Microsoft CRM Workflow...the Salesforce.com killer?

Posted by Mike Snyder on July 24, 2008 in   |  Microsoft Dynamics CRM 4.0 Step by Step Book  |  Comments (11)

We are working with a prospect to switch them from Salesforce.com to Microsoft CRM. As part of this process, I'm learning all sort of colorful details about why Microsoft CRM is a superior platform! Tonight I stumbled across one I just could not believe, so I thought I would share the goods!

First and foremost, Salesforce.com does NOT include workflow in all of their editions. If you want a workflow engine, you will need Enterprise Edition or Unlimited Edition. That means instead of paying $65/per user per month for their Professional Edition, you'll be paying $95 or $120 per user per month for their Enterprise or Unlimited Edition. As a reminder, Microsoft Dynamics CRM includes workflow with ALL versions of the software (on-premise, Online or partner hosted). The Microsoft Dynamics CRM Online version includes workflow, and that costs just $39 (or $59) per user per month. That's quite a savings when compared to $95 or $120 per users per month! Assuming you have 30 users, you would save about $30,000 per year by going with Microsoft Dynamics CRM Online at $39/month instead of $120/month!

Now Benioff might say that Microsoft is less expensive because it's not as good. Well if you're just looking at workflow, it only took me about 3 minutes to find one significant flaw in Salesforce.com's workflow (when compared to Microsoft Dynamics CRM):

You can't nest workflow rules within another? Even if you cough up the extra $$ for the Enterprise or Ultimate Editions? Yikes! Now let's take a look at Microsoft Dynamics CRM workflow:

As you can see, it couldn't be easier to have workflow rules reference one another in Microsoft Dynamics CRM! From here, you can create incredibly sophisticated and complex rules to automate all of your business processes. Enjoy!

Partner conference wrap up

Posted by Mike Snyder on July 14, 2008  |  Comments (1)

Last week I attended the Microsoft Worldwide Partner conference in Houston, TX, and I thought I'd wrap up some of my thoughts and observations:

• Once again, Microsoft CRM was a featured product at the conference! Microsoft sells thousands of products, but CRM gets plenty of attention. During the opening keynote on Tuesday, there was just one product demo: Microsoft CRM (conducted by Brad Wilson).

• Another very hot product is Sharepoint. Chris Capossela said that Sharepoint is a billion dollar business by itself, which is very impressive. All of the Dynamics products combined (CRM, GP, NAV, AX, SL) just went over a billion dollars collectively in the past few years.
• The partner conference is absolutely massive in size, with around 15,000 people in attendance. The keynote sessions had to be held in the Toyota Center, which is the professional basketball court and home of the Houston Rockets.

• Microsoft is ABSOLUTELY focused on the Software + Services opportunity. Every keynote session talked about cloud services and their importance for Microsoft. In the past, the tone of the S+S topic was more like "well, as a partner you should consider this because some customers want it" while this year the tone was "this is an unstoppable train so you better prepare yourself to get onboard quickly". To that end, Microsoft announced some new services/pricing for hosted versions of Exchange, Sharepoint and Office Communicator. And of course don't forget that Microsoft officially launched the hosted version of Microsoft CRM back in April.
• During the Steve Ballmer keynote, he dropped a new (but expected) little tidbit. Microsoft will launching a platform as a service, details are still TBD but this is a very exciting opportunity for both customers and partners.

"So what is the future? The future is about having a platform in the cloud, just as we have an operating system for the client, for the server, for devices. We will be launching a platform for the Internet cloud that lets you write programs and have them deployed and managed, that does computation and storage, and management, directly out in the Internet. We're not getting rid of servers. We're extending the basic programming model and management model that we know today from Windows and Windows Server to the cloud. Software development approaches will need to change. People will want to write applications that actually span this whole world. And so we're driving .NET, and .NET through Silverlight, and JScript to support rich application development across the cloud, the devices, the servers, and, of course, the PC client.

Deployment, the world will insist on a model that I call “Click to Run.” That's kind of the way Web sites today work, or HTML works, you click something and it runs. You don't click, hit install, you don't click and configure, you click to run. And the model in the Software Plus Services world will be a model of Click to Run, that will take cost and complexity not only out of enterprise IT  I'm sorry, not only out of cloud IT, but also out of enterprise IT."

• During the Dynamics keynote, I saw a new tool that automatically extracts data from Quickbooks into Microsoft Dynamics GP. It looked pretty impressive, and I am sure it will be a great help for GP partners.
• I learned some new numbers and statistics about Microsoft CRM:
  • There are now 14,000 customers and 775,000 users worldwide
  • Microsoft added 4,000 customers and 225,000 users in FY08
  • There are 500 Microsoft Dynamics CRM Online customers
• Our company Sonoma Partners got some props as a finalist for the Microsoft Dynamics CRM Partner of the Year finalist. We received a fancy trophy during the CRM general session, and our name was sprinkled throughout various conference locations such as the program and other signage.

