Don’t get me wrong, I’m not going to say that XRM is flawless and/or that it fits anything and anyone. Not at all actually. If you gave me 15 minutes, I could keep complaining about missing XRM features for all that time.
However, what I’m going to say is that, with the proper application of XRM customizations, Dynamics CRM can be tweaked to cover almost any business needs. As far as server-side customizations are concerned, XRM really allows you to do almost anything with the data that’s being passed back and forth between the user and the server.
XRM is not as advanced on the client side as it is on the server side, and that’s one reason there always used to be those “unsupported customizations” which any responsible consultant would at least point out to the client. However, it’s still quite advanced there. Not to mention that one can opt for a completely custom implementation of the specific piece of the client-side functionality and use an iframe to embed that additional piece into the existing CRM forms.
How does it all add up, though? Awesome, not awesome, too many customizations, not enough customizations..
In my view, it’s a matter of having proper functional fit-gap analysis done. Yet it has to be functional not in the “technological” sense, but, rather, in the business sense. It`s a little difficult to draw the line; however, what I mean is that all those XRM perks which come with Dynamics CRM, such as the ability to quickly create new entities and forms, are not primary business functions. They are a nice addition to the core functionality, that’s true, but, on their own, they will not cover required business scenarios.
In that sense, a fair statement might be: if CRM can cover significant amount of the functional business requirements out of the box, then it`s very likely going to be worth the efforts which will be put into the implementation before your CRM project goes live. And the reason XRM is awesome, in that sense, is that it will likely allow you to cover the rest of the requirements, as long as you are ready to invest into the implementation. Although, quite frankly, this is no different for any other off-the-shelf software.
And, then, the real proof of XRM awesomeness is this: there are succesfull implementations of Dynamics CRM which can hardly be considred CRM implementations at all. Those are completely custom applications with a lot of custom entities and with a lot of business logic implemented in the plugins/javascripts. Still, they are successful. Which proves the power of XRM. Whether it makes sense to take it that far is still a question, of course, but a different one.