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Showing posts from December, 2014

To Code or Not to Code in Dynamics CRM

Microsoft Dynamics CRM offers a wide range of features combined with the ability to customize the data model and workflows without any coding.  The question is, will these features fulfill all your business requirements or do you need to write some custom code?  This is an important question, because once you start writing code you need to put in place a commensurate framework, methodology and platform to support it.  For instance, you may need multiple environments for development, testing, staging and production.  You may need version control for code as well as documentation.  If you choose to go the No Code route, you may need to compromise the complexity of your business rules and change the way you work to suit the product better.  You will also have to settle for a bit less automation of some functions that could be streamlined through code. For instance, if you are determined to assign Account IDs that are a combination of the abbreviated customer name, state and date that

Essential Dynamics CRM Customizations for Government Contractors

Microsoft Dynamics CRM offers a rich set of features and a data model for sales force automation and marketing activities.   Each industry (and each company) requires some configuration changes in order to make it work according to their business processes. For government contractors, here are some of the most common customizations: Change the focus from individuals to organizations.   You are likely selling to agencies (accounts) rather than consumers (contacts).   Add the relevant fields to forms and views.   For instance, marketing list members doesn’t show the account name by default.   Define the sales process in opportunities.   Define all the steps that an opportunity goes through before becoming a contract, such as sources sought, request for information (RFI), request for proposal (RFP), down-select, orals, best and final offer, and verbal approvals.   Be sure to allow for all your proposal review steps.   Add fields to track contract vehicles and types of competition.

Microsoft Services Provider License Agreement (SPLA) Benefits

Microsoft offers a special licensing plan for organizations that offer hosted software and services to end customers who can sign up for subscriptions rather than traditional perpetual software licenses. This program is Microsoft Services Provider License Agreement (SPLA) and is probably Microsoft's least understood licensing option. Hosting providers who want to offer software services to their customers and who will include software licenses as part of their service offering should use SPLA. Microsoft SPLA is the only Microsoft Volume Licensing program that allows Microsoft products to be used for commercial hosting. Under SPLA, Microsoft products are licensed per month, either per user or per server depending on the product.  Nearly the full catalog of Microsoft products are available under SPLA.  If you already own perpetual licenses for Microsoft products, you can also use them in conjunction with a hosting partner, in essence extending your on premise deployment to a de