Microsoft has brought a great product to market with Dynamics CRM. The CRM marketplace has traditionally been fraught with failed offerings, stalled implementations and troublesome products. With Dynamics CRM, Microsoft has created a robust CRM solution that works well out of the box, but more importantly is straightforward to customize. There are two versions of the product on the market, one for On-Premise and one Online. Both offerings have their advantages, depending on your requirements. Today, I’m going to look at the Online offering.
The key to the online offering is that it is ready to go. No hardware needed and no software installs necessary. Contact a and you’re ready to get started It really is that simple with the Online offering. Once signed up, you add your users, have them download the Outlook connector utility and they are ready to go as well.
Do you have data to convert? Not a problem. Where is the data coming from? Spreadsheets, ACT, Goldmine, SalesForce.com, some other system - all of this data can be easily converted. Dynamics CRM has a robust data import tool that allows the data to be pulled in from a CSV and mapped to the new fields. If you are having trouble pulling data from your current CRM there are plenty of import tools options like Scribe Software’s converters.
Most people have done some customizations in the past systems to meet their business needs. is easily customizable in the online version. All you need is a little training (available from a partner or online) and permission as a system customizer. New fields are added to the system and forms quickly and easily, new entities (think Vendor, Affiliates, Trade Shows, etc) can be added and related to the existing entities (Accounts, Leads, etc) in multiple ways. All of this is available with the standard CRM online toolset. No special coding is necessary.
Another great aspect of the Online version is the ease of upgrades. Since it is online, Microsoft takes care of upgrades automatically. For example, in November users of the online version were upgrade to the newest release. All of their customizations remained intact and no additional work was needed by the clients to receive the latest features.
Microsoft is offering CRM online trials for you. If you’d like ,
By: Bill Reckard of ,
I've been using CRM since version 1 and I have tested out the online version. It's a great way to get started using a CRM system without a big commitment. You also can try it out for free for 30 days.