November 2009 Service Update Article #3

In another article, I did a quick write-up and linked to a recorded tutorial on how to use the charts that come built-in to Dynamics CRM Online. Basically, they are available to end-users, who can use them to personalize their home page, with up to four charts across the new horizontal “Chart Pane”.

The only entities that arrive stocked with charts are:

• Accounts
• Activities
• Campaigns
• Cases
• Events
• Leads
• Opportunities

   

For example, Account comes with three charts, providing graphical counts of your accounts across territories, territories and owners. The Case entity ships with fifteen (!), most of which show distributions of cases (using counts, again) across various attributes like origin, priority, type and so forth. Opportunities, on the other hand, are all about sales, and the ten charts built-in for that entity are almost all different cuts of forecasted (open) and historical (closed) sales.

I encourage you to explore these built-in charts and see what’s available, for a couple reasons:

• The charts provide a good guide for what kind of information is commonly tracked in Dynamics CRM, and more importantly, what kind of information your organization should be tracking. For example, if your Accounts by Territory and Accounts by Industry charts show you a single big bar labeled “Blank”, you might consider defining and using meaningful values for those two attributes!
• After you know what’s available, you’ll know what you need to create, which brings us to the topic of this article.

Creating Charts with the Chart Designer

You can add custom charts for either system entities or custom entities. Assuming you’ve got sufficient privileges (by default, contained only in the security roles “System Administrator” and “Customizer”), you add them using a new tool called the “Chart Designer”, which is available through the familiar entity customization UI:

1. In the navigation area, click Settings, then click Customization.
2. Click Customize Entities.
3. Locate the entity to add a chart for, and double-click it to open it.
4. Click Charts, then click New. The Chart Designer opens. Here’s a screen-shot of it on top of the slightly modified customization UI (for Contact, in this example)

The Chart Designer is a self-contained one-window application, which as you can see from the picture, requires you to specify the following properties to build your chart:

• Record Type View. Select from existing system views in the drop-down list. Every chart is based on a view, and the view does the data filtering work. When you create a new chart you may need to create a new view first, although you might be able to use one of the existing views.
• Chart Name is self-explanatory.
• Legend (Series). I’ll refer to this as the “Series”, but whatever you call it, it’s what provides the data for your chart: the height of a bar in a bar chart, or the percentage of the pie a piece takes up. If you select a text field you can only select “COUNT” as the “aggregate”. If you select a numeric field you’ve got a bunch of options (MAX, MIN, SUM, etc.)
• Horizontal (Category). The Category represents the values across which the data will be distributed. So for a bar chart, the height of the bars will display the aggregated data, and you’ll have one bar per category. Two examples:
  • If you want to see the number of accounts in each territory, make a chart based on the Active Accounts view, and select Account Name as the Series and Territory as the Category.
  • If you want to see the total of account annual revenue just for your accounts, distributed across industries, select My Active Accounts as the view, Annual Revenue (Base) as the Series, and Territory as the Category.

   

Here are a few tips, tricks and gotchas, based on my admittedly limited experience with the tool:

• Views must be published before they can be selected (to base a chart on), and charts must be published before they can be selected (in the dashboard). Notice the Publish button in the customization UI.
• Within the Chart Designer, the “preview” that’s displayed is real data and it displays in real time. You can use this as a kind of a what-if visualization tool, seeing how your data are distributed across different attributes for the Category value, for example.
• It took me a while to figure out how the “Sales Funnel” chart type worked. I thought there was some behind the scenes magic dependent on having a staged workflow for opportunities, and that it only worked for opportunities, or something arcane like that. But if you want to figure out the “Sales Funnel”, try this:

1. Open up the Opportunity entity’s customization UI, and click Charts.
2. Double-click the out of the box Sales Pipeline chart. Depending on … you may see an inherently uninteresting funnel with one data point, as I did the first time I tried it:

   

    

3. That’s because the out of the box version uses Pipeline Phase as the category attribute. If it doesn’t contain any data every category in the sales pipeline funnel goes into the “blank” category. So just change the category to something that contains data, and you can get a nice pipeline funnel. For example, my organization uses a different attribute to represent our sales pipeline: the system picklist, “Sales Stage” (attribute name “salesstagecode”). Here’s what the pipeline funnel looks like if all I do is change the Category to a field with data:

   

    

   Apparently what the sales funnel chart type does is to “display values as progressively decreasing proportions” (from the online help). You can see in the screenshot that in this case it works as expected. I’ve experimented with different attributes for the category and got different results, however, such as the aggregates for the category values not appearing in “progressively decreasing proportions”. There are definitely some nuances I don’t understand about this chart type yet, so if you’ve got it nailed, please let me know!

