By Chris Alliegro [bio]
Posted: Apr. 21, 2008

The following an excerpt of a Research Report published by Directions on Microsoft, an independent research firm focused exclusively on Microsoft strategy & technology. More samples of our content, as well as a list of upcoming articles and reports are also available.

Dynamics CRM's entry into the enterprise market is attributable in large part to the work of system integrators such as Avanade, which ran early benchmarks on the product's third version to determine whether it could handle enterprise workloads. Avanade has since deployed several Dynamics CRM installations that support more than 1,000 users. For example, in 2006, the integrator rolled out a 1,200-seat deployment (with plans to expand to 3,000 seats) at real estate and money-management firm Jones Lang LaSalle, replacing a variety of disconnected, legacy customer relationship management applications at the company.

Despite Dynamics CRM's base ability to support relatively large workloads, the product was not initially designed for large customers. Consequently, partners like Avanade must work around product gaps or write custom code to solve problems that the product does not address natively.

Among others, these typically include the following:

Integration with other applications. Avanade has relied on custom callouts (renamed plug-ins in Dynamics CRM 4.0) to flag changes to Dynamics CRM records and has developed various back-end connectors that provide integration with applications and platforms from vendors such as IBM, Oracle, and SAP. Such tools help organizations synchronize CRM data with other key applications, such as accounting and manufacturing systems.

Product feature gaps. Among other utilities, Avanade has developed an auditing tool that can track field-level changes in Dynamics CRM records, particularly relevant for organizations in regulated industries such as healthcare. Other tools allow workers to link CRM records to documents managed in SharePoint document libraries. (Out of the box, Dynamics CRM allows workers to attach documents to CRM records—for example, a worker could attach a business proposal Word document to a CRM account record.) Storing such documents in SharePoint instead of internally in the CRM database allows organizations to use SharePoint's document management capabilities, such as versioning and check-in/check-out, and makes it easier for workers who are not users of Dynamics CRM to view and work with the documents.

Custom business logic and workflows. Common development tasks involve custom logic for data aggregation calculations and custom workflows that automatically notify users when certain records change (for example, notifying a sales manager when an important customer opens a support ticket) and automatic assignment of new records, such as leads.

Geographic distribution. Global deployment can introduce performance problems that are not evident in smaller, local deployments. For example, sales workers in remote or regional offices can often experience frustrating latency when trying to work with centrally located applications. Performance considerations often dictate the extent and types of customizations (e.g., limiting forms customizations to reduce the amount of data passed over the wire) and physical deployment architectures. For example, high network latency might require an organization to deploy Dynamics CRM's application server in regional datacenters and the CRM database server in a centrally located datacenter.