I’ve been working with Dynamics CRM for over 5 years so far. That did involve various projects, for both private and public sectors. Some of those projects were more about CRM than others, but I’ve never seen a project where a client would take Dynamics CRM and start using it as is. There is always something.. missing. And there is always a customization required, then another one, then a security role, then a workflow, then a javascript, then, maybe, an integration with another system. The more people start using Dynamics, the more they really want to customize it.
I think it’s good, though. I would rather have that than find myself in the situation where somebody would start using CRM, find out that it does not meet the requirements, and put the whole implementation on hold just because there would be no way to customize the solution.
However, what I am wondering about is whether there is such thing as Dynamics CRM vs Dynamics XRM, or whether it’s always Dynamics XRM?
Check this out, for example: http://www.xrm.com/xrm/xrm_defined.aspx
What they are saying there is that “xRM depends on extensibility of the CRM platform on which it is built. Microsoft Dynamics® CRM currently provides the most powerful xRM platform available because of the Microsoft® .NET Framework that underlies it. Companies can typically achieve 80% of their business requirements using Microsoft Dynamics CRM. The .Net Framework, meanwhile, provides a common architecture that software developers can use to build custom line-of-business (LOB) applications that supply the remaining 20% of a company’s requirements quickly and economically.”
Which is, for the most part, a fair statement. However, there is an element of marketing there. If we make an analogy with a car, then it does not matter if 80% of the car functionality is avaialble out of the box or if 99% of the functionality is available. What matters is that the car should be able to take us from point A to point B, and, for that, it has to be 100% ready. So, if we turn that famous 80/20 rule around and use it differently, could it take 80% of the time to build those remaining 20% to get the whole thing working? I think the answer is that it may well take that much.
I guess what I am trying to say is that there is no pure CRM implementation out there – they are all XRM. Some of them are more XRM than others, and I actually see it as a potential problem.. but I’ll talk about it in the second part of this post