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Microsoft's New Dynamics CRM Product: Project Service


Microsoft has intensified the pace of innovation in Dynamics CRM, adding a broad set of new capabilities in recent versions of Dynamics CRM Online.  Most of these have been from companies that Microsoft acquired, such as Customer Service (Parature), Field Service (FieldOne), gamification (FantasySales Team), and Marketing (MarketingPilot).

Project Service, the latest addition, was developed in-house by Microsoft.  It offers an end-to-end solution that helps sales and delivery teams track project delivery activities.

Project service helps you:
  • Estimate, quote, and contract work
  • Track time and expenses
  • Plan and assign resources
  • Enable team collaboration
  • Capture time, expense, and progress data for real-time insights and accurate invoicing
Project-based contracts
Project contracts relate quotes and orders to project plans, financial estimates, labor pricing, and billing arrangements, like time and materials or fixed price. The contract highlights key metrics, including profitability and feasibility.

Project planning
Visual project planning tools include predecessors, and automatic task scheduling. The plan may be exported for use in other documents.

Resource management
Project Service tracks skills and availability, so you can assign people to the right projects. The following screen shot shows resource utilization for members of your project team.


Time and expenses
Team members can use the web or mobile apps to record time and expenses for projects. Managers can participate in approval workflows for timesheet entries.

This demo walk-though video is a good place to begin:



For a longer description of Project Service, watch this:



Many of our CRM clients require project management capabilities but find Microsoft Project Server too unwieldy for users who are not professional project managers.  CRM Project Service fulfills the needs of a large audience -- perhaps for the majority of services projects.




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