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Microsoft Offers Peek At Next-Gen CRM
4foot10 writes "As reported by VARBusiness.com, Microsoft's next release of its Dynamics CRM application, code-named 'Titan', is moving a little closer to completion. Today, the vendor is making the new software, which uses a single code base to support on-premise and software-as-a-service deployments, available to several hundred business partners for testing, giving them an early start on developing complementary solutions."
Customer Relationship Management.
From Wikipedia
Full ArticleIf the rest of this thread didn't tip you off, it's an overloaded term that means fuck-all to anybody except people responsible for buying and selling software. CRM platforms tend to do whatever the squadron of consultants who set them up tell them to, and tend to be enormous monstrosities to that end.
Think of the suite of applications you or your employer run to keep the business going. Now, imagine that those things were all hooked into an enormous, proprietary back-end (if you're running Windows, you're halfway there...). That's CRM: a really good way of squeezing money out of customers.
The only really universal features common to everything that claims to be CRM software are:
a) A database
b) A six-to-eight-figure contract with the vendor
Nobody really needs it. Everybody sells, or wants to sell, it. Lots of money in it.
You sir are a tard without a clue. Calling Microsoft Support is a great experience (no I don't work for Microsoft). All calls I've ever made are answered within a few rings. You don't get a press this or that menu, you get a trained person to triage your request. After the triage has been made, the initial rep assigns you a casr number for tracking and they connect you directly to the engineer who assists with the request.
I've also called Microsoft on a few occasions because certain MSDN license keys of mine hit the activation limit and on each occasion I was issue new keys, or given an activation code to enable an old key.
If you work in support you probably use something almost identical already. You know; RT, OTRS, Bugzilla, Remedy.
A CRM usually has a couple of add ons though. A link to a comprehensive database of customers which records all interactions with them via email, telephone, snail mail etc so that marketing can look for purchase preferences to send them junk mail and customer services can make sure customers are happy rather than annoyed.
The other thing is usually a workflow add on (many ticket systems already have this) so that you can take a customer request through various business processes, be that a sale, a problem resolution, whatever. It makes sure that they eventually get through to the end without dropping through the cracks.
There's various other features depending on the vendor but you can pretty much roll your own CRM system using some of the open source ticket management systems, they just need a little tweaking.
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My company has been "beta testing" this fancy new CRM business for nearly a year. We've moved our customer info out of the old AS/400 and we've moved our help desk from Heat to CRM to track call tickets, projects, etc. I can't say it's been a smooth transition, but that may be due to the fact that the consultant working with us isn't the best. (I won't get into that much but we spent hours in "training" while he attempted to figure out what he was trying to train us.) On the bright side, because we got in so early, I'm told we've had a lot of input into what goes into the program.
There are two sides to this CRM program that I can see. The first is how well it actually manages customer relationships. The second is more technical. As far as the first thing goes, it manages information pretty well (I'm no sales person, but it's pretty straight forward and easy to use). The technical aspect, though, is troubling.
Due to our size, we don't use a hosted solution, we run our own server in house. There's a plugin for Outlook that gives access to the system, or you can use your favorite MS browser to access the system if you don't have Outlook, or if you want it to work faster and not drag your system down. The whole thing is just web based forms. There are two separate clients for Outlook. The "laptop version" and the "desktop version."
The desktop version will do three things - 1. Allow you to access the CRM system. 2. Make starting and closing Outlook an excruciatingly long process. 3. Prevent your computer from shutting down unless you manually close Outlook, with no helpful error/warning messages. It just sits with outlook open, and you can tell it to shutdown over and over.
The laptop version has all the "features" of the desktop version, but it installs a personal version of SQL Server so you can access customer info when you're offline. This has the added benefit of being an incredible memory hog. When I first tried it I only had 512 megabytes of memory, and it was more than happy to use 100-200 for the Outlook/CRM Combo even when I wasn't offline. It was so bad I requested extra memory, but they told me to quit using the laptop version (I don't need all that customer info at my fingertips anyway).
Just recently we discovered that you can aim IE (but not Firefox...go figure) at the server and access the entire system that way without bringing Outlook to it's knees. This has the added benefit of loading the pages more quickly, however there is always lag from when you click on an item to when it creates the new window, to when it puts all the controls on the new window. Sometimes it's long enough to be frustrating, but other times it's just long enough to remind you it's a browser app. If they could make it snappy so it ran more like a local app, that would be a big improvement, but I haven't seen it yet.
Wow, this got long... So in conclusion, with my personal experience the system works, and probably looks great on paper, but suffers from bugs and technical issues more than design flaws. That's not to say it's designed perfectly, but I would go so far as to say it's designed reasonably well. But I'm in the technical department, so I have limited contact with it. Our sales people might have differing opinions.
Adding an NVidia card to my Shuttle to replace the i810 graphics *did* cause me to have to reactivate my MSDN copy of XP.
What bothered me more was a time when I disabled my network card to stop the netbios chattering while I was playing a game. I finished playing, shut down the machine and went to bed. When I tried to boot up the next day I was greeted with the activation message. Now, when it happened with my video card I was able to activate over the internet. Stupidly because my network card was installed but disabled I couldn't log in to enable it, couldn't reactivate over the internet and really didn't feel like trying to call MS on a saturday to reactivate it.
I ended up grabbing an old 30G hard drive, slaving it to the shuttle's primary and installing Ubuntu in it. It ran like that for two weeks before I finally got around to calling MS. But yeah, your right when I called they were fairly quick, nice ( I got nervous little twitters of laughter from the rep when I explained the situation, glad *she* found it funny anyway!) and I was reactivated pretty quick.
I still think it's BS.
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