Partners and Dynamics CRM 2011: The Avanade Case

Dynamics CRM has entered the enterprise market in large part thanks to system integrators such as Avanade, which closed important feature gaps and solved many of the early problems with enterprise workloads. Avanade has deployed several systems for customers with over 1,000 users and built a Dynamics CRM application (called Task Management Tracking) that now has over 55,000 users. According to the company’s CRM Solution Manager, Joseph Basile, Dynamics CRM 2011 and the latest Microsoft-hosted Dynamics CRM Online service solve a number of important problems for enterprise deployments, but still leave opportunities for partners to add services and software.

Closing Feature Gaps

Dynamics CRM 2011 delivers several features that Avanade had previously created for enterprise customers using earlier versions of the product. Specifically, auditing (which captures the history of data and security changes) and field-level security for custom fields are particularly important for organizations in regulated industries such as healthcare. Similarly, SharePoint document integration has proven important for many large organizations, and role-based forms targeting is valuable both for security and to simplify the user interface based on users’ job roles.