Microsoft recently launched a
hosted demo of their Dynamics CRM 3.0 application which gave me an opportunity to avoid the
Black Friday chaos and settle into my own CRM sandbox for a couple hours.
My negative experiences with CRM 1.x in the past (and the fact they skipped CRM 2.x all together) meant I approached this demo with much skepticism. I was also of the opinion that Microsoft's recent announcement that
CRM Live would launch in mid 2007 was designed to generate more
FUD than actual customers or partners.
But after playing with the demo for a couple hours I can honestly say that CRM 3.0 is most definitely not vaporware and is truly an enterprise class software solution to be reckoned with.
After registering for a demo account, I was led to believe that it would take up to 24 hours for my request to be approved. Not so. I received an email within 1 minute with my login account and password.
Although there were some links to FAQs and demo instructions, I charged ahead and sought to evaluate the initial intuitiveness of the application. Bad idea. After signing in my browser completely shut down and disappeared. After 3-4 attempts of logging in and losing my browser I finally decided to read the instructions. Sure enough, the first instruction says to turn off your pop-up blocker or the demo will not work (Note to the Program/Product Manager at Microsoft. First impressions are everything. Update loader.aspx to elegantly handle this use case or user adoption will drop dramatically).
Alright, with the pop-up blocker disabled you're greeted with this Outlook-like interface
MS CRM 3.0 is designed around the "Workplace" metaphor. The navigation links on the left open up work places (work "place" instead of work "space" was a subtly confusing change for me... not sure why) for the common CRM functional areas of Sales, Marketing, and Support (called "Service").
If you can find your way around Outlook, then you can find your way around MS CRM 3. It's that simple. Users of MS CRM 1.x know that the entire user experience was built into Outlook. In 3.0 the experience is completely web-based (still not sure what the disconnected story will be or how legacy Outlook plays into the product).
Marching on, the Sales work place gives you top-to-bottom access to Leads, Opportunities, Accounts, Contacts, and a number of other records available on-demand.
Giving Leads a high-level Topic description was useful. It's a simple way to note the Lead's expactations without creating an actual opportunity.
I liked the A-Z alpha indexes at the bottom of every view. They have AJAX-y behaviors so the filtered list shows up in milliseconds without posting back the entire page to the server.
The Marketing Workspace is centered around campaign creation and Lead management activities. The Sales Literature link (that appears on both the Sales and Mktg Work places) is a great collaborative space for posting product case studies, white papers, and other documents.
The lookup pop-up windows are another subtle feature that I really liked. You can create a new contact record and account record on the fly. The Account lookup provides a quick "New Account" form for entering basic information.
I could go on about each Work place, but the overall design pattern is pretty consistent. You create records which have lookup relationships to other records. What I really wanted to know was how extensible and configurable MS CRM 3.0 is for the average Small-Medium sized business.
For example, what if you need to capture a Lead field such as "Favorite Color"? Surely this is not an out-of-the-box piece of metadata. MS CRM 1.x had a fairly grueling customization process, but CRM 3.0 is surprisingly much more user friendly (even if the underlying data model still exists, which I suspect it does).
There is support for customizing new Entities as well as Forms/Views, Attributes, Relationships, and Messages.
The fact this is all configurable through the web browser is a huge productivity gain. No Active X controls. No direct access to Active Directory or SQL tables required. It is truly a web declarative environment.
The most redeeming quality of MS CRM 1.x was it's ability to track email conversations directly in Outlook. The built-in, web-based email features in MS CRM 3.0 are very convenient. Every Lead or contact centric view has one-click access to sending and tracking emails.
Each view also has one-click access to workplace centric reports. I liked the ability to access and create reports on the fly, but was let-down by the inability to do cross entity JOIN reports. This will likely be a BI add-on or 3rd party capability.
Advanced Search is a feature that is oft used. The AJAX-y environment was very responsive. The grouping of ANDs and ORs is very clear and the ability to save pre-canned searches is very cool.
Gripes and Concerns
So what didn't I like about MS CRM 3? From a customer perspective, the demo was very good. There were no show stoppers and I felt myself being drawn to the ultimate question "So how much is it?".
Assuming a Small-Med Business is able to use most of the features and standardize adoption on it, then I think there's great value at $50-$65 month per user.
Which begs the question. Will the hosted CRM Live solution be the same as what I saw in this demo? My guess is "Yes". MS Live is essentially a hosted version of Dynamics CRM 3.0.
As for an in-house installation of MS CRM 3.0, I just wouldn't do it. Knowing the kludge of Active Directory, Exchange, Kerberos Authentication, SQL, and other install/config issues involved to make this work, it's just not worth taking this solution in house (in fact, my early attempts to install this myself failed. I brought in a local MS CRM consultant who also failed... and then sent me a bill, doubling the sour taste in my mouth 
).
But as a hosted solution, I give this a thumbs up from a customer perspective.
As a Microsoft partner, will I invest in an "i-Dialogue for Microsoft CRM Live" solution? I can't say. The customization was powerful, but if I invest 2 months in creating custom "Job" and "Applicant" entities (for example) will I be able to export and package these customizations to an AppExchange equivalent and install them into new CRM Live instances? My demo account was a least privileged user, so I don't know.
The XML API in MS CRM 1.x was a fairly flexible point of integration in the past (although I would have preferred real SOAP proxy end points instead of constructing and passing raw XML messages). Assuming this API is still available, I think a broader ecosystem of composite applications from 3rd parties can emerge, but I don't believe Microsoft will be able to host partner extensions in the initial release (someone please correct me if I'm wrong).
Clearly the potential for Microsoft Service Partners is huge as every SMB will likely want some consulting and service support to get up and running. I suspect that a successful product/ISV partner relationship would have to help drive MS CRM 3 into verticals that Microsoft cannot reach by themselves. Platform or horizontal add-on components will likely encroach on Microsoft's future CRM roadmap.