Microsoft is in the news a lot lately for its developments in the CRM space. Stories coming from the company’s annual Convergence conference this week in San Diego recount impressive integration between Microsoft’s CRM application and the Office suite. The Redmond company could become a huge player in the CRM market, bringing flexibility and interoperability to the rapidly evolving CRM system.
We’ve
developed for the .NET platform for several years now, and our choice
of this Microsoft platform is one of the great benefits we’ve been able
to bring to the Amdocs Clarify™ development path for companies. Our
open design philosophy, from the very beginning, enabled Companies with
a Clarify database to expand beyond the box, with our hundreds of APIs,
and now Web services.
The Microsoft platform, with its friendliness to open standards, robust performance, and flexibility, does a lot of heavy lifting for a Clarify database exposed through Dovetail CRM to the rest of the company’s IT infrastructure. The Dovetail SDK, based on this platform, is realistically the most adaptable and easily configured solution in the marketplace today.
The legacy Clarify systems that we deal with are a good reflection of CRM’s
development history in general: systems have been inflexible, complex,
and hard to learn – all of which adds up to a history of failed
strategies, and chronically low adoption by users.
"'In the last 10 years, companies have spent a lot of money on deploying CRM technology and solutions,' Brad Wilson, general manager of Microsoft CRM,
said during a presentation. 'It takes too long to deploy, it’s too
difficult to align business and IT. Probably the biggest single issue
is you’ve gone through all this time and expense and people don’t use
it.’” From Microsoft CRM targets usability
As Microsoft begins what will be a long involvement with CRM, its advantages are many. While its expertise doesn’t go that deep into the niche functionality of CRM,
its ability to be all things to millions of users – with customization,
extension, and cross-enterprise integration – is exactly what the new CRM market is demanding.
The complementary products to Dynamics CRM
on display at Convergence 2007 are a strong step towards the grail of
full integration. that integrate in new ways with the Office suite.
“Microsoft Dynamics CRM is an example of this type of cross-enterprise access into larger systems and databases, Microsoft pointed out.
“All of its reports, forms and processes for managing
sales, marketing and customer service are presented to the user within
Microsoft Office Outlook using these new tools.” – New Dynamics Tools Extend ERP via Microsoft Office
The intricacies of integration are the bane of in-house IT departments with CRM
systems, and these are the intricacies we’ve specialized in for a
decade with Clarify. For a good view into how hard it can be use a
full-text search in Clarify data, and how Dovetail makes it better
using Microsoft, read Gary Sherman’s latest post, Using Microsoft Full-Text Search within Dovetail applications. Dovetail’s Director of Software Development provides an in-depth account of using the Full Text Search engine bundled with SQL Server, starting with installation of Microsoft Search, and leading to customizing the Dovetail client.
