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To: TEDennis who wrote (7156)	12/16/2002 9:33:08 PM
From: TEDennis	Respond to of 9677

Microsoft CRM hints at bigger things to come Microsoft CRM is merely a first shot into the enterprise applications market. In fact, Microsoft's Business Solutions group has been quietly weaving together "the mother of all business suites" from a vast collection of software that will cover just about every business process, including customer-facing, back-office, and supply-chain applications. From what we've seen of it so far, MS CRM should make a successful debut. Predictably centered on .Net and using Outlook and Internet Explorer clients, MS CRM should lure small and midsize companies to seek the usual CRM benefits (increased sales, better customer service) from a provider that can meet all of their software needs, from OS to business applications. MS CRM will combine basic sales and customer service functions, and include the capability to create custom workflows, personalize views, and extend the original database with additional fields to suit customers' needs. To further sugar the pill, Microsoft is promising the option of in-house or hosted service deployment (the latter possibly via business partners) and seamless integration with a variety of reputable financial applications, including Axapta, Great Plains, Navision, and Solomon, depending on the company's size and the complexity of its business processes. Of course, for connecting to other satellite applications, such as BI, analytics, portals, etc., there are .Net-based Web services. The promised off-the-shelf integration with back-office and other applications is the most compelling benefit for customers. They will be tempted to choose the Microsoft way rather than deploy a CRM-only solution from a vendor such as Salesforce.com, Salesnet, or Upshot, and then manage the cost and complexity of integration on their own. In essence, the strength of MS CRM will be in offering a system that starts with a typical CRM nucleus and can be extended in various ways to meet specific business requirements for companies in various industry segments. The plan is convincing, but in CRM, as in any other business application, the devil is in the details. Microsoft is proposing what others have attempted but rarely achieved: a CRM solution that is flexible enough to satisfy a wide range of business requirements, using disparate software sources to cover all the tiles of the business puzzle. We can't wait to read the next chapter of this story. -- Mario Apicella infoworld.com