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In this article by Nicolae Tarla, the author of Microsoft Dynamics CRM 2016 Customization, you will learn about the Customer Relationship Management (CRM) market and the huge uptake it has seen in the last few years. Some of the drivers for this market are the need to enhance customer experience, provide faster and better services, and adapting to the customer’s growing digital presence. CRM systems, in general, are taking a central place in the new organizational initiatives.

(For more resources related to this topic, see here.)

Dynamics CRM is Microsoft’s response to a growing trend. The newest version is Dynamics CRM 2016. It is being offered in a variety of deployment scenarios. From the standard on-premise deployment to a private cloud or an online cloud offering from Microsoft, the choice depends on each customer, their type of project, and a large number of requirements, policies, and legal restrictions.

We’ll first look at what environment we need to complete the examples presented. We will create a new environment based on a Microsoft Dynamics CRM Online trial. This approach will give us 30-day trial to experiment with an environment for free.

The following topics will be covered:

  • Introducing Dynamics CRM
  • Dynamics CRM features
  • Deployment models
  • Global datacenter locations
  • Customization requirements
  • Getting setup

Dynamics CRM 2016 is the current version of the popular Customer Relationship Management platform offered by Microsoft. This platform offers users the ability to integrate and connect data across their sales, marketing, and customer service activities, and to give staff an overall 360-degree view of all interactions and activities as they relate to a specific customer.

Along with the standard platform functionality provided, we have a wide range of customization options, allowing us to extend and further customize solutions to solve a majority of other business requirements. In addition, we can integrate this platform with other applications, and create a seamless solution.

While by no means the only available CRM platform on the market today, Microsoft Dynamics CRM 2016, is one of the fastest growing, gaining large acceptance at all levels from small to mid-size and enterprise level organizations. This is due to a multitude of reasons, some of which include the variety of deployment options, the scalability, the extensibility, the ease of integration with other systems, and the ease of use.

Microsoft Dynamics CRM can be deployed in a variety of options. Starting with the offering from Microsoft, you can get CRM Online. Once we have a 30-day trial active, this can be easily turned into a full production environment by providing payment information and keeping the environment active. The data will live in the cloud, on one of the data centers provided by Microsoft.

Alternatively, you can obtain hosting with a third-party provider. The whole environment can be hosted by a third party, and the service can be offered either as a SaaS solution, or a fully hosted environment. Usually, there is a difference in the way payment is processed, with a SaaS solution in most cases being offered in a monthly subscription model.

Another option is to have the environment hosted in-house. This option is called on premise deployment and carries the highest up-front cost but gives you the ability to customize the system extensively. In addition to the higher up-front cost, the cost to maintain the environment, the hardware, and skilled people required to constantly administer the environment can easily add-up.

As of recently, we now have the ability to host a virtual CRM environment in Azure. This offloads the cost of maintaining the local infrastructure in a fashion similar to a third-party-hosted solution but takes advantage of the scalability and performance of a large cloud solution maintained and supported fully by Microsoft. The following white paper released by Microsoft describes the deployment model using Azure Virtual Machines:

http://www.microsoft.com/en-us/download/details.aspx?id=49193

Features of Dynamics CRM

Some of the most notable features of the Dynamics CRM platform include:

  • Scalability
  • Extensibility
  • Ability to integrate with other systems
  • Ease of use

Let’s look at each of the features in more detail.

Scalability

Dynamics CRM can scale over a wide range of deployment options. From a single box deployment, used mostly for development, all the way to a cloud offering that can span over a large number of servers, and host a large number of environments, the same base solution can handle all the scenarios in between with ease.

Extensibility

Dynamics CRM is a platform in which the base offering comes with prepackaged functionality for Sales, Service, and Marketing; a large variety of solutions can be built on top of Dynamics CRM. The extensibility model is called xRM and allows power users, non-developers, and developers alike to build custom solutions to handle various other business scenarios or integrate with other third-party platforms.

The Dynamics CRM Marketplace is a great example of such solutions that are built to extend the core platform, and are offered for sale by various companies. These companies are called Independent Software Vendors (ISVs) and play a very important role in the ecosystem created by Microsoft. In time and with enough experience, some of them become the go-to partners for various implementations.

