Business Contact Manager (BCM) to Microsoft CRM Online - what is Microsoft's strategy for BCM?

Pariveda just completed a Business Contact Manager (BCM) to CRM 2011 Online migration for one of Dallas based clients. The new CRM 2011 platform was met with strong and widespread adoption after the BCM experience. I’m actually quite surprised that our client was able to limp along with BCM for 3 years for a 50 user environment. I hate to knock my friends at Microsoft, but I’d like to understand the strategy for BCM. The tool is definitely not meant for an environment larger than 1-10 users.

 

Some of the challenges our client ran into with BCM include:

• Performance hits to Outlook using the BCM client – BCM causes the CRM client to crash constantly and even typing an email can be a painful experience. It was not uncommon for the COO to reboot Outlook several times each day.
• Limitations in custom fields – BCM limits the amount of custom/user defined fields to 40 total fields. While this may sound like a lot, they run out quicker than one might think.
• Limited filtering capability – Filters are built in the form of reports in BCM instead of dynamic queries. When you export these reports – you end up with all records and Excel hides the ones that are ‘filtered’ out. Your exported spreadsheet data requires manual clean up and editing thereby making the Excel export unusable.
• Restrictions on data export – BCM allows core Account and Contact entity data to be exported, but the associated Notes have to be extracted directly from the database and reformatted manually. Also, Leads and Opportunities are not easily extractable.

 

Based on this experience, I wonder if BCM was meant to be a feeder channel for Microsoft CRM. If that is the case, Microsoft should have addressed the data export functionality at a minimum. While CRM Online has a BCM data map, BCM does not allow easy export of notes data.  Providing more robust export tools would at least encourage BCM users an easy migration to Microsoft CRM, when their business needs matured. I’d love to hear from someone at the Microsoft BCM team on this one.

 

CRM 2011 Online – A more flexible cloud offering

Microsoft has taken a unique approach to their CRM cloud offering, allowing customers to wait up to 1 year before forcing them to upgrade to the latest version. Microsoft came up with a pretty engaging marketing campaign called ‘Don’t Get Forced’, which I discussed in a blog entry late in 2010. They even developed a nice site at www.dontgetforced.com with lots of reference stories. Many of the users referenced in this campaign are alluding to the costs of Salesforce.com and Oracle forcing them to Microsoft CRM. I see another large differentiator besides per user cost, as a driver for Microsoft CRM 2011 Online.


For customers on the majority of hosted CRM offerings, it is a forced march to their newer upgraded platforms. Microsoft is changing the game in their CRM Online environment, by providing their users a choice on when they upgrade their CRM platform. For the 2011 release, they are giving users on v4.0 until January 2012 to upgrade. This provides customers flexibility as well as significant time for testing, planning, deployment, and re-training of users. All but one of our CRM Online customers has upgraded to CRM 2011 Online in the last 6 months. Other than some early performance hits which were addressed with Rollup 1, they have all successfully adopted the new platform. Only the most customized and integrated customers are waiting until later in the year. For information on scheduling your upgrade you can visit: http://offers.crmchoice.com/crm2011-upgrade-process/

As for Microsoft’s on-premise offering, we have several CRM clients on v4.0 that upgraded to CRM 2011. There are also a few that are waiting for more roll-ups to be released before upgrading. I’ll talk in more detail in a later post about upgrading On Premise CRM v4.0 to CRM 2011 environments, and some of the things you'll need to think about in planning your upgrade.

CRM vs. SharePoint

Pariveda is a Microsoft National System Integrator which in addition to CRM, provides services across the Microsoft application stack including custom .NET development, business intelligence and data warehousing, and document management and collaboration leveraging SharePoint. Our Microsoft centric clients often ask whether SharePoint or CRM should be leveraged and for what business need. These two platforms definitely have some overlap, however I think about these two applications based on their strengths and weaknesses.


SharePoint is a strong web portal and document management platform. It is excellent at providing a site structure for internet, extranet, intranet sites as well as smaller team collaboration sites. Users can easily manage documents and web content across sites. SharePoint plays particularly well with Office 2007 and above allowing users to easily save Word, Excel, PowerPoint, and other Microsoft documents into SharePoint sites. SharePoint has built in workflow which can provide document/content routing and approval.

SharePoint is not a relational database, nor was it designed to be used as one. However, many organizations early in their SharePoint maturity try to develop complex applications in the environment only to rip them out later.

CRM is an excellent relational database and was built to allow users to quickly model their own hierarchical entity relationships within the system without writing code. CRM is built to easily integrate with other relational database systems with a full web services toolkit. Microsoft CRM can also be extended as a development platform to meet business needs other than the traditional sales, marketing, service functionality. In addition, CRM has robust reporting leveraging SQL Server Reporting Services, user configurable Dashboards, and the Advanced Find query builder which exports to Excel Dynamic Pivot Tables and Workbooks.

CRM is not a strong document management platform. CRM stores documents as an attachment to a ‘Notes’ entity. There is no version control, check-in/check-out, archiving, or workflow capability around documents within CRM.

The marriage of CRM 2011 and SharePoint 2010 allows each of these tools to play to their strengths in managing relational customer information and related documents all in one interface for the end user.

EMSI CRM Implementation Case Study Now Live!

In late April, Pariveda Solutions was recognized by Microsoft and our client Examination Management Services Inc. (EMSI) for a successful Microsoft CRM implementation. EMSI was an early adopter of CRM Online in late 2008 implementing CRM to replace ACT! for a group of insurance brokerage sales professionals. Due to the success of that deployment, we assisted the investigative services group at EMSI called ICS Merrill migrate from Goldmine CRM onto Microsoft CRM. To integrate seamlessly with EMSI back-end systems, we migrated CRM Online to an On Premise environment. Since the code bases between CRM platforms are identical, the migration from the Microsoft to EMSI data center was a seamless move to the EMSI sales users.


