CRM stands for “Customer Relationship Management”. Dynamics CRM is a software package developed by Microsoft for managing a company’s connections with its present and future customers.
It’s a customer relationship management software package focused on enhancing the customer relationship for any Company. From straight out of the box, Microsoft Dynamics CRM has three comprehensive functional modules Sales, Marketing, and Customer Service. A key difference is the Framework that allows its customers/partners to swiftly build Extended CRM applications, also known as xRM applications. So, it can be easily customized to meet the end client requirements.
In recent years, Microsoft also provided the full mobile support for using CRM apps on mobiles and tablets. So, its user can enjoy a handy experience to access it anytime anywhere.
This product can be used to drive as well as monitor the sales productivity and marketing effectiveness for an organization, it also has a support module which handle the complete customer support chain, and provide social visions, business intelligence, and a lot of other straight out-of-the-box functionalities and features.
The fundamentals of customer relationship management
· Centralize customer information
· Automate marketing process/interactions
· Provide business intelligence
· Facilitate communications
· Track Lead, opportunities and sales
· Analyze data
· Responsive customer service
· Reporting
Microsoft Dynamics CRM Product Offerings
Microsoft Dynamics CRM package is accessible in two categories:
CRM Online
The first category is a cloud-based CRM Online offering all the back-end processes such as complete setups, Application servers, database, deployments, Licensing, etc. are managed by Microsoft servers. Cloud computing is a fast-growing option for many big and small businesses types. The affordability, reliability, and flexibility of this virtualized environment service has motivated to all sizes of organizations and industries to move from On-Premises to Cloud Computing.
CRM On-Premise
The second category CRM On-Premise is more about customized and robust offering of Microsoft Dynamics CRM, under this option the CRM application and its databases are deployed on the CRM On-Premise “CRM purchaser” servers. Having CRM On-Premise it offers you to control all your customizations, deployments, databases, licensing, backups and other hardware and network setups. In other word the organizations who wants to go for a customized CRM solution prefer on-premise deployment as it offers better integration and customization capabilities.
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CRM Online
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CRM On-Premise
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It’s a cloud-based solution all the servers and databases are managed by Microsoft.
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It’s an on-premise solution the servers and databases are managed by the customer at his end.
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Just pay for the user and the used space and you can start with online CRM within a few days.
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With On- premise user needs to have sufficient technical knowledge and time to set up CRM instance and get it running.
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It supports comparatively less customizations than the On-Premise and extensions.
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It supports relatively more customization than the CRM Online and extensions.
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In CRM Online, you cannot perform manual data backups and restore options as it is hosted on the Microsoft servers. But Microsoft performs daily backups of your database into their servers.
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CRM on-premise gives complete ability to manage your database.
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CRM Online has various plans based on the data storage limits.
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CRM on-premise does not have any such limits on it and depends on the size of your own servers.
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CRM Online provides inbuilt capabilities of features such as insights, social listening, analytics, etc.
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CRM on-premise has extra costs for these features.
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CRM Online supports automatic updates to future version.
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CRM on-premise upgrade need to be installed by the IT guys of its company. All the steps and process need to be properly followed and monitor for successful upgrade.
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Methods to Access MS Dynamics CRM
Microsoft Dynamics CRM can be accessed via any of the following options −
· Web Browser
· Mobile and Tablets
· Outlook
MS Dynamics CRM Product Competitors
Microsoft Dynamics CRM is certainly one of the top products in the CRM market. However, following are the other CRM products which contend with Microsoft Dynamics CRM.
· SAP
· Oracle
· Sage CRM
· Salesforce
· Sugar CRM
· NetSuite
Microsoft Dynamics CRM Product Version History
Microsoft Dynamics was initially launched on January 2003 with its first version as Microsoft CRM 1.0 then gradually as the time passed Microsoft launched many of its version by improving the Software package. Following is the chronological list of release versions:
· Microsoft CRM 1.0
· Microsoft CRM 1.2
· Microsoft Dynamics CRM 3.0
· Microsoft Dynamics CRM 4.0
· Microsoft Dynamics CRM 2011
· Microsoft Dynamics CRM 2013
· Microsoft Dynamics CRM 2015
· Microsoft Dynamics CRM 2016
· Dynamics 365