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 is a collection of client applications, Web applications, and databases that aim to help organizations manage front-office processes, such as sales, marketing, and customer service.

Out of the box, the product supports three main front-office processes:

Customer service. Dynamics CRM provides tools for logging, assigning, and tracking customer incidents or cases; creating and managing knowledge bases, such as collections of articles describing problem-resolution steps; and scheduling and dispatching service calls, which is particularly useful for companies that do onsite installation, maintenance, and repairs.

Marketing. The product includes features that help front-office workers manage marketing activities, such as advertising campaigns and mass mailings. For example, an organization could use Dynamics CRM's marketing features to select lists of potential customers for a campaign; assign, track and manage work activities, such as creation of marketing literature; send bulk e-mails to customers; and manage responses from customers. (For an overview of how Dynamics CRM handles responses to marketing campaigns, see the illustration "Managing Campaign Responses".)

Sales. Dynamics CRM stores and manages information about customers and products; tracks customer communications, such as e-mails and phone calls; identifies and qualifies leads; and tracks and manages quotes, orders, and invoices.

Dynamics CRM also is a platform that customers, solution providers, and ISVs can customize to support specific business processes. Because the platform is fairly generic and flexible, developers can customize and extend it to support processes beyond traditional CRM. For example, the U.S. Air Force has created an application based on Dynamics CRM that manages and tracks troop and personnel movement. Spokane-based Pathology Associates Medical Laboratories uses an application built on the product to track lab samples through testing processes.

(For more information about Dynamics CRM components and an overview of the product's architecture, see the illustration "Dynamics CRM Architecture.")

Customization and development options available for Dynamics CRM include the following:

Extended, custom entities. Graphical, Web-based configuration tools help nondevelopers extend and customize CRM entities, a set of predefined record types (such as contact, account, lead, product, and case) that are stored in the Dynamics CRM system. Developers can create new entities, define entity relationships, and modify and create the Web-based forms used for viewing entities. An Entity Editor allows administrators to add, delete, or rename entity fields or attributes, while the Form Editor is used to customize forms.

Custom workflows. Users with appropriate permissions can create and extend workflows, which define the steps that must be followed in CRM-specific business processes. For example, a workflow could send e-mail reminding support technicians to follow up with customers by phone within 24 hours of a case being assigned. In CRM 4.0, users define workflows with a new Web-based workflow designer and workflow engine based on the Windows Workflow Foundation, which is built into the .NET Framework and used by other Microsoft products, such as SharePoint Server. CRM 4.0 also ships with a base set of actions ("Create Record" and "Send E-mail," for instance) for use in workflows; developers can create more complex, custom actions by writing code in Visual C# or Visual Basic .NET.

Client and server extensions, integration. A server-side SDK includes a pair of Web services that let developers access Dynamics CRM entities programmatically, allowing them to create custom applications or integrate the product with other business applications, such as ERP systems. In addition, an event mechanism called plug-ins in CRM 4.0 (callouts in earlier versions) can help developers create logic that responds to server-side actions (e.g., a program that validates data after a record is updated but before it is written to the Dynamics CRM database). The product also supplies a client-side SDK that helps developers write custom code or scripts that respond to predefined client events—for example, an onLoad event, which executes before a Dynamics CRM form is loaded in the browser, could allow a developer to customize the way the form renders for a particular group of users.