Since the implementation, the benefits which EMSI has received include:

• More proactive sales operations

• Reduction in manual reporting for sales professionals

• Flexibility to accommodate changing business needs

• 360 view of customer information across systems for company wide insight

You can read the complete case study at Pariveda’s website by clicking here

CRM 2011 is Live!

CRM 2011 went live today!  I watched the global launch at the Irving Microsoft campus with the local Microsoft CRM team.  We watched Steve Ballmer, Kirill Tatarinov, Brad Wilson, and Craig Unger highlight the new Microsoft Dynamics CRM Online launch in 40 markets and 41 languages and showcase customer success stories.  CRM 2011 or version 5.0 has made leaps and bounds over previous version and will bring alot of value to CRM v4.0 users or new users of the product.  The most impressive functionality includes: the Outlook interface and user personalization, the dashboard and charting capabilities, and the overall enhancements to the user experience.

To sweeten the offer, Microsoft has aggressively priced CRM 2011 at $34 per user per month until June 30th, 2011.  This is a $10 discount from the previous version and less than half the monthly fees of many competitors including Salesforce.com and Oracle's CRM On Demand.  Microsoft announced a call to action:  'Cloud CRM for Less' targeting Salesforce and Oracle customers offering of $200 per user to switch to CRM Online.  These 'rebate' funds can be allocated to reduce the cost of switching to the Microsoft platform.  Based on the new pricing and the rebate, CRM 2011 Online users will have a lower overall TCO compared to Salesforce.com and Oracle CRM on Demand users.
It is shaping up to be an interesting year in the world of Cloud CRM! Sign up for a free trial of CRM Online at http://crm.dynamics.com/

Creating a CRM habit

I was having lunch the other day with a commercial real estate company today discussing their adoption of CRM and it surprised me that the CIO and VP of Application Development were concerned with the lack of CRM usage. They felt that their users were just scratching the surface of CRM and many had actually fallen into their old bad habits of management by Excel. I have found that even within our organization, trying to get people to adopt CRM can be difficult as there are still account lists which circulate in Excel.  As our CRM champion I do my best to wrangle these rogue Excel sheets and port them into CRM but they can sprout like wildfire if you don't control them.  I think the issue is that many organizations underestimate the amount of time it takes for users to create the habit of using CRM on a daily/weekly basis.  I ventured out of technology and into the psychology world to see what I could find on habit creation and found some interesting data. You can find the article which I reference by Dr. John Grohol at the bottom of my post.
Creating a new habit is a difficult thing and requires repetition. If you do a Google search, you'll find that creating a new habit takes around 21-28 days.  The concept that you can create a new habit in 3 weeks was created in the 60s by a doctor named Dr. Maxwell Martz.  He was a plastic surgeon who noticed that amputees took around 21 days to adapt to the loss of a limb and extrapolated this across all life changes in a book which he published.  However, a recent study published in the European Journal of Social Psychology showed that it took people on average 66 days to create a new habit.  This makes sense as the amputee is forced to deal with the change where many habits are made by personal choice rather than necessity.

The study also showed that new habits are not created equal, as it took on average less time for people to remember to drink more water each day as opposed to doing 50 sit-ups in the morning.  Some might argue that remembering to update CRM each day is actually more grueling than a morning regiment of situps.  A few technophobes might even happily add pushups and pullups before agreeing to key in their daily activites in CRM.

If this is the case, why do organizations throw CRM to the masses and assume they will use it?  One training class alone will not change the habits of end users.  Even if CRM is built around business processes end users will revert back to their old habits if they are easier.  Therefore, to be successful you must recognize that adoption is a long process and it may take 2-3 months to see change within your user community.  In one of my upcoming posts I'll discuss ways to reinforce the new CRM behaviors you'd like to see from your user community.

How Long to Form a Habit?

CRM 2011 Sneak Preview

I am really excited about some of the new functionality which Microsoft has made available in the newest version of CRM 2011.  We are hosting a Sneak Preview CRM 2011 event on December 3rd at Hully and Mos in Dallas so please email me if you are interested in attending.  There are 3 categories in which I see these enhancements benefiting Pariveda's internal CRM and our clients:

• User Experience and Visualization Enhancements
• Business Productivity
• Customization Management

User Experience and Visualization Enhancements:
Microsoft has finally embedded CRM into Outlook using true Outlook forms rather than an IFrame.  The application takes advantage of native Outlook functionality for things like conditional formatting, reading pane previews, and more personalization. 

Business Productivity:
The CRM 2011 platform has improved workflow by adding guided dialogs to help users work through a script with a client.  The CRM 2011 platform is also tightly integrated with SharePoint 2010 to improve document management capabilities within CRM.  Other valuable enhancements include team ownership of records, custom activity types, out of box field level auditing, and improvements to queues.  Many of these changes will enable call center environments to more effectively manage their processes.

Customization Management:
The customizations area of CRM has become more of a drag and drop environment and has eliminated many of the clicks required to modify a form.  Developers will like the improved web services and .NET data types.  Microsoft has also included role-based forms which eliminates the need for lots of Javascript on shared forms.  Finally we have field level security out of the box.  Last, the solutions area makes it much easier to package customizations and move them between environments.

This is just a taste of what the platform has to offer and if you see my blog on this topic, hopefully you can join us on December 3rd in Uptown.