One of today’s greatest business challenges is how to be more customized, more rapid, and more engaged with your customers while still driving down transaction costs and associated overheads. Solving this challenge means enabling more productive alignment of sales and marketing with the management of vendors, customers, and orders, or in IT terms, improving the collaboration between the people who do information work and those who do structured task work.
In order to make the interactions between people doing information work and people doing structured task work more efficient, business and IT leaders need to be able to blend the structured tasks with the unstructured data across the business process flow. Since information workers use productivity tools and collaboration solutions, such as online team workspaces, while structured task work is performed on relational line-of-business (LOB) applications like a customer relationship management (CRM) solution, these two modes of work can be blended through a tool called a “relational productivity application” (RPA).
An RPA merges the best aspects of the collaboration toolsets used for information work and the relational LOB applications used for structured task work. In the Microsoft environment, the RPA is best accomplished by integrating the xRM application framework of , which is used to build relational LOB applications for structured task work, and , the collaboration and document management platform used in information work.
Leveraging the Microsoft Dynamics CRM xRM (xRM) application framework can result in tremendous cost savings because xRM:
- Enables application developers to make use of a single framework for many applications
Contains pre-built functionality that makes it relatively simple for developers to use and re-use its extensible building blocks
- Is easily customized, reducing expenses for packaged software and specialized outside service providers
- Is built using Web services making it relatively simple to integrate with other applications, such as Office SharePoint Server, in an RPA
To learn more about how Microsoft Dynamics CRM and Office SharePoint Server merge into a “better together” scenario, in which the different types of workers involved in a business can access the information they need to work more productively and intelligently, download this complimentary whitepaper:
By Socius, an Ohio Microsoft Dynamics Partner
