Microsoft has recently released their Partner Competency Guide, which lays out the requirements for organizations like Ironworks to meet in order to be considered a partner. Keeping track of these requirements can be a full-time job, and then keeping track of your organization’s progress within that framework can just be overwhelming. Couple that with keeping track of basic skills such as C#.NET and T-SQL, and then blow that out beyond Microsoft’s walls and well, someone in your organization is pulling their hair out on a consistent basis.
Enter CRM (or more appropriately in this context, xRM), a platform that is great at managing these various entities, their relationships, and the reporting necessary to pull it all together. What’s great about xRM is not only the fact that this can all be done out of the box with just a little configuration, but can then be integrated with your company’s intranet (in our case, a MOSS 2007 portal) as well as managed through a common tool within the Enterprise – Microsoft Outlook. What does this mean? Typically it means less time actually learning the tool and more time getting the most of out of it.
This is going to be a multiple-post blog entry as this is a work in progress. We started off looking for existing solutions within this space. One of the great things about CRM/xRM is the vibrant community and the solutions that are provided by that community. Microsoft provides a tool that allows you to find partner-built solutions that work with CRM/xRM to meet your needs. There are some great vendors and solutions to be found within this database. Additionally, Microsoft provides a set of CRM accelerators, or add-on solutions that provide good examples of how the platform can be configured for various business needs. These are provided free of charge and can be extended even further, or modified to meet your needs. There are also various vendor solutions and add-ons that are provided at a cost.
Unfortunately, our needs were not met by any pre-built solution, so we began building out our prototype by mapping out our entities in Visio just as we would a relational database, which is important to note. CRM/xRM is a great platform for managing structured data, or data that maintains relationships between entities. In contrast, a platform like SharePoint is a great platform for managing unstructured entities such as documents, which are typically not related to other documents (which changes in SharePoint 2010 with documents sets – which is another topic entirely).
This is important for two reasons. First, you do not want to select a platform like SharePoint for a solution such as the one we are trying to build out – it just doesn’t make sense. It’s important to realize this so that you are not trying to fit a square peg into a round hole. Secondly, you should also take into consideration that CRM/xRM may not fit every need that you have, whether that need is to retain documents or to display information to end-users, which is where a product like SharePoint does fit nicely. The point is that these two products are meant to live side-by-side, and complement each other’s capabilities nicely. That’s not to say that CRM will not stand on its own, as it very often does, but for a more robust and fully featured solution, CRM can, and often will integrate with other platforms.
I’ve provided our relational model below. This is really a first cut, as I expect this to grow over time. Next up is creating the entities and relationships within CRM, which will be the next post. Stay tuned!
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