Summary, What’s Missing

After a custom chart is created and published, it will be available for use by any user (with sufficient privileges) on their homepage dashboard. I haven’t yet figured out a way to create a chart and then make it available to all users, so the (apparent) fact that each user must go through the steps required to personalize their home page dashboard in order to consume these charts…well, it seems like a bit of a limitation. These must be exposed somehow, but like I said, I haven’t figured that one out yet, so if you have, please let me know!

So at least as far as I’ve been able to tell so far, custom charts can be created by a user with sufficient security privileges and then consumed by users as a personal configuration only. It would be nice if you could create a shared dashboard page that exposed the same charts to multiple users, but like I said…I haven’t figured that one out yet.

In the meantime, here’s something that’s better than nothing: if you add “/Home/Homepage/TTV_Home.aspx” immediately after the “dynamics.com” part of the URL you use to get to Dynamics CRM Online, at least you can get a nice personal dashboard that displays bigger charts without the baggage of the rest of the UI. For example, if I navigate to https://imginc.crm.dynamics.com/Home/Homepage/TTV_Home.aspx, here’s what I see:

Cheers –

Richard Knudson – richardk@imginc.com
new web site: www.IMGinc.net

 Introduction

Dynamics CRM Online – the cloud version of Microsoft’s flagship customer relationship management application – is an excellent product. The “November 2009 Service Update” gets rolled out to current customers on November 9, and in my view the term “service update” doesn’t do it justice. There are too many improvements and brand-new features to cover in one article, so I’ll cover only one of them in detail here: the up and running experience. But first, I can’t resist a quick list of some of the most important enhancements and new features:

• A new Home page with a customizable dashboard.
• A new Chart Designer you can use to create custom charts for that dashboard
• New and improved data import wizard that will replace the Data Migration Manager
• Improvements to Internet Marketing
• Out of the box support for mobile clients

The “Up and Running Experience”

With on-premise software, we expect installation to require technical expertise. IT professionals handle the installation/configuration heavy-lifting, non-technical folks are spared the gory details. Cloud computing is different: one of its biggest selling points is the promise of doing away with on-premise IT requirements. An organization might choose to outsource its IT infrastructure by migrating to hosted software options. On the other hand, for plenty of small organizations without dedicated IT staff (mine, for example) it’s a requirement rather than a choice.

In any case, the cloud version of installation – what I call the “up and running experience” – is a lot more likely to be performed by a non-technical type, like a manager or a power-user or a CEO. So it better be good, and it better be accessible.

The November 2009 Service Update of Dynamics CRM Online takes what was a good up and running experience, and turns it into a great one. The new process can be performed in less than five minutes, and it’s so easy a cave-person could do it, provided he or she has an e-mail address that’s associated with a Windows Live account.

I’ll provide a step-by-step walkthrough next. Just make sure first that you have an e-mail address associated with a Windows Live account.

Up and Running, Step by Step

1. Navigate to http://crm.dynamics.com and click the “Get Started” button. Here’s what “Step 1″ of the process looks like:

   

   Notice that it says “Sign Up for a Free Trial”. The way it works, is, everybody essentially gets a 30-day free trial. As I’ll describe below, this approach is one of the things that makes it so easy. Also, I was already signed in with my Windows Live ID (which for me is the same as me e-mail); if you aren’t signed in, you’ll need to enter an e-mail in Step 1, and create a Windows Live account if you don’t have one yet.