If nothing else, the Dynamics Marketplace is a cool place to look at some of the solutions created, and search for specific applications. The idea of the marketplace became public sometime around 2010 and was integrated into Dynamics CRM 2011. At launch, it was designed as a searchable repository of solutions. It is a win-win for both solution providers and customers alike. Solutions can also be rated, thus giving customers better community feedback before committing to purchasing and implementing a foreign solution into their organization.

The Dynamics Marketplace is hosted on Pinpoint, Microsoft’s online directory of software applications and professional services. On this platform, independent companies and certified partners offer their products and services. At the time of this writing, Pinpoint hosts a few marketplaces, including Office, Azure, Dynamics, and Cloud, and is available at the following location:

https://pinpoint.microsoft.com/en-CA/Home/Dynamics

Navigating to the Dynamics page you are presented with a search option as seen in the following screenshot:

You now have the option to filter your results by Solution providers, Services, or Apps (Applications).

In addition, you can further filter your results by distance to a geo-location derived from an address or postal code, as well as other categories as illustrated in the following screenshot:

When searching for a solution provider, the results provide a high-level view of the organization, with a logo and a high-level description. The Ratings and Competencies count are displayed for easy visibility as shown here:

Drilling down into the partner profile page, you can find additional details on the organization, the industries focus, details on the competencies, as well as a way to connect with the organization. Navigation to additional details, including Reviews and Locations is available on the profile page.

The Dynamics Marketplace is also available, starting with Dynamics CRM 2011, as a part of the organization. A user with necessary permission can navigate to Settings | Dynamics Marketplace.

This presents the user with a view by solutions available. Options for sorting and filtering include Popular, Newest, and Featured. Community rating is clearly visible and provides the necessary feedback to consider when evaluating new solutions.

Ability to integrate with other systems

There is a large variety of integration options available when working with Dynamics CRM. In addition, various deployment options offer more or fewer integration features. With CRM Online, you tend to get more integration options into cloud services; whereas, the on-premise solution has a limited number of configurable integration options, but can provide more integration using various third-party tools. The base solution comes with the ability to configure integration with the following common services:

  • SharePoint for document management
  • Yammer for social features

In addition, you can use specific connectors provided by either Microsoft or other third-party providers for integration with specific solutions.

When the preceding options are not available, you can still integrate with other solutions using a third-party integration tool. This allows real-time integration into legacy systems. Some of the most popular tools used for integration include, but are not limited to:

  • Kingsway Software (https://www.kingswaysoft.com/)
  • Scribe (http://www.scribesoft.com/)
  • BizTalk (http://www.microsoft.com/en-us/server-cloud/products/biztalk/)

Ease of use

Dynamics CRM offers users a variety of options to interact with the system. You can access Dynamics CRM either through a browser, with support for all recent versions of the major browsers. The following browsers and versions are supported:

  • Internet Explorer—versions 10 and above
  • Edge—latest version
  • Chrome—latest version on Windows 7 and above
  • Firefox—latest version on Windows 7 and above
  • Safari on Mac—using the latest publicly released version on OS x 10.8 and above

In addition, a user can interact with the system directly from the very familiar interface of Outlook. The Dynamics CRM connector for Outlook allows users to get access to all the system data and features from within Outlook. In addition, a set of functions built specifically for Outlook allows users to track and interact with e-mails, tasks, and events from within Outlook.

Further to the features provided through the Outlook integration, users of CRM for Outlook have the ability to work offline. Data can be taken offline, work can be done when disconnected, and can be synchronized back into the system when connectivity resumes.

For mobile users, Dynamics CRM can be accessed from mobile devices and tablets. Dynamics CRM provides a standard web-based interface for most mobile devices, as well as specific applications for various platforms including Windows-based tablets, iPads, and Android tablets. With these apps, you can also take a limited sub-set of cached data offline, as well as have the ability to create new records and synchronize them back to CRM next time you go online. The quality of these mobile offerings has increased exponentially over the last few versions, and new features are being added with each new release.

In addition, third-party providers have also built mobile solutions for Dynamics CRM. A quick search in the application markets for each platform will reveal several options for each platform.