• Microsoft announced some forthcoming solution accelerators that they will release for Microsoft CRM. The product team provided a demo of some of these solutions, and they are very exciting! Some of the highlights:
  • Customer service portal: allows your customers to login, update contact information, create/view cases, search the KB and schedule a service.
  • Event management: allows you to setup a website where customers can register for a marketing event. These registrations are automatically created in Microsoft CRM as campaign responses.
  • Updated BI analytics tool: pre-built data cubes and reports for Microsoft CRM
• As a host city, Houston was acceptable but not great. As expected, Houston in July is HOT. Fortunately, our hotel was adjacent to the convention center connected via a skybridge so you could stay indoors in the cool if you wanted to. On the downside, I wasn't in love with George R. Brown convention center. It was very spreadout and confusing, but I guess that's difficult to avoid for a conference of that size.

Scoble interviews Salesforce.com CEO, he mentions CRM just once

Posted by Mike Snyder on July 6, 2008  |  Comments (2)

I just listened to Robert Scoble's interview of Marc Benioff, and I thought the following was interesting:

• Scoble kept asking Benioff to introduce himself, but Benioff wanted to do more small talk. Awkward.
• Benioff mentioned their CRM offering JUST ONCE in this 25 minute interview. It is obvious to me (and it should be obvious to customers) that Salesforce.com is really focused on their platform as a service offering...which isn't great for their CRM customers since they are playing second fiddle.
• At the 14:20 minute mark, Scoble mentioned a startup that was funded with just $8,000. Benioff says "Well thank god they're not using the Microsoft infrastructure" insinuating it would have been more expensive. Scoble says "Well they were actually using .NET..." and Benioff just talks right over him!
• Benioff has a giant Salesforce.com surfboard outside his office. Not sure why, weird.
• He might be worth $1 billion dollars, but Benioff doesn't know how to pronounce Bono correctly. :)

Overall, I think it is worth a listen if you get a chance.

The world's absolute worst buying guide on CRM systems, from an unexpected source

Posted by Mike Snyder on July 3, 2008  |  Comments (4)

Last week I received the July issue of CRM Magazine, and the cover story is about Microsoft CRM (more on that later). Bundled with the magazine was a 30+ page supplement labeled as "2008 Annual Buyer's Guide". I assumed this document would outline the various CRM systems available and what each of these systems offer. As I expected, their Index lists the companies/products and if their solution meets these categories:

• Analytics/BI
• Business Strategy
• Contact Center
• Customer Service
• Data Quality
• E-Commerce
• Industry Solutions
• Integration
• Knowledge Management
• Large Enterprise CRM
• Marketing
• Mobile CRM
• Open Source
• Partner Management
• SaaS / Ondemand
• Sales
• Self-Service
• SMB / Mid-Market CRM
• Social Media

This is pretty standard list of CRM functionality by topic, so you would think that prospective buyers could use this document to map up their CRM needs to potential vendors. However after looking at this actual listings, I noticed something interesting:

I found it hilarious that this "Buyer's Guide" doesn't include two of most popular CRM applications on the market in Microsoft Dynamics CRM and Salesforce.com. This gaffe is particularly bad because Microsoft is on the COVER OF THE MAGAZINE talking about their CRM solution. I can only assume that this Buyer's Guide is pay-to-play, where if you don't pay the magazine they won't include your solution in their listings. If that's the case, that's a shame because it obviously severely limits its value to companies considering purchasing CRM solutions! No customer can take this Buyer's Guide list seriously if it excludes the CRM offerings from Microsoft and Salesforce.com.

If you're interested in finding out how Microsoft CRM maps to these topic centers, here you go:

• Analytics/BI: Yes
• Business Strategy: Yes
• Contact Center: Yes
• Customer Service: Yes
• Data Quality: Yes
• E-Commerce: Customization required
• Industry Solutions: Yes
• Integration: Yes
• Knowledge Management: Yes
• Large Enterprise CRM: Yes
• Marketing: Yes
• Mobile CRM: Yes
• Open Source: No
• Partner Management: Yes
• SaaS / Ondemand: Yes
• Sales: Yes
• Self-Service: Yes
• SMB / Mid-Market CRM: Yes
• Social Media: Customization required

Microsoft CRM Outlook client and authentication balloons

Posted by Mike Snyder on July 1, 2008 in   |  Microsoft Dynamics CRM 4.0  |  Comments (2)

You know those little "balloons" that pop up from time to time in the Outlook 4.0 client? Below are some registry settings to change the Outlook client's behavior around network connectivity, notifications and so on. Our support manager recommend increasing ClientAuthAllowRetries to 10 and ClientAuthNotificationThrottle to 60000 (60 seconds), but you can obviously tweak to fit to your unique environment.

Regkey Name	Default	Description
ClientAuthNotificationThrottle	30000	Specifies the required elapsed time before which another balloon notification may be displayed (helps prevent too frequent balloon notifications).
ClientAuthRenewPeriod	60000	Specifies how frequently the hoster process will check if it should renew authentication.
ClientAuthVerifyConnectionPeriod	30000	Specifies how frequently the hoster process will check connectivity to the web application by downloading a tiny icon (anonymous access).
ClientAuthVerifySignedInPeriod	5000	Specifies how frequently the hoster process will check if authentication has been lost (ex: detect if cookies have been deleted or the CRM ticket has expired).
ClientAuthAllowRetries	3	Specifies the number of failed authentication attempts (after this an error will be shown or the client will move to the offline state).