2. Click Next. The worst thing about Step 2 is the “captcha” text Microsoft uses. (It’s the best disguised captcha text I’ve ever seen, and I literally couldn’t figure it out the first couple tries. Fortunately there’s an option to play audio and type along.) Accept the terms and conditions:

   

 3. In Step 3, you choose the name of your organization. This will be in the URL you and your fellow CRM Online users navigate to, so you should use something short. Also, it must be unique, so you might have to try a couple different options. For example, the URL of my company’s production CRM is https://imginc.crm.dynamics.com . The “imginc” part of that is our organization name.

In Step 3, you also need to specify the base currency for your organization. Neither the organization name nor the base currency can be changed after your site is created. (Dynamics CRM has great multi-currency support; the “base” currency is simply defined as the one currency whose exchange rate is always 1.00000000 – all other currencies’ exchange rates are defined with respect to the base currency.)

Here’s what step 3 looks like:

That’s it. Click Finish and after about 30 seconds you’ll something like the following:

You can get started right away by clicking the link to the web application. If you look carefully at the previous screenshot and the next one you’ll see that the organization I created for my free trial is “23daves”. So even if you already have a production system you can create a new organization for your 30-day free trial!

And by the way, if you’re an existing CRM Online customer (like me), you’ll have to wait until November 9 to see the new features in the service update. But if you created a new organization any time after November 1, you got the new features first!

Getting Started

Once you’re up and running, IF you’re familiar with the pre-November Service Update feature set, things start to look different (in a good way!). I’ll write plenty of articles about the new features; for now I’ll just mention three of the most obvious, all of which you can see on the following screenshot:

1. The Getting Started page has been renamed “Home”, but more importantly, notice the dashboard presentation of charts. You can have up to four charts across your home page, with a list immediately beneath, and the charts are configurable: you can select from a whole bunch of built-in charts for system entities. Plus, you can create your own custom charts, both for system entities and custom entities. All of these charts support drill-down.
2. There’s a sample data set that now comes pre-installed with a new system, so you can kick the tires without having to enter bogus data yourself. You can uninstall it whenever you’re ready (Settings/Data Management/Sample Data), and if you uninstall it and then change your mind, you can reinstall it again.
3. Activate Your Subscription. This is how they implemented the “everybody gets a free 30-day trial” feature: the “trial” is really just an “inactive” subscription. If’s fully functional, but if you don’t activate it, it goes away after 30 days. In the previous approach, you had to whip out your credit card and pay an activation fee ($79, I believe). So in the new approach, the free trial really is free, so you can get in there and get your feet wet and your hands dirty.

Don’t Forget to Designate Your Partner

Finally, don’t forget to follow these steps as soon as you’re up and running:

1. In the left navigation, click Resource Center.
2. In the slightly revamped Resource Center, click Highlights.
3. In the Connect with Us section at the right side of the window, click Designate a partner.
4. Search for “The Information Management Group” (Oak Brook, IL).
5. Once you find us, designate us as your partner.

But you don’t have to memorize the steps in this section. If you prefer, just add me as a user in your organization, assign me to the “system administrator” security role, and I can do it for you. J

That is actually what my clients do, by the way, in order for me to perform customizations and configurations for their Dynamics CRM Online organizations. So if you’re reading this and you think you might need some help in customizing after you have the super-easy up and running experience, please let me know!

Regards,

Richard Knudson

Corporate: www.IMGinc.net
Blogs: www.DynamicsCRMTrickBag.com
User Group: www.DynamicsCRMUserGroup.com
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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!

The Highlight of our 12-Month Cloud Migration

I’ve written elsewhere about my company’s recent 12-month migration from a traditional (and dysfunctional!) on-premise IT infrastructure to an  all-cloud one.  The process was about as much fun as a 12-month root canal, but the outcome is lovely: no more server maintenance, no more worries about sites going down.

We migrated a LOT of important services — e-mail, collaboration/document management, blogs, web site, CRM — and the best part of the migration was CRM: to Dynamics CRM Online. This is the hosted version of Microsoft’s fast-growing CRM application, and you can find out more about it (and whip out your credit card and sign up for it, if you like) at http://crm.dynamics.com/

I’ll write a LOT more about our experience with Dynamics CRM Online, but in the meantime I wanted to share out this presentation I gave a while back at the very first meeting, back in December of 2008, of the Dynamics CRM User Group. I uploaded the slide deck to a site called SlideShare.net, and you can view it in its embedded form here, or go to SlideShare and see it there.