Global Data Centre Locations for Dynamics CRM Online

Dynamics CRM Online is hosted at various locations in the world. Preview organizations can be created in all available locations, but features are sometimes rolled out on a schedule, in some locations faster than others.

The format of the Dynamics CRM Online Organization URL describes the data center location. As such, the standard format is as follows:

https://OrganizationName.crm[x].dynamics.com

The OrganizationName is the name you have selected for your online organization. This is customizable, and is validated for uniqueness within the respective data center.

The [x] represents a number. As of this writing, this number can be anywhere between 2, 4, 5, 6, 7, 9, or no number at all. This describes the global data center used to host your organization. The following table maps the data center to the URL format:

URL Format: crm[x].dynamics.com

Global Data Centre Location

crm.dynamics.com

NAM

crm2.dynamics.com

SAM

crm4.dynamics.com

EMEA

crm5.dynamics.com

APAC

crm6.dynamics.com

OCE

crm7.dynamics.com

JPN

crm9.dynamics.com

GCC

Out of these global locations, usually the following get a preview of the new features first:

Organization

Global Location

crm.dynamics.com

North America

crm4.dynamics.com

Europe, the Middle East and Africa

crm5.dynamics.com

Asia-Pacific

New data centers are being added on a regular basis. As of this writing, new data centers are being added in Europe and Canada, with others to follow as needed.

Some of the drivers behind adding these new data centers revolve around not only performance improvements, as a data center located closer to a customer will provide theoretically better performance, but also a need for privacy and localization of data. Strict legislation around data residency has a great impact on the selection of the deployment model by customers who are bound to store all data local to the country of the operation.

Overall, by the end of 2016, the plan is to have Dynamics CRM Online available in 105 markets. These markets (countries) will be served by data centers spread across five generic global regions.

These data centers share services between Dynamics CRM Online and other services such as Azure and Office 365.

Advantages of choosing Dynamics CRM online

Choosing one of the available hosting models for Dynamics CRM is now not only a matter of preference. The decision can be driven by multiple factors.

During the last few years, there has been a huge push for the cloud. Microsoft has been very focused on enhancing their online offering, and has continued to push more functionality and more resources in supporting the cloud model. As such, Dynamics CRM Online has become a force to reckon with. It is hosted on a very modern and high performing infrastructure. Microsoft has pushed literally billions of dollars in new data centers and infrastructure. This allows new customers to forego the necessary expenses on infrastructure associated with an on-premise deployment.

Along with investments on infrastructure, the SLA (service level agreement) offered by Dynamics CRM Online is financially backed by Microsoft. Depending on the service selected, the uptime is guaranteed and backed financially. Application and Infrastructure are automatically handled for you by Microsoft so you don’t have to. This translates in much lower upfront costs, as well as reduced costs around ongoing maintenance and upgrades.

The Dynamics CRM Online offering is also compliant with various regulatory requirements, and backed and verified through various third-party tests. Various rules, regulations, and policies in various locales are validated and certified by various organizations. Some of the various compliance policies evaluated include but are not limited to:

  • Data Privacy and Confidentiality Policies
  • Data Classification
  • Information Security
  • Privacy
  • Data Stewardship
  • Secure Infrastructure
  • Identity and Access Control

All these compliance requirements are in conformance with regulations stipulated by the International Standard Organization and other international and local standards. Independent auditors validate standards compliance. Microsoft is ISO 27001 certified.

The Microsoft Trust Center website located at http://www.microsoft.com/en-us/trustcenter/CloudServices/Dynamics provides additional information on compliance, responsibilities, and warranties.

Further to the aforementioned benefits, choosing cloud over a standard on-premise deployment offers other advantages around scalability, faster time to market, and higher value proposition.

In addition to the standard benefits of an online deployment, one other great advantage is the ability to spin-up a 30-day trial instance of Dynamics CRM Online and convert it to a paid instance only when ready to go to production. This allows customizers and companies to get started and customize their solution in a free environment, with no additional costs attached. The 30-day trial instance gives us a 25-license instance, which allows us to not only customize the organization, but also test various roles and restrictions.

Summary

We learned to create a new environment based on a Microsoft Dynamics CRM Online trial

Resources for Article:

Further resources on this subject:

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