Top Five Reasons to Like Dynamics CRM Online

Background: Our Move to the Cloud

There’s a lot to like about Microsoft’s SaaS version of CRM, Dynamics CRM Online (http://crm.dynamics.com ). In a recent article, I provided an overview of my company’s experience over the last year as we migrated all of our mission-critical IT functions from a traditional on-premise infrastructure to hosted services. Whatever you call it – SaaS, cloud computing, hosted – the most important benefit of migrating is that you don’t have to worry about the purely technical aspects of hosting: they become the job of whoever’s doing the hosting.

The IT functions we migrated to the cloud included E-mail, our web site, my blog, our CRM, and our Intranet site for document management and collaboration. Of all of these, our CRM migration – from the on-premise Microsoft Dynamics CRM 4.0 Enterprise version to the hosted Dynamics CRM Online – was far and away the best experience. It fulfilled the promise of cloud computing in many important ways, so I thought I’d recount them, in the form of a top five list.

So, without further ado, the…

Top Five Reasons to Like Dynamics CRM Online

1. Great up and running experience. The process of getting up and running is flawless. In my opinion, most businesses will be able to sign up, add users, and be up and running in a day, without requiring dedicated IT staff or any previous CRM experience. This seems to be the whole point of cloud computing, and not everybody gets it right. (BPOS, for example, is Microsoft’s cloud combination of Exchange E-mail, SharePoint and Live Meeting. The BPOS on-boarding experience is time-consuming, complex and will for most organizations require the assistance of experienced specialists. )

   What I’m describing as the “up and running” experience for Dynamics CRM Online is the alternative to the installation process for the on-premise version. The on-premise version is installed on your own servers, and must be installed on top of an already-solid platform consisting of Windows Server 2003 or 2008, SQL Server 2005 or 2008, the correct version of the .NET Framework, the latest hot fixes and security patches, and some other things. After going through your “pre-installation checklist”, the installation of Dynamics CRM isn’t too bad…but still, it’s a multi-step process that takes some experience to really feel comfortable with, and it really should be done by an IT professional. 

   Contrast the on-premise installation process with the Dynamics CRM Online up and running experience: Choose a name for your organization. Pay for at least five users ($44/month per user, Microsoft will charge your credit card after each month). Add the users with the (what else?) New Users wizard. That’s it: nothing to install, Microsoft does the heavy lifting for you.

    

2. No (unplanned) downtime. Starting in March of 2008, I’ve either had a demonstration organization or our production version running on Dynamics CRM Online, and as far as I know we’ve never had any unplanned downtime. Periodically we are notified, well in advance of planned downtime for server maintenance or upgrades performed in the Big Data Center in the Cloud. It’s usually on a weekend night and it’s usually for about 4 hours.

    

3. No server maintenance. Not only do we have 100% planned up-time, but we don’t have to perform backups, install patches or hot fixes, do performance tuning, etc. I’m still not sure what the precise argument was in the famous article by Nicholas Carr, IT Doesn’t Matter, but I do know this: if by “IT” we mean installing and maintaining server software, maintaining connectivity and providing bandwidth, then all that matters to me is whether it works, not who actually does it.
4. Two deployment options, one platform architecture. Microsoft is nearly unique in having both an on-premise and an online option, and as far as I know entirely unique in having the same architecture for both options. What this means is that you can migrate data and customizations either way: from on-premise to online, or from online to on-premise. There are lots of scenarios this single-architecture supports. Here are three examples:

• I can prototype customizations in an on-premise organization, demo them to a client running Dynamics CRM Online, and then export them from the on-premise organization to the client’s production online system when ready.
• An organization might start with the online platform, and then migrate to on-premise if its user-count grows enough to justify the IT investment.
• The flip-side is just as easy: an organization currently running on-premise can migrate everything to the online platform.

  I should add a caveat to this last point: there are some customization techniques supported for on-premise that are not supported for online (see below). If your organization relies on some of these, a migration from on-premise to online will be more difficult.

5. In the Cloud, new features just happen! This is something it took me a while to fully appreciate. If you’re running the on-premise version, you don’t get new features until the next product version ships. If you’re running online, you get new features every time Microsoft does a “service update”. According to my count, there have been two service updates so far for Dynamics CRM Online, and each one has added very important new functionality in an area of special interest to me, Internet Marketing. There’s another one coming in a month or so that will feature some more cool new features.

So if you’re running Dynamics CRM Online now, you’re getting a sneak preview of features the on-premise product won’t see until Dynamics CRM 4.0 comes out! For example, some important new features will be in the November 2009 service update. Here’s a preview.

What’s not to Like?

Nothing’s perfect, including Dynamics CRM Online. Here are a few areas where the online experience suffers in comparison to on-premise:

• Some limitations on ability to extend. While the customization architecture is the same, there are some limitations on how you can extend the product in its online version. Basically, the customizations you can perform are either ones that use the built-in tools, or ones that extend the platform using web services and the methods they expose. This includes a LOT of customizations…but not everything you might want to do. Here’s a quick summary of all of the customizations tactics available in the on-premise version, and the subset of those available in online, ca. October 2009:

   

• Many add-on products not yet available for online version. This is actually a corollary of the previous point: since many of the ISVs who have developed add-ons for Dynamics CRM have exploited the extension techniques that aren’t yet available for online, some of their extensions aren’t yet available. I won’t provide a long list here, but suffice it to say that the ISVs who have versions of their products available for online as well as on-premise now are more the exception than the rule.

• No “multi-tenancy” for online. Multi-tenancy is available only in the (on-premise) CRM 4.0 Enterprise Edition, and means you can create multiple “organizations” within a single deployment. Since data and customizations live at the organization level, multiple organizations give you LOTS of important benefits, such as support for separate development, test, and production organizations. I use them all the time to implement prototype and demo organizations I can show a customer, before migrating customizations to a production system.

  Anyway, this feature isn’t available for online, so unless you’re fortunate enough to also have an on-premise Enterprise Edition, it means prototyping and testing must happen in your production environment.

All these Tradeoffs!

Like I said, nothing’s perfect, and the fact that Dynamics CRM Online has a few limitations compared to the on-premise version shouldn’t be too surprising. For many small-medium sized organizations, the advantages of cloud computing – wonderfully realized in the online version of Dynamics CRM – are going to be compelling reasons to consider the platform.

A couple years ago, we regularly saw clients decide to go with Salesforce for the simple reason that it was the only option. These were obviously organizations that had already seen the advantages to cloud computing and were sympathetic to the “no software” pitch.

Now, things have changed a little. Salesforce isn’t the only option anymore, and must now win deals based on good old-fashioned dimensions such as features, price and value. Judging by Microsoft’s recent revenue and revenue-share growth, the CRM marketplace seems to think Dynamics CRM stacks up pretty well!