The first part of the presentation is a comparison of the Dynamics CRM Online and on-premise versions. About the only thing in the presentation that isn’t correct anymore is the $39/user/month price I included for the Pro version of CRM Online (that was a special, only good through 12/31/2008, and now the price is $44/user/month) 

It took 12 months, but I’ve nearly reached Cloud Nirvana

In other articles, I’ve described myself and my company as ideal candidates for so-called “cloud computing”. As with lots of concepts, it’s tough to beat Wikipedia’s definition of cloud computing, virtually every potential advantage of which has been a huge trouble-spot for my firm over the last year or so. Here’s a summary of our migration from a traditional “on-premise” IT infrastructure to an almost all-cloud platform. While every business is unique, my guess is that our experience mirrors that of lots of others; let me know if your experiences have been similar…or not!

Setting the Stage

A year ago I sold the part of my business that had traditionally provided open-enrollment classroom-based IT training services. With the part of the business I sold went a lot of overhead expense (classrooms take up a lot of room, require lots of computers to fill up the space, and require administrative and support staff to set computers up, move them around, schedule, cancel and reschedule classes, and the like). I was determined my new business would be profitable, so I wanted to minimize non-billable IT resources. Then the economy tanked, so keeping non-billable headcount wasn’t an option in any case!

In short, I found myself with zero dedicated IT staff…and an IT infrastructure consisting of at least eight internal servers apparently required to keep us up and running with e-mail, blogs, accounting, intranet, and our web site. We had a lot of bandwidth coming into our office, provided with byzantine complexity and benign neglect by AT&T. We had switches, routers, internal and external name servers, domain controllers…oi!

Making the Move(s)

We had a lot of different services that needed to be migrated – blogs, e-mail, intranet, internet, accounting, crm – and some that didn’t – domain controllers, internal name servers. This table lists them in the order of the migration date, and shows the platform we were running a year ago and what we migrated to:

Results

Most small to medium sized businesses are going to be better off with cloud-based services. The more legacy infrastructure you have the harder it is to migrate (see above), but it’s still gotta be done! Here is my executive summary, the high and low points and some editorial opinion. Of all the apps we needed to migrate, I have the most expertise on CRM, SharePoint and blogging, and I’ve written more detailed articles on those pieces, and will write more.

Forthwith, the executive summary:

• Dynamics CRM Online. This was the highlight of this adventure in cloud migration. The platform is rock solid (and simple to administer) and the architecture is the same as the on-premise version so there are no substantive migration issues. I’ve written about this elsewhere, and enthusiastically recommend Microsoft’s cloud CRM.
• BPOS for E-mail. BPOS (for Business Productivity Online Suite) is Microsoft’s hosted combination of Exchange, SharePoint and Live Meeting, and I can’t recommend it for most small businesses’ e-mail service. It’s complex enough that it requires internal IT skills, or a certified (and competent!) partner to assist you. One of the most important reasons for going with hosted services is to eliminate the need for specialized IT resources, and in my experience BPOS simply puts the internal support bar too high.
• BPOS SharePoint. I was careful in the previous paragraph to dis-recommend BPOS for e-mail. Its SharePoint implementation is actually quite good. The only two problems with the hosted SharePoint experience are:
  • It’s Intranet only, so we had to figure something else out for our public web site;
  • It’s bundled with BPOS e-mail.
• WordPress for blogging. I spend a lot of time blogging in my new slimmed-down me-centric business model. In February I moved my blog from MOSS 2007 to WordPress, and I’ve been blown away by the WordPress platform. I was a late-comer to the open-source phenomenon, and what an eye-opener it’s been! I use a company called DreamHost for blog and web site hosting, and I recommend them as well.
• Accounting. My company had a dedicated ERP server for years. We ran Dynamics GP, and while that’s a solid ERP application, it’s overkill for most small businesses and it too effectively requires dedicated IT staff to maintain, upgrade, customize. We switched to a hosted QuickBooks in July and it was a good move.
• Domain controllers, internal and external name servers…yuck! I can’t quite pull the plug on those yet, but I’m close, and when I finally do my IT staff and I are going to have a Big Party!
• Web site. This was a tough one, as it involved the most wrenching migration, at least from a philosophical standpoint: we’re close to completing a migration of our public web site from MOSS 2007 to Joomla. If you’re as true-blue Microsoft as I’ve been for most of my career, you might wonder what the heck Joomla is. It’s one of the leading open-source platforms for web sites, and in the end, as much as I love SharePoint, I had to conclude that for small to medium sized businesses, hosting your public-facing web site on SharePoint just isn’t the best option. This migration is worth a more detailed treatment, so stay tuned for that.

