Dynamics CRM Online

Dynamics CRM Online is a Microsoft-hosted customer relationship management (CRM) service that is currently based on Dynamics CRM 4.0, which shipped late in 2007. It rounds out Microsoft’s CRM strategy by targeting customers who lack the desire or necessary skills to run complex applications like CRM 4.0 in-house. It should appeal most to organizations with fewer than 25 users, including small and midsize companies and workgroups or departments in larger organizations. It is hosted on multitenant hardware like the Standard versions of the core BPOS services; a Dedicated version is not available.

As is true of CRM 4.0, workers can use a Web browser or a plug-in for the Outlook e-mail client to access CRM Online’s three main functional areas:

Customer service 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.