CRM Online and the Business Productivity Online Suite — Which One is Ready for the Cloud Computing Primetime?

If ever there were a good candidate for cloud computing the Microsoft way, it’s me. I’ve managed a Microsoft partner firm for …well, a long time, and we pretty much drink the Redmond kool-aid: Exchange for email, SharePoint for our web site and collaboration, Office for all the docs that go into SharePoint, Dynamics CRM for sales, marketing and service, .NET code for any plumbing work. We’ve always had a more or less dedicated IT staff to maintain all those servers. Over the last 5 years I’d guess we averaged 1.5 full-time resources for IT, give or take. Last Summer I sold a big chunk of our business, and along with the chunk I sold went about 70% of my employees and revenue, and about 85% of my expenses.

So now I’ve got a smaller, more profitable business, no IT staff, and no desire to hire any non-billable resources any time soon. I used to justify fulltime internal IT resources by thinking, “well, that’s what we do for customers, so it’s good to get the practice”…but now I don’t want internal IT staff, I don’t want servers, I don’t want to hassle with bandwidth or firewalls or any of that. I just want email, CRM and SharePoint up and running. Maybe recessions make you focus your attention on the stuff you really need, or maybe I’ve become a curmudgeon.

So I tried Microsoft’s two highest profile SaaS offerings, and my experience is decidedly mixed. Here’s my executive summary, after almost a year of experience with Dynamics CRM Online and about four months experience with Business Productivity Online Suite (Exchange and SharePoint online, basically, BPOS if you prefer acronyms):

Dynamics CRM Online is very good, and getting better. I think any small business looking at CRM should consider the hosted options. If you’re a Microsoft shop or you’ve got Outlook users, you should look at Dynamics CRM. You pay, you’re up and running, it works, they’re always adding cool new features. This was what I thought cloud computing should be.

BPOS, on the other hand, is terrible. I’m amazed Microsoft took this product to market. After my nice experience with Dynamics CRM Online, I whipped out my credit card and paid for my monthly BPOS subscriptions, expecting we’d be up and running in no time. That was in November, and although I’m getting monthly BPOS bills regularly, we have yet to get our hosted Exchange email up and running, and worse yet, we have yet to get any worthwhile help or technical support!. It turns out that you apparently need a full-time staff MCSE or a consulting firm to figure out how to actually send and receive emails with BPOS. Don’t get me wrong – I’m all about consulting firms. I can see that you might need professional help to do something complex like migrate users’ mailboxes or implement customizations. But if all you want to do is something that should be simple like get your email up and running, it shouldn’t take months and lots of professional help. If it does, I’d say it pretty much defeats the purpose of “cloud computing”!

I remember early discussions from Microsoft execs on the hosted Exchange model, ca about 12-15 months ago. Back in those days, their stated approach was to only go after the largest organizations; the argument being that they wanted to prove the model with engagements large enough to justify the consulting and services investment required to make them successful. 

Well, based on my early experience with their hosted Exchange, I’d say they should have stuck to this model until they got their product finished…or at least, “finished enough” to be usable without lots of hours from Microsoft Consulting Services. 

Anyway, that’s my two cents worth. Anybody else have a different experience? If so, maybe could you shoot me a quick email with some tips & tricks on how to set up my mx records on my networks solutions dns settings…or whatever that stuff is.

Cheers, Richard — richardk@imginc.com