particularly in 4.0 where Windows Workflow Foundation is used.
It's true that installation can be tricky, mostly due to all the dependencies on various other Microsoft bits-and-pieces.
The real genius of the MSCRM is the underlying platform though. There's a completely extensible relational framework in there. You can create new entities (tables), add properties (columns) on the fly and add relationships of all kinds between entities through a GUI and it's immediately available to users (after a "publish changes"). There's a solid plugin architecture for business logic other than workflows. You can export and import customizations between running systems, and entire installations (data and all) can be moved around between servers. It's an extremely impressive feat of engineering if you ask me.
Right now, it's somewhat difficult to leverage the underlying platform in a general setting due to licensing issues (go figure), but it's certainly there for you to use in your CRM system.
Microsoft CRM is a great product, but we need to set realistic expectations while making the evaluation decision. Like most technology products, it has its own strength or weaknesses.
First we should understand the philosophy being Microsoft CRM. Microsoft CRM does not compete with a Siebel CRM on functionality. It has very limited functionality with an emphasis on ease of use. Hence comparison with Siebel on functional points and industry integration would be useless.
Microsoft CRM is ideal for organizations with an existing Microsoft Stack Windows Server, AD,SQL Server, and Microsoft Office). The USP of Microsoft CRM is the integration with Microsoft Office in general and with Outlook in particular. Salespeople love to use Outlook, and the CRM Outlook client ensures that they have access to Microsoft CRM from within their Outlook.
Microsoft CRM also scores on Ease of Use. The Microsoft CRM UI is consistent with the Microsoft Office Outlook interface (and now most members of the Microsoft Dynamics family adhere to that look and feel). Users new to Microsoft CRM would find working with it a breeze if they are used to working on Microsoft Office.
Microsoft CRM is highly customizable. Anyone who has tried customizing a Siebel or Oracle CRM would love the simplicity of customization on Microsoft CRM. But obviously, there is a tradeoff between simplicity and depth of customization. There are certain limitation s the Microsoft CRM SDK imposes on certain types of customization.
A good Microsoft CRM consultant would be able to provide solutions that minimize customizations in Microsoft CRM, as it is a very costly affair to maintain and support customizations for an organization in the long term
To summarize, Microsoft CRM is a great product if you are a Microsoft shop, and are looking for a low TCO, simple to use CRM system with limited functionality
Been working with Dynamics CRM since v1.0 beta.
Dynamics CRM should not be considered an "out of the box" sales-service-marketing tool but rather an amazing line of business application platform. About 80% of the implementations that I have been part of did not use traditional sales/service/marketing features but rather we built specific applications and resolved a lot of pain/inefficient processes.
I have seen implementation failures... they are usually where the client wants "just install and let us play with it" To be successful you need to plan, just like a custom app, and if planned and documented properly the implementation will be successful.
This is a Microsoft product and requires the Microsoft stack.
There are a 100 things I love about this product and I make my living implementing/developing in it. I am fully booked for 3-4 months out.
What I don't like: -while much, much better, the Outlook integration still causes issues from time to time. THis is more of Outlook not working well with add-ons. -cannot do mass emailing with attachments, I get this request from clients at least 2 times a month -on the dev side in order to keep customizations "supported" you need to develop extraneous code. Eg. - you need to write a complicated "plug in" that takes many lines of code, configuration of DLLs where I could write a 3 line SQL trigger that does the same thing, however isn't a supported customization.
Good Luck!