A BPOS Story with a Happy Ending

One of the first articles I posted on the re-launched Dynamics CRM Trick Bag was a bit of a rant about the Microsoft product Business Productivity Online Suite (BPOS, for short). This is Microsoft’s “cloud computing” suite of hosted Exchange, SharePoint and Live Meeting. I had a heck of a time getting it configured, and in the previous article I compared BPOS somewhat less than favorably with their other high-profile cloud offering, Dynamics CRM Online.

The day after I posted that article, my phone rang off the hook. I probably received ten calls from three different members of the Microsoft Online Services team. One of them ended up playing the quarterback role for me, and set up a call with the appropriate people from their side, with as it turned out two main goals:

1. Solve my problems and get my company up and running
2. Get my feedback about what they could be doing better to improve their service

I must say, I was quite impressed. I didn’t post the article thinking it would get a reaction like that, and I’m still not sure what kind of alerts they must have configured on Twitter to have reacted so quickly. But in any event, after a couple of calls and some changing of MX records and some making of the hosted email server “authoritative” for incoming email, we were up and running. We’ve been up now for a couple of months, it works great, I don’t get any untrapped spam anymore, and we’re a happy camper.
As far as the constructive feedback I offered them, I think it boiled down to:

• The distinction between the user site and the administrator site was confusing and should be cleaned up.
• They need better step-by-step instructions overall, and in particular for doing things like changing MX records & making the MS-hosted server authoritative for inbound email.

Based on my experience, I’d say that BPOS will be successful. The team is certainly listening to its customers and trying to fix their problems. I was amazed at how fast they responded to my venting, as well as with how carefully they listened to my input. They still have a little work to do in making it easier to get up and running, which I’ll try to summarize next.

BPOS and Dynamics CRM Online: User Experience Compared

I used the hosted version of Dynamics CRM (“CRM Online”) for about a year. (I used the free partner demo version, and kept our production CRM on the on-premise version – Dynamics CRM 4.0 Enterprise, to be exact.) As I mentioned in my previous article, the CRM Online user experience is better than BPOS, and the BPOS team would do well to take a page or two out of the CRM Online book. With CRM Online, you whip out your proverbial credit card, pay for however many seats you want, and you’re up and running immediately. In my opinion, any user who can use a web browser will be able to get CRM Online up and running; again, this is still not the case with BPOS, which I believe most organizations will not be able to get up and running without the assistance of a consulting shop or BPOS technical support. Not exactly the Gartner Magic Quadrant, but here’s one way to look at it:

One of the sweet spots for any hosted SaaS offering has got to be the small-medium business market. I suspect I’m not the only business proprietor who’s downsized in the past few years and simply can’t justify staff and infrastructure to maintain a bunch of servers in my shop. For me, there’s absolutely no strategic value in hosting my own Exchange Server, and very little in hosting my CRM server.

A big part of the costs of being on-premise are the costs of installing, configuring…getting up and running. In my opinion, the current version of Dynamics CRM Online effectively removes those costs, which will help push organizations to the online product.

The BPOS team has a great product and like I said above they seem very committed to improving the customer experience. But to really drive adoption, they need to change the “will require assistance” in the Up and Running column to “anybody can do this”; they have a high bar to shoot for, set by Dynamics CRM Online.

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